Over the course of more than a decade (1985-1998), Joe Henderson gave a series of lectures to the San Francisco Jung Institute Friends of ARAS.  Dr. Daniel Benveniste attended all of the lectures and kept careful notes of Dr. Henderson’s remarks. He collected these detailed summaries in an unpublished manuscript entitled “Thinking in Metaphor”. Recently, Dr. Benveniste graciously gave his permission to publish his transcripts of these lectures and this edition of ARAS Connections features the second lecture that we are publishing in that series-- “On the Rosarium Philosophorum”. We intend to publish the series in full over time, one lecture at a time. Dr. Henderson emphasizes throughout these lectures that “most symbols appearing in dreams or waking fantasies are still in a process of formation and if we speak of them as known, fixed images, we rob them of their creative potential.” Kako Ueda, the curator of ARAS, has undertaken the supervision of this project and she will be assisted by others who will help in the editing of the commentary and the selection of images to bring to life the written accounts.

Gary Astrachan’s “Self-Portraits” takes us on a breathtaking journey that begins with a short description of the last fifteen minutes of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary film, National Gallery. Astrachan’s exploration of “poesis” and the nature of seeing and being seen, of the visible and invisible is a stunning romp that is at times ecstatic. The rapturous, unbridled flow of his narrative actually induces the kind of vision that Astrachan helps us see through the eyes of Rembrandt’s final self-portrait painted in 1669. He writes, “Rembrandt’s eyes have this capacity to rip off the veil of ordinary looking to reveal an other world, a world of seeing through appearances, beyond surfaces, to the perpetual otherness of the world, to “the other of all worlds, that which is always other than the world” (Blanchot 1982, p.228). I must confess that this is one of the more radical and thrilling essays that we have published in ARAS Connections.

Perhaps in the same spirit of Astrachan’s exploring the visible and invisible in Self-Portraits, Rachel McRoberts takes us on her own unique journey in “The White Rabbit:  Sacred and Subversive.” She writes, “I have often remarked over the years that the spirit of the White Rabbit guides my life, pulling me with curiosity, like Alice, to my next adventure. Now approaching midlife, transitioning personally and professionally, it seems fitting to deeply visit the White Rabbit, taking yet another dive “down the rabbit hole”. Her amplification of the symbol of the White Rabbit is wide ranging and multivalent as she writes: “Cultures around the world have told stories of these “paradoxical creatures: symbols of both cleverness and foolishness …of rampant sexuality and virginal purity”, masculine and feminine energy at once, the “wily deceiver and sacred world creator rolled into one” (Windling, 2020) since the beginning of time.”