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Antonio Mercurio

THE MYTH OF ULYSSES AND SECONDARY BEAUTY

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Copyrighted material

Published by The SOLARIS INSTITUTE

of The SOPHIA UNIVERSITY OF ROME. (S.U.R.)

Copyrignt 2009 by SOPHIA UNIVERSITY OF ROME

All rights reserved.

Original title: Il Mito di Ulisse e la Bellezza Seconda

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

ISBN 9788895806075

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Notes from the translator:

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

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

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Table of Contents

FORWARD...................................................................................................................5 PART ONE - Bread and Beauty ...................................................................................6 FURTHER REFLECTIONS: Ulysses in search of lost beauty and of beauty to create......................................................................................................................16 CONCLUSION....................................................................................................37 PART TWO - Between Art, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art there is continuity as well as a qualitative leap........................................................................................................40

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Forward

This book was developed from a paper I wrote for Russian and Baltic country

psychologists. They had come to Italy to the Institute in Ascoli Piceno, which is a

member of the Sophia University of Rome, to participate in a seminar on Sophia-

Art and Cosmo-Art.

The same paper was expanded and presented at the Second Ulyssiads of the

Sophia University of Rome, organized by the Institute in Tempio Pausania and

held in Alghero, Sardinia, in the summer of 2005.

This book is a synthesis of my ideas, which include Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art,

Cosmo-Art and Existential Personalistic Anthropology.

Reading it can be useful to anyone who wants to discover new ways of thinking

and acting, and who wants to transform him or herself as well as human history.

Antonio Mercurio

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THE MYTH OF ULYSSES AND SECONDARY BEAUTY

A guide for unifying Existential Anthropology, Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-

Art in your lives and your work as Cosmo-Art Anthropologists

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

A.M.

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

The beauty we are familiar with comes in many different forms. I want to look at three specific types.

The first is Primary beauty, which is found in nature and is always subject to death.

The next is Secondary beauty, which is created through the artistry of human beings and once it is created, is no longer subject to death or the law of entropy. It is immortal, and it guarantees immortality to those who know how to create it.

It is immortal because it lives in the works of art created and preserved by human beings.

It is immortal because it lives in the archetypes found within the human species’ collective unconscious.

It is immortal because it lives within the consciousness of the various human cultures.

It is immortal because it lives in the cosmic consciousness that surrounds this planet and the entire universe, just as an aura surrounds our bodies and is only visible with Kirlian photographs.

It is immortal because it can travel from one universe to another, without end.

Primary beauty has to do with form and with the relationship between matter and form as perceived by our senses, such as sight, hearing, taste and touch.

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Secondary beauty is not necessarily connected to form. To the contrary, it transcends both form and external sense perception, and it leads individuals directly to the very special energy field it is made up of and that keeps it alive. This contact does not come about through the senses, but rather through the vibrations that this beauty emanates, and that we must train ourselves to perceive.

Up until now, this type of beauty has only been produced by the great artists, through their immortal works of art. Cosmo-art brings it to a level where all those who decide to work together to create a Group SELF and a single living organism made up of a continual synthesis of opposites, can have access to it. This particular type of beauty signals an evolution in art. It will no longer require a material support that must be kept alive, and it will no longer remain closed within the confines of this universe’s space-time.

There is then a third type of beauty, the beauty of life or the beauty of living. This, too, is a type of primary beauty that is found in nature. It can be lost and found again, but it cannot be purchased. If it exists, only the I can perceive it, the senses cannot. If it is not present, both the I and the body perceive a feeling of not being well.

When we feel as though we have lost this type of beauty and we want to find it again, we must be willing to undertake a challenging journey, which may be an existential path that we can begin in many different ways. We have learned to do this through first the help of Sophia-Analysis, and then with the help of Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art.

Placed in the larger context of Existential Personalistic Anthropology, which studies the laws of human growth, Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art are disciplines that both complete and enrich the first. They are paths of knowledge and of wisdom that can help us transform ourselves, so we can create beauty. Essentially, this journey is a search for beauty (the beauty of life and secondary beauty) and not on just a search for knowledge and healing as final goals.

What I would like to propose is how to fuse together the science of Existential Personalistic Anthropology with the arts of Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art, to create a holistic approach to creating secondary beauty and recuperating the beauty of life.

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

Whether we work as Existential Anthropologists or as Cosmo-Art Anthropologists, the first question we must always ask ourselves is, what do you want to do with your life? Create beauty, or create ugliness?

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The beauty we are talking about is one that is a synthesis of many pairs of opposites: the I and the YOU, the I and US, the I and the Cosmos. This beauty is a synthesis of four opposing values: truth, freedom, love and beauty, where beauty itself is a synthesis of pain, wisdom and art.

If we decide to create secondary beauty, we must first begin investigating our existential unconscious, from intrauterine life up until adolescence, because the greatest traumas that paralyze our actions and our creativity happened during that period of our lives.

An exploration of the existential unconscious (one of the most important discoveries that Sophia-Analysis made) is indispensable, because it contains our factual unconscious, our reactive unconscious and our decisional unconscious.

Those who do not continuously map out their existential unconscious (I still do

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

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

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

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

One of the decisions contained there is the one to repress and deny hatred. This decision saved us during our prenatal experience, but during our postnatal lives, it becomes our greatest enemy. It becomes a continuous source of hatred towards ourselves, towards others and towards life itself, and it takes away our ability to love ourselves and others.

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Sophia-Analysis is necessary so we can make a first unification, of the many we must make during the course of our lives. This first unification must come about between the conscious I and the unknown Fetal I, which does not want to leave the maternal womb because it is deeply attached to its trauma, its pain and its hatred towards those who wounded its pride.

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

However, I repeat, this will only be possible if we have already chosen to create beauty, as well as to love ourselves completely and wisely. Otherwise, why should we ever forgive someone else? Where would we ever find the strength to forgive? Since it often happens that we find ourselves completely immersed in hatred, it also happens often that we are faced with having to choose between loving or hating ourselves, and between creating beauty or ugliness. (see “Rules for the Ulysseans’ Nocturnal Navigation”). In these circumstances, acting wisely means being able to unify Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art. The first helps us to unify our conscious selves with our unconscious. The second helps us transform ourselves so we can make our lives into a work of art, and also helps us learn to use the energy that our hidden unconscious guilt contains. The third gives us the ability to insert our individual purpose into the cosmic goal, so we can understand what our true identity is, and why we were given that particular identity and not another one. Sophia-Analysis is a precious tool at the beginning, but not as we continue our journey, because it cannot explain why pain exists, or what pain’s precious purpose is in life. We need Sophia-Art to find the answer: without pain, transformation is not possible.

Only Cosmo-Art offers a complete answer: PAIN IS NECESSARY TO CREATE. We, instead, are convinced its purpose is for expiation. Pain helps us face death and fuse it together with life, the type of life that emanates from secondary beauty. The reason secondary beauty is immortal is because it does not deny death, but rather,

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by going through pain it encounters it, goes through it, and transforms it into life (see A.M. “The Ulysseans”, and “La nascita della cosmo-art” {The Birth of Cosmo-Art}. Another fundamental contribution of Sophia-Analysis lies in its affirmation of the existence of the Personal SELF (see A.M. “Theory of the Person and Existential Personalistic Anthropology”). This structure is within every human being, and it contains a particular type of wisdom and a source of love that operates within us and for us, often without us even knowing it. Sophia-Analysis not only affirms the existence of this structure within us, but it demonstrates how it operates in our favor from the very beginning of our life as embryos. The laws of life (see A.M. “The Laws of Life”) are also contained in the SELF, and these are what guide us in learning about our conscious I Person and our deep I Person, and about how guilty feelings surface when we oppose ourselves to these laws. The SELF also contains our personal life purpose that we are here to accomplish, in harmony with the purpose of the universe. At this point, we must make a second type of unification, between the I Person and the Self. We must do so to be able to use all the best energies at our disposal, and to accelerate our process of understanding, of birthing our new identities and of transformation.

Sophia-Art’s approach to the SELF is indispensible for this second unification (see A.M., “La vita come opera d’arte e la vita come dono spiegata in 41 film” {Life as a Work of Art and Life as a Gift explained in 41 films}, and see A.M., “The prayer of the Ulysseans”, in chapter 23 of “Hypothesis on Ulysses”). Without Sophia-Art, we would never know how to artistically unify all of the I’s split parts, and how to make our lives a work of art. We could never recuperate the beauty of life unless we learn how to do this. (see “The Ulysseans”, Chapter I). We would know nothing about the dialectical process necessary to achieve a synthesis of opposites, the ones we carry inside ourselves and the ones that life continually puts before us. We would not know how to learn how to look at lives as artists and not as victims. A victim is someone who spends their time complaining, and blaming others for the bad things that have happened to them. An artist is someone who, instead, takes complete responsibility for his life and wastes nothing of what has happened to him, as he can use it all to make his very life a work of art. Sophia-Analysis, with the support of Existential Anthropology, recognizes the existence of the I Person, and the importance of becoming a Person CAPABLE OF FREELY LOVING ONESELF, LOVING OTHERS AND BEING LOVED. However, it does

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not have the tools to decipher the meaning of Life, nor to understand why this universe exists. It does not look at the Artistic I that exists alongside the I Person, nor does it understand what its purpose is. Sophia-Analysis understands that pain is part of human life from the time of conception onward, but it does not know why this bitter presence is something humans must bear. Sophia-Analysis knows what the purpose found in the Personal SELF is, but it does not know what the Cosmic SELF’s purpose is. Nor does it know how pain, together with art, is part of this cosmic purpose, which has to do with creating secondary beauty and a single, complete living organism. (see “Principles of Prenatal Anthropology. Searching for Lost Beauty: primary beauty and beauty to be created: secondary beauty” in “Cosmo-Art Theorems and Axioms”). This is why it is necessary to integrate the contributions of Sophia-Analysis with those of Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art.

Only Cosmo-Art can offer a complete answer to the question of why there is pain in life and why pain hides in the abyss of intrauterine life.

Only Cosmo-Art can break our obstinate dependence on our biological parents, along with our Fetal I’s arrogant demands and desire for vengeance. We are children of the Cosmic SELF, and our parents are only intermediaries between ourselves and Life. We must not obstinately depend on our parents and on their behavior towards us. The Cosmic SELF wants and loves us, and entrusts each one of us with a personal goal and a cosmic purpose that only we can contribute to life (see the interpretation of the animated movie: “Kiriku’ and the Sorceress” in “The Cosmo-Art Laboratories”). Cosmo-Art is necessary to unify humanity and the universe it belongs to, so a single living organism can arise through the creation of a Group SELF in a couple and a Group SELF in groups of individuals. We must realize that Sophia-Analysis by itself cannot help us break out of our innate narcissism and of our tendency to consider ourselves an absolute.

With Sophia-Analysis alone, we would not be able to handle the kind of pain that can suddenly emerge from nowhere, from our unconscious and from our life experiences. Instead, if we combine Sophia-Analysis and Cosmo-Art we can create the Cosmo-Artistic Bridge that helps us understand our pain and gives us access to all the human and cosmic energies we need to navigate from one universe to another. To become an artist of one’s life is a great ideal to work towards, and it is an even greater one to work towards becoming an artist of the life of the universe.

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To do so, we must have a strong belief in our own creative artistic abilities, and we must break free of the mental categories that pertain to the old philosophical and theological models. These models have imprisoned our minds within limited boundaries for more than two thousand years, in the conviction that we are only creatures capable of sinning, and incapable of creating or adding anything of value to life and to the universe. Cosmo-Art helps us understand the connection that exists between the I Person and the Cosmic SELF, and it shows us how together they form a single living organism that Life has created.

In this single organism, not only the I Person depends on the Cosmic SELF, but also the Cosmic SELF depends on the I Person to carry out the goals they have chosen to reach, just as our heads depend on our feet to walk and move around, and our feet depend on our brains to know where they have to go.

