C.G. Jung was a radical thinker. He was a man who ventured into unknown psychic territory and wrested a map out of the unconscious, which he thought was able to link the present moment with a remote past. To his surprise Jung found in alchemy a model that he identified as the basis of our modern way  of perceiving things. In other words, a model for how we experience reality. Alchemy provides a pattern of transformational processes right under the threshold of consciousness, which all energy follows.

The patterns are there. Seeing them is the challenge.What is this curious practice called alchemy? There is more than one answer. For one it is the art of seeing beyond material surface. It is a way of seeing we have lost since Cartesian thinking removed the enchantment from our world. Common knowledge holds that chemistry evolved out of alchemy. That is true, but it was also the end of the alchemical vision, as chemists believed their experiments took place only on a mundane physical level.

Alchemists had a different vision. Alchemists knew that energy and matter could not be separated. They knew that there was no such thing as inorganic matter and that indeed all matter was infused with an element of consciousness. They knew that you and I are much more connected than mundane science wanted us to believe. They also intuitively knew what quantum physicists confirmed at a later age, namely that the alchemical principle holds that the consciousness of the experimenter influences the outcome. You and I matter! Our conscious and deliberate intent is much more powerful than the authorities in charge want us to believe.

No wonder that alchemists were discredited, persecuted, burnt at the stake and ridiculed.Jung saw and understood that. There is a heretical and subversive aspect  to Jung’s work , at least from the perspective of our cultural dominant, which I cherish.

Alchemy describes a pattern of transformation. All creation and transformation follow the cyclical movements of falling apart and coming together on the spiral of evolution. There is one and it falls apart and becomes two and of that a third (something new) emerges and out of the third comes the oneness again that is the fourth. (This is a paraphrased version of the axiom of Maria Prophetissa, a third century female alchemist).

This is the movement of evolution and it is the movement in the mandala in Jung’s work. 

If we transfer this movement into the evolutionary process of human consciousness then the falling apart (the two, the duality) represents a confrontation with a previously unknown content that ultimately belongs to the oneness that we are part of, but not necessarily conscious of. A constant flow between what is conscious and what is unconscious is established, which is best captured in the image of the Klein bottle 

As materialism and one-sided rational thinking weaken but still dominate the Western world view and as we have brought ourselves to the brink of our own destruction, we must ask ourselves: Where are we in relation to matter, to earth? Where are we in relation to psychic reality? The South African Jungian Analyst Ian McCallum suggests that we desperately need to develop what he calls “Ecological Intelligence”, an intelligence the alchemists seemed to instinctively possess.

McCallum describes ecological intelligence as a way of understanding and articulating our evolutionary links to all of life, to all living things, as a debt we owe to the earth and as our contribution to the evolution of human consciousness. An ecological intelligence is also an intelligence oriented towards the feminine principle. It is the fourth we have been waiting for. It may be the next step in the evolution of human consciousness. The feminine principle is the principle of relatedness and of completeness.  Relatedness and completeness are the opposite of  perfectionism that so often drives our inner and outer lives.

Ecological intelligence can be experienced as a deep empathy for the other in the outer  world, but also for what feels other within  ourselves. The other as it manifests in other races, ethnic groups, but MacCallum particularly sees the other in the natural world, in nature, animals, plants.

It is the beauty of our evolving relatedness.

..for beauty is nothing but the terror, which we are still just able to bear. R. M. Rilke

I highly recommend: McCallum,Ian: Ecological Intelligence. Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature. It is a wonderful book.

]]> http://1000petals.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/the-primordial-archetype-of-the-collective-mind/ Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:00:50 +0000 axinia http://1000petals.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/the-primordial-archetype-of-the-collective-mind/

In spite of all the attempts to drive the Mother Goddess underground, or to eliminate her altogether, she still occupies the essential place in the collective mind. We should remember that our civilisation has arisen from the Neolithic culture, in which the Mother Goddess was the only deity. In this respect, our culture was not different for that which gave rise to the great civilisations of India, China and pre-Columbian America. We should not forget that, except for our own modern society, the Mother Goddesses been revered everywhere, and at all times.

This is what led C.G.Jung to recognise in the Mother the primordial archetype of the collective mind. His desciple, Erich Neumann, in his study of the archetype of the Mother Goddess recognised that the West neglected the matriarchal aspect of the collective consciousness and developed only the patriarchal aspect.

However, none of the attemps to banish the religion of the Mother from the human soul has ever been completely successful. The Eternal Feminine has always resurfaced in the one for or another. For the Greeks she took the form f Sophia, for the Jews that of Shekinah, and for the Christians that of Mary.

from “The Search for the Divine Mother” by Gvenael Verez

(image by unknown author)

My Twitter faux-nemesis, Mike Jung, posted a blog about the difference between his virtual-temperament and walking-around-self.  Writers are encouraged to have a large on-line presence these days, and the bigger the personality, the better.

You could say that Mike projects a rather *ahem* large personality on Twitter.

Yet he claims that if you meet him in the flesh you will be overcome with his genteel self-effacement.  What is one to make of this conundrum?

Mike Jung is a big fat liar.

No, seriously.

Let’s take the example of the guy who “goes on a toot” on Saturday night, then crawls into the chuch pew next to you on  Sunday morning smelling of Axe and Tic-Tacs.  He nods  approvingly every few minutes during the sermon on temperance.  Which of those faces is the real deal?

Well…both.

C. G. Jung, another Jung almost as famous as Mike, tells us that as individuals we have unlimited potential.  We choose consciously and unconsciously what parts of our character to express–whether to be kind or brusque, generous or selfish, dignified or Mike Jung.

We are ALL libertines; some of us suppress it and some of us let ‘er rip.  But we are also Puritans. Some on the inside, others on the outside.

Bazinga.

So how much should we worry about making sure our insides and outsides match?

Not one little bit.  We should strive to to make the wall between our interior and exterior selves porous.  We shouldn’t be afraid to know what we’re hiding.  Hell.  Let it come out to play!  That hilarious sarcasm you’ve recently unleashed may like it out in the sun.

Right, Mike Jung?

What did happen to psychotherapy? The word alone can send unpleasant shivers down the spine of some and evoke images of state regulated symptom control in order to increase “evidenced based” productivity in the workforce and compliance with societal norms. It sounds sickening, but is true. We have created a narrow path of what is considered “good mental health” and in the process marginalized large numbers of people who do not fit the established criteria. Is psychotherapy supposed to be that?  It is certainly not what I had in mind when I entered the field. And I would like to believe that the founders of modern psychotherapy from Freud to Jung, would be, maybe not surprised, but still abhorred by what psychotherapy has become nowadays, particular in institutional settings.

Psyche means soul and psychology is the science of the soul, while our word therapy derives from the Greek therapeia, which means healing. The Greek myth of Psyche talks about her suffering, not because she is “ill” but her suffering being an unavoidable  “symptom” of her journey towards union with her love Eros and ultimately on her journey towards immortality. By learning to love and by enduring the pain associated with it we transcend our physical limitations.

Looked at from this perspective we are all in need of healing and guidance. It removes the prevalent and stigmatizing divide between the “healthy” and the “ill”.  Our current definition of “mental health” causes more harm than help. It terrorizes the soul. The truth is we are all in the same boat. We may have different life stories and we may be at different stages of psychic development, but we all participate in the same divine drama of becoming conscious of who we are, which may be just another way of stating our movement towards immortality.

Therapists of the Jungian persuasion appreciate the soul. We are stewards for psyche. We cannot serve two masters. We cannot serve the collective and psyche at the same time. When Jung developed his idea of “individuation”, he understood that an individual following his true calling may be taken far from collective values and expectations. To walk one’s own path may at times take one even far from what is considered “good mental health”. If you have not ventured into the darkest recesses of your soul, no treasure shall ever be yours.

