The Seba library treats Brick in 6 passages, across 6 authors (including Papadopoulos, Renos K., Jung, Carl Gustav, McGilchrist, Iain).
The furnishings were mediaeval; the floors were of red brick… I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks… As soon as I saw this I knew that the walls dated from Roman times.
Brick strata in Jung’s house-dream function as depth-markers, signalling the descent from medieval personal history into the deeper Roman stratum of the collective unconscious.
, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006thesis
I was in a house I did not know, which had two stories… the upper story, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in rococo style.
Jung’s own account of the layered house-dream establishes the architectural descent — from rococo salon through medieval floors to Roman brick — as the experiential origin of the concept of the collective unconscious.
, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis
the left hemisphere’s way of building up a picture slowly but surely, piece by piece, brick on brick. One thing is established as (apparently) certain; that forms a platform for adding the next little bit of (apparent) certainty.
McGilchrist uses the brick-on-brick metaphor to characterise the left hemisphere’s sequential, incremental, and ultimately reductive cognitive style, contrasting it with the right hemisphere’s holistic grasp.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
Jesus was sleeping with a brick for pillow. The accursed demon came… I have come to get my things.—And what things of thine are there here?—This brick that thou restest thine head on. Then Jesus seized the brick and flung it in his face.
In Corbin’s Sufi source, the brick-as-pillow becomes a test of spiritual non-attachment: the saint’s willingness to fling away even his material support signifies liberation from demonic possession by worldly comfort.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
Huai-jang sat down, took a brick, and started to polish it assiduously… ‘I am making a mirror out of my brick.’ ‘You can polish it till doomsday,’ scoffed Mat-su, ‘you’ll n[ever make a mirror].’
The Zen koan of polishing a brick to produce a mirror illustrates the futility of compulsive ego-effort — here compulsive meditation — as a means of achieving enlightenment or transformation.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994supporting
πλίν(θ)ος [f.] ‘brick, air-brick’, metaph. ‘square building-stone, metal ingot, abacus’
The Greek etymological entry for πλίνθος documents the semantic range of ‘brick’ in antiquity — from fired clay to metal ingot to the abacus — providing the philological ground from which metaphorical extensions in philosophy and architecture develop.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside