soul and the reader in the context of the self boundaries and place experienced in
reading, and the relationship between the various characters and places that
populate or figure in a literary text.
The concluding Chapter 11, The Sacred Heritage, points to the fact that MLC
and SC each relate to the sacred and transcendental or transpersonal dimension of
human consciousness, one that implicates place, because place is the most
fundamental existential element that underpins human existence. I suspect that the
universe, the places within it that we inhabit and human consciousness have a
much more structured relationship than we suspect.
Quantum mechanics, as developed by Niels Bohr, has revised our
understanding of the relationship of mind and matter and we know from Complexity
Theory that a form of instantaneous communication does exist and has
correspondences with Jung’s ideas on synchronicity and archetypes. Thus, many
forms of communication, including poesis and storytelling, become much more than
simple processes or transactions. These theories help us to understand how the
mythopoeic writer animates place in their writing, how they habitually, sometimes
intentionally, operate as a spiritual functionary; one who in the Western cultural
tradition is consanguineous to the shaman of preliterate, pre-industrialized societies.
Such animation of place results in an especially puissant form of enchantment,
something akin to the experience of the numinous or an epiphany. This is
illustrated in the case of the literature of the three writers researched.
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