Dreams in Blog - THE MUSIC OF LIFE18/Feb/2010

THE MUSIC OF LIFE

Posted by : Prof. Stefano D'Anna

The MUSIC of LIFEYou are the song you sing. Your music shapes your existence and anything you see, touch and

feel. There is a human mass that sings a chant of sorrow and projects a world on the edge of a

precipice. There are individuals who sing a chant of love and victory. The vastness of their music

shapes destinies and societies, and profoundly affects the roots of the human spirit.

Brueghel Jan, the elder : The sense of hearing  

 

Are you ready to conduct a very interesting experiment? Can you accept being both the scientist of this experiment and at the same time the guinea pig? Well! Just pick out one of your days. Select any day of your life. Look carefully through it. Explore any detail of it. Notice the words you say. Classify them. Single out those you say more often… Scan the feelings you experience. Classify them. Single out the most frequent ones… Look at your thoughts. Classify them. Single out the most persistent ones, those that appear with a higher frequency. Just as one cell, the smallest unit of life, contains the biological information of your entire organism, so, if your search is sincere and you really want to know about yourself, any one of your days can tell you all about you. That tiny segment of your existence is the epitome, the very synthesis of your life and knows your destiny, buried under thick layers of lies. It is like having the Delphic Oracle at hand. At your disposal. When you want it, if you want it. 

  

We are monotonous beings

In all likelihood, such a search will make us realize that our words, thoughts, and feelings, are recurring; we just repeat them mechanically, day after day, over and over. We may discover that as a whole we are a quite monotonous being. Pick out the physical sensations you experience in a day. If you pay a bit of attention, you will realise that there is nothing new in what you sense. Moreover this search will make us aware of our mechanical nature. It will take our breath away at the terrifying discovery that our ‘machine’ is already programmed to feel those sensations, to experience those emotions, to have those thoughts, to pronounce those words. Like a musical instrument that vibrates at a given frequency, and can emit only that sound, we are occupying only a very narrow bandwidth in the infinity of possible keys, vibrations, and sounds. 

  

What song are you singing? 

You will realise that every day you sing the same song and that the external world, what you call reality, does nothing but obey to that rhythm, that sound, that vibration. A man's reality, his ability to do and therefore to have, his degree of happiness as well as his financial destiny, perfectly corresponds to his ‘rate of vibration’. The world is more or less narrow, more or less large according to the wideness of our song. "What song are you singing?" is the same as questioning yourself about your destiny. When you are able to listen to it, when you are more careful with the notes you utter, you will be able to notice it’s mono-tony. If you will realize this, then you will also find the will and the ability to widen the narrow pentagram in which you are living. Like a piano, that with respect to other instruments has such a breadth of octaves to occupy two pentagrams, so there are men who have a wider expressive range than do others. There exist men who play music that spans three, four, five pentagrams… because their "dream" is too wide to be contained in the narrow bandwidth that suffices for the rest of mankind. Two men conduct business between them because of a fusion of rhythms, a consistency of sounds… an harmony. And a firm takes over another firm for the width of its music; a civilisation conquers another civilisation and absorbs it for the vastness of its chant, the width of octaves, the quality of sounds, the richness, and the power of its music.

It is easier to move a mountain 

Notice how difficult it is to change even a single word of your everyday vocabulary,

an accent, a pet phrase; notice the impossibility of changing an attitude, a reaction, of breaking a routine, of going outside of the mechanical repetitiveness of gestures, or of sounds. Just imagine what it could mean to transform a thought, to change an emotion… Notice inside you the impossibility of catching a new idea, to accept it… to dive into the invisible, to think something original, to dream something apparently impossible… to play a single note outside of the pentagram in which you were driven to live. You will realise that it is easier to move a mountain.

Every intentional effort, even the smallest, made to modify a repetitive action, a mechanical reaction or to break a habit, is a victory over our monotony, the tripping up of repetitive habits and recurrences of our life.

 You will realise that the aging, the process of progressive stiffening of your life started long ago, and though you may be young, soon you will no longer be able to reverse it. Rich men and tramps, politicians and employees, Nobel prize winners and ordinary people - everyone carries around his own song. Everybody is locked in self-created prisons of roles, sealed in bubbles of negative emotions, embalmed in their own habits. The greater part of mankind obeys a programme set at birth, reaffirmed in childhood by parents who can do nothing but transmit the song which they in their turn received from their parents; and reinforced in schools and universities where they learn a hypnotic music taught by bad musicians, tedious teachers, and prophets of misfortune. Throughout the millennia, the traditions of wisdom have devised and transmitted every kind of ‘trick’ to contrast with the rigidity and repetitiveness towards which men inevitably tend. Genuflections towards Mecca five times a day, the fasting ritual of Ramadan in the ninth month of the Islamic lunar year; indeed, the current rituals of every religious tradition, could all be characterized as ‘tripping’ mechanical behaviours. Their function is to nourish mankind’s drowsy intelligence and latent understanding, by the interruption of routine; pushing men to deviate from the rut of deep-rooted habits. 

Like a jammed gramophone

There are grandiose musicians, visionary individuals who sweep through the pentagrams of existence, who create and catch their music from immensity, from above, and there is a human mass resigned to their sad and flickering existence, men and women similar to a jammed gramophone repeating their whining, mournful theme learned since childhood and never modified. Their life is an elementary, basic song played by pressing few keys with just a finger. If we bothered to pay the slightest attention to our movements, we would discover how mechanical and repetitive our lives are. Every morning we set out with scrupulous rigour on a series of actions which are always the same: we get out of bed with the same foot, we start

shaving from the same side, we clean our teeth repeating the same number of movements, in the same fashion, and always with the same facial expression. We have settled habits; we express received ideas with the same gestures, words and inflections we have always used. Even our emotions are predictable, like conditioned reflexes of the soul. In the ordinary man, the will is buried. His behaviour is the reflection of a mechanical intelligence and could be studied more profitably by sciences like ethology or robotics than by psychology. Once he has understood this, a man can have no other aim in life but to escape from this narrow bandwidth where all mankind is kept prisoner - to escape from his own music's monotony and poverty. There is no greater project, no holier war than contrasting one’s limits and raising one’s own chant. The cast out of Eden of Adam and Eve, the original sin, the paradise lost doesn’t occur once upon a time but every moment that humanity raises a chant of fear and sorrow and keeps singing it over and over. The world is such because you are such. 

Change your music

This hellish song springing from a black hole in man’s soul, accounts for the all the conflicts, poverty, criminality and any moral and material disease of the planet, including humanity’s millenary curse of aging, getting sick and dying. If you want to change your reality, change your music, and devote yourself to widening your ‘dream’. The dream is the most real thing there is. It is the dream that creates reality. And only the dream can rescue us out of this tight position of Being, out of our chant's monotony that becomes pain in our bodies, fear in our feelings and doubt in our minds. One day our being will be so wide to be able to listen not only to our, but also to others' songs… the sounds others utter… the profoundness and the height of their octaves… their notes' colour, timbre, rhythm. When we are ready to stand up to the responsibility of this truth, we will find out that humanity thinks and feels negatively; it sings a song of misfortune, of sorrow, of doubt and fear. The whole world is in your head, like the music you play, the song you sing inside. And your fate is recorded like in the grooves of an LP. 

Dream a beautiful dream

If you study yourself, if you observe yourself, you will know more about yourself and day-by-day you will be able to broaden your dream, creating and singing a new melody. Every day you will realize more and more that ‘the dream’ is more real than our illusion of acting in life. Through dreaming you will create relationships, solve problems, and enter inaccessible worlds. You will learn how to dive into the invisible. Reality will follow, and will take the shape and dimension of your dream. Knowing ourselves is discovering that man is alone in the universe, solely responsible for

anything happening to him. Life is as you dream it. Your song shapes your existence. You can live in paradise or in hell. It is up to you. Have the courage to dream a beautiful dream. Have the courage to sing a unique melody, outside of the chorus, like a solitary bird. Be an individual and conquer all that is possible to conquer… inside your head.

Dreams in Blog - SOLITUDE

04/Jan/2010

SOLITUDE

Posted by : Prof. Stefano D'Anna

TEMPO January 2010 Article By Stefano E. D’Anna

The characteristics of the solitary bird are fivefold: First, it flies towards the highest point 

Second, it does not tolerate companions Third, it aims its beak to the sky Fourth, it has no definite colour 

Fifth, it sings most sweetly.