The common goal they both share is the creation of secondary beauty. With secondary beauty, Life, which is eternal but is not immortal, can become both eternal and immortal. In return, Life can give the same gift of immortality to both the universe, and to the humans who have collaborated in this immense effort to create a beauty that does not yet exist, and that once created never dies.

The meaning of human life and the answer to the question “Why do we exist?” is found in this connection between the I Person and the Cosmic SELF. The reason we exist is to create a type of beauty that Life needs and that we need as well.

The meaning behind pain, the answer to the question “Why does pain exist?” is: because without pain we could not create a type of beauty that can overcome death.

The meaning behind death and the answer to the question “Why does death exist?” is, without death, we could never go from a mortal form of life to an immortal one. And what is the meaning of art? Why does art exist?

It exists because it is the only human activity that synthesizes opposites, so secondary beauty can emerge. It is also the only thing that humans have developed so far in our history that allows us to create a synthesis between our existence, pain and death, the existence of the cosmos and the existence of the I’s creative artistic ability. The connection between the Personal Self and the Cosmic Self also reveals the secret of how we can go from the finite reality of this universe and of everything that

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is mortal, to the infinite, immortal reality pertaining to the energy field that is secondary beauty.

A new cosmological framework emerges from this connection, and it is what can help us understand how the Artistic I paints the canvas of human life, when it is in harmony with the Personal Self and the Cosmic SELF.

Each one of the unifications mentioned produces beauty, and all together, they contribute to the creation of life as a work of art. However, when we go from unification to fusion, we accomplish a perfect synthesis of opposites, and this produces secondary beauty.

The first step in this process is for the I to become a Person, capable of freely loving itself, of loving others and of receiving love. The second step is for the I to become an artist of its own life. The third and last step is for the I to become an artist of the life of the universe (the fusion of the I and the SELF, the I with a You, the I with Others, the I with the Cosmos). It then creates the One within itself, a single living organism instead of many different separate ones, which means creating secondary beauty.

Without Sophia-Analysis, Cosmo-Art has no substance and is without a supporting foundation. But Sophia-Analysis without Cosmo-Art is incapable of helping us face the painful events life presents us with and of explaining their mysteries.

It is important that we understand how we can make the step from art to Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art.

The goal of art is to transform matter and to impress on it immortal life. The goal of Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art is to transform the mortal spirit (the I is a mortal spiritual principle) and to impress immortal life upon it. A sign that we have accomplished this is when we manage to create a Group SELF and produce secondary beauty. This goal is a higher one than the goal of art as we have known it so far.

Even if the I cannot exist without matter, the human I is spirit, not matter. The I is not made of atoms, and its energy is not of the same type found in the physical or biological dimensions, just as a work of art’s energy has nothing to do with the type of energy found on a physical or biological level.

The spirit is like the wind, and it flows where it wants to (spiritus ubi vult spirat). It is difficult to catch the wind. It is even more difficult to catch the spirit, to grasp the I and bend it to accept the intention of art, which is to unify and transform it. It is immensely more difficult to grasp the I than it is to take matter and bend it to the intention of art. To do so we need a type of art that is superior to the kind that artists have shown us so far.

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Grasping the I means exposing how the Fetal I is still present within the Adult

I, and how it forces the Adult I to follow along with its decisions of hatred and wounded pride, and consider revenge its only reason to live.

We must realize that the power struggle between the Fetal I and the Adult I is just like the one between Polyphemus the Cyclops and Ulysses, and if we don’t find a way to get it drunk we will never be able to blind it, and thus finally deactivate its determination to get revenge. The Fetal I is an essential part of the I, and the I does not perceive it as a threat like Polyphemus is. Instead, it uses the seductive song of the Sirens, and offers a promise of happiness and satisfaction that is hard to refuse: the satisfaction of revenge. Just as Ulysses tied himself to the ship’s mast and to his goal of returning to Ithaca, we must tie ourselves to the mast of the joy principle (Sophia-Analysis) and to the goal of becoming artists capable of creating beauty (art, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art). The Fetal I does not just embody vengeful hatred; it also tenaciously defends its desire for intrauterine incest. This type of incest keeps a child tied to the mother forever, in an embrace that often becomes fatal. (See the interpretation of the film “The Piano” by Jane Campion, in “The Group Cosmo-Art Laboratories”, as well as the relationship between Ulysses and Circe, Ulysses and Calypso, Ulysses and the Sirens and Ulysses and the various monsters he meets during his journey. The song of the Sirens has more than one meaning: it represents the desire for revenge, intrauterine incest and the pleasure of staying enmeshed with the devouring mother).

If we decide to constantly take small steps forward, we will be able to bring forth freedom, serenity, unification and beauty, where once we experienced pain, hatred, anguish, ugliness, brokenness, splitting, and a mortal embrace with the mother. When this happens, it is certainly thanks to how a superior type of art can have a miraculous effect, and can obtain more from less, immortality from mortality, infinity from what is naturally finite. This happens because it has been able to transform both the I’s essence, and its existence. Whereas the Fetal I once dominated, with its omnipotence and arrogance, its implacable desire for revenge, its incorrigible narcissism and total dependence on the mother, now the Artistic I comes forth, and creates beauty for itself and for the whole world.

What we mean by immortal is the I that is born as a mortal, and creates an

immortal soul for itself by embracing its values, becomes capable of living beyond the physical confines of this universe, without the help of any God.

What we mean by infinite is the type of life that can stay alive without having to

go through the death-rebirth cycle, and without having to borrow energy any longer from the environment in which it lives.

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As the I becomes ever more unified with the SELF, with a YOU, with Others and with the Cosmos in a great Group Purpose¸ the I can create this form of infinite, immortal life for itself.

The energy of the I fused with the energy of the SELF, the YOU, Others and the

Cosmos creates a sum of energies that, once accomplished, produces and nourishes secondary beauty forever.

Therefore, if human beings want to reach their most authentic dimension, they

must be willing to search for truth and freedom. With the truth and freedom they gradually manage to acquire, they become capable of recognizing their creative artistic ability. This ability allows them to recreate themselves an infinite number of times, until they become artists of their own lives and artists of the life of the entire cosmos they belong to. They can then become creators of a beauty that does not yet exist and that once brought to life, can exist beyond the space-time confines of this universe.

Beauty is the universal glue of life, of both personal and cosmic life. Beauty is a

force, which both attracts and repels. Physicists understand the force of attraction, and they call it “universal

gravity”, but they do not yet understand the force of repulsion and they have been trying to understand it for years.

Here I want to underline that there is a profound difference between searching

for knowledge and searching for truth. Truth lies deep within us, and it takes a lot of courage and we must face a lot of pain to find it. Knowledge lies on the surface, and while it requires study and constancy to find it, in our search for it we don’t have to face pain, only fatigue.

The best images that I have found to describe the most appropriate way to fuse

Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art, are in Homer’s Odyssey. For this reason, I will now look at the myth of Ulysses.

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Further Reflections:

Ulysses in search of lost beauty and of beauty to create

To understand Ulysses in the way nature made him, a man who had based his life on stealing and violence, one must read the Iliad. To instead understand how Ulysses transcended nature and goes from living life as a thief to living life as a gift, from life as violence to life centered on the creation of secondary beauty, one must learn how to read the Odyssey.

With one specific warning.

Most commentators on Homer, from Dante Alighieri up to today, have always seen Ulysses as a man who hungered after knowledge, but also as a man who continually conjured up deceitful and dishonest schemes. As we can see, knowledge and deceit can easily coexist, and this is one way of saying that Ulysses hungers after knowledge, but not after truth.

This is why in his “Divine Comedy” Dante condemns him to hell, after having him die during at a storm at sea, while passing through the columns of Hercules. We, however, know that this is only something Dante invented. It is not Homer’s thought. During Dante’s time, the poem of the Odyssey was yet unknown.

None of these commentators have ever noticed that Homer calls Ulysses “the man of the thousand woes” (he mentions Ulysses’ trials and tribulations 59 times throughout the poem), to describe how he was capable of transforming himself and others through his pain and his artistry.

Nor have they noticed how Ulysses is a man who makes his life into a work of art¸ while in continual dialog with Athena, the goddess of wisdom, thus creating beauty for himself and for the whole world. (In the poem the Odyssey, Athena intervenes to help Ulysses 48 times, and Ulysses asks her to help him 12 times).

Despite all the anguish and troubles he goes through, Ulysses never considers himself a victim of fate, but always as an artist of his life and of the life of the universe, ready to transform himself every time it is necessary for him to do so.

We have a clear example of this when he lands on the island of the Phaecians after being shipwrecked by a terrible storm. One day he had barely escaped death, and the next he begins narrating his trials with such skill that everyone remains enchanted by him, and would wish that he never stop telling his story.

With the help of Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art, we want to learn

about this mythical figure and make him a role model for our lives. THE PACT FOR BEAUTY

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Before reading the Iliad, it is important to know about what happened before and about Ulysses’ important role in this episode.

The Achaean princes were all in love with Helen, considered the most beautiful woman of her time. They all went to Sparta in hopes of receiving her hand in marriage.

Helen’s father Tyndarus cannot decide who to give her to, because he does not want any of the princes to become his enemies. He cannot find a solution to this problem.

At this point, Ulysses comes up with a brilliant idea: Helen will choose her husband, not her father, but all those she does not choose will vow to go to Helen’s rescue should she ever be threatened in any way.

Helen chooses Menelaus, and the princes make their vow. When, some years later, the Trojan prince Paris kidnaps Helen and takes her

off to Troy, the Greek princes honor their vow and put together a great army. They then go to Troy to get Helen back.

Keeping in mind that here we are dealing with a myth and not historical facts, we can try to read what the myth is hiding in its depths and to understand its meaning.

Helen is the most beautiful woman in the world. She is therefore the ultimate symbol of beauty. But of what type of beauty? We are definitely dealing with primary beauty, or with the beauty of life, but not with secondary beauty, that never dies.

A woman’s beauty is subject to the detrimental effects of time and death, which come like a thief in the night and take it away. Today Paris kidnaps her, and tomorrow death will do the same.

What can a man do, to save the beauty that life has given him, and the beauty

his heart desires so badly, from the ravages of death?

The Greek princes make a vow; they make a pact to defend beauty even at the cost of their own lives.

This is the first time we have ever heard of a “pact between men to safeguard beauty”. It had never happened before, and it has not happened since.

Ulysses is the one who proposes the pact and he gets results from it: Helen returns to Sparta. But for how long? With Ulysses’ cunning and the strength of their weapons, the Greeks managed to overcome Troy’s high walls and conquer the city. Menelaus gets Helen and her beauty back, as do all those who fought for the same cause, but this solution is ephemeral, and it won’t last forever.

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We cannot definitively solve the problem of how to save beauty with the use of cunning, deceit and weapons.

Ulysses understood this in the very moment he proposed to make the pact, and, in fact, when the Greeks come to Ithaca to ask him to respect the pact and come with them to Troy, he pretends he is crazy and does not want to leave. He leaves only because he is forced to. (see The Encyclopedia of Greek Mythology).

When after ten years of war and innumerable deaths on the battlefield Troy is conquered, and the Greeks leave to go home with Helen and all of Troy’s treasures, Ulysses knows that the true problem has not been solved, or it has been solved only in part. He therefore must attempt new ways that are different from the use of weapons and deceit, even though these tactics can still sometimes be necessary and useful.

He needs to find new ways, different from those based on primary beauty¸ that is here today and gone tomorrow.

A different type of beauty must become the goal, a type of beauty that is

immortal, not ephemeral; that is forever safe from death, and can protect from death those who know how to create it. Only artistic action can accomplish this. Art, in fact, has the power to transform the essence and the existence of that which exists in a temporal dimension, so it can become part of an atemporal dimension, capable of eternally passing through the present and the future.

This same idea can be explored in other ways. If gods are immortal by their nature, what can humans do to become

immortal?

Ulysses leaves Troy with this idea stuck in his head. He is in no hurry to return to Ithaca. To the contrary, he does not want to return until he has found the secret of immortality.