But we therapists must not fall into the deadly trap of believing that we facilitate a healing or that we have the capacity to guide  a patient’s psyche. That would be a fatal inflation. What we can, in fact, what we must do is twofold. For one, we must provide a safe space, a container for the work to occur and we must develop eyes to see the energetic shifts and battles fought out in this space. We can hope, maybe even pray that the true guide of souls, Hermes, shows up  and guides the work.

This necessary safe space is not unlike the alchemical vessel. It is both an actual physical location, as well as an imaginal space. It is the field created between therapist and patient. We can imagine this field as a crucible, an open vessel. This kind of soul work is not counceling. We do not give advice. On the imaginal level it is a relationship between two equals. The sparks and darts (transference) will fly back and forth. It will get heated. The imaginal vessel needs an opening for toxic vapors (emotions) to be released.  A therapist will begin to “see” the circulating energy as old contents are broken down, bottomless despair is mutually suffered and only then, with grace, a new content in the form of an unexpected thought, an image, a dream will present itself.

At other times the vessel of soul work needs to be imagined as hermetically sealed. When new life needs to be protected. This could be when the therapist senses, “sees” the shimmer of a newly emerging attitude in the patient. Often before the patient has any awareness of it or is unwilling to imbue it with any energy. Just like a plant needs water and light, a barely present new psychic attitude needs to be watered with feeling and fed with the energy of intent.

All too often have the inner workings of the therapy vessel been forgotten. What has survived are the outer manifestations of confidentiality and the code of ethics to protect the patient. Both are crucial aspects of therapeutic work, but without an eye for  the drama lived out in the imaginal space of therapeutic work, soul is abandoned one more time again. So you psychotherapists out there, in whose service are you?

In 1925, in the midst of working on the Red Book (RB) Jung wrote “It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic creatures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses as though they were patients and I was analyzing them”. S. Shamdasani, the editor of the RB, noted that Jung found mythological work both exciting and intoxicating. Jung understood mythological images as symbols of the universal life force (libido) depicting the movements and dynamics of the autonomous, archetypal psyche.

Jung writes about one of his earlier visions: “On the night when I considered the essence of the God, I became aware of an image.” In this vision he dialogues with Elijah and his daughter Salome. Two thoughts strike me immediately as relevant for an understanding of Jung’s approach. One is his use of the word image.

An image is not to be confused with outer reality. Physicists provide explanations for the nature of matter and outer reality, but one thing is certain, our experience creates an inner image that is not the same as outer reality. The image is a subjective experience in the individual mind. It can be visual, but the experience of a sound or a physical sensation will also bring forth an image. A thought is an image.  No question, there is an outer world and also an objective psychic reality, but it is only through the subjective capacity of cultivated self-reflection that one can – with some luck and grace – gain access and insight into the larger, transpersonal realities. An image is like a symbol. It is not to be taken literally or the door becomes a trap holding you prisoner in a concrete and narrow reality. An image is a doorway  into another reality.  A paradoxical situation, the image is you and is not you. You are the observer and the observed. A necessary duality has been created. Necessary because all creation depends on this duality and the forever shifting dance between the two opposing forces. A oneness has been torn asunder. It is in the liminal space in-between that new life can be born. In the context of self-reflection the new life can be a new insight, the possibility of a new pattern of experience.

In the context of a necessary duality, it is interesting that Jung when contemplating the essence  of “the God”, encountered a male AND a female figure. The transpersonal may be a field of oneness, but the human intellect can only approximate the  divine mystery of creation as two intertwined forces. As above so below. Think DNA. These two opposing forces are often referred to as masculine and feminine, but one must drop all preconceived notions about gender or sexuality. Each individual psyche, male or female,  is made up of these energy strands, as is the objective, archetypal psyche. Yang and Yin are more neutral descriptions. Jung elicited the principles of Logos (yang, masculine, foresight, legislation, ordering, willful) and Eros (yin, feminine, receptive, related, moving, dissolving) out of his visionary meeting with Elijah and Salome. Jung writes: The way of life writhes like a serpent from right to left, from thinking to pleasure and from pleasure to thinking. Collectively and individually we are suffering an imbalance in this eternal dance that has favored the masculine principle. Where Logos rules order and persistence  prevail, where Logos rules at the expense of Eros, it degenerates into dominance and abuse of power. In the individual this tendency can be associated to the sickness of the soul, known as the narcissistic personality. The problem of narcissism has been thought of as a characteristic of a dying culture. I can see this trajectory, unless psyche is irrigated by the flow of eros and balance is restored one more time again.

I am less interested in why Jung’s psyche chose Elijah and Salome as personifications of his unconscious thoughts. These are uniquely his images. It seems of much greater significance how he engaged these images. A method that later became known as Active Imagination. A technique that strongly emphasizes the duality principle. In other words, the ego, the “I” as I know it does not disappear in the face of the visionary figure. One must hold ones ground vis-a-vis an imaginative figure. They are to be met with respect, but not revered as gods, because they are not. Nor are imaginative figures spirits who have all the answers and will tell one what to do. They also don’t foretell the future. Our psychic images are real, but the essence of their reality is behind the surface of the mental image.

It is in this dialogue with Elijah and Salome, in that sacred, liminal space between them that  Jung realizes: “If forethinking and pleasure unite in me, a third arises from them, the divine son, who is the supreme meaning, the symbol, the passing over into a new creation. I do not myself become the supreme meaning or the symbol, but the symbol  becomes in me such that it has its substance, and I mine.”

Not one, not two. The paradox, nonduality requires duality.

]]> http://ipevo.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/89/ Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:30:37 +0000 jowun http://ipevo.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/89/

These quotations show with what emphasis the reality of evil was denied by the Church Fathers. As already mentioned, this bangs together with the Church’s attitude to Manichaean dualism, as can plainly been seen in St. Augustine. In his polemic against the Manichaeans and Marcionites he makes the following declaration:

For this thing all things are good, since some things are better than others and the goodness of the less good adds to the glory of the better… These things we call evils, then, are defects in good things, and quite incapable of existing in their own right outside good things…

While I was in New York I checked out Creation of a New Cosmology.

I was thrift seeking in Greenpoint the day prior. When Jung’s book The Wisdom of the Dream found me. I took this as a sign I should go to the show.

Upstairs there is an exhibition called Vision of The Cosmos. The section on Alchemy naturally was my favorite part.

The following video plays on a loop. It blew my mind…

Much has been written about the film Avatar since its release. Critical voices abound. Some see it as a “white person’s fantasy on racial identity”. This thought would have never occurred to me. Others see it as a “mythic expose” of Western militarism & colonialism. That reasoning I can appreciate. It is what one might see when the eye is focused on the history of Western civilization.  To that I will add some thoughts from psyche’s perspective.

I will focus on the intra-psychic angle, which means we will attempt to see from “the inside out”. Imagine that there is indeed a World Soul, as the ancient philosphers and alchemists believed and  captured in the image of the Anima Mundi (Soul of the world). It is the spirit in nature that animates all matter. It is the spirit that creates an interconnected, sentient and intelligent web of life of which humanity is part of.

An ancient symbol of this unity of life is the world tree. This image shows up in most world mythologies. From Yggrasil, the world tree in Nordic mytholgy to the Tree of Life in the Genesis.  It is part of the mythology of the San people of the Kalahari desert, the oldest existing culture on earth and the world tree also figures prominently in the cosmology of the Mayans. That so many seemingly unrelated cultures revere the world tree points towards a synchronistic event reflecting a much larger cosmic reality. As above so below.

The biologist Carl Calleman postulates (in “The Purposeful Universe”), a central axis, a cosmic Tree of Life which creates organizations of life on a microcosmic level, that is on the level of our lived life. The soul knows, and has always known, that the image of the tree holds a deep mystery and a connection to a transpersonal reality. The tree, deeply rooted in the ground below, opens its branches towards the heavens. It needs the water from below and the light from above to live and grow. In Jungian thought, the tree, has a bridging function and is an integral part of nature. The tree image is an exquisite image of the archetypal feminine.