 

SOLITUDEClose your eyes and feel your presence, enjoy your own company. Search for solitude. This is the way a leader builds his integrity and

acquires power.

 

We all tasted immortality. It was during the physical gestation, when for nine months (but in fact for an endless time) we have been aquatic, dreaming beings, floating in the amniotic liquid. And while for zoological beings this is the only gestation, necessary and sufficient ‘to come to

this world’, for human beings this physical gestation is followed by an age of development, a sort of long psychological gestation, which continues until the age of 18-20. Therefore the news I am giving to the youngest of you is that you were not born around 1990, but as complete beings, you are having birth now, in 2010. And just now, like Narcissus, you are looking at yourself in the mirror of the world and no parent or teacher, no school or university, has prepared you to recognise your image in what you touch and see around you. 

Up to now you have been in the shell, family has protected you; now you are starting to bare your own reflection in the world, and the image in front of you is not always pleasant. You start to experience the first disappointments, the first misfortunes, some accidents, sentimental delusions, apparent problems… And not recognising them as the reflection of your being, you have already got used to complain, to blame and accuse others, to hide, to lie, to feel sorry for yourselves. These are the clear signs that you are becoming part of the dark sea of adulthood. Adult has not a very nice etimo. It comes from adulteration. We could say that an adult is an adulterated being, a child who has stopped dreaming. You are going to be hypnotised by a description, a tale of the external world, like 99.9% of grown-up people. You spend most of your time out of yourself, with others; and if occasionally you are alone, you are waiting for something to happen, a phone ringing, a person or event that can bring you life from the outside. Longing all the time for the company of others is like to depend on a lung-machine for breathing. Following others, living in their shadow, imitating others and whatever is cool, trendy, makes your life banal. 

Be ahead of fashion! Put it behind you. Be yourself… The others will be imitating you. To achieve this state of freedom, of independent thinking, you have to know yourself, you have to find out who you really are. It is necessary to reduce the hours that are spent in ordinary activities, working out of home, absorbed, immerged in the external world, and stay some time in solitude, alone with yourself. Spend more time being in your own company, free from any kind of conditioning. Do it intentionally if you wish to achieve a life rich in all senses.

For most people, and especially young people, to spend time alone is unbearable. They search for others to fill their solitude, they stuff their lives with engagements and events; their agendas are crammed of meetings and appointments. In the effort to escape from themselves, and the unbearable burden of a forced loneliness, they look for the

crowd, they gather in its temples: cinemas, theatres, stadiums, they huddle in a group with others and they are at ease wherever they can feel the reassuring presence of the crowd. Multiplicity of events and commitments, external circumstances, an unceasing flow of facts, of insignificant experiences, the constant presence of the others in our lives, are all indicators of the incapability of living in solitude. People do not like to spend time in their own company and when, obliged by circumstances, they happen to be alone, they turn on the TV, make a phone call, listen to music or look for the company of a book. What I have learned from the Dreamer, and which I have narrated in The School for Gods, the incapacity to be alone, the compulsive need for others, are symptoms of a self-destructive inclination, although unconscious. People, especially youth, do not bear solitude because they don’t love themselves.

The inability to love themselves leads to a kind of self-sabotage that may come about in various guise, through harmful attitudes and habits, like smoking, assumption of drugs, abuse of alcohol, but also provoking apparently involuntary, unpredictable accidents… like the many casualties for road accidents that happen after leaving a party or a disco. Solitude is fortitude. Solitude has to be felt as a friend. We need to learn how to feel good on our own, loving ourselves. The more we live in solitude the more occurrences disappear and number of people we meet shortens to make space for more intense encounters and more real events.

Caspar David Friedrich : Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

There is an internal time and an external time. Schools and universities should transfer to their students the intelligence that one must balance them, that we must dedicate to ourselves at least as much time as we dedicate to others and the external world. Differently, will be left without the oil in the lamp, with our being deprived of the ‘precious essence’.

When you are alone, you must learn how to live beautiful moments in a conscious, intentional, creative solitude if you do not want to live bad moments in a forced loneliness. Anytime you can, take the opportunity to transform loneliness into precious time to enter into yourself, to practice the most fruitful of all activities: observing, studying, knowing yourself.

You should realize, and then explain to your children, that to stay by yourself means to build yourself, to strengthen yourself. It is necessary to learn how to transform loneliness into creative solitude. Creative solitude means to have self-control, it means to master your emotions, to possess your inner world. In not comprehending this, people search for fulfilment and happiness in the outside world, they try to find certainty in the eyes of others. But the world, the outside reality is only a mirror. Things happen only because you are. There is nothing out there. Nothing at all. Also the people that you meet and deem real, are nothing but your reflections. In reality, you only meet yourself. There is no greater adventure, no work more useful than that of encountering others and recognising them as projections of our thinking, our states, our values. One day you will realise that you are the Dreamer and not the dreamed, the Creator and not the creation, and that everything is at your service. Then you will no longer be dependent. Close your eyes and feel your presence, enjoy your own company. Search for solitude. This is the way a leader builds his integrity and acquires power: being with himself. He knows that power cannot come from the world, cannot be given to him by others. Only a few ‘greats’ of history have arrived at feeling inside themselves this sense of vastness, knowing that they could not depend on others, that they could not ask anything of anyone. 

A leaders is alone. He builds himself from the inside, in solitude. Alone with himself, in stillness and silence, he can catch a fragment of eternity to enlarge his thinking, to invite large, courageous ideas and solutions beyond imagination. There he finds the strength to take decisions that always go against existing ‘status quo’, common opinion and the convictions of others. His certainty comes from his integrity, the belief that everything depend on him and he can only rely on himself. 

Solitude versus others, individual versus mass is a great argument that needs to be brought further and deeper. Others are you. Are you in time. Whoever you meet measures the distance that you have inside.

The others are you distant from you. When they have too much significance in your life, is a worrying sign that soon or later you can be trapped. But this will be matter for my next article and I look forward to discussing it with you.

29/Mar/2010

THE OTHERS

Posted by : Prof. Stefano D'Anna

THE OTHERS

All that you always wanted to know about the others and nobody ever told you. Instructions on how to handle the others, what are they all about and what are they for.

Painting by René Margitte.

The others are you.  

This article is continuing the reasoning and the train of thoughts started in the January’s issue with my article on “Solitude”. Solitude and others are a most interesting polarity of our lives. They are a most crucial dichotomy, like light and darkness, fear and love, life and death. If there is one, there cannot be the other. 

No school, no parent or mentor, no teacher or university taught us what is the meaning of the others, what are the others all about and for what reason they are there. Moreover nobody gave us instructions on how to ‘use’ them - to handle them. The others are your reflex in the world and whoever you meet is a flitting image of you captured by a mirror. As matter of fact you can only meet yourself. Anyone you meet is yourself. If you are aware of this, anybody you encounter is an officiant Pythia, the sibyl or priestess of the Oracle at Delphi, capable to telling with pitiless precision who you are, and what your destiny is. In a few minutes you can discover yourself, know yourself, and also  know everything about the other. Whomever you encounter, you can know his or her destiny, and the destiny of any other who is like-minded. The more you know yourself, the more the external world and the ‘others’ become an open book for you. 

The internal gap

Among the things I have learned from the Dreamer, which I have narrated in my Book “The School for Gods”, one of the most amazing is the unveiling of this: whoever you meet, beyond the surface, beyond the thin layer of what you are discussing, that encounter is measuring, registering an internal distance, the gap existing between you and yourself. This is the real and most profitable outcome of encountering the others. Shortening the gap, bridging this distance in yourself, you will see the multiplicity of the world reduced and the others go down in number till they gradually fade away, disappearing from your life, like tools which are no longer needed, when the work is done. The more you are separated from yourself, the more this space must be filled with others, stuffed with casualness, with a multitude of adversities, with a crowd of events, most of which are unpleasant.  The more you fill the inner gap the less the world intrudes between you and yourself. Without this understanding men meet each other in a somnambulistic state, troubled by worries, clouded by doubts and fears and lost in daily discord. They meet so as to pursue objectives and insignificant, external advantages, instead of taking from the encounter the only real, durable profit: to eliminate one’s mediocrity and lies, and conquer oneself. No matter how much people devote themselves to doing, to discussing business or making apparently important decisions, from an

evolved man’s point of view, they appear to be little more than uncivilized individuals busy negotiating and haggling over glass beads, bric-a-brac and trash. It is you who gives significance to events, who creates the people crowding your life. You are responsible for their moral and human quality, their actions and reactions, their understanding. It is in your power to illuminate them or to switch them off, for a second or for a life time. You can speed them up or you can slow them down. You can keep them or let them go. The world is an appendix, a game of lights and shadows where people exist and things happen only because you are. For a real man, meeting others is only a stratagem to know oneself, to discover one’s own incompleteness and heal it. 