In antiquity Gilgamesh was another king who was driven by this same kind of anguish, and he traveled by land and sea in search of this secret. He, however, did not leave us a role model we can possibly imitate. Ulysses instead does, as described by Homer. This is what we can find in the Odyssey.

At this point, a question arises: but what does all this have to do with the work we do as Existential Anthropologists or as Cosmo-artistic Anthropologists?

People come with their symptoms and their problems, and they are looking for solutions to these, but they are not looking for beauty or immortality.

This is what it looks like, but this is not the truth. They have bread to survive on, but they also need beauty to live and this is what is missing in their lives.

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Under the cover of symptoms and problems lies a deeper truth, which cannot be said aloud right away, because it would be seen as madness. No one wants to be considered crazy.

If someone were to go to a therapist directly asking for the secret to immortality

or immortal beauty, it would be an inappropriate request. It would be a crazy request, so it must be carefully camouflaged to make it look acceptable and believable for both people involved.

Therefore, people must disguise themselves as sick patients with certain problems, and hope that the therapist will fall for their deception and give them hope they can get better.

It’s a bit like what Ulysses does when he disguises himself as a beggar so he can go into his palace besieged by the Suitors. In this way, he can hide what his true motives are.

But how can we heal from the “obscure sickness”¸ from the deep suffering that is caused by our fear of death, by our anguish because we know we are mortal but we do not know how to achieve immortality, which was once guaranteed to everyone by religion but has now lost its certainty and credibility?

It is certainly not a coincidence that psychotherapy has become so widely

diffused, while every day religion is losing a bit more of its influence and the importance it once had in people’s lives.

There is a terrible emptiness left in its place, and the deception that psychotherapy can fill this void cannot hold up for long, unless psychotherapy understands the question people are really asking, and what its answer is.

Two books by Jung can be very useful: “Psychology and Alchemy” and “The

Psychology of Transference”. In addition, a good book on the history of alchemy can illustrate how the search to transform lead into gold was actually a search for beauty and immortality.

Alchemy is present in all the world’s cultures, in its own specific language or expressed through the language appropriate to each culture.

My exploration of secondary beauty and immortality is very similar to alchemy,

even though it proposes a completely different path, comparable to therapy but naturally superior to it as it is an artistic spiritual one. This path is available to anyone, not to just a select few, just as anyone can read the Odyssey.

THE PACT FOR COSMOARTISTIC BEAUTY Those of us in the Sophia University of Rome have formulated the following

pact:

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THE COSMOARTISTIC PACT FOR BEAUTY I affirm the Life is my Mother and the Universe is my Father, and that with

their immense love for me I can become capable of separating from my biological parents, with grateful forgiveness and love.

I affirm that Life is powerful, but it is neither omnipotent nor perfect, and as

such, I accept it with all my heart and all my strength. I affirm that Life and the Universe are the creators of everything living and not

living on Earth and in the entire Cosmos. I affirm that everything that is organic and inorganic in this Universe forms a

single living organism, and that every human being is a precious component of this living organism.

I affirm that human life is continually evolving, as is the universe that it is a

part of, and its essential purpose is to develop the properties emerging in this universe: the creation of a form of life that is immortal beyond this universe’s space-time.

I affirm that a mortal life, such as a human one, can create a form of immortal

life if it creates Secondary Beauty¸ as described by Cosmo-Art. I affirm that my desire within for immortality is the same goal that Life has,

and that if I become a co-creator with Life, we can reach this goal. I am convinced that pain is one of the cosmic forces that human beings can

use, along with wisdom and art, to create secondary beauty, which is the result of a fusion of cosmic and human forces.

I am convinced that pain is like death. In nature, death encounters life to

create new forms of life that are also mortal, while pain encounters human life to incite us to create a new form of life that is now immortal. By doing so we realize the deepest desire of Life in this universe, which is immortality.

I affirm, along with the great poet Homer, that those who manage to create a

fusion between an I and a You create the beauty of glorious concordance. This is what Ulysses did with Penelope.

I affirm that those who realize the fusion between their own I and their SELF

become One with the Cosmos, and this is what Ulysses (the I ) did by always listening carefully to the goddess Athena’s advice (the SELF).

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I affirm that just as Ulysses won over his monsters and poisons, I can also win over my own internal monsters and my own poisons. By doing so, I can make my life a work of art, that is a fusion of truth, love, freedom and beauty, without, however, demanding that this happens overnight.

I believe that the moral perfection the great religions proposed is only one step

in human evolution, and that it is not an end in itself but is finalized to humanity’s next evolutionary step: to transform oneself into an artist of one’s life and of the life of the Universe.

Any life begins and ends, but a life that creates a form of immortal life such as

secondary beauty overcomes every beginning and ending and transforms the continual flow of life and death into a form of life that never ends, and no longer must die.

Artists create immortal works of life within the space-time of this universe. They

are the first ones to have created an immortal soul and to have infused a mortal, material medium with it.

Cosmo-Art is a continuation of the way opened up by artists, so human life can

create an immortal soul and infuse this mortal universe with it. Cosmo-artists create works of art that have a soul that is immortal even beyond

the space-time of this universe. In this way, after death they can navigate forever from one universe to the next.

I affirm that if those of us who follow Cosmo-Art can unite in a pact to create

Secondary Beauty, we can create a Group SELF that goes beyond the egoism of those who want only their own well-being, whether it be spiritual or physical, and we can accomplish a goal that is not only individual, but is Cosmic.

I thus affirm that friendship is a value that those of us who aspire to a cosmic

goal must loyally cultivate: a cosmo-artistic friendship that we are sealing with this pact. It is a friendship based on our decision to help each other fight our poisons, and make the internal transformations we must make in our daily lives.

“Today is a new day and I choose love and I choose beauty. Love that is a fusion of truth, freedom and the love force. Beauty that is a fusion of opposites and a fusion of pain, wisdom and art”. Whoever remains faithful to this pact can find peace, joy and happiness, today,

tomorrow and forever. Strengthened by these convictions and affirmations, those of us in Cosmo-Art

hereby swear to cultivate our faithfulness to the Pact for Beauty, and every morning, in complete freedom, we will renew our vow.

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THE BEAUTY OF LIFE Now, let us put aside secondary beauty for the time being, and look a bit more

closely at the beauty of life. What I mean when I speak of the beauty of life is what pretty much all of us

receive during intrauterine life and that we generally manage to preserve until we are children.

Then, at least in the West, this beauty disappears. We can see around us many young people who are sad and anxious, and who in ever-greater numbers are using alcohol or pills or all kinds of drugs that soon they can no longer live without.

The way Sophia-Analysis sees this crisis is that while it is true that during

intrauterine life we learn to enjoy the beauty of life, it is also true that during that period, this beauty is severely compromised by many different types of trauma. It is also damaged by the great amount of hatred we accumulate inside ourselves against those who were often the involuntary cause of these traumas, our parents in particular.

The pain we experience because of these traumas often manifests right after birth, but sometimes it incubates for a while. We go through childhood relatively immune from the effects of our trauma, but they later explode in full force. Life becomes an infernal labyrinth that hides a fearsome monster that continuously devours us.

Freud called this labyrinth the “repetition compulsion”. Is there any hope we can break free of this labyrinth? Freud does not think so, because he believes that Thanatos is stronger than

Eros, and Thanatos will end up living because we are all destined to die. Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art, instead, think that we can break

free, and they show how the myth of Ulysses is an incontrovertible answer to Freud’s radical pessimism.

The crucial question that faces humanity is not the banal enigma that the Sphinx poses to Oedipus. Instead, it is this: who is willing to go down the path of transformation and creation that Ulysses and Penelope chose?

The path of Ulysses is not a repetition compulsion, nor does he get lost in the

labyrinth where he winds up caught forever in the jaws of the monster, which is really none other than our own repressed hatred or our desire for revenge. Instead, he goes into the labyrinth to go through all his pain and to unravel his hatred, helped along constantly by Athena, which represents his own internal wisdom. Once he has unraveled his hatred, he can condense all his energies and create the immortal work of art that is secondary beauty.

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At the end of this journey, he is able to reconquer lost beauty (just as the

Achaens won Helen back). Moreover, not only does he get Penelope back (and with her the beauty of life), but he accomplishes his goal of creating a new type of beauty with her, through a new type of couple relationship, that can overcome death forever.

This new type of couple relationship emerges from the fusion of two wills: the will of the I and the will of the You, which is a truly difficult task that requires an entire lifetime to accomplish. For Ulysses and Penelope it took twenty years, and if we include the time of the voyage that Teireisias told Ulysses he would still have to undertake after he got home, it took even more.

Ulysses expresses his intention to create this new type of couple relationship, based on concordance and on the fusion of the I with the You, when he speaks to Nausicaa for the first time:

.... “may the gods bring you all the gifts your heart so desires a husband and a home may they bring you along with glorious concordance as well; nothing is more beautiful and more precious than this when with a single soul man and woman run their household; the malicious are rendered furious but their friends rejoice and they become well renowned” .... (Od. VI, 180-185) At this point, the question that someone who comes asking us for help poses

can be seen as follows, which is a little easier to accept: I once knew the beauty of life and then I lost it and I can’t find it again; is there a

way I can find it? I am not talking about the search for lost time, but the search for lost beauty,

because without it life is not pleasurable. Does the person I am asking for help understand what my question is, and can

they give me an answer that they have found true themselves, and have not simply read about in books?

If you understand what Ulysses’ and Penelope’s journey is, and you have

managed to make it your own through your own life experience, you will have no problem in answering yes, in being credible and trustworthy in terms of what you do and what you promise to them.

But you must first ask yourselves if the fact that we cannot live on bread alone, but on bread and beauty, is true for you as well, and if you have really decided that you too are looking for beauty.

There can be no beauty if we continue to cultivate infinite arrogant demands, as Penelope did, who allowed the Suitors into her home and let them camp out there at her own expense. Nor can there be beauty if we sit and weep like she does, when

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she dreams about an eagle that comes and kills her geese, which are a symbol for the Suitors.

INTRAUTERINE LIFE AND INTRACOSMIC LIFE The forces of nature are enough for the creation of primary beauty (a beautiful

face, a beautiful sunset, etc.). To create secondary beauty, instead, an immense amount of energy that is

greatly superior to the type that nature has at its disposition is necessary. This energy lies within the depths of human beings, and it is both a human

and a cosmic type of energy. It often happens that human beings must invest all their best energies in

defensive and offensive mechanisms, from as early as intrauterine life. If we do not first free these energies, we cannot use them to create secondary beauty

This is why a journey back into the abyss of intrauterine life is necessary. This is what Ulysses does during his odyssey, so he can free all the energy tied up in his defense against his inner monsters, and then use them fully to create immortal beauty.

While Dante identifies the cardinal sins as negative forces that destroy humans during their lives after they are born, Homer places them in the period of life before birth. He not only looks at these vices, but he also looks at the inner monsters and the trauma produced by them, as well as the immense pain that they cause.

Ulysses’ long and arduous return to Ithaca has been interpreted in many

different ways. Listen carefully to the interpretation I want to propose. The journey of Ulysses in the Mediterranean Sea is a re-edition of Ulysses’

voyage inside his mother’s womb. The womb is full of amniotic liquid, and seawater fills the Mediterranean. The

Mediterranean is contained within a sort of cove, just like the mother’s womb contains the fetus.

He faced traumas in the womb, and at sea he faces monsters that he must overcome.

All of Ulysses’ experiences during his journey by sea, whether good or bad, are things he had already gone through during his intrauterine experience.

There is, however, one profound difference: during prenatal life, these

experiences were forced upon him, and he had to go through them in a passive, incomplete and inadequate way.

During that period, he had to make use of huge defense mechanisms, such as repression and splitting, so pain, rage, or his suicidal and homicidal drives would not overcome him, which could have very well provoked an abortion.

Then he had to act with cunning, and concentrate the space of a year into the space of a month or a day, to not risk being seduced forever by the seductive mother (see Fairbairn) and end up staying enmeshed with her for the rest of his life.