Such a tree is the source of strength, knowledge and inspiration of the Na’vi, the native inhabitants of Pandora. I suggest that the Na’vi can be seen as personifications of our disowned and split off connection to nature, our own nature as well as Nature in the world. The Na’vi may represent our repressed connection to the mysteries and wonders of life and cosmic reality. This seems  true on an individual as well collective level.  On the individual level, this is what happens when cynicism wins out over a tender feeling. In that moment a bulldozer killing machine steamrolls our soul and consciousness. Not unlike the military commander, who is cut off from nature’s suffering and her plight. The abuse of the natural world and her resources on a collective level are so blatantly obvious that there is no need to go into further detail now.

Avatar can be seen as a constructive countervision to the catastrophy mongering of 2012 mania. It shows us what needs to be done. Individually and collectively. The archetypal feminine is returning. Whether we like or not, the Goddess is on her way back. Symbolically,not literally, but the forces involved are VERY REAL. Whether this will be a smooth process or a catastrophic event depends largely on us. Can we make this shift, as individuals and as a culture, to make room for  Yin, the archetypal feminine and expand our linear, mechanistic and overly rational frame of what we think consciousness is?

One intriguing fact is that the Na’vi are blue. I have no doubt the makers of  Avatar were aware of the blue god in Hindu mythology, Krishna.Krishna was the eighth reincarnation (avatar) of the Hindu God Vishnu. Significant similarities exist between Krishna and the Christ figure. Both were sent by a father god to challenge the tyranny of the ruling class. Both were considered divine and human. Krishna is often depicted with a flute, which  people found irresistable. Krishna was a rebel, a poet and a lover of many women in Hindu lore. This earthy behavior and the flute connect him to the Greek Pan and they are all aspects of the connection to the archetypal feminine that needed to be split off, denied and repressed in the Christ of the dogmatic church. (Only the Gnostics allowed for a different image of Christ to surface).

The 2012 hype aside, many sense that a major shift is demanded from us. We may need to, as shown in AVATAR, emerge into our Na’vi nature, which is living in harmony with the feminine of which the soul is part of.  This is not a simplistic return to nature or to a previous evolutionary stage. It may be the next leap in the evolution of consciousness, and the only one that  may hold the promise of survival.

Includes the contents, particularly illustrations of C.G.Jung that can be found on the famous Red Book, which was released on October of 2009.

Watch Video Here.

An abstract from the Marion Woodman keynote speech at the 3rd Annual Women & Power Conference .

Marion Woodman

Marion Woodman is a widely read and acclaimed author, a leader in women’s spirituality and feminine consciousness, and a Jungian analyst. Internationally acclaimed for her work as a “bridge builder between the male and female worlds,” the former high school English and drama teacher has, in the 25 years since she enrolled in Zurich’s C.G. Jung Institute, earned a name as a groundbreaking analyst with a rare understanding of the role of the feminine in bringing about personal and cultural transformation.

Perhaps best known for her videotaped workshop with men’s movement pioneer Robert Bly, Bly and Woodman on Men and Women, she is also the best-selling author of many books, including Addiction to Perfection, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women, Conscious Femininity, Leaving My Father’s House, and, with psychologist Elinor Dickson, Dancing in the Flames: The Black Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness.

In Woodman’s presence, the often enigmatic world of Jungian archetypal psychology becomes accessible to anyone, and especially to women who are on a quest for wholeness. Woodman believes that centuries of “patriarchal thinking” have stripped the soul from the inner and outer lives of individuals and in the world. To recover the soul, we must engage with the complex shadow world of the unconscious and go beyond absolute, either/or thinking to embrace the “dance of opposites”,

The publication of the Red Book (RB) has rekindled much interest in Jung and his world. People are fascinated with its imagery and often inexplicably moved by it. What is it about this book?  Many people feel its soulfulness, literally, when they first hold it in their hands. The Red Book is in the truest sense of the word awesome. But what to do other than admire it? Who has access to Jung’s at times elusive knowledge? Is it only the world of Jungian analysts who inherit Jung’s world? That would be terrible.  Jung would abhor that thought.

Are those who have experienced an in-depth Jungian analysis his rightful heirs? Maybe. There is a lot to be said about working closely, intimately with someone who has walked the walk before. There are plenty of wonderful Jungian analysts out there. But unfortunately psychoanalysis has been assimilated by the medical model and has lost, by and large, its connection to soul. It is a shame. Psychology is the science of the soul, but it has deteriorated into a mere management of symptoms for the most part. Mainstream psychology has forgotten that symptoms are messages from the soul.

Jungian work is soul work.  There may be other ways than the traditional route. Jung did not want us to emulate him. Psychoanalysis was originally conceived as a new “Weltanschauung, a new world view, a new way of experiencing reality. Jung was particularly interested in rescuing the soul out of the clutches of what he experienced as a stifling dogmatic Christianity.

In the book “Who owns Jung?” ( by Ann Casement), the analyst Joe Cambray answers the question with “the one who emerges from Jung”. What does emerge for you out of an encounter with Jung? Where does Jung take you? What does Jung mean to you? When we look for meaning we get in touch with the soul.

Jung held on to his soul. He held on to his longings and his felt sense of wonder beyond the visible world. He held on to his visions outside the world of reason. He maintained an unwavering trust in her. “My path is light” his soul says and Jung answers in his vision, “Do you call light what we men call the worst darkness?” “I have become a monstrous animal form for which I have exchanged my humanity”, Jung reports from the same vision. His trust is tested to the brink. He becomes angry at his soul.

I wonder if anyone has ever experienced that when trying to be truthful to oneself, following one’s path, one ends up in a spot where one did not want to be at all? When self-reflection only conjures up accusatory self attacking images? How can one have trust, faith, in an elusive guidance from the invisible world that has lead one so astray? The rational mind will say that one has lost it, one may feel insanity knocking on one’s door. Jung did. “My thoughts were murder and the fear of death spread like poison everywhere in the body” Jung writes. He knows a murder needs to be committed.The king must die, long live the king.

Jung relives here the archetype of the year king. A cyclical life-death-rebirth deity that represents a pattern of creation and renewal in nature. The king that needed to die was Jung’s idea of reality . “So the reality is meaning and absurdity”, he realizes, and he captures the circling movement of the archetype of the year king as it enters his consciousness with the following words: “Noon is a moment, midnight is a moment, morning comes from night, evening turns into night, but evening comes from the day and morning turns into day. So meaning is a moment, and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a transition from meaning to meaning.”

The task  is to tolerate the “absurdity”, when life shows us a face we don’t understand. To ask for meaning even then. Especially then. The challenge is to move with the spiraling twirl of our psyche. To let the king of our identifications die. To welcome the newness even if it still feels utterly insane. To trust nature. One’s own nature. That there is a central axis that holds the universe together and that there is also a central axis that holds us together. That we become an embodiment of the tree of life.In a few hours the darkness will collapse in itself and light will move in.  Winter solstice.  Just a moment in the dance. But a moment of victory. New Life! Rekindle joy!

I have had the fortune to see and hold in my hands a new publication: The Red Book of C.G. Jung. It is a large format, coffee-table type book of one of the 20th century’s most important psychologist/philosophers. Here are some pictures from amazon.com:

I have been drooling over this book since I first heard it was being published back in October. The Red Book resembles an illuminated text, like many early bibles and prayer books, or the Book of Kells. It is also a dream book. Here’s the caption from the amazon.com product description:

“[...]The most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. When Carl Jung embarked on an extended self-exploration he called his “confrontation with the unconscious,” the heart of it was The Red Book, a large, illuminated volume he created between 1914 and 1930. Here he developed his principle theories—of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—that transformed psychotherapy from a practice concerned with treatment of the sick into a means for higher development of the personality.”