The others are your being made visible

The others are mirrors reflecting our image. The others are our being made visible, our psychology materialized. In fact, depending on the state of being that you are in, others reflect your doubts, your uncertainties, your sorrow and fears or they reflect your state of independence, wellbeing and  certainty. This realization will allow us to encounter a stable, clean and harmonious world if we live corresponding states of being. The others are projections of our states of Being. When certain states disappear from inside, certain events and certain people disappear from our lives. For a humanity that is unprepared to encounter a respectful, balanced, bright world there could only be an entry into a world of negativity and boredom. An incomplete person cannot bear to be by himself, to enjoy his own company. His incompleteness, his guiltiness urges him to always look for others to meet, in a constant state of expectation, perpetually waiting for something to happen. Solitude, a state in which to cultivate elevation of one’s Being, is boring for unready people because it goes towards silence and leads to an absence of events, circumstances and gripping, absorbing emotions… and above all, an absence of others. You need to prepare for perfection or it arrives like a shadow, fear, threat. Unprepared people would suffocate with boredom. They would see unity of being and stillness as idleness and immobility. Realizing himself to be the solely responsible for his own world, an ordinary man would feel strangled and crushed.  He prefers to believe that he is part of the creation, part of the shadows, in a world made by others, rather than to accept the responsibility of being the Maker of his destiny -

because the state of being the Dreamer, the Creator is too powerful.The life of a dreamer will not accept even a single atom of uncertainty. Understand this and you will either give yourself up to sleep with its justifying, complaining, and accusing or you will dedicate yourself to your evolution - to your improvement.

Others are time

Turn to yourself. This must be our discipline. Realize that there nothing out there. There is nobody to ask, nobody who can tell you the way to go. When you realize that there is nothing that the others can do for you, you are free. Free to finally fetch from yourself, from your uniqueness, from your originality.On the contrary, ordinary people long to be with others, they incessantly search for company. A man goes out to a restaurant, to the cinema, to the disco, just for one reason: to encounter others. And each time he returns home with a sense of defeat. The reason is that others are himself in time, others are time. They are the past that haunts him.  The victory is to be one without otherness.  People get married to avoid being alone, in the attempt to overcome their loneliness, and to find happiness in the other.  But two incomplete human beings clinging to one another deceive themselves into thinking that they can complete each other, that together they can form a whole. But the result of the union of two incomplete people is incompleteness squared.Ordinary people, and especially the young, are unaware that happiness is an inner matter. It can only be the intentional choice of this very instant and cannot be in time; it cannot happen with another person.  It is impossible.  Only you, in absence of time, returning to the source, regaining your unity, can be happy. Integrity doesn’t have plurality.  Integrity cannot be achieved in two or three.  Just like one cannot be healthy in two or in three. If you lower your level of integrity, of truth, of happiness, the world fragments, and becomes a kaleidoscope.  Innocence is a return to integrity - a rewinding.  The closer you are to integrity, the less you rely on others, the less you need others, until for your nature, there is no alternative to your solitude; it becomes a blessing state that you can pursue and hold constant in the middle of a crowd, or in the uproar of a bazaar.

The Portable Paradise

Timelessness makes life tremendously easy. Liberate yourself from time. Liberate yourself from the hypnotic need for others. Train yourself to have a paradise inside - a portable paradise. There is no role, friend, relationship, that can make you live in paradise. Only you, yourself can do it.  No marriage, no music, no drugs, no sex can give you paradise or happiness. No politics, no religion, no priest, no master or guru can do it – no one outside of yourself.

Dreams in Blog - Article on Sleep

14/Jul/2009

Article on Sleep

Posted by : Prof. D'Anna

The invitation to write on such an interesting theme, so close to our existence and yet so misterious and in many ways still unexplored, has received my immediate assent. In fact it has been for me a precious pretext to compress in the few pages of one article the ideas and the material that since many years I am gathering on this wonder of our life, on this amazing phenomenon.

From the first draft of this article, and procedeeng with the iconographic search and selection of the images that could illustrate my ideas about sleep, I realised the extent of the subject, its multi-faceted nature and complexity. My first choice then has been to limit the investigation to some aspects of sleep as an intimate, individual phenomenon, and to some reflections which cannot commonly be found in the existing literature on this theme.

Keeping in mind the final development of this work, my excursus moves

from the apology and praise of sleep - in a vision which considers it a pleasure, a phisiological function and a natural right given for granted - to the exploration of more misterious sides of sleep, depicting it as rather an uneasy, unquiet state, till the consideration of some disturbing aspects of it.

 

Beauty, Eros and Sleep

An aspect of sleep, as part of its collective imagery, is certainly the sensual sleep. The sleeping Venus, one of the last works by the Italian renaissance Master Giorgione is an extremely influential painting. It portrays a nude woman whose profile seems to follow that of the hills in the background. This painting, also known as the Dresden Venus, is an hymn to beauty, sleep and eros. Erotic implications are made by the placement of her left hand on her groin and Venus's raised arm. To show one’s armpit for a woman still today, in many cultures, is considered an indecent gesture.

The choice of a nude woman marked a revolution in art, and is considered one of the starting points of modern art. The painting was unfinished at the time of Giorgione’s death (1510). The landscape and sky were later finished by Titian, who later painted the similar Venus of Urbino.

Sleeping VenusGiorgione, c. 1510

Oil on canvas108,5 × 175 cm

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

 

Sleep after sex

In 1866 a Turkish Diplomat Khalil Bey ordered a painting to the French artist Gustave Coubet, the foremost realist painter of mid-19th-century. The image of a pair of entwined sleeping female bodies far from being a purely erotic painting has undeniably an element of trasgressive sensuality which cannot be lacking in a short but comprehensive research on sleep.

Coubet’s work also gives the cue for a quick note on how foundamental has been the trasgression in art to push further the frontiers of our freedom and intelligence, which are one and the same thing.

Gustave Coubet  Sleep (Le sommeil)

 

The tight connection between sleep, sex and death is more visibile in some masterpieces that represent the human condition (especially man’s) of unguarded sleep after sex. Botticelli’s Mars and Venus shows through the face of Mars how deep is the intuition built in the French language which names the condition post coitus ‘la petite mort’, the French expression for orgasm. 

 

Botticelli - Mars and Venus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_and_Mars_%28Botticelli%29

 

Ascetic, meditative, prophetic sleep

A very rilevant observation is that sleep is in time. An ordinary person who is sleeping is fully immersed in time and has a very limited control, if any at all, on his body, on his life. As I will try to dimostrate at the end, this unguarded condition of limited awareness is not very different from what happens in men’s (so called) waking state. Nevertheless there is a dimension of sleep which opens the doors to timelessness. Intentional day dreaming, divinatory and meditative states are somehow induced by sleep but do not imply a loss of control on oneself. Just the opposit. And yet they are intimately connected to sleep and carried by it.

This timeless condition of sleep is well expressed by this image of sleeping Budda, carved in one inestimable block of white Jada, which I have captured in a visit to Hufo temple in Shanghai. It is the rappresentation of wide open eyes sleep of a timeless, alert being.

In the Greek mithology there has been just one man, Endymion, who was given by Hypnos the privilege to sleep with open eyes.

White Jada BuddaHufo Temple - Shanghai

 

Sleep as flight

In Georgia, in his modest studio of Tiblisi, I met Koka Tsikhelashvili and his extraordinary art. This painting in particular I brought with me to exhibit at the Aria Gallery in Pietrasanta, Tuscany. It is named ‘the Flight’.

I found it a very poetic, fairy-tale representation of sleep as an escape from the so called reality. Men turn their impotente and sadmesse into sleep and entrust themelves to its wings when life becomes too painful,

suffocating and one doesn’t know how to deal with it, how to transform it. 

Ordinary men wake up and as first thing they meet with their inner song of unceasing sorrow. They do not want to listen to it nor want to face that pain they bring deep inside. Men drown their sorrow in a coffee, plunge into their daily worries and same worn-out routines; they let themselves be caught by their laborious existence, because they do not want to know.