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Here he had to make a profound choice based on freedom. It meant making the firm decision to face today what he could not face then: pain that was so overpowering it seemed unending, and intense hatred towards everyone and towards himself. He also has to deal with the immense pleasure that derives from intrauterine incest¸ that is capable of imprisoning us for all our lives, and can very well consume us.

Let’s look at some examples. Ulysses goes into Polyphemus’ cave along with his companions, as it is full of

milk and cheese. The cave is like a womb, rich with precious substances that nourish fetal development. But Polyphemus’ cave is dark, and it frightens Ulysses’ companions, who beg him to be able to just take the food and get out as soon as possible.

Ulysses, however, insists on staying until the Cyclops returns, believing that

Polyphemus will respect the sacred Greek laws that impose the duty to offer hospitality to strangers.

He does not know what will happen, but deep inside he knows that he wants to understand what lies buried in his unconscious with respect to his intrauterine life, so he can first recover lost beauty and then create new beauty. If he does not go through his old traumas, he can do neither. This is why his unconscious wisdom pushes him to go into a tragic situation, which his companions rightly foresee as such.

And along comes a monstrous giant with one eye, who could care less about Zeus’ laws of hospitality, and he starts eating Ulysses’ companions two at a time. Here Ulysses encounters the phallic, devouring mother (already present within his factual unconscious), the killer whale of a mother who only wants to feed on her children, and devours their lives while sending them to death. She has only one eye: she can only see what can satisfy her own needs, and has no consideration whatsoever either for the needs or the lives of her children. There are an infinite number of examples of the phallic, devouring mother and I have run into many of them. When we encounter them, we face pain and our fear of death. “Bear with me, heart, more atrocious pain you suffered the day the undefeatable, crazy Cyclops ate my happy companions”.... (Od.XX, 18-20) So says Ulysses to himself, when he sees that his servant girls have become lovers with the Suitors and “his heart howled inside of him”.

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Ulysses’ first reaction (that arose from his reactive unconscious) is to take out his sword and kill Polyphemus with it. But his inner wisdom intervenes immediately (found within his Personal SELF) and it shows him that it would not be a good idea to kill the monster, because it had rolled a huge boulder across the cave’s entrance when it entered the cave, and not even a hundred men could have moved it. If Ulysses kills Polyphemus, he and his companions will die inside the cave, because no one can save them. It is more convenient for him to repress his rage, to detach from his hatred by splitting and denying it, and to calmly concentrate on his creative power so he can find a solution and get out of the cave alive. If, while still in the uterus, the fetal I expresses all the anger and hatred it feels towards the killer mother, the I dies, not the mother. It is much better to develop defense mechanisms and put off any type of vindication, even though by doing so it creates repressed hatred and the drive for revenge, which will weigh like a heavy mortgage on the rest of its life. Ulysses thus decides (he had already made this decision with his decisional unconscious while in the maternal womb) to set aside his rage, to not get revenge and to develop a different strategy. First, he gets the Cyclops drunk on excellent wine, and then he blinds his only eye by stabbing it with a sharp stick. Finally, he and his companions manage to escape the cave by hiding under the bellies of the sheep (Od. 9, 215-565). It will not be enough for Ulysses to encounter the devouring mother only once. Ulysses experienced only a part of his rage and hatred through Polyphemus and he still has a lot of it to unravel and a lot of pain that he will have to face. It will take many more encounters and new processing for him to do so. Ulysses’ travels by sea are similar to a journey through a labyrinth (see G. Chiarini, “Il labirinto marino” {The Marine Labyrinth}), that runs from east to west, and north to south. A monster is hiding at almost every turn of the labyrinth, waiting to devour Ulysses and his companions. There are the anthropophagous Laestrygonians who destroy eleven of the twelve ships in Ulysses fleet (Od. 10, 80-132). There is Scylla, a monster with six heads found in front of Charybdis, that eats six of Ulysses’ companions at one time. There is the sorceress Circe, who transforms men into swine (Od. 10, 239), and there is Calypso (Od. 5, 28-277), who would have never let Ulysses leave her island at the edge of the world, had Zeus not intervened. Finally, there are the Suitors, who devour Ulysses’ goods, harass his wife Penelope, and await his return so they can kill him. (Od. Books 14-22). As I amply explain in my book “Hypotheses on Ulysses”, each one of these steps is indispensible so we can enter into the labyrinth and into the abysses of our

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past traumas. In this manner, we can strip ourselves of the monstrous danger these traumas represent. We can recover all the energy we invested in hatred and defense mechanisms, so we could protect ourselves from the hatred we generated within ourselves. It also becomes possible to finally face pain and death with great strength, and transform them into a doorway to life, and a source of immortal beauty. SECONDARY BEAUTY

We must try to understand how Ulysses works to create secondary beauty.

The very decision to actively face his intrauterine trauma, and to transform this dark part of himself, is a substantial part of this effort.

Ulysses is the man of many woes¸ as Homer calls him several times, because by deciding to go face his trauma, the fear of death that is part of the human condition overwhelms him. By facing all that immense pain, he can capture the energy it contains and use to create a beauty that has already faced death and overcome it. This is why we can say it is immortal.

However, anyone who goes back into their trauma has to face all the immense rage and hatred (repressed hatred) that the trauma caused as well.

Wisdom must placate rage, and forgiveness must unravel hatred. If, instead, they remain intact, they consume all our best energies, which are necessarily invested either in exhausting defense mechanisms, to protect us from sudden explosions of rage and hatred, or in repeated offenses against ourselves, against others or against life. We must free these energies up, so we can invest them in the creation of secondary beauty.

The journey we must make to unravel our repressed hatred is a never-ending story, just as the folds of our intrauterine experience are never-ending.

In the Odyssey, nothing shows this never-ending presence of repressed hatred more than the persecutory presence of Poseidon, which hangs over Ulysses from the beginning of the poem to the very end. This is true even though Poseidon appears clearly on the scene only once, when Ulysses is on his raft just off the island of the Phaecians. In the rest of the poem, he is always in the distance. However, he is off in the distance just as repressed hatred is always looming right behind the conscious I . Poseidon is in Ethiopia. He is far away, and yet he is always there, ready to jump suddenly out from the marine depths and attack Ulysses, so he can take his life away. Ulysses manages to always save himself, because during each episode he learns to forgive himself and others a little bit more, with Athena’s help.

According to Greek mythology, Poseidon is the god of the sea, the god of the marine depths. Water can give life and it can take it away. Poseidon is a symbol of the mother, and the mother believes she has power of life and death over her children.

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Poseidon with his trident is a symbol of the mother with a phallus, the phallic mother who continuously manipulates the life of her children according to her own needs.

How can we not be afraid of this mother? How can we not hate this mother? And what is worse, how can we not identify with this mother? Identification with the aggressor is one of the most common defense mechanisms. However, we cannot build our lives on our defense mechanisms. They hold up for a bit, but then they start to crumble, and we are left with desperation.

We must base our lives on love, not on hatred and guilt.

Ulysses is a man who undertakes this journey into his past, so he can solve the problem at its roots. He travels on the sea for ten years, so he can meet his internal monsters created by his repressed hatred. Then he must undertake a journey by land, on foot, so he can meet the dimension of total, radical forgiveness.

Forgiveness of others and forgiveness of ourselves. Forgiveness of our mothers and forgiveness of ourselves for having hated our mothers for so long.

All of Oriental and Western spirituality can do nothing for us, unless we find a way to unravel our repressed hatred and learn to completely forgive both others and ourselves.

Ulysses found the way, and he obtains a serene old age.

To find a way to complete forgiveness means creating concordance between the conscious I and the unconscious one. If there is concordance, we experience peace, serenity, and the beauty of life. And if there is concordance between the I and the You, between the I and the Others, between the I and the Cosmos, then we can also create secondary beauty.

In Poseidon’s eyes, Ulysses is guilty not because he blinded Polyphemus, but because he would have preferred to kill him. Polyphemus is another symbol of the phallic mother, and Ulysses has hated the phallic mother since he was in the womb. To hate means to death wish upon the other. The only reason Ulysses did not kill the mother was because had he done so, he would have died himself. In Polyphemus’ cave, Ulysses calms his rage, but he does not calm his hatred, he only represses it.

Now the time has come for him to go into the depths and to face his hatred in a radical way. This is why Poseidon stirs up the terrible storm, and Ulysses can no longer run from the deeper truth: he is an assassin, blinded by his hatred and his wounded pride.

He is guilty because as soon as he gets out of the Cyclops’ cave, Ulysses shows how arrogant he is, how full of hybris he is, as the Greeks would say. The gods do not tolerate arrogance and hybris, and they severely punish anyone who is guilty of them.

This is why Ulysses must suffer, and he must transform himself and go from being arrogant and overbearing to becoming humble.

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When the storm strikes, Ulysses goes through one of the most terrible moments of his life, and we will look at this in a moment through Homer’s words.

During the worst moment, he is offered two types of help. One comes from Ino, and the other comes from Athena. One comes from the depths below, and the other comes from above.

Ino, the daughter of Cadmus and Harmony, is a marine goddess, and she offers him a precious veil that helps him overcome his fear of death. Athena, the daughter of Zeus, comes to her hero’s aid by calming the winds and by suggesting to him what he can do. We must note, however, that neither exempt him from having to taste every bit of the danger of death’s bitterness.

Following are the phrases that Homer wrote in book V and that repeatedly describe the mortal anguish that overcomes Ulysses: 300 I am afraid that the goddess told me the truth, when she said that before I reached my homeland, I would have experienced the most painful of times at sea… 305 … now (here) the abyss of death is a sure thing for me. Oh! If only I had died beneath the walls of Troy… 312 … Instead my destiny was to be the victim of a miserable death. While he spoke thus, a towering wave broke over him, With terrible force, and turned the raft around. 315 Far away from the raft he was thrown and he let go of the tiller: the mast at the middle broke

under the horrendous gust of fighting winds, and the sail and boom were thrown far into the sea … He was under water a long time, he was unable

320 to come back to the surface, assaulted by the great wave. … He finally came up and spit out the salty, bitter water from his mouth,

that coursed also down around his head. … At this point the nymph Ino saw him and felt pity for Ulysses… who was drifting, consumed with anguish… and she said to him: “…. Here, place this veil under around your waist, it’s immortal: you won’t have to be afraid anymore of pain or death”. This is precious help but the storm still does not cease…

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… For two days and two nights; and in the swollen waves he drifted about, and often in his heart he saw death before him. And when Ulysses finally saw land, fear takes over him 420 … that some god would send some huge monster against me

from the abyss. He won’t have to fight the sea monster anymore but his suffering has not ended at all:

… There were no safe ports for ships, no bays, there were only sharp crags and rocks and cliffs.

... “Woe is me, Zeus has let me glimpse the land I’d lost all hope for

after coming all the way through this abyss 410 but I see no way out of the frothy sea only sharp rocks protrude with waves all around

that scream and roar and only one naked stone wall rises up out of them;

425 … and here came a huge wave that dragged him against the harsh coastline; where his skin would have been torn and his bones smashed, had blue-eyed Athena not whispered in his heart: and leaping he grabbed the rock with two hands, and he clung to it moaning, until the enormous wave receded.

After having been smashed against the rocks several times, Ulysses finally saw the mouth of a river and thus he prayed:

445 “ Hear me, Sire, whomever you may be: I believe you must be often

called upon, by those escaping Poseidon’s wrath by leaving the sea. It is by venerating the immortal gods That a lost man just like me now arrives before your river, at your knees I come, after so much suffering.

450 Have pity on me, sovereign: I am hereby your servant”.

The river heard his prayer and Ulysses found a landing. 455 …His whole body was swollen, much saltwater poured from his mouth and nose: without breath or voice he lay exhausted, prostrated by a terrible tiredness.

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I have dwelled quite a bit on these verses, because it is important to understand how Homer describes here with great artistry what happens to all of us when the hatred we have created and repressed during our intrauterine experience, can suddenly re-emerge when painful life circumstances happen that we never could have imagined were possible.

