#imaginal

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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"Sophia is a spontaneous image produced by the individual or collective psyche when the soul, longing for understanding and clarity, is awakened from the dull slumber of consumer consciousness and obedience to social and institutional conditioning. When the longing of the soul responds to the call of aliveness of the soul of the world, the process of personal initiation and cultural change is triggered.

This "dull slumber" has been described countless times through the ages by sages, poets, visionary philosophers, and seers as a kind of death, sleep, hell (Dante), a cave (Plato), Ialdabaoth (gnosticism), or as the sublunary realm of images. This condition is depicted in cultures around the world as a dragon who guards a jewel; sometimes as a crocodile, Typhon (Egypt), or other reptile. The jewel is the place where we connect to the power of wisdom: when we speak from this condition of conscience and consciousness, it rouses the dragon.

To reclaim the jewel of our own conscious aliveness is to encounter the dragon and engage in a life-death struggle. To prevent being overcome by isolation, scapegoating, exclusion, and ridicule requires us to activate wisdom: the faculty of clear perception or discernment. We must free our intelligence from its slavery to gathering and manipulating information and disengage it from the presuppositions of the cultural myths which keep it bound to unexamined habits. This consists of the entirety of what has gone before in the form of language, beliefs, dogma, and all of the social conditioning that we obey without questioning.

The encounter is accomplished through the form of inquiry that seeks to understand what lies underneath and outside the parameters of marketplace/ consumer consciousness, that looks at the underbelly, questions the presuppositions of the current myths, be they religious or scientific and strives to free itself from slavery to social and institutional norms. This path pits the individual against the mass mind--the emotional glue that binds large numbers of people to prejudice, to past tropes, to the habits of conditioning and past behavior--good and evil--that I call the dragon. This struggle has also been variously named and described in the literature as purgatory (Dante), the rational realm on the divided line of Plato, the "Great Work" of alchemy.

The successful outcome of this struggle has been the focus of spiritual philosophy and yogic practices around the world and is the fulfillment of the soul's longing. This is the heavenly Sophia, the anima mundi or soul of the world, Perfect Nature, the paradise where Beatrice awaits Dante, the celestial form of the zodiac, the inerratic or realm of fixed stars of Plato. The vital soul has reclaimed itself from the past and no longer alone and fixated and bound to its conditioning is instead situated between the dragon on one side and Sophia on the other. The vital soul no longer is in danger of being swallowed and used by the dragon. Instead, that Old Master of the Sublunary realm--the dragon--now serves the soul who has freed itself from slavery. The sage is one who has gained control of the power of life, who uses the dragon in service to the soul of the world. Sophia and her companion of power, the dragon, are reunited in service to the unfolding intelligence of the universe through the agency of the human psyche.

Kathleen Damiani,Sophia and the Dragon: A Modern Alchemy of Personal and Collective Initiation

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Ppl are arguing that sex workers will be run off the site, and knowing staff's history with 'content filtering', they might just consider LGBT/queer tags nsfw too. Also any sfw blogs that get deleted by accident like the last time

salty asks

1. What OTPs in your fandom(s) do you just not get?*

DM: Ru//c//est is one that comes to mind, it’s less of not getting it and more of hating it and im glad i’m not seeing it anymore when i go into the search. i’ve also seen a tiny bit of Balthazar/Scarlet here and there like in fic and such (unexpectedly too, i’m there for Herblet and then Suddenly) and im like…..guys??? guys??????? that one makes no sense to me. and then i’ve seen some Gru/Scarlet here and there and i also hate that one

ML: [rubs hands together] oooh boy, there’s a lot of ml ships out there, and some im not a big fan of. first of all, literally any Nathaniel ship out there aside from Marcnath, but out of those my least favorite is probably Chlo//nath for the absolutely petty reason that their color schemes clash like hell imo (also there’s the fact that she bullied him many times). there’s also Gabe//Nath (Nathalie, side note we need a different nickname for Nathalie), ig the show’s tryna make that one canon but it comes right tf outta nowhere and noah fence but i’m not invested enough in either of these characters to care, i mostly wanna see Nino throw his shield at Gabe again while Adrien and Lila (mostly the former but also the latter b/c of Catalyst) roast him for all the times he’d hurt them, Alya films while Marinette and Chloe are like ‘o shit’, anyway this got way off-topic but that’s abt all i can think of for this question

3. Have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion?

yes, i unfollowed this one popular fic writer cause at first i was really interested in their fic but then. suddenly the Lila hate came pouring in and im not here for that (vee u might be able to guess who it is). for dm tho i dont think i’ve ever done that

5. Has fandom ever ruined a pairing for you?*