But their flight in sleep reveals to be ephemeral and that neglected pain becomes more and more acute. One day we will discover that that dark corner of our being we never lighted is the very source of all the difficulties and failures that then we meet in our life.

Koka TsikhelashviliThe Flight

Aria Art Gallery-Pietrasanta-Italy

 

The Monster of Sleep

"I have often imagined the monster of sleep as a heavy, giant head with a tapering body held up by the crutches of reality. When the crutches break we have the sensation of falling" - Salvador Dali

 

This pulpy head looks very ugly and restless.., It depicts sleep as rather an uneasy, unquiet state. The body is useless and almost dead (hanging on just one crutch), the head is loaded and functioning, though not fully capable of feeding awareness (eyes and ears are closed). It has indeed no control on reality, thus desperately depends upon thin and short

crutches which hardly manage to keep the head from totally collapsing.

Moreover, it seems there is a tremendous struggle going on. The loaded, heavy head pushes downwards, uncomfortable with the interference of the crutches...yearning to fall into the dark (might be interpreted as night or maybe forgetfulness and death).

Dali's Sleep

Hypnos

In your next visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art you can admire a rare 1st century Roman bronze statue of Hypnos. Classical mythology represents him, the personification of sleep, as a gorgeous young man neked, with wings attached to his head. Son of goddess Nyx (Night), his power was such that not only men but even gods couldn’t resist him. According to one story, Hypnos lived in a cave underneath a Greek island; through this cave flowed Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.

But the part of Hypnos’ mith which is more interesting for the purpose of this article is that he has not just a brother but a tween brother: Thanatos, personification of death and mortality.

Sleep and Death

somnus mortis image

The School for Gods

To go deeper into this important, disquieting vision of “somnus imago mortis”, sleep as representation of death, I shall introduce you to the work of an ancient School and to the ideas of a peculiar figure of a philosopher-monk called Lupelius, a free spirit of the Dark Ages, and a native of Ireland - in those years a refuge for learned men, a land at the crossroads of cultures and traditions, tormented by every war and conflict imaginable.

At a crucial point of my life I met an extraordinary being, a timeless man.

In my Book: The School for Gods, I called Him the Dreamer.

I wish all of you, readers of this article, to meet Him soon in your life. He changed my destiny. Among other difficult undertakings of my apprentship, He pushed me to a disperate, hopeless quest for an original manuscript 1.000 year old, written by Lupelius in the ninth century and whose traces had been lost for centuries.

After indescribable vicissitudes, bringing my quest in three continents, I found the Lupelius’ manuscript in Everan, Armenia, at the Institute of Ancient Manuscripts.

What follow are spinters of wisdom, extracts from the content of this priceless masterpiece.

Sleeping is a bad habit

With his inimitable black humour, universal jester and master of disguises that he was, Lupelius claimed that every night men play out the dress rehearsal for their own final exit from the scene. Persevering in their ‘bad  habit’ of sleeping, half the planet goes to bed, its inhabitants bidding each other good night without even realising what a macabre ritual they are performing....

   “When you know that sleep is the representation  of  death, you can no longer approach it as you did before…In any case, whatever precautions or methods you adopt, you must never let anyone, not even your woman, see you sleeping…Exercise the art of staying awake!...A warrior knows that to be caught napping is to expose his vulnerability…it is like inviting the world to attack and strike us to death.”

 Fall asleep awake

People fall asleep in the same way as they hope to die…suddenly…But, whatever time it is, however long your day has been and however hard your battle, make sure you ‘fall asleep awake’…Those who do not know how to manage their energy, fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day, more dead than alive…If you really have to sleep for a few minutes, then you must approach sleep from a state of wakefulness. This will prevent you from falling  into the infernal depths.”

 

Why are we awake?

Antropologists, sociologists, experts of customs and usages, scientists above all, have tried to discover the mechanism which oversees and regulates sleep, so scattering the mist around the enigmatic cause of sleep. But up to now there is no concrete answer to this question: why we sleep?

It is my belief that following a less travelled scientific path the comprehension of sleep becomes deeper and reveals unsuspected secrets if we move the focus of our inquiry from the sleep to the waking state and we ask: why are we awake? Or more simply: what is the real difference between beeng asleep and being awake?

 

The Endymion Syndrom

What if we found out that the sleeping condition is not limited to the night sleep but were a life time condition? What if we would discover that in reality an ordinary man never wakes up; that what he calls wake were in reality the natural continuation of a state of continuous sleep through which his entire life runs out?

The myth-theme of Endymion being not dead but endlessly asleep, by Zeus’ decree, and who received from Hypnos the special capacity to sleep with open eyes, can well become the crucial symbol of ordinary man’s condition.

The final thesis I am bringing forth is that an hypnotic sleep tyrannically rules every man’s existence. The ordinary man, plunged in a hypnotic sleep, lulled by a song of pain, will keep on lying to himself. No matter how terrible his life may be, he will continue to indulge in it, and will never ever find the will and enough energy to escape. 

I will try to go into this matter thoroughly in this last part of the article.

 

Hypnotic Sleep

The hypothesis of a planetary population of 7 billions of “sleepwalkers”

who work, teach, pollute, riproduce, and above all get in each other’s way and fight, in a state of drowsiness if not of hypnotism, without a real will, driven by strings like puppets, is shocking but has the very fascination of all great pre-scientific hypothesis, of those powerful heresies that later in time have been recognised as corner stones of the history of ideas and of scientific thought.

“Men meet each other in a somnambulistic state, troubled by worries, clouded by doubts and fears, lost in daily discord. They meet so as to pursue insignificant objectives and external, vain advantages.” – says the Dreamer.

The discovery that we do not just sleep at night but that, with the exception of few fleeting moments of lucidità, of real waking, we spend our entire life in a state of unconsciousness, could change our vison forever, and with it our destiny.

 

No political, religious or philosophical system can change society from the outside. Only an individual revolution, a psychological rebirth, a healing of the being, man by man, cell by cell, will free us from an hypnotic vision of the world, from a self-created prison. It will lead us towards a more intelligent civilization, truer, richer, more happy”.

For this we need a School, schools of responsibility, schools of wakening.

In them the cells of a new humanity will learn the art of dreaming. Dreaming means to be awaken, alert, to keep out of any ipnotism.

It means stopping self-sabotage, any self-distructive activity. It means stopping to be in fear, in uncertainty, indulging in any negative mood or emotion. The Art of Dreaming is to realize to be the creator of your reality, that life is as you dream it. It means to stop being a victim of the

worls, a victim of your own creation.

And if the schools and universities which we know are for men, then we need Schools for Gods.

Now we can understand the deep meaning of the Greek mith of Hypnos twin brother of Tanathos.  Hypnotic sleep is moral, psychological death. The opposite of a sleeping state is not to be sleepwalkers, sort of zombies, but to be really alive, alert, aware. It means to lead and not to be led, it means to have a will.

Ulysses orders his crew to tie him to the mainmast so as not to obey to the sirens’ song and abandon, not to fall in “mare magnum” of the planetary hypnotic sleep. The ropes bind him to his principles. His decision is the act of a real heros, of a ‘man of the School’.

He emblematically shows the way to a new humanity to persue lucidity and freedom. Their motto, has been coined long ago for the worrior-monks of Lupelius: sleep less, die less, dream more. 

Herbert James DraperUlysses and Sirens

Dreams in Blog - The way of Icarus28/Sep/2009

The way of Icarus

Posted by : Stefano E. D’Anna

 Dedalos and Icaros

Problems are everywhere. And the solutions?

The way of IcarusProf. Stefano E D’Anna

Humanity is enclosed in a labyrinth, languishing since time immemorial in a prison of repetitiveness without ever finding a solution to its age-old

problems. The possible way out comes from the myth of Daedalus which recalls the condition of man imprisoned by his own creation. The

solution is the problem seen from the top. The way of Icarus. 

Minos closed all the doors to usHowever, he could not close the sky...

 

The progeny of Sisyphus

The myth of Daedalus, the man imprisoned in the labyrinth, his own creation, is the oldest myth that our civilization recalls. Its origin is lost in the mists of time. In the western culture there is no prototypical idea

more emblematic of our own condition.

Humanity is enclosed in a labyrinth. It languishes since time immemorial in a prison of repetitiveness without ever finding a solution to its age-old problems. The calamities and global challenges we have to face are innumerable and grave: from world pollution to the poverty of countries, from the death of a child every seven seconds due to hunger to the thousand conflicts and hatred between countries and different ethnic groups. The domineering characteristic of man’s problematic reality seems to be its unsolvability. Everyone is searching for solutions. Men, governments, civilizations would like to know the way out of this labyrinth, to possess Ariadne’s thread and the wings of Icarus.