We must understand that what seems to have to do with the present is actually something that happened in the past. Rather, it is a monster of the past that has remained buried in the depths of the psyche, and jumps out at us when we least expect it to.

When Ulysses escapes Polyphemus’ cave, he shows all of his hybris. He is full of arrogance and omnipotence as well as much hatred. The fact that he had seen death with his own eyes within the cave was not enough to make him decide to rid himself of it.

Therefore, his hatred returns, disguised as Poseidon, and it overwhelms him when he is least expecting it.

If Ulysses manages to save himself, it is because Ino and Athena come to his aid and they inspire his soul.

What do they transmit to him? The message that if he does not decide to unravel his hatred towards the devouring, seductive, castrating mother through forgiveness, his hatred will turn against him and he will die a miserable death.

That if he does not leave behind his hybris and become humble, no one will help him or offer him a safe haven.

Ulysses listens, and he understands. His prayer to the river (to Life) is an obvious sign of his change. The next day, then, he will be able to follow Nausicaa’s advice, and bend before Arete in complete humility, like a son who, having forgiven his mother, can now ask her for help. Now a new life can begin for him that was unthinkable even just the day before. How often are we overcome by intense anguish and deep darkness, like Ulysses was when he was facing the storm, and we can not possibly see what will happen the next day: the encounter first with Nausicaa and then with her parents and the Phaecian princes, who fill Ulysses with gifts and eventually help him reach his longed-for destination. We must be able to entrust ourselves to life, even when everything seems lost.

For Ulysses to complete his process of forgiveness, Teireisias had already told Ulysses what he had to do. After he returns to Ithaca, he will have to leave again, and undertake a new voyage, this time a small part of it by sea and a great distance by land. He will be able to stop when he meets someone who mistakes his oar for a winnow. There he will offer Poseidon sacrifices, and the god will finally be placated. Afterwards, Ulysses can go home and live out a serene old age.

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We have abolished animal sacrifices, and rightly so, but we cannot escape from offering up our wounded pride if we want to decide to forgive deep within ourselves. This can happen only when we can peacefully communicate with those that have hurt us.

This is where the work begun with Sophia-analysis reaches its completion: the person who has unified and made peace with him or herself. Let us look, however, at how Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art are interwoven in this process, and how they complete it.

Sophia-Art teaches us that every transformation of the I is a death that we have overcome. Every passage from one dimension of the I to a higher one means we must allow our former identity to die, and become willing to receive a completely new one, which is superior to the former.

Ulysses creates beauty and accumulates it inside himself every time he faces the death of a part of himself, and is transformed by it. Every time a part of his fetal I - that he is powerfully controlled by and that does not allow the artistic I to emerge – dies, every time his animalistic parts, based on thievery and violence that he has carried within since birth, die, Ulysses creates ever more beauty.

This beauty is immortal because, besides having faced death, Ulysses creates it through a continual effort to synthesize opposites.

Sometimes he synthesizes life and death; sometimes he synthesizes love and hatred and creates the love force; sometimes he synthesizes his I with his SELF, symbolized by Athena, who represents wisdom. Sometimes he synthesizes his I with the Cosmos, represented by Zeus; sometimes he synthesizes his I with a You , the masculine principle and the feminine principle, represented by the female characters that Ulysses encounters during his journey, and that are always positively transformed by their meeting him.

By making a continual synthesis of opposites, Ulysses acts like an artist who can transform his very life into a work of art.

This work of art contains immortal beauty, which is sometimes visible to the naked eye but which often is visible only to the eyes of the heart.

This beauty can emerge from the story of his adventures at sea, and it enchants all the Phaecians, the king and queen, the princes and princesses.

They all decide to give him gifts, and what is most surprising is that they decide to take him to Ithaca on their fastest ship. By doing so, they are going against their father Poseidon’s rules, and he will punish them for it by transforming them into a block of stone (Od. 13, 155-158).

This beauty makes Ulysses immortal, it means that he will live forever and be capable of generating new life, today and forever.

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All the other Greek heroes, and especially Achilles, are just vague shadows when compared with him. They are shadows that cry over the life they had because they were unable to take advantage of their opportunity to transform it into a work of art, as Ulysses was able to do. Homer makes this clear when he talks about Ulysses’ descent into Hades.

(Od. Book 11) Thousands of shadows of those who had lived before (Agamemnon, Achilles,

Patroclus, Ajax who refuses to forgive even after he is dead, and many other men, women and semi-gods such as Hercules), parade before Ulysses, who entered Hades alive.

This is Homer’s ingenious way of telling us that Ulysses has accomplished a type of immortality the others were not able to achieve.

He is immortal not because he was welcomed on Mount Olympus like Hercules, a Greek hero who became a semi-god but whose shadow is still in Hades, nor because died in battle covered in glory like Achilles, who in Hades laments the fact that he no longer has his life. Instead, he is immortal because by facing inner death many times, he went from the fetal, animal dimension of intrauterine life, which imprisons every human being even after birth, to the artistic dimension that goes beyond the confines of this universe, and that can travel forever from one universe to another.

Ulysses is immortal not because the gods gave it to him, but because he

created it for himself, with his pain, his wisdom and his art. Ulysses is immortal because he lives forever in Homer’s verses. He is immortal because he lives in the works of art created after Homer that

mention him. He is immortal because by now he lives as an archetype in the collective

unconscious of humanity. He is immortal because he has become an essential element in the cosmic

consciousness of this universe, and he is capable of permeating not only this universe, but also other possible universes that today we are unaware of.

Here we must point out that both the sorceress Circe and the nymph Calypso,

two of the goddesses that fell in love with Ulysses, promise to make him immortal if he marries them. Ulysses, however, refuses to obtain immortality in this manner, and this is what makes him a hero without precedent in the Greek world. He is a hero unequalled by any other hero in all of world literature, unlike any other.

He tells Calypso: I know that you are immensely more beautiful than Penelope

is, but I know that I can create a superior type of beauty with her if I can transform her “heart of stone”, and make her into a woman capable of loving one man for her whole life. A woman capable of fusing her feminine side with my masculine one,

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capable of fusing her will with mine, capable of fusing the will of the I with the will of the You into a single will, so we can create immortal secondary beauty.

Ulysses’ response contains two different conceptions of beauty. One refers to

physical beauty, the type that Calypso has more of than Penelope does. The other refers to a type beauty that does not yet exist, but that Ulysses wants to create by returning to Ithaca and creating a fusion of opposites between himself and Penelope.

The words I have put in Ulysses’ mouth are not the exact words Homer used. I

have described it this way because, after pondering it for a long time, I am convinced that this is the strategy Ulysses has in mind to become immortal. After he has accomplished the fusion of his I and his SELF (Ulysses and Athena), he wants to accomplish the fusion of his I and a You¸ even when Penelope’s You tenaciously resists this fusion and does not want to recognize or love Ulysses. She resists because she is still attached to her childhood, to her arrogant demands and to the maternal figure that devours life (the Suitors).

Homer tells us that Ulysses’ goal is to create the special beauty produced

when the I fuses with the You when he meets Nausicaa and, as we mentioned earlier, he says, “may the gods bring you all the gifts your heart so desires, a husband and a home may they bring you along with glorious concordance as well; nothing is more beautiful and more precious than this, when with a single soul man and woman run their household; the malicious are rendered furious, but their friends rejoice and they become well renowned” (Od. VI, 180-185).

Concordance between husband and wife and the possibility to become a

single soul can happen only if they manage to fuse the I and the You.

Nothing in the world can create a greater beauty than this. Nothing is more beautiful or more precious than this type of beauty, and even Calypso, whose beauty is divine, cannot compete with it.

A goddess can compete with another goddess, like when Aphrodite competes with Hera and Athena to see who is the most beautiful among them. However, this beauty, according to what Homer thinks and according to Cosmo-Art, is always inferior to the type of beauty that a man and a woman can create when they have become a single soul, when they fuse in a single will two wills that by nature are in opposition.

Ulysses faces all his internal monsters and he detaches from Circe, Calypso and Nausicaa so he can find this beauty by returning to Ithaca and to Penelope, and create with her secondary beauty, immortal beauty that is greater than anything that either humans or the gods can create.

INTRAUTERINE INCEST

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Ulysses stays in Circe’s house, madly in love with her, for one year. He stays in Calypso’s cave for seven years, making love with her the whole time. During the last years, though, Ulysses spends the nights in bed making love with the goddess, and during the day, he sits along the coastline crying because he cannot leave for Ithaca. There on the island he lies, suffering great pain, in the home of the nymph Calypso, who keeps him there by force. (Od. V, 13-15) But generous Odysseus was not to be found inside (by Hermes); he was sitting on the promontory, crying, just like always, with tears, moans and suffering lacerating his heart, and he looked tiredly at the sea, letting his tears fall. (Od. V, 81-84) No primary beauty¸ not even when it is of divine origin, can satisfy a man’s heart. He will always feel an inner torment that will push him to look for a superior type of beauty that he can create himself. But why does Ulysses have to spend so much time with Calypso? This is another repetition of an intrauterine experience, that we call “intrauterine incest”. It is the most dangerous weapon a mother can use to seduce her son and take over his life forever. The same goes for daughters, and the movie director Jane Campion, in the film we mentioned earlier, The Piano¸ gives us a splendid example of this in Ada’s character. Before encountering the devouring mother, a child encounters the seductive mother and the castrating mother. The Junghian analyst E. Neuman introduced the concept of devouring mother, and the Freudian analyst Fairbairn introduced the concept of the castrating and seductive mother.

In the Odyssey, the sorceress Circe, the nymph Calypso and the Sirens are all representations of this mother that first seduces her son and then castrates him.

Ulysses, however, knows how to defend himself from the Sirens, and he knows how to transform Circe and Calypso so they will actually help him (this is artistic creativity).

Circe, once Ulysses tames her, offers him all of her esoteric wisdom to help him learn how to go into Hades and leave it, so he can meet Teireisias the sage. She also warns him about the Sirens, and she tells him the best way to face Scylla and Charybdis.

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Calypso, once she finally decides to put Ulysses’ well-being before her own, first teaches him how to build a raft. Then she teaches him the art of navigation by night using the stars, and this is an even more precious gift.

While in the uterus, a baby does not have many ways it can defend itself from its mother. She is the primary love object, an absolute love object. She doesn’t have a face yet, but she most certainly sings a sweet, beautiful, wordless song that is far more beautiful than the Sirens’ song, which is also wordless. The child is enchanted by it, and gets stuck there forever. Only the laws governing biological growth manage to detach the child from this love object, and send him towards the opening of the uterus so he can face birth. However, it often happens that birth takes place only on a purely physiological level, because in reality the Fetal I has stayed behind in the uterus, fused and con-fused with the primary love object. The Adult I will have to face terrible battles so it can decide to emerge, to be born and to conquer its freedom to detach from the primary love object and love another object that is truly an “other”, and not simply a substitute for the first. For this reason, Ulysses must get involved with and then detach from three women: Circe, Calypso and Nausicaa. The last separation is the easiest of all of them.

Often we can win this freedom if we bend to the need to regress and return to the uterus. We can decide to re-experience everything that happened then and was recorded in our cellular memory and the memory of our Fetal I, by projecting it on to substitute mother figures.

If we re-experience all of this actively instead of passively, like we did the first time around, our Adult I can develop the freedom and the power it needs to completely separate from the first love object, and from the beauty of incest with the mother. This is what Ulysses does with Circe and Calypso.

A mother that does not want to free her son will try to castrate him. She will use her beauty to seduce him, beginning during intrauterine life, and she will try to never completely concede herself to him. By doing so, she deprives him of any satisfaction or full enjoyment of his connection with her, which would allow him to later detach from her.

There are those who use terror to maintain their power of life and death over their children, and this is one of the most effective ways a mother can castrate them forever.