A friend of mine brought it to one of our classes one evening and let us all look through it. All that did was further my desire for this book. The price is a bit steep at $195.00 USD, but it’s on sale for half off on amazon right now. I cannot wait to get this and will post a full review when I do.

I just returned from a New York pilgrimage to get an audience with the actual object: The Red Book of C.G. Jung. Every Wednesday, the Rubin Museum turns a page , so I got to see two actual spreads. Plates 104-105 and 106-107.  Stunning! The majority of the exhibition includes high-resolution facsimiles, pencil sketches, and a few other original paintings in the style of the Book’s plates.  I was quite taken with two small chalk pastel landscapes.  Jung was a very talented artist of high dexterity. He possessed an extraordinary ability to capture light.

It may take the rest of my life to get through the Red Book. Then, maybe, I will understand something of it, and therefore of myself. Jung’s ability to connect to and describe the inner workings of the soul are unparalleled. Reading his biography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I somehow felt less alone in the world by learning of his visions and how he used the mandala as a tool for decoding his inner experience.

Mysterious Creative Powers— a small painting from the exhibition, in the style of the Red Book illuminations

The exhibition is quite small, but The Red Book is displayed center stage, behind bullet-proof glass. The lighting is low, glowing. It definitely has a talismanic quality. I just stood in front of it wondering what hubris it takes to commission a book like this in the first place?

“Yes, I’d like to order a really, really big, 600-page, 100% cotton paper, hand-bound, leather book. And while you’re at it, let’s make that RED leather. Oh, and can you embellish it with lots of gold foil stamping, and why not add a little rose border on the edges too. “

Now imagine— you have the giant leather tome with its gold embossing and thick vanilla pages— already a masterpiece— in front of you, and you have to start drawing and painting on the pristine pages. Page One— Deep breath. Begin…

What many people do not realize is that the book is carefully planned. It is not a “stream of consciousness” effort. The texts were written in several smaller Black Books, then transcribed, carefully edited, and finally, typed up with carbon copies over a period of many years.  Jung worked on the Red Book at night after his daily tasks and family responsibilities were complete.

A sketch of Jung's early mandala "Systema Munditotius" from Black Book 5

After years of  preparation and pencil sketches, the gouache and calligraphy pens were employed. It took him 16 years to complete the final illuminated manuscript. On the scale of the Book of Kells, Jung’s Red Book work is absolutely precise—an illuminated manuscript for the new millenium.  You can purchase a reproduction of the Red Book through Amazon and Barnes and Noble, but alas, it is temporarily out of stock.

Here is a Review from The New York Times, with some good images of the exhibition and examples from the Book.

Once a week Arnie and I convene at Bubby Rose’s Bakery & Café to enjoy the intimacy of friendship. We pay attention to whatever is weighing on the other’s heart-mind by deep listening and compassionate problem-solving. Our time together is marked by kindness and honesty. Once pressing business has been attended to, our conversations roam freely from topic to topic: politics, writing, loving, ageing, relationships, Zen, movies, women, money, art, and the subtle delights for which a café is the ideal venue.

For much of my life I’ve preferred the company of women; hanging with men has made me feel ill at ease. Now in “the afternoon of life” (C.G. Jung), such categorical boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred. As we leave the bakery, we catch a Saying on the chalkboard: It is futile to resist.

                                                                                   Amen.

image: en.easyart.com

Psychosis is the great other in Western civilization. Insanity, craziness, off-the-wallness is what frightens us the most. And for good reason, for one it is terrifying. And if that were not enough, we also run the risk of being immediately (over)medicated, hospitalized and stigmatized with that awful descriptive of having a “mental illness”. To be fair, there are of course psyches that are so fragile that they are hopelessly and helplessly flooded by what Jung refers to in the Red Book (RB) as the spirit of the depth. Much of this individual suffering can be alleviated by proper medication and designated caring environments. The psychiatric wards of most hospitals these days are not “caring environments”, but the problem is a systemic one and generally not the fault of the well intentioned but overworked and misinformed personnel of these wards. But the needs of this relatively small group of the population are not what I am addressing here. I am talking about you and me. The chances are that if you are reading this, you qualify for this much larger segment of the population, the reasonably well functioning average neurotic. What we generally deny is that we also have psychotic pockets in some of the more hidden corners of our psyche. Often a source of great fear and shame, these raw, uncontrollable spots in our inner landscape may also connect us to a divine, transpersonal reality.

A good working definition of psychosis is that the boundaries between inner and outer world have become blurry or non-existent. Remember the last time you completely lost it? Had a melt-down? Were so caught up in a personal complex that outer reality became skewed? This is where the other side begins. No problem as long as you can bounce back.  The ability to recuperate from a moment, or days, or weeks, or even years of insanity is the real marker for psychic health and not having no knowledge of madness and therefore seeing (projecting) it only onto others. “It is unquestionable: if you enter into the world of the soul, you are like a madman, and a doctor would consider you to be sick”, Jung writes in the RB.

“I am seized by fear, but I know I must go in” he says, “the spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing”. The descent into the depths can be maddening and dangerous, but what is remarkable is that Jung also sees a form of madness looming when a person never leaves the surface. In other words, when a person is entirely identified with waking life and ego consciousness. In Jung’s words, “the spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly, balance is godly”. There is great wisdom in these three words, “balance is godly”. There is a time to be lost and there is a time to find oneself again. We fall apart and we are put together again. We breathe in and we breathe out.  To accept the good and the bad.  Life and death. Each cycle leaving us slightly changed. The secret of transformation lies in moving to this rhythm, consciously. “Depth and surface should mix so that new life can develop”, Jung writes.

Consciousness is related to awareness, but also to meaning. Without finding meaning in events, especially in our mad episodes, whether they take the form of a suicidal depression, a panic attack or an outburst worth a wrathful god, no light, no consciousness can be wrested out of it. “The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create”, Jung writes.

The editor of the RB, Sonu Shamdasani, remarks in a footnote that what Jung is developing here in the Liber Primus is the connection between individual and collective psychology. What that means is that if we, as Jung did, look inward, give credence to our dreams, visions, fantasies and moods, when we dive into them versus running away, we will unavoidably come in contact with the forces of the collective unconscious and that can  be terrifying and overwhelming. “My knowledge has a thousand voices, an army roaring like a lion, the air trembles when they speak, and I am their defenseless sacrifice”, Jung writes.

What is being sacrificed here? Jung suggests that it is our own head that needs to fall. Growth and new life are subjectively experienced as something most dreadful and even evil, like our own execution. “You thought you knew the abyss? Oh you clever people! It is another thing to experience it”, Jung writes. Our head is also sacrificed, when we let go of our judgment, when we accept experiences for what they are: expressions of the soul’s life regardless of how psychotic they might be. I know this is easier said than done, but Jung for one has walked the talk before us. The Red Book is proof, it can be done.

We cannot learn without pain.
Aristotle (384-322 BC), Greek philosopher.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
C. G. Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist.

A Contribution To The

ERBzine Library Project

A Review Of

SHE

by

H. Rider Haggard

Review by R.E. Prindle

Part IV and end:

Herself Portrayed

     The idea of a twenty-two hundred year old woman patiently waiting for the reincarnation of a man she had murdered in that far off time is in itself an extraordinary concept.  As an imaginative flight of fancy very likely Rider Haggard can be seen as its originator.  Burroughs would borrow the notion twenty-seven years later in his The Eternal Lover when he reverses the sexes and has a cave man asleep for millennia wake to find his reincarnted woman.  Since then variations on the theme have become quite common.

     She, or Ayesha, was a powerful image of a woman.  C.G. Jung saw her as the personification of his Anima theory.  Haggard drew on many personal and historical details to create her.  Ayesha was titled She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.  As a child Haggard had a doll to which he gave that name.  The doll must have represented his mother.  If he invested characteristics of his mother into Ayesha then she must have been both warm and loving and cold and imperious.  Over all one gets the impression that she was not particularly loving.  Thus, Ayesha, while appearing to be in love with Leo/Kallicrates is nevertheless imperious, demanding and self-centered. In her only real display of afftection she kisses Leo on the forehead, as Haggard says, like a mother.   As Haggard says of Meriamun in The World’s Desire, her love was not so much for her lover but an expression of her own vanity.