In the sphere of research conducted on leadership and of the studies on the decision-making process done in the Institute of Entrepreneurial Psychology of the European School of Economics, we asked ourselves why humanity’s problems are not only unresolved but with time they have become more acute. Even the phenomenon of famine in the world has worsened. Though we possess the most advanced means and techniques, paradoxically, we are now producing less food for the third world then forty years ago.

We are the descendents of Sisyphus, condemned to the same torment. Since millennia we push uphill our problems as heavy huge stones, to then see them rolling down to the bottom before reaching the top. And to start again, endlessly. We shift our problems to another place or pospone them to another time and then we call this solution. We were inadequate in the Stone Age when we could only count on our bare hands and we still are now in this digital era with atomic energy and internet. It is time to identify the reason of our powerlessness.

 

The problem seen from the top

ESE works on the hypothesis that the problem and solution are not opposites but they are in fact the elements of the same reality. If we were able to rise into our being, if we were able to rise above ordinary vision we would realize that the solution is not divided from the problem. They are the same thing. The only difference is the levels on which they stand.

The solution is the problem seen from the top. This vision is what

distinguishes a leader.

The discovery is revealing itself to be of huge practical value in the preparation of a new generation of leaders, visionary men, pragmatic dreamers that do not believe in the search for an external solution but in their very own capabilities.

‘It is your vision, it is your pace that creates the path. A leader does not need to choose a direction because he is the direction, the inventor of the dream that is unfolding itself and that takes on the appearance of reality’ (from The School for Gods)

These men know that what other commonly call problems are in reality solutions in disguise. There is always a solution, it comes together with the problem, it is one with it, but to reach it we must overcome our conflictual psychology, must get over lower worlds where any reality cannot but take on problematic forms. Only through passing time, we can identify the solution where before we only saw the problem.

 

Waiting for Godot

Man searches outside himself. He runs around and looses breath all his life following external solutions that with time transform themselves in problems and in this way a ceaseless perverse cycle is formed. For an unhappy destiny, we will never know that outside ourselves there is nothing and no one that can help us out. As the characters in the tragicomedy of Samuel Beckett we will be endlessly “waiting for Godot” (God-ot) believing in a deus ex machina that can resolve us from the outside. Never realizing that we are the solution. Like reindeers we run after the fragrance of musk, enraptured by that essence without ever discovering that it is not out of us, but secreted by our own glands.

Man searches for freedom, happiness, love, he searches outside himself but the journey of the “prodigal sun” is not external…it is an internal adventure; it is the journey of man returning to the unity of his being.

Man ceaselessly tries to regain his integrity, a state of completeness, of interior unity but nothing seems capable to bring him back to his paradise lost.

 

The Art of Decision Making

All organizations, and companies especially, live as arks scourged by an ocean of problems. Their life could be defined as a set of intervals of apparent success from one crisis to another until the last one, which will mark its decline and consequently its death. Organizations, aware of their fragility and vulnerability, are continuously searching solutions and looking for the best way to take the right decision under various circumstances. Decision-making and problem solving techniques were formed due to the need to have guidelines to follow when it is time for taking a decision, a ritual to follow that can appease this exhausting, stressful condition of continued uncertainties. There is no executive education programme or master in Business Administration and neither a very least certificate in management that does not provide the teaching of decision-making with relative curriculum, books and exam. The goal of these courses is to equip the manager with a variety of techniques to render him able to identify possible solutions and be able to weigh disadvantages, limits, strengths and weaknesses attached to them.

Gut-Feeling. The Decision-Making Instinct

From Harvard down, from the colleges of the American heavy league to the eighteen noblest British universities of the Russel Group, in the academic and scientific circles the world over we find that the domineering conviction is that the solution is external to ourselves. If we only knew how to handle, if we had the right  techniques, everyone could discover the way out, the solution; become a decision-maker, a leader.This belief in choosing the right solution between all possible solutions is just as incorrect as it is undisputed. The reality is that if we abandon the academic towers of ivory and we poke our noses outside the classrooms, we discover that decision in modern contexts, in the background of high competition are taken in a completely different way. Outside of routine decisions on simple questions that can return to the discretion of an employee, for the vaster and more complicated questions, and in general for the decision making processes of complex systems where the variables are innumerable like in the case of big multinationals, the only solution is instinct. In fact, the journal Business

2.0 has recently entitled an article on the argument with the significant title: Think with your guts. The invitation to managers to think with their ‘guts’  announces the revolution in the way of viewing leadership and in the preparation of a responsible governing class, a decisional aristocracy. And while all universities in the world still believe in techniques and mental approaches to the “problem solving” and are in fact intellectual gyms, there is a need for new schools and universities of being, capable of preparing decision-makers, pragmatic visionaries, equipped with an intelligence of the heart and of new senses: a sixth sense, intuition, and a seventh sense, ‘dreaming’.

‘A man pointed towards the top, impeccably aimed at his improvement, can find solutions for situations that appear without a way out, transform adversities into events of  superior order’.

The Decision of Washington

Towards the end of 1776, veteran of a series of conflicts: Harlem Heights, White Planes, collimating in the abandon of New York, the American army is adrift, exhausted, deprived of everything. Followed by 20.000 ‘red jackets’ rested and well equipped. Washington tries to flee towards the south, toward New Jersey. His goal is to save his young soldiers that would have been otherwise hanged or executed as rebels. The English did not take prisoners, as they did not see them as enemies. On the eve of Xmas Washington arrives on the banks of Delaware, he takes over all the boats that he can find and he crosses the river hoping that it will not freeze completely and that it will slow down his followers. He manages to transport all his soldiers but once on the other side he receives bad news: Trenton, one of the last bulwarks still in the hands of the patriots has been taken by the army of German mercenaries at the service of the English. Five hundred patriots have been executed. At that point, with a decision that was anything but rational and that will go down in history, George Washington re-crosses the river and attacks Trenton on Christmas Day. The conquest took just one hour and was done without the use of guns as they were without ammunitions. It is the beginning of what then be called ‘Christmas Campaign’ that overturned the destiny of the war until the Victory of Yorktown and the birth of the United States of America.

Before any solution comes our change

Who knows how to produce intentionally in himself the smallest rise in

his being can move mountains and projects himself like a giant in the external world.

Intervening on our being, on the quality of our thoughts, our ways of feeling, to circumscribe negative emotions- starving some while nourishing others, not only do we modify our aptitude and therefore our way of reacting to the events that come from the external world, but it is also changes the very nature of events that follow one the other, day after day.

Only a man capable of betting everything on himself, only a man that ‘wants’, that asks and tries to change with all his forces, can make it. And even if to the eyes of ordinary humanity he appears to be a daredevil, a person that lives riskily or even as a hell-bent, a man guided by integrity and seriousness is constantly accompanied by this ‘sense of salvation. Only he knows that in reality is not risking anything. In business, as in any undertakings that appear as reckless, he who has this certainty cannot be attacked, cannot fail. Whatever he touches grows richer and multiplies; under any circumstance, even the most desperate, he always finds a solution. He is always successful because he himself is the solution.

To Decide

The very etymology of the word ‘decide’ has something mysterious to it. If we take the root, caedere, to fall down, to be knocked down, or if instead prevails the element cida, which means to eliminate, whichever the case, we hear in it a terrible warning. That human feature which we proudly consider our noblest ability, indissolubly tied to our free will, in reality hides our fall, our ruin. One of the most diffused prejudices, and in truth the architrave on which the common description of the world lies on, is that there are objective decisions that any of us could take provided we had all the necessary information and all the decision-making techniques to assess, read and weigh them out.  In truth, the most extraordinary thing to discover about decisions and decision-making processes is that good decisions, objective and valid in absolute, do not exist.

Solutions are as good as the individual that takes them.

America would not be here and it would have been impossible even to imagine its existence for centuries if the certainty in the greatest and most wonderful of all miscalculations did not support Christopher

Columbus who until his death remained convinced that he had discovered the route to the Indies. The American Indians still carry the legacy of this erroneous certainty registered forever in their names.

In the world of events, in the realm of opposites, you cannot encounter solutions. Solutions are not on the same plane of the problems.