When Ulysses goes into Circe’s house, he follows the god Hermes’ advice. He

first her threatens her with his sword, and then he makes her take a solemn oath

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that she will never again cast a spell either on him or on his companions (Od. 10, 321-347).

By having taken away the mother’s power of life and death over him, Ulysses can now completely enjoy possessing his love object, and when the time has come, he can easily decide to separate from her and grow in complete freedom.

In the same way, when re-experiencing his intrauterine incest with the nymph Calypso, Ulysses gives himself all the time he needs. When he is ready to separate from her, Zeus again sends Hermes to help Ulysses, and Ulysses is saved.

Ulysses’ relationships with Circe and with Calypso are essentially one event, and we have used two different ways of looking at what it means.

The first is: no primary beauty can satisfy a man. One must create secondary beauty through one’s own efforts.

The second is: one can satisfy an unmet intrauterine need by dialectically re-experiencing it, and afterwards go on to grow into maturity.

Both interpretations of Ulysses’ encounters with these maternal figures are necessary in understanding our deeper truths, which have more than one level.

The second interpretation can help us recover lost beauty, and the first can stimulate us to want to accomplish the creation of secondary beauty.

When we undertake an Anthropological Cosmo-Artistic path, we have both of

these options open to us. Whether we will want to focus on just one of them or on both, and if we will want to honor the personal and cosmic goals that life has assigned to us, depends on us.

***

Conclusion:

- If life is like a painting, and we are the artists who paint it, Sophia-Analysis is what prepares the canvas; Sophia-Art is the art with which we learn to use color; Cosmo-Art is the frame we use for the picture we have painted, and it is the nail we use to hang it up on and show the beauty we have created.

- For stars to create light, they go through the processes of condensation, collapse

and thermonuclear reaction. These processes create high temperatures, and these temperatures fuse atoms. The fusion of atoms produces a star’s light. What purpose does the light of the stars have?

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I have read many, many books on the subject, but I have never found an answer that satisfies me. It is not enough for me to know that without the light of the stars we would not be able to understand the structure of the universe. We could have done so by using radio astronomy. The answer that I consider the best is that light is necessary to create intelligent, highly complex beings. Light has nurtured us for millions of years. Bacteria began living by nourishing themselves with light, and all the other life forms, including human beings, came from bacteria.

Without intelligent, highly complex beings like humans, works of art could have never been created. Without works of art, we could have never discovered secondary beauty. What a long process!

- Just as it takes high temperatures to create a star, it takes the high temperatures

of truth, love and freedom to create a Group SELF. Sophia-Analysis, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art fused together create high temperatures. The fusion of the I with the SELF, in a couple, in a group and within the cosmos, comes about in the Group SELF.

This fusion creates a single living organism, which is endowed with human and cosmic forces. Secondary beauty emerges from it, like a light that comes from light. Its speed is also immensely higher than even the speed of light, and it can go through any type of barrier.

- Secondary beauty is the type of beauty that can transform a mortal life into an

immortal one, and it can endow it with the ability to travel from one universe to another. Secondary beauty is a beauty that allows Life, and us with it, to achieve its dream of no longer having to go through the cycle of death-rebirth just so it can exist. With this beauty, Life can go from being something that is continuously in a state of becoming, to being both whole and becoming whole.

- Just as billions and billions of bacteria continually evolving created first the

biosphere and then the human being, that at one point did not exist but now does, billions and billions of humans continually evolving will one day create a form of life, made of immortal beauty, that is both whole and becoming whole. They will eternally create immortal Life and immortality, that is at once whole and becoming whole.

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- Those of us who belong to the Sophia University of Rome are called to achieve this

goal.

*******

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PART TWO

Between Art, Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art there is continuity as well as a qualitative leap

In both Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art, we speak of life as a work of art, but what is art, and what is a work of art? The essence of art is a mystery, and there is no definition of art accepted by everyone. Unless it expresses the essence of what it is trying to define, a definition is not a definition. Up until today no philosopher, artist or art critic has ever been able to completely capture the essence of art. In the same way, there is no universally accepted definition for what a work of art is, nor are there any definitions of artistic beauty or of beauty itself. Nevertheless, artists, writers and poets do exist, and we recognize them for what they are. They also recognize within themselves the ability to create works of art and, sometimes, to create authentic masterpieces. While we do not have a definition of what, exactly, a work of art is, we can look at the characteristics that have always been recognized as being of their essence. Following are some examples:

- individuality and universality - a particular style and universal content - unity and multiplicity of its parts - being both temporal and atemporal - highly condensed material and immaterial energy - singularity and complexity of the energy field typical of a work of art - the ability to contain a soul or a vital energy that makes it immortal in the

space-time of this universe - the ability to contain and express a synthesis of opposites - the ability to speak to not just the intellect, but to the mind, heart and

deepest emotional part of human beings - the ability to inspire not only aesthetic emotions that satisfy a taste for

beauty, but also emotions that generate a transformational process in those that experience the work of art

- an ability to contain and express essential truths about humanity and the universe that rational concepts cannot express

- an ability to contain and express an immortal type of beauty that can be experienced not only by those in present time but also by those of future generations

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- the ability to contain truth and beauty that, sometimes, cannot be understood by people in that time but only by those yet to come

- an ability to win over death and time - an ability to exist even after the artist that created the work of art dies - an ability to receive and contain forever the spirit of the artist that the artist

incarnated into his or her work - an ability to become a living subject capable of communicating with other

people and to harmonize with them to either attract them or push them away

- an ability to contain inexhaustible content that can inspire new adventures for the human spirit and is always ready to fuse with the content and the forms of other works of art coming from any time and any place.

***

At this point, we can also propose (almost) a definition of what a work of art is, without expecting that everyone will accept it:

A work of art is a highly concentrated field of energy that is both material and immaterial. It is a unified field that contains a living synthesis of many opposites and many meanings; it has its own life, beyond the life of the artist who created it. This life form can overcome death and it challenges eternity. It is a form of life that can generate other forms of life, and it can act to transform its audience’s way of being, when they are willing to embrace it.

It is a form of life into which the artist has transferred himself, his spirit, and this spirit no longer dies. It is a form of life produced by the love, pain, wisdom, art, creativity and struggles of the artist who tenaciously thought about it and worked on it, continuously creating and recreating it.

Corollaries:

The freedom a work of art contains generates more freedom in those who experience it.

The beauty it contains serves to attract.

The truth it contains serves to transform.

The attraction and transformation act on the potential energy found in those who experience it and create a chain reaction of transformations.

We can also try to define what an artist is in a universally acceptable way:

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An artist is someone who transforms the essence and the existence of the materials he works with and creates new realities and new viewpoints.

While it is impossible to capture the entire essence of the work of art in a complete definition of it, it is, instead, possible to capture the essence of the materials the artist works with. By looking at the essence of these materials, we can see if the artist has been able to transform their essence and bend them to the intention of art, giving them a new essence and a new existence.

Here we could attempt to define art in another way and say: art transforms the essence and the existence of things and produces truth, freedom, love and immortal beauty.

If this is what art is, life as a work of art¸ as produced by Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art, is a life lived with a constant commitment to transform the essence and the existence of one’s own I and of one’s own personal story, to produce truth, freedom, love and immortal beauty for oneself and others, using pain, wisdom and art as one’s tools.

Before the Fetal I dominated, with its arrogant demands and its megalomania, its traumas and its hurt pride, its victimhood and its desire for revenge, its splitting and its brokenness – this is the I we are all born with. Afterwards, however, a unified and transmuted Adult I emerges, an I Person that is fused with its Personal SELF and the Cosmic SELF. The masculine principle fuses with the feminine one, and the I becomes centered on truth, freedom, love and the ability to create beauty.

***

Between Art and Sophia-Art, Art and Cosmo-Art, there are many similarities, but there are also some profound differences.

Sophia-Art can be produced by an individual effort, whereas Cosmo-Art is always the result of a group one, or at least of two people who are part of a couple.

The goal of Sophia-Art is to make a person an artist of their life.

The goal of Cosmo-Art is to make people artists of the life of the universe.

Sophia-Analysis or Existential Personalistic Anthropology, which is what we call it now, is at the basis of Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art, and its goal is to help individuals become Persons, i.e. capable of freely loving themselves, of loving others and of being loved.

In Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art, in regards to Art itself the first thing we change here are the materials the artist is working with.

We are not talking about working with marble or with canvas or any other type of material we are accustomed to thinking of, but we are talking about the essence

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and the existence of the individual itself, and that are the object of Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art’s efforts.

In Sophia-Art, even the most vile, evil and horrible parts of human beings are considered objects we can work with creatively.

In Cosmo-Art, we face our most ancient traumas and most terrible conflicts so we can transform them into energy fields that are indispensable in creating secondary beauty.

However, in both of these disciplines, the first thing that changes is our conception of life and the world around us.

The two qualitative leaps in our thinking that Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art both ask us to do regard our view of the world and of life itself (see my books “The Ulysseans”, “La nascita della Cosmo-Art” {The Birth of Cosmo-Art}, Theorems and Axioms of Cosmo-Art}. They invite us to work wisely and with artistry on our essence and our existence so we can radically transform them.

In this new cosmological view, the universe is made up of Life, and it is a single living organism. All its components have a specific task and a specific purpose. Life is given to humanity so it can create secondary beauty, which is a form of life that is superior to the one already existing in nature, and is always subject to either death or entropy.

In this view, we find an answer to the question of why death and pain exist never offered before. Furthermore, we look at art within a context that goes beyond any avant-gardism or any type of deconstructivism, which are the most recent forms of art found today.

Human life, just like a canvas that an artist paints on, needs a framework, and every frame needs a wall to hang on and a nail to hang it up.

Throughout human history, every populace and every civilization has created its own framework, as well as a nail to hang their lives on, just as we hang paintings up on a wall.

Every time, however, history forces change on us, the frame is often broken, the wall falls down and the nail breaks.

We are now in the midst of enormous change, and we are all looking for a new framework, a new nail and a new wall where we can hang the canvas of our lives.

Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art offer a vision whose roots are solidly planted in the past, but it differs in the sense that it is much more original and ingenious than any offered before in either the East or the West.

After thousands of years of civilizations that have come and gone one after another, we know that:

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- moral perfection alone brings absolutism and intolerance along with it, and through time, this becomes perfectionism, which is actually a negation of perfection.

- artistic perfection by itself encourages unfettered individualism, which quickly becomes deconstructivism: there is no longer art but the negation of art, there is no longer a search for beauty but a destruction of beauty.

What we want to say is that if these two perfections were to be fused together, instead of progressing separately as has happened up until now, certainly something new would come out of it. This new approach would no longer contain the vices of either and it would mean that humanity could make a qualitative leap in its ability to create itself.

The effects of circular causality and not just a single cause are visible throughout nature, in continual examples of self-creation. We can see them in the stars, the galaxies and in black holes; in Pangea that gave rise to the various continents; in the progression of animals to hominids and hominids to human beings. It happens on a cultural level as well: from the art of the first graffiti, we arrived at the art of the Renaissance; from dialects, we produced languages; from tribes we created nations etc. Everything creates itself, through trial and error, and everything constantly collaborates in this self-creation, without knowing ahead of time what will be created later on, after the next leap has been undertaken. It is particularly evident that every artist becomes one not because others make them do so, but because they create themselves as such. Just think of Giotto who painted in a completely different way from Cimabue, at his own risk.

Artists search for artistic perfection, and religions, in both the East and the West, search for moral perfection. However, we still have not yet completely understood what the ultimate goal of these quests really is, even though many attempts to do so have been made throughout the centuries.

A Sophia-Artist does not search for either of these types of perfection. Instead, a Sophia-Artist is looking for something that can synthesize them both, but which is neither one of them. This something is different, just like the type of perfection that nature is looking for by creating ever more evolved forms of biological life is different.

Nature tries to accomplish one essential goal: the creation of primary beauty.

The goal Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art is to create secondary beauty. Primary beauty is subject to death. Secondary beauty is immortal, and it can overcome the time-space barriers of this universe and travel to other universes.