     Haggard represents her as a living corpse in white funereal garments, completely shrouded.  She has a strange accoutrement in the serpent belt with two heads facing each other.  This is  close to the caduceus.  Perhaps Haggard had no ideaq of what the symbol meant in 1886 but by 1890 he had come up with an explanation.  In The World’s Desire Queen Meriamun of Egypt keeps something she calls the Ancient Evil  in a box.   The Evil is a small blob.  When she warms it in her bosom it grows.   World’s Desire pp. 144-45:

          Thrice she breathed upon it, thrice she whispered, “Awake! Awake! Awake!”

     And the first breath she breathed the Thing stirred and sparkled.  The second time that she breathed it undid its shining folds and reared its head to her.  The third time that she breathed it slid from her bosom to the floor, then coiled itself about her feet and grew as grows a magician’s magic tree.

     Greater it grew and greater yet, and as it grew it shone like a torch in a tomb, and wound itself about the body of Meriamun, wrapping her in its fiery folds till it reached her middle.  Then it reared its head on high, and from its eyes there flowed a light like the light of a flame, and lo! its face was the face of a fair woman- it was the face of Meriamun!

     Now face looked on face, and eyes glared on eyes.  Still as a white statue of the Gods stood Meriamun the Queen, and all about her form and in and out of her dark hair twined the flaming snake.

     At length the Evil spoke- spoke with a human voice, with the voice of Meriamun, but in the dead speech of a dead people!

     “Tell me my name,” it said.

     “Sin is the name,”  answered Meriamun the Queen.

     “Tell me whence I came.”  it said again.

     “From the evil within me.”  answered Meriamun.

     “Tell me where I go.”

     “Where I go there thou goest, for I have war and thee in my breast and thou art twined about my heart.”

     This quote gives an idea of what the snake belt worn by Ayesha signifies.

          Of signficance while Meriamun is dealing in magic Ayesha denies all connection with the art saying she utilizes nature.  She doesn’t use the word science but nature; nature would include psychology.  She herefore draws on natural processes discovered but not scientific processes exposed.  Thus when she kills her rival Ustane she does it by untilizing electro-magnetism, somehow using her own electro-magnetism  to negate Ustane’s thus extinguishing her life force.  We have then an example of tele-kinesis- action at a distance.  As I’ve noted in other essays tele-kinesis was amongt an array ofr mental powers thought to reside in the unconscious being investigated by the Society For Psychic Research.  Thus Haggard, probably through Lang is up on the latest psychic developments.

     The ability to kill by telekinesis places a moral burden on Ayesha.  If one agrees that the use of such a power may be necessary the question arises of when it may be misused.  It would seem that the killing of a sexual rival was an inappropriate use, so the warring good and evil heads of her snake belt refers to the moral dilemma Ayesha faces.

      Her belt seems somewhat different than that of Queen Meriamun of The World’s Desire.  The latter having accepted the aid of the Ancient Evil was committed to evil being unable to remove the belt.  There seems to be an element of volition remaining to Ayesha.  She is not ‘possessed.’  Of course Ayesha began her life some thousand years after Meriamun so perhaps psychology was somewhat further evolved at that time or evolvedwith her over her two thousand year life span.

      Indeed, a topic of discussion Haggard introduces shouldn’t be dimissed lightly.  That topic is the age old discussion of whether good can come from evil and evil from good.  This is indeed a dilemma as bad results can arise from good intentions and vice versa.  There is a serious side here.

     Ayesha is pure irresistable beauty.  Once she shows her face no man can resist her.  She glories in this power.  In The World’s Desire of four years hence Haggard will separate good and evil making  Meriamun represent evil while Helen, the world’s desire, is all good.

     Holly is an interesting character who may be a back hand slap at the concept of evolution.  Holly also makes this the story of a beauty and a beast.  Holly is described as having a low forehead with a hairline growing out of his eyebrows, further his beard and his hairline meet.  He is said to have a hugely broad chest and shoulders with extra long arms, perhaps down to his knees although this is not stated.  What we have in Holly then is the Wolf Man combined with King Kong.   Monstrous indeed.

     In contrast Leo Vincey is a Greek god, a sort of Apollo.  As Ayesha is irresistable to men Leo seems likewise to be irresistable to women.  Indeed, he was married to Ustane within minutes of arriving in Kor.  He appears to have sincerely liked Ustane even though on sighting Ayesha’s face he too loved her.  Ustane was a rival for a portion of Leo’s affections  so Ayesha cut off her electrical supply.

     Of several truly dramatic scenes in this spectacularly well constructed story a very dramatic one is when Leo confronts his twenty-two hundred year old incarnation 0f Kallicrates.  Haggard doesn’t dwell on Leo’s understanding of this strange phenomenon although from the potsherd and his father’s letter he must have been convinced of the truth.  Strangely he doesn’t ask Ayesha for an account of this earlier life, nor how it was that she came to Egypt from Yemen to interfere in his romance with Amenartas.

     Haggard and Lang were aware of the early history of Yemen from whence Ayesha as a pure Semite came.  She was pre-Christian, although not pre-Jewish,  of some ancient Arabic religious beliefs.  How she got to Egypt is never disclosed or how she came into conflict with the Egyptian princess Amenartas for Kallicrate’s affections.

     Ayesha merely confronts Leo as the neo-Kallicrates without any preparation.  A year or so to get to know her and become accustomed to her face might have been nice.  Although, Leo weas married within minutes of arrival in Kor and was apparently satisfied with his wife.  He was a pretty adaptable guy.

     At any rate Ayesha rushes him into immortality and while tomorrow may be a long, long time, eternity is even longer.  One might want to consider a moment about a relationship of that duration.  Nor does she adequately prepare Leo’s mind for the ordeal of fire that she wants him to go through to become immortal.  Twenty-two hundred years of waiting had done little to improve her patience.

     Haggard has put everything he has into this story.  He was granted clear vision only once in his life and he took advantage of it.  In later years he was frequently asked why he didn’t write another story as good as She.  His reply was that such a story may only come once in a man’s lifetime.  The concentration and focus probably will never return again.  While Allan Quatermain, his third successive attempt to create a lost civilization was on the weak side I would argue that Treasure of the Lake come close to She.

     So, the four of them set out for the place of the fire of life.  Masterful effects.  High in the mountains there is a gigantic balancing rock, a huge mushroom type cap balanced on a spire.  It would seems that Zane Grey was also greatly affected by She as Riders Of The Purple Sage  hews very close to She.   A narrow ledge of rock extends out opposite with a gap of fifteen feet.  To cross this gap with high winds howling through, a plank carried by the ever patient Job has to be lowered across the gap.  No mean task I’m sure, with only one chance of getting it right.  Once in place, thousands of feet above the gorge each has to walk from side to side; plus they have only a few minutes for all four to get over during a single beam of light from the setting sun.

     Fortunately all four make it crossing the balancing rock to descend into a cave leading to the bowels of the mountain.   There an eternal flame that ensures the life of the planet rumbles by every so often.  Twenty-two hundred years before Ayesha had bathed in this fire which following esoteric doctrines had burned away her gross, earthly, moral impurities making her essentially, pure spirit.

     A famous incident of the process is recounted of the goddess Demeter in her travels after the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades.  Coming to Eleusis Demeter in her form of old crone was taken in by King Celeus and his wife Metaneira.  As a reward for her kind treatment Demeter set about to make their infant son Demophon immortal.  Thus each night she held him over the hearth fire to burn away his mortal impurities.  Surprised one night by a startled mother, Metaneira, the process was disrupted so that Demophon retained mortal impurities and failed to attain to godhood.