Solutions come from above and not in time! We have to know how to enter into the world of solutions. When you rise your being all that looked blurry becomes clear and the apparent problems that seemed unconquerable mountains reveal themselves to be nothing more than light protrusions, humps on which to step on and go further.

Change Your Dream first, Reality Will Follow

For millennia, nothing has happened. The planetary problems from poverty to crime, from conflicts to war are the same as always, now in the Digital Era as in the Stone Age. Yet we delude ourselves that we are in fact improving.

‘To improve’ is the password for those who want to leave everything as it is, who indulge in a way of thinking that is obsolete and deprived of vitality. Believing that the world can be improved from the outside is the conviction of an fideistic, old humanity that does not have the strength to face the evil at its root. We need a revolution of our way of thinking. An overturn. In order to change reality we need to change the dream. Only the individual can accomplish this. Time bends and so does man; and all the civilizations he has created bend and break down with a cyclical procession that always brings them to the starting point of their past whilst they have the illusion that they are going towards the future.

The solution, in the life of a man as in the history of a civilization, is never in time but in a ‘vertical time’, in a time without time, in the raising of the quality of thinking that can only happen in this instant.

Only being able to manage the hanging instant between nothingness and eternity will humanity be able to mould its destiny, create events of a superior order.

The Greeks dreamed cities where architecture, theatre, music, sport, everything was at the service of being, of its elevation towards the world of ideas, of solutions. Especially in the classic time of Greek civilization, always with the aim of entering areas of greater freedom where the

individual is the solution, invented universities, created Schools of thought around a teacher. Not by chance, these schools were located in enchanting places chosen for the magic of their legendary history, near rivers and sources of water. The Academy was near the Cefis river, the Lyceum, east of Athens, was where the waters of Eridanus touched it lightly and Cinosarge, where the cinic Antistene taught , was created near the Illisso river, south of Athens. Water not only symbolized life and knowledge but it was used for ablutions. In these schools, the culture of the body and spirit were the two inseparable faces of the same reality. If we would know how to give centrality to man, how to put him back to the top of any priority, at the centre of attention, we could start healing humanity, individual by individual, one by one, cell by cell.

ESE is only the emerging, visible top of the iceberg, an example that we can make it, that we accomplish this task. Classic culture, the search for truth, self-knowledge can and must live in contemporary with modernity, with internationality, with pragmatism that the new challenges ask for, in politics as in economics, to the young governing class, to the decision-makers of the future. Our culture must re-establish education, re-create schools and universities of being. We have to return to our roots, we must go back to that wisdom, that love for beauty and for truth  and for that knowledge of oneself which is the solution.

‘We have regressed from the wonderful project of the Academy and the Plato’s dream. The universities of the future will do what they do not currently do: teach the art of ‘self-discovery’.

Every student is a light that is waiting to be turned on in order to disperse obscurity- said Ben Okrri, a Nigerian poet and writer, ex alumnus of Cambridge, concluding an historical conference organized in London by ‘The Times’ by the title: What are universities for?

From the School for Gods by Stefano E D’Anna

Become the solution…inside! - commanded the Dreamer - Outside this there is no problem to fix, nor is there any villain to defend from or any enemy to fight. To give an answer to the world you have to become the solution… Enter in sincerity, simplicity, lightness of your being…. If you are able to see the ‘game’ from the top you will discover that for an man of integrity the solution always comes before the problem.

When you meet difficult situations rub your hands and rejoice because it is the very reason why you are here for. When you see a problem

coming down the road, say to yourself: I was waiting for you. I have been training for you all my life.

We must realize that all man have in themselves all the power to turn things around.

Dreams in Blog - PINOCCHIO: The universal parable of man's destiny19/Aug/2009

PINOCCHIO: The universal parable of man's destiny

Posted by : Stefano E. D’Anna

 Pinocchio by Enrico Mazzanti (1852-1910) - the first illustrator

(1883) of Le avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un burattino - colored by Daniel DONNA

 

It is time for the world to reflect on Pinocchio's fable and discover it as  the ferociously ironic caricature of an untruthful mankind, tyrannically moved by invisible

external strings.

 

 

A mystical text disguised as a fable 

PINOCCHIO:THE UNIVERSAL PARABLE 

OF MAN’S DESTINY By  Stefano E. D’Anna

 

Behind its ironic and easy-going tones and its didacticisms, the puppet is actually the ferociously ironic caricature of an untruthful mankind, tyrannically moved by strings of casualness, negative emotions and the unhappiness of an inescapable fate. Hidden under the surface of this fable, there lies the biggest and boldest mystical text of all world literature: man’s initiatory trip from puppet, prey to its instincts, to a real man endowed with will. As a matter of fact, Pinocchio is the most widely read book after the Bible and the Koran.

 

A mystical text disguised as a fable

Although universal literature, from Aristofane to Beckett, is full of great novelists, perhaps there has never been one as intelligent, ironic or secluded as Carlo Lorenzini, alias Collodi. It is true. We are a touchy and violent species. Over the centuries, whoever had to reveal some unpleasant truths or break some deeply-rooted prejudices, had to take some timely precautions. When Copernicus, for instance, wrote the “De Revolutionibus” in which he exposed his revolutionary discovery he took two precautions: a) he dedicated his work to the Pope, b) as a security measure, he published his book after his death! Lorenzini also had to disguise the most terrible secret as a fable and pass for an author of nursery stories rather than one of the most scholarly anthropologists of our nature and human ethnology. One day a wiser, more aware mankind will recognize him as the man who knew how to pleasantly show us the cruel and terrible truth: humanity is made up of millions of puppets; we are bio-chemical marionettes, driven by invisible threads; we are incurable liars. Above all, he will be appreciated because he told us the truth and made us laugh at the misfortunes of the poor puppet, without having his book condemned at the stake. We are incapable of seeing how Pinocchio’s toughness and untruthful nature, along with his irresponsibility are the psychological stigmata of the sapiens species and the very roots of all our misfortunes. The abandonment of his puppet dress and his transformation into a child is not a

melancholic passage to normality or a cruel flight from the spell of childhood with its unbounded vitality. 

Moon-men, Sun-men 

What a misunderstanding! In actual fact, Collodi presents us with the horror of a puppet-like sub-human “moon-man” who is influenced by everyone and everything. They are zombies who, through misadventure, sorrow, antagonism and disappointment, will one day enter a real humanity, “sun-men” who are proactive, responsible and shine in their own light. By paraphrasing Caligula's words to his ministers - by analogy - we could say: if Pinocchio is a puppet then we are men. But if Pinocchio is a man, then we are still men with a primitive conscious - larvae encased in their pods, waiting to break out and evolve. 

A riddle to solve 

There is an air of mystery about Pinocchio’s story, a riddle we would like to solve. Why did a writer such as Carlo Lorenzini, who throughout his carrier never rose above a Thouar or a Dazzi, suddenly produce an immortal story, an objective tale and a world-class masterpiece that had the unfathomable depth of an evangelical parable. How is it possible that a fable hastily cobbled together, perhaps reluctantly, with no clear plan, by a man who was probably defeated by personal and political disappointments could be considered an echo of a universal message and the mirror of all mankind? It’s a worrying thought. Why didn’t he sign it with his real name, like his other works, instead of choosing to use a “nom de plume”?

 

Wood shavings of our soul 

These two questions can be made into one, in that there’s an explanation or better still an hypothesis that answers both of them. The hypothesis is that the text is both inspired and the result of a brainwave. The adventures of Pinocchio, the most widely read children’s book which has been translated throughout the world, in the guise of a children’s tale, conceals the greatest and most daring mystical text of all world literature.In actual fact what we see in Pinocchio are the wood shavings of our lost soul. This explains why when we read Pinocchio the text appears to be real while the author remains an unnecessary hypothesis. His existence is superfluous like in the Old Testament and the Gospels. There’re holy books, but not holy authors. Carlo Lorenzini didn’t feel like signing a universal story, that was written in Heaven, it only had to be written down. 

The awful secret 

Benedetto Croce once wrote that “the wood which Pinocchio is carved in is that of mankind”. Out of all the fables ever written, Pinocchio is perhaps the most comprehensive and the most painfully truthful. It comfortably belongs to the “black fable” genre of Orwell and its ruthlessness is only be equalled by “Animal Farm”. It’s the transparent filter of a humanity cast adrift, that lives in fear and ignorance of its own identity. The tale of Pinocchio’s adventures belongs to the art of mysteries: the art of revealing by concealing. The secret which has been under the noses of millions throughout the world for more than a century is awful. Pinocchio is the mirror image of a bio-chemical puppet which has become man as we know him to be. We are reluctant to recognise ourselves in the grotesque image of Collodi’s character, we loathe the idea of identifying ourselves with a speaking piece of wood, apparently alive, but in actual fact driven by external forces and terrible invisible strings. In the mirror we can see Pinocchio’s image, the embarrassing appendix of an informant, but just like Narcissus we refuse to recognise ourselves in that imagined reflection - we cannot see the woodenness of his being, his chronic and incurable deceit or his disloyalty. 