It is a type of immortality greater than the kind created by works of art. The immortal beauty found in works of art created by artists must always depend on a material support, and no material support has ever yet been able to defy the law of universal gravity.

Immortal beauty created by Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art can detach itself from its material support, from whoever created it, just as light detaches from the stars. It

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can exist without the support of its point of departure, even though it still needs its point of arrival, that lies somewhere in other universes.

This specific ability of secondary beauty represents another qualitative leap.

A work of art conquers death and time, but it cannot conquer the space-time dimension, which is the framework of our universe. This will continue to be true until someone comes up with a way to go beyond the space-time dimension of this universe: this is what Cosmo-Art asserts secondary beauty can do, as it can travel from one universe to another.

Let’s look at an analogy. In the beginning, a language exists thanks to material and intellectual support of those who create it; then it keeps on existing because other humans embrace it and keep it alive with their support. If these humans become extinct (the Maya, for example), the language is no longer alive and it becomes a dead language. If, instead, these humans expand, for example the Spanish, when they colonized Latin America, the indigenous populaces that before did not know that language eventually chose it as the official language of their nations. The Spanish language passed from one support – Spain – to another one: South America.

Every language is created because it allows us to communicate news, events, feelings and ideas. Ideas can be banal, scientific, philosophical, religious or of any other type.

However, a language can also become poetry, song, and theatre, and then its content becomes artistic. It begins to possess a new energy that a language alone does not possess. It is the same for the life of a human being that is first only biological, and then, if it becomes a work of art, possesses a new energy that no longer has anything in common with the energy that merely keeps a biological life alive.

Every work of art exists first within the artist that wants to create it. The ability of the artist consists of being able to first conceive it and then to be able to transfer it from inside himself to outside, incarnating it into a material support, and then having it pass from this support to yet new ones, the audience, via an immaterial process.

A work of art must first be materialized within oneself. Then it must be de-materialized internally, so it can be materialized externally. Then it must be able to be dematerialized again, so it can autonomously transfer to the audience that will grasp its intimate beauty.

Therefore, human beings that want to become artists of their lives must first know how to imagine how they will make their life a work of art, and then they must find the faith and certainty that the energy contained in their work of art will be able to lift off in flight and travel through time and space.

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***

The human I is made up of material energy, which is the body, and of immaterial energy, which is found in thought and will power. But thought alone cannot create, nor can will power act on its own.

Another energy is thus necessary, beyond the energies of thought and will power, which can render the body, and the I that inhabits it and governs it, immaterial, so it can create new beauty.

What is necessary is the energy of the spirit, and nature does not automatically give the spirit to human beings completely created. The spirit is produced by the ability to condense within oneself, through continual assimilations and transmutations, the energy of everything around us together with the energy we have deep within. It is also produced when we are able to give these energies a new form and a new strength, in a way that is completely unique to each one of us.

The energy of the spirit is like the energy of art. Artists discovered this energy, but no one knows what it is made of, how one can acquire or accumulate it, nor from where it comes. What is certain, however, is that they have created works of art that are visible with it.

Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art add to the artistic energy that every human being possesses the energy of personal pain as well as the energy of the group. They have also created laboratories where people can practice fusing these various types of energies, and create a new type of energy. Anyone who participates in these laboratories can feel that a new type of energy circulates there. It is similar, in some ways, to laser energy, in the sense that it is organized, concentrated and compact, while at the same time being very lightweight.

Depending on the various definitions we already know of, human beings are either rational animals (Aristotle) or digestive tubes (science); they are children of God (the religions) or sheep together with many other sheep, ready to be cloned by a sorcerer’s apprentice (apprentie sorcière), as society imposes.

Philosophies, religions and science all impose their own vision of what the essence and existence of human life is all about.

We all know that no one else can define our essence. We each know what our essence is at birth, and what it can become as a result of our own choices.

At birth we are love and hatred mixed together, we are animals and plants, we are rational and irrational, victims and perpetrators, unified and split, born and unborn.

We can stay this way all of our life, or we can decide to be born, to grow and to transform ourselves.

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We can transform ourselves from being children into becoming “mature” adults, but this is not the end of what we can do,

Sophia-Art proposes something new when it says we can also become artists of our lives, and transform our life into an authentic work of art by synthesizing everything positive and negative we have inside. We can do so by unifying and transmuting all the split parts of ourselves that we carry within since birth, and by synthesizing the masculine and feminine principles, life and death, the I and the SELF, the I and the You, the I and Others .

If possible, we can create a work of art that has all or almost all of the characteristics we described earlier.

Cosmo-Art adds another new idea when it says we can also become artists of the life of the universe: of this universe and of the other universes that are awaiting us after we die.

To become artists of our lives, we must be able to make a work of art that can unify and transform all our components of our I and our personal history, whether they be positive or negative.

For us to become artists of the life of the universe, we must become part of a group goal that, by following the organismic principle, can transform many people who are complete strangers into a single living organism, which has its own specific purpose within the larger one of creating beauty and following the laws of life.

This is a colossal work of art, and as such it requires an enormous commitment and a lot of work.

*** The path one can take to make their life a work of art has been amply described in my book “La vita come opera d’arte e la vita come dono spiegata in 41 film” {Life as a work of art and life as a gift explained in 41 films} Italian edition 1995. I also described it in my paper entitled “Il Mito della Sophia-Analisi: la vita come opera d’arte” {The Myth of Sophia-Analysis and Life as a work of Art}, first published in my book in French, “La vie comme oeuvre d’art” (1988), and later chapter one in my book “The Ulysseans” (Italian edition 1997, English edition 2009).

I discussed art and artists at length in “La visione cosmologica della Sophia-Art” {The cosmological viewpoint of Sophia-Art} (published for the first time in the magazine Persona, in 1990. I later developed this theme in my book “The Ulysseans” Italian ed. 1997, English ed. 2009), and in the booklet “Noi della Sophia-Analisi e della Sophia-Art, una stella in via di apparizione” (1990) {Sophia-Analysis and Sophia-Art, A star being born}.

I have discussed Cosmo-Art in three books: “The Ulysseans” (Italian ed. 1997, English ed. 2009), “La nascita della Cosmo-Art” (2000) {The Birth of Cosmo-Art},

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which also contains the various topics from the first Cosmo-Art Laboratories, and “Theories and Axioms of Cosmo-Art” (Italian edition 2004, English edition 2009). I have pointed out the dates of my publications, because I would now like to quote what the art critic Vittorio Sgarbi says in his book “Gli Immortali” {The Immortals} published in 1999 by Rizzoli, about art and artists: “The work of art is man’s titanic attempt to conquer death …

… “the artist who creates a work of art dies, but he has transferred his spirit into it…”

… the artist is dead but “the work of art is alive”… …. “We will die but the work of art will live eternally after us… … “art is a promise of eternity…” … “immortality is the very meaning of art as its highest goal”.

I wrote these same things and I published them before Sgarbi, and I also included them in a much larger context, which is Sophia-Art and Cosmo-Art.

I claim the paternity of these ideas.

But now I would like to say something about myself and my own life, and about the way I have tried to make it into a work art.

Sophia-Art is a synthesis of art and wisdom.

How have I brought art and wisdom into my life?

Wisdom:

First, I had to give up the ideal of perfection and the ideal of sanctity, which were ideals I had cultivated with complete devotion for more than twenty years. I had to remain tenacious as I faced great pain, an enormous amount of guilt and a horrific solitude while doing so. After I had transgressed everything I possibly could have transgressed, I constantly tried to improve myself, by following the voice of my SELF within me.

I centered my life on my Personal SELF and I always tried to cultivate a continual, uninterrupted dialog with it (see The Prayer of the Ulysseans, chapter 23 of the book “Hypotheses on Ulysses”).

I did not listen passively to the voice of my SELF. I talked to it, I reasoned with it, and only when I was deeply convinced that it was right to do what it asked of me would I do so. Sometimes I was opposed to what it told me to do, and I know I was right in doing so.

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This is true because the SELF is boundless, while instead the I knows the correct boundaries of things.

I always believed that my SELF was acting for my own good, even when I was unaware of it. I was quickly convinced of the fact that the SELF travels straight even when the path is not, and this means that if I could look closely enough, I would always be able to find two types of wisdom acting together: the wisdom of my SELF and the wisdom of my profound I Person¸ which acted together with my SELF.

It was not easy to come to this conclusion. To get there, it took a lot of humility and a lot of flexibility. The I , instead, is always ready to complain that life is not the way it wants it to be, so it must either complain or oppose things or impose itself, to try to get life to conform to its desires.

I always tried to be an artist instead of a victim, to be someone, that is, who can transform what the SELF and what life forces upon me. I tried to look at all the pain, all the injustices, the prevarications and exploitations I went through at the hands of others as messages coming from my SELF, that were there to help me better understand myself and the world around me. Above all, I saw them as offering me an opportunity and a stimulus to transform myself, to create a new identity for myself and, eventually, a new knowledge I could offer to others as well.

This was possible as far as I was able to continually develop my own inner freedom. I acquired this freedom by going through continual deaths and continual separations from my ways of being and of thinking. Sometimes, when it was necessary, I did this by deciding to break my ties with everything I loved, facing emptiness and the desert, solitude and other people’s disdain. I also had to give up my theomania, my thinking that I was an absolute and my expectation that others would treat me as such. I am not an absolute; I am a living cell within the organism that is this universe that I belong to. I take care of it and it takes care of me. I take care of its goals and I harmonize my dreams and goals with its dreams and goals. I always tried to reduce my arrogant demands and to become a humble servant of life. Ulysses killed his arrogant demands (the Suitors) in one day, while I know that it will take me hundreds of days to do so. Each one of them has seven lives: the more you kill them, the more they come back in full force.

I was born into a culture where pain is considered a way to expiate. I fought this idea with everything I had, as I consider it a grave illness that afflicts humanity. I substituted it with a different conception: pain always serves to create something new. A new identity, a new form of life, or secondary beauty.

I also began to understand another grave illness that afflicts humanity, sadomasochism, where pain actually produces pleasure, not physical pleasure but

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moral pleasure. This very subtle, almost invisible illness is very difficult to cure. It usually accompanies negative, victimistic thoughts. It also produces a great amount of hatred, towards oneself and towards life in general.

Pleasure mixed with pain hides behind negative, victimistic thoughts, even though it is always invisible. Every time I became aware they were slipping into my mind, I chased them away by making a decision to love myself instead of hating myself. The hatred was hidden in those thoughts so I could not see it.

As far as I was able to, I used this as an antidote: to put in first place the joy principle instead if the pleasure principle.

For me to be able to do this, I first had to ferret out my repressed hatred and take its power away. I had to bend my hurt pride and give up any desire for revenge. This took me a long time to accomplish.

Forgiveness can melt away both hurt pride and the desire for revenge, but it is something that takes forever to fully achieve. It follows a spiral path, with many different levels of curves. It is silly and naïve to think we can forgive anyone who hurt us during our childhood, or as far back as our intrauterine life, once and for all.

An I that considers itself an absolute does not need anyone else.

But a human I needs a You and it needs Others.

This is why I decided to go through a thousand woes, so I could create a couple relationship and also a group SELF.

Every time I ran into an enemy, I looked it squarely in the eye: first I saw myself, and then I saw my SELF.

I saw myself: within others is all the evil that is within me, but I cannot see it. It is in a potential state inside of me, whereas within others it has merely been actualized. However, this does not make any difference at all, and it does not mean I can say that I am better than anyone else.

I encountered my SELF. My SELF asks me lovingly to own all my evil and to be willing to transform it. Art:

Ever since I was a boy, art history fascinated me, and I saw all the works of art I could possibly see.

Michelangelo left a great impression on me, with his ability to make the impossible possible (see the story of how he created the David, and how he made the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel). I was also fascinated by Burri and his ability to transform canvas sacks into splendid paintings.