     In this sense then the fire that maintained the life of the Earth traveled a route through this mountain at the center of the Earth.  It appeared something like Old Faithful at Yellowstone periodically.  When it swept by, of one stood in the flame it burned away one’s mortal impurities leaving one, it is to be assumed, wholly Spiritual.  All the materiality was gone. 

     Spirituality and materiality are still being discussed today.  Some talk of Spirit as though it exists while the materialists aver that all so-called spirituality is a seeming effect of materiality.  I am of the latter school of thought.  Oneself is all there is, there is nothing more.  The effect of spirituality is nothing more than a mirage created by intellect and consciousness which is entirely material.  It is all reduced to psychology which is a description of material existence.

     In Haggard’s story it is clear that Ayesha having lost her materiality to the flames is purely spiritual.  This is going to cause her problems as she steps into the flames the second time.

     The flame passes by while Leo dithers.  Impatient for Leo to assume immortality Ayesha strips, as the flames will flame the material garments about her but not her body.  As the flame comes around again Ayesha eagerly stands in its way.  However having been once purified it is good for eternity.  The second time is disastrous.  Perhaps spiritually dessicated by the double dose Ayesha begins to wither devasted even in her death throes by her loss of beauty.  Love in vain.

     Job is so horrified he dies of fright leaving Leo and Holly alone.

     The story for all intents is over but Haggard takes a dozen pages or so to get his heroes out of the caves and back to civilization.

     Ayesha’s existence wasn’t extinguished.  Her dying words were that She would return.  Room left for the sequel which not surprisingly was called The Return Of She appeared in 1906.

     Haggard hit the groove sharp as a knife in this incredibly well devised and executed story.  One will find evidences of it strewn all through Burroughs’ corpus.  Not least in his own character of La of Opar.  La itself translates from the French as She, of course,  so Burroughs even appropriates the name.

     La is as ardent for Tarzan as She was for Leo/Kallicrates.  Tarzan himself remains cold and indifferent to La throughout all four Opar stories finally abandoning her in Tarzan The Invincible.

     She by Haggard is well worth three or four reads to set the story in mind and savor the wonderful and unearthly details

End of Review

Thanksgiving is a huge holiday in this country. Their favorite one many of my US friends say. It was not a holiday where I grew up and as the meaning of holidays is very much tied to one’s culture and familial traditions, Thanksgiving as I saw it practiced in mainstream America meant very little to me. I love the idea of harvest festivals and of expressing gratitude, but I could not make  sense of a national turkey day and an obese nation stuffing themselves silly followed by a shopping spree on Black Friday.

I wonder if those who consciously experience and express gratitude on Thanksgiving are a miniscule group. Maybe not, but probably not as large a group as they could be. How do we understand gratitude psychologically and how does one get there? Melanie Klein introduced gratitude, together with its opposite, envy, into psychological language. There are always two sides to everything. Just as light and shadow do, gratitude and envy go together. Jung had a profound understanding of the duality of nature. He knew that the opposite is always present, but usually hidden in the invisible world he called the unconscious.

Most people who experience gratitude describe a feeling of fullness and richness that is unrelated to any material possessions. They experience a well of goodness that does not run dry. There is  enough good to go around for all. They feel as if they were plugged into a source that stills a thirst beyond the physical. Gratitude is an expression in response to an experience of being deeply cared for and held by something larger than oneself. This gratitude goes far beyond a thought of gratefulness that one’s lot is a little lighter to carry than one’s neighbor’s. Gratitude is fearless, it fosters compassion for all living beings and the ability to see life even in the so called inanimate matter.

I do not believe one can fully experience gratitude without being aware of its opposite envy. In Jungian thought gratitude and envy are archetypal forces. They exist outside of our individual lives, but we partake of them. In the case of envy, there is no escaping it.  We all are envious to some degree. The problem is that envy lives in the shadows of the unconscious. Whatever is unconscious will be projected out. Our unconscious searches for a suitable object  and we just hang our projection on this object like an old hat. Consciousness will trick us then into believing what what we see is “reality”.  (Reality becomes more slippery the more we think about it.)

We all know some of these people, may even have been one of them at times, who spew nothing but negativity. Everything needs to be criticized, ridiculed, made small or put down. Envy destroys hopes and dreams.  Envy is full of fear. There is never enough of the good. It is anti-life. It poisons the soul.

Envy is even harder to catch when it is directed against oneself. Then it manifests in that, often very rational and “adult” inner voice, that ridicules our desires and will stop us from believing that our dreams are worth pursuing. That you are too young, too old, too fat, lack education, lack money, not healthy enough or it is just plain impossible or unrealistic… I better stop, I made my point, the list could go on forever. Envy constricts and restricts and hardens, it turns the heart into an arid patch.

What to do about envy? Unfortunately there is no miracle cure or pill. But, as with everything else, awareness and acceptance are the first steps. Nothing changes without them.  Envy is archetypal. We did not create it. We are only responsible for how we express it. We need to trace our negativity. Who or what is on the receiving end of our sneer? How can we put an image to that inner  voice, that judge or saboteur that prevents us from living our life with courage and grit. As we take a stance and stand up to the poison of envy, its opposite, gratitude and trust in goodness, can be released. We don’t own goodness either, but we can take our fill from that cup that never runs empty, regardless of where and who we are in our lives. Gratitude – at last.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A Fascinating and Unique Autobiography

Jung explores many fields that are both familiar and strange, such as astrology, alchemy, philosophy, psychology and religion. For someone with limited knowledge and experience, Jung is quite understandable, as he conveys his ideas and feelings very well despite the broad scope and  complexities of the subjects. He has a truly synthesizing mind.

It’s a unique autobiography, because, instead of a record of events in Jung’s life, it’s an account mainly of his inner experiences, his dreams, fantasies and reflections. Life is viewed as a process of transformation, namely, transformation of the psyche to achieve “wholeness” or “total consciousness”. Jung also reflects on his relationships and encounters with people who have influenced him, most notably Freud. It’s surprising, however, that he seldom mentions his wife, though he speaks volumes about his parents.

Jung identifies himself strongly with Goethe’s Faust, who gave his soul in exchange for knowledge. He asserts that there are opposites in everything and is particularly obsessed with the dark secrets. The book documents his fascination with corpses and graves, his experiments and experiences with  the unconscious, spirits and multiple personalities. If not for his social support, he would perhaps have gone over the edge like Nietzsche.

Answer Comes From Within

“Inner experiences also set their seal on the outward events that came my way and assumed importance for me in youth or later on. I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little. Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience. … I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals.”

A Diabolical Mixture of the Sublime and the Ridiculous

“From the beginning I had conceived my voluntary confrontation with the unconscious as a scientific experiment which I myself was conducting and in whose outcome I was vitally interested. Today I might equally well say that it was an experiment which was being conducted on me. One of the greatest difficulties for me lay in dealing with my negative feelings. I was voluntarily submitting myself to emotions of which I could not really approve, and I was writing down fantasies which often struck me as nonsense, and toward which I had strong resistances. For as long as we do not understand their meaning, such fantasies are a diabolical mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. It cost me a great deal to undergo them, but I had been challenged by fate. Only by extreme effort was I finally able to escape from the labyrinth.”

“I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies and as a psychiatrist I realized only too well what that meant. After prolonged hesitation, however, I saw that there was no other way out. I had to take the chance, had to try to gain power over them; for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me. A cogent motive for my making the attempt was the conviction that I could not expect of my patients something I did not dare to do myself. … This idea that I was committing myself to a dangerous enterprise not for myself alone, but also for the sake of my patients helped me over several critical phases.”

The Process of Individuation

“As I worked with my fantasies, I became aware that the unconscious
undergoes or produces change. Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious. In individual cases that transformation can be read from dreams and fantasies. In collective life it has left its deposit principally in the various religious systems and their changing symbols. Through the study of these collective transformation processes and through understanding of alchemical symbolism I arrived at the central concept of my psychology: the process of individuation.”