The snare

Who knows if Collodi, wherever he may be, is laughing or crying at the millions of readers, the countless generations of children around the world who are rocked to

sleep by the enchanted words and images of his fable, without even knowing its real nature: a dark and pitiless parable of the human condition. However from the very beginning, the storyteller Collodi, warns us that a snare awaits us and that we will uncover the deception only when it is too late - once we have crossed the threshold of the promised fairy-tale world that opens with the fateful words: “once upon a time…” It is as if Lorenzini was compelled to warn us against his own deception, bound to an unlikely deontology, that takes us back to Cat and the Fox.Once we’ve crossed the threshold of the nursery tale, the tacit agreement with the reader is immediately upset and we find ourselves in the presence of a gruesome fable, with its ruthless and sublime irony. Reading it, the book opens up a threatening, splendid and ephemeral world that begins with a disturbing absence. There is not a King. The place of the King figure has been taken by the mass which is a joyfully plebeian crowd. The eternal dialectics between mass and individual, between destination and destiny, emerge and this tears our world apart. 

The victim is always guilty 

Pinocchio is any piece of wood that belongs to the pile. It is stuff that is destined to be destroyed and burnt, but it also longs to live. In this transformation the antagonists, represented by the Cat and the Fox have a providential, religious, ideological and theological nature.The world is a mirror. Through its events and in its symbolic language that are made up of circumstances and meetings, it constantly gives out signals, clues and indications. If Pinocchio ( the ordinary human being ) could read them , he would not be so busy sabotaging his own being, he would not make the wrong choice at the crossroads of life and neither would he reject experience, in specious collaboration with error and misunderstanding.The Cat, cruel and simple and the Fox, ironic and savage are two poetic criminal figures. The characters in Pinocchio’s world are nothing other than projections of our imagination, figures that thanks to our strong belief in them, have ended up by haunting our world. The Cat and the Fox stand out more than all the others, with their physical deformities, a symbol of a putrid conscience that is disguised with cunning.

A strict deontology compels them to warn the victim with a thousand signals, contradictions and slips. In short they can rob someone who is determined to be robbed. This is why, one day, in all the law courts of an advanced humanity, we shall read in very large letters: “the victim is always guilty”.

 

The gospel according to Pinocchio

The initial idea, the suspicion that this story conceals a parable of human destiny, a gospel, a timeless Bible is reinforced and gains ground bit by bit as we continue to read. Mastro Ciliegia, a carpenter, is the first character to appear. The father figure is called Geppetto, a nickname for Giuseppe. Geppetto is not a carpenter but he has tools to cut wood. It is more than a coincidence. As we continue we discover the story has an inexhaustible number of symbols, riddles and allegories, and that under the wrinkled and tough exterior, the most famous puppet conceals the man in search of himself. What a conjurer and an illusionist Lorenzini-Collodi is to conceal the truth under everyone’s nose. Pinocchio is born from a carpenter called Giuseppe or Geppetto. On top of this, he has a yellow wig on his head, that looks like a poor and hot “polenta”, it is true, but it is also similar to the golden colour of an aureole. Therefore… why did we not understand that… Pinocchio is… is…Any piece of wood, a man of the crowd, the real KING-individual, becomes real. The magical project of our advancement is encapsulated in that fable like a gospel about the transformation of a puppet into a real man, of a being without will driven by strings of fortuity and mechanisation, into a free man who is the master of his destiny. 

The birth of Pinocchio 

Pinocchio is a fairy-tale character, like other magical figures, he comes into the world in one of those dark periods, into one of those infernal circles. Like Jesus Christ, who comes into the world in a shed looked after by animal warmth, Pinocchio is born into misery, surrounded by misfortune, “on a bad night in winter” ( my old book of Pinocchio, an edition of 1958, says: “a hellishly bad night”) amid thunder and lightening. So we have another clue that shows that the fable, in the guise of a

popular picaresque story, is actually an initiatory journey, that begins with our coming into the world, into this “valley of tears”. The symbolism is just too obvious. In our societies, so-called civil societies, life begins according to one of the most brutal rituals.

Welcome to hell

Childbirth is painful, we are welcomed by the operating theatre’s blinding lights, by the doctors’ excited voices and by our mother’s screams, then we are spanked and put down on a cold surface, so we can say that from the very beginning everything appears as though we were truly “welcomed to hell”. It does not take much for the child to accept the discipline of the masters of misfortune or the instructions that will convince him that he has arrived on a dark planet where you are born to die and you live to suffer. In a world that is a “valley of tears”. In fact, our first sensation on being born is that of a terrible fear of suffocating, of being overwhelmed and dying. From then on everything that appears familiar to us has this sweetish taste of fear.

 

 

The imprinting of pain

This is how we - who for nine months of growth ( but in actual fact for an age) have been aquatic creatures, kings of a universe that is lukewarm, dimly-lighted, silent and liquid - meet fear as our first feeling and from that moment on, like the imprinting of a goose, we follow her as if she were our real procreator. Fear and pain soon limit the possibilities in a man’s life; an unreal hypnotic space, in which a man feels safe as if between the huge walls of a bunker that is half refuge and half prison. The whole life of an ordinary man seems to be controlled by this first moment, by the experience of that liquid fire that he has felt enter his lungs in that terrifying passage from aquatic being to an air-breathing creature.Like the salmon that goes against the river’s current to return to where it was it was born, we have a long journey to make to overcome the trauma created at our birth

and make our way home again in search of a lost paradise.

The Pinocchios of Johannesburg

There are other elements in the story that constantly draw a parallel, there is an analogical connection between Pinocchio’s adventures and our life. Pinocchio always has a thousand good intentions, he sets out with a kind of touching naivety, but then, he always diverts from his course so as to follow the easiest route, namely to lie whilst hoping to get off scot-free. He gets so used to lying that he is no longer able to see the difference between true and false, right and wrong. We’re like this. Official reports and media news are full of good intentions and are as unreal as Pinocchio’s. We’ve heard world leaders say these things, decade after decade, from Rio to Johannesburg. They are like the puppet on his first day at school, making false plans/promises about brotherhood and voicing concerns for the unfortunate, poor, starving and oppressed of the world. 

The animal that lies 

Pinocchio’s story reveals our weaknesses and our hypocrisy, which are still hidden even from ourselves, so used are we to the dynamics of falsehood. We tell lies to everyone around us because we think about our own personal interest. However, even worse than that, we lie to ourselves, every minute of every hour of every day of our life, climbing up castles of prejudices and illusions. Collodi’s invention of Pinocchio’s nose, brings an embarrassing discovery to our notice, he reveals our most disturbing psychological feature: the tendency to lie, first to ourselves, and then to others. This is the point: we can get away scot-free with others, but we shall never be able to escape unscathed when confronted with our own conscience; this is a part of us that reads our inner self, and we are aware of it, so for us, there is no peace, no rest, just endless torment. The cornerstone of research carried out by The European School of Economics, of which the Department of Sociology is a part, is the study of the individual and the discipline of self-observation or the study of ourselves.The central element of this work is the study of lying.Falsehood is a permanent state of the being, in which man has been “educated” throughout his life.Man is a liar and only lies to himself. Poverty, war and sickness, which are part of the world’s events, are only the consequence of an inner struggle created by our lying that has enveloped us since birth, and the execution of a precise and

monotonous script that we’ve brilliantly interpreted. The lie has become flesh. To leave the lie means to observe it and consequently to eradicate it.I would like to thank all the students of the European School of Economics, who have “reread ” “The Adventures of Pinocchio” with me and have contributed by giving deeper interpretations of this never ending story. Among the many works I have chosen:

Irene Licia Melloni - ESE Genova 

Pinocchio is the story of an esoteric life of an initiatory completion which clearly evokes that jewel of the late Roman period, Apuleio’s “Metamorphosis“ where the individual, starting from the most inert and decaying matter, comes through difficulties, tests and suffering of every kind to finally experience catharsis and recognition of his dignity and redeeming destiny. The metaphysical-eschatological interpretation of the fable that originates from the old myth (Iside and Osiride, Attis and Cibele) and is then modified by the Judaic-Christian tradition ( Job and the whale, the resurrection of Lazarus and the story of Jesus), shows us how faith (Geppetto), wisdom (the speaking cricket and the blue fair), the experience through evil (the Cat and the Fox, and the Fire-eater), the knowledge of the ephemeral pleasure of the world (the Toyland), the fraternal and filial pietas (Lucignolo and again Geppetto), death ( passing through the whale’s miasmatic stomach) and in the end takes the weak and sinful man, formerly a puppet that is prey to its own instincts, to the recognition of faith and life. This is where Pinocchio’s journey ends, the puppet and the man in search of himself, and due to the many ups and downs, he becomes conscious and this is an eternal metaphor for Man’s journey through Life. 