From these two abilities, I discovered two rules of wisdom and art that I could apply to my own life. I did not stop before anything that seemed impossible to me,

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and I used all the leftovers in my life to extract beauty from them. Here you can see how I fused together wisdom and art.

Little by little, I began to understand how an artist thinks. Artists generally use mostly circular thinking, and when they think in a linear fashion, they insert it in a circular process. It’s a bit like how when the wheel was invented, the spokes (straight lines) were inserted into a circle (circular line). In addition, those who perfected dialectical thinking did so by creating a circular movement between thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Linear thinking presupposes a type of absolute action coming from a single cause, whereas circular thinking presupposes the action of many causes together, or at least of two. Linear thinking presupposes that there is only one point of view, whereas circular thinking contains more than one; at least seven, just like there are seven colors in a rainbow.

It was not easy for me to think this way during every day of my life, but I keep on trying to do so. This is why I am always in dialog with myself, with my SELF, with a You, with Others. Dialog is at the basis of circular thinking.

Art is a product of circular thinking. During the transformative journey that can allow us to make our lives a work of art, we also need dialectical thinking. We can understand it better if we look at a pendulum: first, it swings all the way to the right, then all the way to the left, and it can’t help but go through the middle. We must first experience the two opposites before we can create a synthesis. This, too, is art. We are all full of many opposites that are in continual conflict. In the West, we are taught to resolve any conflict by suppressing one of the two opposites. In the East (see Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha), we are taught to explore each opposite, first one and then the other, and to then transcend oneself. In every painting, there are structural lines and the energy circulates within these lines just as blood circulates in our veins. The structural lines in my life consist of four fundamental values: truth, freedom, love and beauty. I had to create a way to get to each one of them, because I couldn’t seem to find a way to do so in what my own culture had taught me. Truth was said to be absolute, and it was not necessary to look for it. Freedom was an act of hope, it was the result of “grace” and not something one could personally create by facing pain. Love was a commandment, and it did not come from an act of freedom, because Judgment Day was always in the background.

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Beauty was only in the hereafter and human beings had no lasting power to create it. Humans were only ephemeral beings and they could only create ephemeral things. It was very difficult and upsetting for me to change all these mental categories and create new ones. It was like going into hell and living there for a long time, before I could understand it all. I also needed other structural lines so I could unify my I and not remain fragmented. I found these by encountering my SELF and by creating a fusion between my I and my SELF. I also found them by encountering a You and creating a fusion between my I and a You. By encountering Others and creating a Group SELF, which could in turn create secondary beauty. Armed with introspection, wisdom and art I did my best to cleanse my intrauterine experience of all the hatred I had accumulated inside myself because of the trauma I had undergone. There are always two components in the present moment: the present, and the past. I used my understanding of the present to explore the depths of the past. I used my pain in the present to help me go through the pain of the past, and then I used my artistic creativity to create a better future. I used Cosmo-Art, which describes this universe as a single living organism, as often as I could, to help me create a Cosmo-artistic bridge between the events of my intracosmic life and the events of my intrauterine life. I did this by first establishing a correlation between the purpose of each of the two series events, and then I integrated my own life and my own personal purpose with the vastness of cosmic life, and with the even greater and more inscrutable cosmic purpose. I had no one besides the artists to help me learn to think and to act in a different way. But I know that I have managed to do so, and that I can share my knowledge with those who want to learn new ways of thinking and of living.

An artistic process requires a lot of time before it is completely finished. Michelangelo took seven years to sculpt his David. Leonardo spent his entire life painting the Gioconda.

We must never be in a hurry nor must we ever lose our faith and hope. What doesn’t happen in one moment, can happen the next, even just a second later.

It is a paradox to try to act as artists and not as victims in life. This is a type of art that is superior to art itself. Artists, in fact, do not know how to create it, and they do not have this art to call upon when facing the trials and tribulations of their lives.

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We never have just one identity, we have one, none, one hundred thousand, as Pirandello says. I found a way to understand this truth both in a vertical sense and in a horizontal one.

When I say in a vertical sense, what I mean is that I can evolve from one identity to another, and continually discover new ones, into eternity. Every time I pass from one to another, I go through a death.

When I say in a horizontal sense, what I mean is that just like Ulysses, sometimes I am Noman, in the cave of the Cyclops, sometimes I am a beggar, standing before Penelope and the Suitors who must not yet know who I am, because otherwise I could risk my life. Sometimes I am one hundred thousand, like in Hades, where one hundred thousand shadows pass before me and they would all like to be alive. Sometimes I am One, as when Ulysses picks up his bow and massacres the Suitors so he can destroy the Fetal I’s army of infinite arrogant demands, which, unfortunately, not only Ulysses, but also Penelope, myself and every one of us carries around within us, like parasites.

This is only a part of the wisdom and the art I have managed to incorporate into my life. The written word is not enough to try to describe it all. I have written many other things about this in the book “Life as work of art and life as a gift, explained in 41 films”. What about you? What kind of wisdom and what kind of art do you want to bring into your life?

*** Definitions of humanity, of art and of artists taken from my books: Humanity, with its foresight and its intelligence, With its tenacity and constancy, With its love and freedom. With its creativity and courage, With its ability to transcend itself and transmute itself, Can make the impossible possible in every field of life.

*** More than anything else, artists are those who make the impossible possible. They make the miracle of extracting unity from fragments harmony from chaos

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beauty from nothingness joy from pain strength from weakness positive from negative good from evil love from hatred life from death poetry and grace from the banality and drama of daily life.

They create unity and harmony by making a synthesis of opposites and by establishing a correct balance between the various parts.

Balance is a result of their ability to transcend themselves, and a unified synthesis is a result of their ability to transmute themselves.

With transmutation, they change themselves and then they change inert matter into a field of energy (for example, a block of marble becomes a statue); rather they transform a field of energy that is subject to entropy (the marble), into an energy field that is not subject to entropic dispersion (the statue as a work of art).

However, a work of art produces a field of energy that does not influence

thought alone, it influences the entirety of a person, mind, heart and will power. - A work of art questions, provokes, breaks down and builds. - It creates dissent and agreement but no one remains passive or indifferent

to it, - A work of art creates freedom and truth; it creates new spaces, new shapes

and new languages. - A work of art sums up the past, interprets the present and opens the door

to the future. - A work of art is not static, it is dynamic. It is something that is constantly

becoming, and it contains the secret of the process of unending chain reactions. It is the result of a process of transformation that, once it starts, it never stops.

- A work of art is love. Love in action. Love as a gift and not as a desire to possess. Love that knows how to give of itself and take itself back. Constructive love and circular love.

- A work of art elicits admiration and emulation. It divides and unifies. It invites us to transcend ourselves and transmute ourselves.

The transmutation of matter and spirit that occurs within a work of art finds its equivalent in the transmutation of mass into energy and vice-versa.

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Nuclear physicists concentrate powerful energies and then they divide or fuse atomic nuclei, releasing energies that are even more powerful.

However, there is a huge difference between the type of energy nuclear physicists produce, and the type of energy an artist creates.

The first type disperses and eventually runs out, no matter how great it is. The second type does neither: it is continually active and it transcends time.

They are similar in the fact that both of them work by reaching the heart of matter.

They are different in the fact that physicists extract energy only from the atom’s nucleus; artists, instead, first extract energy from within themselves and then from the matter they have chosen to express themselves through.

Artists, therefore, must penetrate the heart of matter twice, first within themselves and then within the material they express themselves through.

Artists must penetrate the heart of their own matter, their emotions, their sensations, their experiences, and the heart of their own spirit, because that is where they find their inspiration and their creative intuition. Artists use the spirit to grasp the secrets of matter and form that others do not yet understand.

Physicists are subject to the laws of entropy and the space-time dimension.

Artists go beyond the dimension of time, as they affect every epoch. A work of art is immortal and eternal. It has conquered not only time, but also death. Perhaps the secret of how entropy can be overcome lies in these two victories.

Time and death dissolve everything, but they cannot dissolve a work of art or the energy field it contains. Nor can they dissolve the ability it has to produce new transformative energy fields in whoever sees it, hears it or experiences it.

Immortality is the impossible dream of every human being.

***

One last possible definition of a work of art could be as follows:

“A work of art is the creation of a unified energy field that fuses together every existing type of energy. This energy field is not subject to the law of entropy, and it continuously receives and emits energy that either partially or completely transforms the essence and the existence of its creator and of those who experience it fully”.

***

It is not easy to embrace Sophia-Art. It does not require learning a theory, it

means applying it to daily life. Some ways we can do so are as follows: By cultivating the will to extract from ourselves:

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truth that unifies, not truth that divides truth that ferrets out lies within ourselves before those of others love that comes from freedom and not from need love that is hidden behind hatred and cannot be seen hatred that is hidden in what we call love. By extracting from ourselves: The ability to free ourselves from the need to continually project our ghosts onto others, which deforms reality, so we can learn to live in reality. The ability to enhance our ability to see through the eyes of others to see what is essential, that is invisible to see hatred that is hidden to see love that is hidden to see lies, which are hidden to see power when it is hiding and to know what to do with hatred, love, lies and power so we can act as artists instead of victims. To extract from ourselves: the ability to consider everything that happens to us as messengers from the invisible realms, that come to help us learn about knowledge and wisdom; the ability to learn to extract energy from everything that happens so we can create something new; the ability to creatively face and transform death so death can become a door to life; the ability to use pain to enter into death, instead of remaining in stupidity and bringing death to ourselves and to others; the ability to use pain to create something new instead of as expiation, so we can joyfully grow and expand. All of these things can help us create our own wisdom and, by uniting wisdom and art, make our lives a work of art. *****

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  OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

AMORE E PERSONA {Love and the Person} * 3° ed. Costellazione d’Arianna, Rome 1993 AMORE LIBERTA’ E COLPA {Love, Freedom and Guilt} * 2° ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2000 ANTROPOLOGIA ESISTENZIALE E METAPSICOLOGIA PERSONALISTICA ** Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 1991 THEORY OF THE PERSON AND EXISTENTIAL PERSONALISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY Published by The Solaris Institute of the Sophia University of Rome, 2009 GLI ULISSIDI – Il teorema e il mito per navigare da un universo all’altro** Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 1997 THE ULYSSEANS – THE THEOREM AND THE MYTH FOR NAVIGATING FROM ONE UNIVERSE TO ANOTHER Published by The Solaris Institute of the Sophia University of Rome, 2009 I LABORATORI CORALI DELLA COSMO-ART {The Cosmo-Art Group Laboratories} Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2006 IL MITO DI ULISSE E LA BELLEZZA SECONDA** Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2005 THE MYTH OF ULYSSES AND SECONDARY BEAUTY Published by The Solaris Institute of the Sophia University of Rome, 2009 IPOTESI SU ULISSE** Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2008 HYPOTHESES ON ULYSSES Published by The Solaris Institute of the Sophia University of Rome, 2009 LE LEGGI DELLA VITA {The Laws of Life} Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 1995 LA NASCITA DELLA COSMO-ART {The Birth of Cosmo Art} Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2000 LA SOPHIA-ANALISI E L’EDIPO {Sophia-Analysis and the Oedipal Phase} Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2000 LA VIE COMME OEUVRE D’ART {Life as a Work of Art} Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 1988 LA VITA COME OPERA D’ARTE

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E LA VITA COME DONO SPIEGATA IN 41 FILM {Life as a Work of Art and Life as a Gift Explained in 41 films} Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 1995 TEOREMI E ASSIOMI DELLA COSMO-ART ** Ed. Sophia University of Rome (S.U.R.), Rome 2004 THEOREMS AND AXIOMS OF COSMO-ART Published by The Solaris Institute of the Sophia University of Rome, 2010 TEORIA DELL’INCONSCIO ESISTENZIALE {The Theory of the Existential Unconscious} Ed. Costellazione d’Arianna Rome 1995 TEORIA DELLA PERSONA {The Theory of the Person} 2° ed. Costellazione di Arianna, Rome 1992 * The books that have one asterisk are in the process of being translated into English. ** Those with two asterisks have already been translated, and their English titles are shown without brackets.