A Contribution To The

ERBzine ERB Library Project

She

by

H. Rider Haggard

Review by R.E. Prindle

From London To The The Caves Of Kor

     She is dedicated to Andrew Lang:

I Inscribe This History To

ANDREW LANG

In Token Of Personal Regard

And Of

My Sincere Admiration For His Learning

And His Works

     One may well ask then who is this Andrew Lang and what is his learning?  In point of fact Haggard not only dedicated She to Lang but wrote three books in collaboration with him.  Andrew Lang, 1884-1912, was a Scottish scholar specializing in folklore, mythology and religion so you can see where Haggard came by much of his esoteric knowledge.  In addition Lang was one of the founding members of the Society For Psychic Research and a past-President.  Lang wrote dozens of books over his lifetime.  He even wrote a parody of She in 1887 called He.  Today he is remembered only for his collections of fairy tales.  Twelve volumes in all each titled after a color such as The Crimson, or Blue or Pink or Gray Fairy Book.  The volumes are undergoing a fair revival now with a collector’s edition published by Easton Press and several nicely bound volumes by the Folio Society.

     The nineteenth century was the one in which advanced knowledge of the past was rapidly extending European knowledge greatly.  The Rosetta Stone deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics had been achieved as recently as the 1830s.  Nineveh and the Assyrian ruins had been unearthed.  Schlieman had discovered the locations of  Troy and Mycenae.

     The exoteric side was covered by the academics while the esoteric side was covered by independent scholars like Madame Blavatsky and probably Andrew Lang.  There was a clean split between the academic Patriarchal view of  ancient history and the emerging Matriarchal view that had just been developed by the Swiss mythologist, J.J. Bachofen.    Bachofen organized ancient history into Hetaeric, Matriarchal and Patriarchal periods.  He himself was a member of the successor  Scientific period.

     The academics totally rejected the notion of  a Matriarchal period.  This, of course, led to a complete inability to understand Homer, both Iliad and Odyssey. The Iliad especially is a description of the war by the Patriarchy to destroy Matriarchy. 

     Lang seems to have understood the Matriarchal phase of ancient history.  He must have passed this knowledge on to Haggard.  Ayesha, as She, rules a Matriarchal society.  While the ideas represented in She must have seemed bizarre or merely an amusing reversal of the Patriarchal world at the time, today it all reads comprehensibly.  It rings true if not exact.

     C.G. Jung, the psychologist, who developed such notions as the male Anima and the Shadow was very immpressed by what he saw as the male Anima in She.  Madame Blavatsky lauded the book for its esoteric content.  But then, Haggard was firing on all eight cylinders when he wrote it, it is difficult to conceive of a more perfect fantasy/adventure novel.  Indeed Haggard subtitles the novel: The History Of An Adventure.

     Haggard was an excellent Egyptian scholar.  He not only visualized Egypt convincingly in his Egyptian novels but his Egyptian ideas pervade the African novels.  Many of them involve Egyptian influences and even peoples filtering down into East and Central Africa.  The Ivory Child is a case in point as is She.

     The set up to the trip out is brilliant incorporating details that become cliches in B movies.

     Leo Vincey’s father before he died gave a metal box to Leo’s guadian, Horace Holly, that wasn’t to be opened until Leo was twenty-five.  This box is now opened.  It contained a letter to Leo, a potsherd (a piece of a broken jar) covered with ‘uncial’ Greek lettering, a miniature and a scarab containing Egyptian hieroglyphics that read ‘Royal Son of the Sun.’

     Thus Haggard captured most if not all of the elements that went into the intellectual aura fostered by B moves primarily in the first years of the talkies through the thirties.  That entailed things like the Curse of the Pharaohs, movies like The Mummy  melding into Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein and African juju spells.  Things against which Europeans had no defense because the ancient magic was stronger than modern science, or so we were led to believe.  I can’t speak for others  but it took me a while to shake this oppressive spirit.  This was pretty strong stuff for my ten to twelve year old brain.  Not to mention being bombarded by The Creature From The Black Lagoon, The Thing and The Day The Earth Stood Still.  We wuz tried in the fire and come through good.

     The gist of it is that Leo’s ancestor Kallicrates lived in the time of the last Pharaoh Nectanebo as one of the royal family.  Spookier still Nectanebo was said to have fled Egypt before the conquering hordes, going to Macedon where he secretly impregnated Olympia, Philip’s wife, who then gave birth to Alexander which made him the rightful heir to the Pharaohship instroducing Greeks as rulers into his city of Alexandria.

     At any rate Kallicrates girl friend, Ayesha, killed him in a jealous rage.  The family nursing vengeance for all these two thousand years it is Vincey’s mission if he chooses to accept it, to follow the ancient map to the Caves of Kor and kill Ayesha or, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed who has been nursing regrets over killing Kallicrates two thousand years previously.  Listen to me, I’m tellin’ ya it’s all here.

     So Vincey, Holly and their man Job set out to find this place in Africa even more remote, if possible, than King Solomon’s Mines.  And a heck of a lot more hostile too.

     The trip out is some of Haggard’s finest writing.  They are to be looking for a rock formation on the coast in the shape of a gorilla’s head.  Sailing the coast they miraculously spot this head just as a terrific squall sends their felucca, dhow or other exotic ship from foreign  climes to the b ottom.

     But, even though the ship sinks they beat the reaper because they brought a boat containing unsinkable water tight compartments.   As the storm subsides the three survivors along with an Arab float into the mouth of the appropriate stream as though it were all foreordained.  What follows is some excellent writing with details I don’t need to recount.

     Suffice it to say they are dragging their boat along an ancient canal when they are accosted by men from Kor.  Ordinarily these guys would have speared them and moved on, no strangers needed in Kor.  Using her magic She had learned of Leo’s coming a week previously thus ordering their lives spared while they were to be brought to her.  Uh huh.

     The detailing is terrific, this book is tight and well organized.  It moves right along.  The land is under the thumb of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.  This is a tight Matriarchy as we now recognize not  just some strange place where a woman is in charge.

     While the three are entering the Caves of Kor, Leo Vincey, being the cynosure of all female eyes, a knockout named Ustane steps up and kisses him.  Not averse to a public display of affection Leo lays one on her back.  New to the area and not aware of the customs of the place Leo had just accepted Ustane as his woman.  In town for a few minutes and already married.  That’s the way things happen in this particular Matriarchy.  Ustane is now in conflict with Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.

     The stage is now set for the main drama when Ayesha recognizes Leo as her long lost Kallicrates come back from all those reincarnations at last.

     The exoteric Catholic Church is thus thrust aside in favor of all the heretical doctrines of the esoteric which have been bubbling under the Hot 100 for two thousand years.  These unfamiliar esoteric doctrines would become the mainstay and staple of science fiction/fantasy for the next one hundred years.

     Just as an example of how Burroughs probably learned esoterica, I became familiar with estoeric themes myself from reading 1950s science fiction and fantasy- Amazing Stories, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury  and all that sort of stuff without realizing what I was taking in,  thus Burroughs surrounded by the Society for Psychical Research,  Camille Flammarion, George Du Maurier and Stevenson et al. naturally learned the esoteric language.  No mystery, he was speaking in tongues before he knew it.

      Leo is awaiting the summons from Ayesha which will be covered in Part III.

Saturn devouring his son, P. P. Rubens

This entry is difficult to write. I have dragged my feet. I am struggling with how to make the subject more palatable. How does one write about Jung’s night sea journey in search of the soul in an appealing way? It just wasn’t a pretty and sweet story. But maybe that is the wrong approach. Maybe some things just need to be said as they are. Jung’s School of Analytical Psychology grew out of an intense personal and maddening process that brought Jung to the brink of his sanity. No pain, no gain? Is it that simple? I think that some things come to us as grace, serendipity, as gifts from the gods, if you will. But, unfortunately for the most part, the creative process is a painful, arduous and confusing path,whether creativity is expressed in writing a novel or in carving out a life for oneself that is truthful to one’s soul calling. The deeper one digs, the greater the treasure, if one can withstand the pressure of the deep.