Pinocchio: a universal parable of human nature - Valeria Basso - ESE New York 

I was a child when I first read Pinocchio, and I did not like it, what is more: it upset me. The happy ending where the puppet becomes a boy didn’t even soothe my anxieties. The images of this piece of wood and its adventures, were too vivid and remained etched in my memory for years afterwards like a nightmare. In my opinion Fellini himself would have wanted to make his movie interpretation of the story appear like a nightmare. As far as I know, Pinocchio is not one of the most popular fables amongst children. And amongst the adults? I read it again a short time ago and the feeling I had as a child doesn’t seem to have gone away. Even other adults

who read it are often crossed by a shadow. Nevertheless Pinocchio, the most widely read book and translated throughout the world, is considered a point of reference and fascination. How is it possible? Why do we feel drawn to the story of the puppet, even though it scares us a little at the same time? The answer is because human nature, as complicated as it is, is bewitched by itself; we are all a little narcissistic and egocentric, we like to look at ourselves in the mirror and see our reflection even when we are unaware of what we are looking at? Because we deceive and we are deceived like Pinocchio, we fall to earth and run away with him, we live by our wits and by subterfuge and our life is full of whims and lies, just like our hero.There is an invisible but inseparable thread that connects us to the puppet. We too are often at the mercy of the waves, in danger of being swallowed by the jaws of a shark, though we often put ourselves in that position. A man’s life is continually spent in the vague search of a bit of serenity and clarity, peppered with false moves and failed attempts to return to the correct path. The puppet, apparently without strings, is whimsical, stubborn (he is made of a hard wood) insecure, arrogant, unwilling and a liar: often his attitude, his lies and his stubbornness irritates us and gets on our nerves; at those moments we even hope something bad might happen to him. But then, suddenly, when Pinocchio is in danger we feel sorry for him, and we subject ourselves to all kinds of torment until he is safe. Why? Why can we never condemn him deep down? Because, like him, we are weathervanes battered by the wind, and if we sentenced the puppet with a guilty verdict it would be like throwing ourselves into an abyss. What we cannot stand in others, is just the unconscious reflex of what we cannot stand in our own, but self-love tells us that it is easier to unload our accusations on to someone else whilst all the time believing ourselves to be perfect.Pinocchio too, always professes himself to be a “very very good and wise fellow”. Pinocchio has to struggle to free the good boy buried inside him. What he has to do is go on a journey of redemption: as a matter of fact, the moment he comes alive in the hands of Geppetto, he starts to play his nasty tricks that soon put him to flight. This is the moment of separation, of falling into temptation (he seems to see Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden): Pinocchio loses his innocence and exchanges it for a double-edged weapon of falsehood (again like Adam and Eve). From then on, Pinocchio starts his journey along the slippery road that leads to perdition…Wherever he goes, whatever he does, Pinocchio is always arm in arm with death: along the way there is always someone who dies or is on the verge of dying. Death is such a recurrent theme in the fable, that it almost becomes an obsession though it is made less dramatic by Collodi’s sarcastic quips. An unusual fixation for a nursery tale… We are unwilling to identify with Pinocchio because the truth is difficult to accept. However, whether we like it or not, our unconscious is attracted by him. Whether it is hate or love, condemnation or pity that moves us, his story does not leave us indifferent. And it is precisely this we have to analyse without letting it slip through our fingers. Because there lies the secret about who we are.

Pinocchio would not be able to extricate himself from his condition and complete his journey to redemption, if the superior influences of the Fair and the Cricket had not watched over him - though they pay a dear price for their protection. However it is also true that he is not saved by means of deus ex machine. It would be a disappointing solution. Pinocchio makes it because of his own merits, taking all the time he needs to open his eyes and prove his new self; we also have to know that we can make it on our own, that life is not decided by fate and that we are our destiny.In the beginning Collodi gave his story a tragic ending by having Pinocchio hanged from a tree. However the public did not like this, so he was forced to change it, by having the puppet become a boy. With any other kind of ending, Pinocchio would not have had the popularity it enjoys today. It would have been lost a long time ago. Of course, we cannot say whether the author liked the revised ending or not. But we like it like this, because we have to believe that also our own fable can end well and that we too can change from puppets into real men. 

Laura Dipterans - ESE Lucca 

There are several themes in Collodi’s fable: freedom, family, loneliness, fear, courage, cunning, love, sorrow, fiction, deception… and death which is also a continual theme. Death hovers over the whole story. Pinocchio runs the risk of being burnt, fried, drowned, hanged, starved and even eaten by a whale shark. In Chapter 17 we can even find a symbol of earthly death: the coffin. Despite all the ups and downs everything ends with the puppet becoming a child made of flesh and bones.Tomorrow is October 11 and so go and see the latest production from Oscar Roberto, enjoy the film with its wonderful show of lights, colours, special effects and scenery… and when you come out why not ask the Fair with deep-blue hair to turn yourselves from Pinocchios into sincere and “benign” children? Enjoy the film!

The king and the puppet - Andrea Franzi - ESE Genova 

Pinocchio’s fable conveys a very important concept about the life of the ordinary man; he is up to his neck in a sea that conceals his life from him, there he hides and lies to the world, unaware of how irresponsible he is. The puppet represents the stereotype of man’s daily attempt to sabotage reality, he tries to divert the river of his uncertainties, but is compelled to bend under the unavoidable rush of water that drags him to the end of his journey of self-destruction. Pinocchio cannot hide from the world, he cannot lie in silence, and man for his part, lives out his sad fable with

the woody heart of a puppet, dirtied by the terrible destiny of mediocrity that awaits him. 

Chiara Pasquali - ESE Bologna

From my point of view, Pinocchio is not a negative character. It is true, he is a liar, but this is because of his desire to live and experience the joys of the world, rather than gain any personal advantage by tricking people. Pinocchio starts off as a piece of wood that has never lived or felt joy. He is thrown into a world he knows nothing about, but everything about it fills him with enthusiasm. Pinocchio can speak as a piece of wood, even before he takes on the semblances of a human in the hands of Geppetto. He is already keen to move before he gets legs and becomes a real human. All this is because Pinocchio wants to live and is eager to throw himself into the world like a real child without a past. Many literary critics have compared his mistakes with those of a child and his story with the end of childhood. Pinocchio encounters a series of tempting symbols (Lucignolo, the Cat and the Fox) who lead him away from the right path, causing him to make mistakes, lie, and to be recalled by his teachers. This situation goes on up until an important event takes place: the sight of the Fair’s grave. Like many stories about great men and great heroes, an impulse comes from inside, from the person’s being that carries Pinocchio aloft and makes him become human. It is true that Pinocchio is saved by the Fair, but in my opinion the Fair is not an external character but Pinocchio’s destiny, she is his future and is the sign of what he was created for. Our character was born to be something better than what we see of him on his first adventures. However to improve, he first has to lie, suffer and pay a moral price for his mistakes. He has to have a difficult past and see the Fair die, and at the same time be free of her so he can become a real human and guide himself. 

Milka Platan - ESE Lucca

There are so many puppets in the world and even more donkeys, but Pinocchio is still considered a fable set in a magical world far form reality. Pinocchio’s story, in actual fact, touches the real essence of the human condition. A man’s existence, from birth to death, is very often like that of a puppet who never becomes the man he wants to be. From one futile desire to another, man goes on living as though dozing, which prevents him from opening his eyes and awakening so as to become a real man. The path towards change needs discipline and good will. One has to accept the truth and become aware of our condition as nothing other than a

programmed robot, that acts, feels and thinks like all the others. Those who think like the others will share the same destiny as the others.