Latest case in point: Paul Prudence's Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary, published August 22, 2022, ordered on the 24th, arrived yesterday, promptly inhaled, two more copies ordered so that I wouldn't be bereft if I loaned/presented a copy to somebody who would need to have it. It's that kind of book for a curious coterie of lithic scryers (which is to say, I am not alone...) and hylozoic Argonauts ("...the philosophical point of view that matter is in some sense alive..") and probably the Jung at heart.
About a third of Figured Stones is "The Stone Catalog of The Transfigured Gaze", with these subsections:
The task is to put these quoted bits into a ready-flowing precis, and sequester some for use elsewhere. While this reordering does some violence to Paul Prudence's presentational flow, the hope is that I can capture and transmit the resonance I feel with his text. So:
...in Taoism and Buddhism every rock contains a consciousness comparable to our own. It is a consciousness that is deemed to flow through all phenomena, and is best understood, and experienced, through contemplation and by the fine-tuning of the awareness of that practice. (120-121)If we give rocks the opportunity to speak to us then we allow them to become characters that can act upon the psychophysical stage. (120)
The two-way communication between animate and inanimate is full of emergent signs and the more present we are within its ecology of symbols the more fluent we become with its language and the more alive that language seems to be. (121)
A rock, as a fragment of earth's own memory, only recollects itself in the presence of a consciousness that can perceive it... (84)
Bound within the liminality of contemplation the rocks begin to take on living forms. They begin to create an inter-zone for the imagination to correlate them with their spirit doubles. (79)
These drunken satyrs of the Cubist cycle peer out from rock like stolen sentinels: captives of time, captives of stone. (59)
The gods we weave into our personal mythologies take on lives of their own, and we meet them face to face in the visions we cast into rocks. (51)
Figured stones are portals to the molten mantles of the psyche and all its dreamt-up denizens. (153)
Rocks are cryptographic keys to aid decryption; visionary devices for mythic divination. They are the rebuses of our sublimations and the Rosetta Stones for distilling meaning from our hidden predispositions. (147)
Hylozoic resonance has opened a two-way transmission line so that geology can send messages to us in stone. The messages are mineralized into minds and in the marble patterns of neural pathways. (151)
Figured stones are an aide-mémoire to all our buried cargo. They are a system for prising evocations from deep within the cryptic contours. (148)
The pareidolic gaze may grant us such strange inversions that what once seemed inconsequential now seems a revelation or premonition—obscure impressions become infused with meaning. (148)
By reaching deep into our imaginations a rock momentarily relinquishes its place in oblivion and, enmeshed within the spectres of our fascinations, it connects to our time. Momentarily it remains captive to our sense of space before pressing onwards into the empty distance. Rocks may peer across eternities but in their solemn stillness they bring to us an essence of a moment when the eye of time cast its clearest and most untainted vision—an impression cast upon the mizzen shroud of perpetuity, where the vaguest hints of some future port of call are given. (82-83)
Visions that develop with the accumulative stigmergy of impressions made through reinforcement or erasure; accretions and attritions of the subconscious strata. By freeing our imagination to embellish chaos in this way we re-enact those processes on earth and assist in the emergent system of image-making. ...Worlds are weathered into shape from features that are, themselves, weathered by nature into rock. (50)
When we look at figured stones our eyes skip across their shapes to scan their textures. Lines of sight skim like stones across a lake. Perception flitters as it reads the sectors. Geology, now viewed in random-access mode, is matched against the inner fossil record and images are checked for pattern recognition as the shapes are sorted and the correlations graded. Lithic memory is transferred to human memory; a stratigraphy of precognitions is added to the epigenetic seams. Eidetic figures are etched upon our consciousness and a precious contraband is smuggled into dreams. Figured stones, then, are the outliers of a connective tissue that bridges all forms of consciousness. They create links between different worlds. They are the intermediaries between our conscious mind and our shadow selves. (147)
What we see in rocks and stones depends upon our own internalized database: a stock of culturally mediated imagery forged and embellished by personal memory and psychical topography. (144)
...imagination paints its picture by taking hints and filling voids, and by aggregating all the randomness into something visible and ordered ...what we see in stones are fragments of our inner worlds, and in the process of creating these apparitions we become our visions and we meet ourselves. (144)
Figured stones mock our quests of becoming by evoking the ecstasis of being... (84)