In Liber Primus of the Red Book Jung writes “My soul leads me into the desert, into the desert of my own self. I did not think that my soul is a desert, a barren hot desert, dusty and without drink”. Who does!? That is not what we imagine when we think of soul.  Jung’s search for an authentic experience of his soul lead him into solitude,  away from “men and events” and he continues to say that he even had to detach himself from his thoughts so he could open up to his soul’s life. This strikes me as significant because thinking was Jung’s primary function. This was how he perceived the world and made sense of it. I think what Jung describes here is the necessity to let go of  attachments, distractions and identifications.

Imagine of how you make sense of the world. It could be through rational thinking or it could be through emotional feeling values, or more through scientific data and facts,or it could be through a sense of intuitive knowing. And then imagine that you deliberately let go of this mode of perception, which has become so much part of your identity. Jung seems to suggest that it is from this state of emptiness (or discomfort or confusion more likely) that one makes contact with the otherness of the soul/psyche.

“The soul has its own peculiar world”, Jung writes. Jung expresses his confusion and disappointment, I assume, that having given up most of ego’s distractions, the soul is experienced as an arid, barren land. No comfort, no inspiration, nothing to hold on to. What Jung describes is not the soft, nurturing quality so often associated with soul.

The image of Saturn devouring his son expresses what Jung initially found on his soul searching journey. Astrology  understands Saturn as a stern task master who teaches about limitations, restrictions and duty. Duty to what or whom one may wonder? I suggest that the often maligned Saturn teaches us to be in the service of the soul. The image of devouring his son reflects the idea of being robbed of what is the dearest to one’s heart. The barren land of despair, hopelessness, confusion,when no future seems possible. “But my soul spoke to me and said”"Wait”", and Jung continues,”Nobody can spare themselves the waiting and most will be unable to bear this torment”.

To patiently wait and tolerate one’s feelings is not a popular notion in mainstream psychology. Yet it is a hallmark of Jungian  work.  It is devastating and disorientating to be robbed of the idea of a predictable future and to be robbed of a solid sense of self that can make sense of the world. But these feelings may be unavoidable when venturing into the unknown.  The conscious experience of soul life was the unknown, new territory for Jung. For those of us who wish to live a soulful life we may wonder, what is our desert? Where is our barrenness? Where is that place within us that is so restricted that no life or light can ripple through. Jung suggests that our journey towards wholeness must go through this inner desert.  When we are stripped to the bare bones , then we may meet the soul in the form of the other yet also part of who we are and a dialogue may begin. In  a Jungian sense, only then are we truly alive.

Wassily Kandinsky. Im Blau, 1925

Creativeness, like the freedom of the will, contains a secret. The psychologist can describe both these manifestations as processes, but he can find no solution of the philosophical problems they offer. Creative man is a riddle that we may try to answer in various ways, but always in vain, a truth that has not prevented modern phychology from turning now and again to the question of the artist and his art. Freud thought that he had found a key in is procedure of deriving the work of art from the personal experiences of the artist. It is true that certain possibilities lay in this direction, for it was conceivable that a work of art, no less than a neurosis, might be traced back to those knots in psychic life that we call the complexes. It was Freud’s great discovery that neuroses have a casual origin in the psychic realm-that they take their rise from emotional states and from real or imagined childhood experiences. Certain of his followers, like Rank and Stekel, have taken up related lines of enquiry and have achieved important results. It is undeniable that the poet’s psychic disposition permeates his work root and branch. Nor is there anything new in the statement that personal factors largely influence is and in what curious ways it comes to expression.

Freud takes the neurosis as a substitute for a direct means of gratification. He therefore regards it as something inappropriate-a mistake, a dodge, an excuse, a voluntary blindness. To him it is essentially a shortcoming that should never have been. Sice a neurosis, to all appearences, is nothing but a disturbance that is all the more irritating because it is without sense or meaning, few people will venture to say a good word for it. And a work of art is brought into questionable proximity with the neurosis when it is taken as something which can be analysed in terms of the poet’s repressions. In a sense it finds itself in good company, for religion and philosophy are regarded in the same ligth by Freudian psychology. No objection can be raised if it is admitted that this approach amounts to nothing more than the elucidation of those personal determinants without which a work of art is unthinkable. But should the claim be made that such an analysis accounts for the work of art itself, then a categorical denial is called for. The personal idiosyncrasies that creep into a work of art are not essential; in fact, the more we have to cope with these peculiarities, the less is it a question of art. What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind. The personal aspects is a limitation-and even a sin-in the realm of art. When a form of “art” is primarily personal it deserves to be treated as if it were a neurosis. There may be some validity in the idea held by the Freudian scholl that artists without exception are narcissistic-by which is meant that they are undeveloped persons with infantile and auto-erotic traits. The statement is only valid, however, for the artist as a person, and has nothing to do with the man as an artist. In is capacity of artist he is neither auto-erotic, nor hetero-erotic, nor erotic in any sense. He is objective and impersonal-even inhuman-for as an artist he is his work, and not a human being.

Max Ernst. L'ange du Foyer, 1937

Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process. Since as a human being he may be sound and morbid, we must look at his psychic make-up to find the determinants of his personality. But we can only understand him is is capacity of artist by looking at his creative achievement. We should make a sad mistake if we tried to explain the mode of life of an English gentleman, a Prussian officer, or a cardinal in terms of personal factors. The gentleman, the officer and the cleric function as such in a impersonal rôle, and their psychic make-up is qualified by a peculiar objectivity. We must grant that the artist does not function in a official capacity-the very opposite is nearer the truth. He nevertheless resembles the types I have named in one respect, for the specifically artistic disposition involves an overweight of collective psychic life as against the personal. Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes though him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense-he is “collective man”-one who carries and shapes the unconcious, psychic life of mankind. To preform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

All this beig so, it is not strange that the artist is an especially interesting case for the psychologist who uses an analytical method. The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him-one the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for cration which may go so far as to override every personal desire. The lives of artists are as a rule so highly unsatisfactory-not to say tragic-because of their inferiority on the human and personal side, and not because of a sinister dispensation. There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire. It is as though each of us were endowed at birth with a certain capital of energy. The strongest force in our make-up will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. In this way the creative force can drain the human impulses to such a degree that the personal ego must developed all sorts of bad qualities-ruthlessness, selfishness and vanity (so-called “auto-erotism”)-and even every kind of vice, in order to maintain the spark of life and to keep itself from being wholly bereft. The auto-erotism of artist resembles that of illegitimate or negleted children who from their tenderest years must protect themeselfs from the destructive influence of people who have no love to give them-who dveloped bad qualities for tht very purpose and later maintain an invincible egocentrism by remaining all their lives infantile and helpless or by actively offending against the moral code or the law. How can we doubt that it is art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflits of is personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable resultus of the fact that he is an artist-that is to say, a man who from his very birth has been called to a grater task than the ordinary mortal. A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

Georgia O'Keeffe. Special N.º 21, 1916

It makes no difference wheter the poet knows that is work is begotten, grows and matures with him, or wheter he supposes that by taking thought he produces it out of the void. His opinion of the matter does not change the fact that his own work outgrows him as a child its mother. The creative process has feminine quality, and the crative work arises from unconscious depths-we might say, from the realm of the mothers. Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and moulded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the counscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events. The work in process becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe. And what is Faust but a symbol? By this I do not mean an allegory that points to something all to familiar, but an expression that stands for something not clearly known and yet profoundly alive. Here it is something that lives in the soul of every German, and that Goethe has helped to bring to birth. Could we conceive of anyone but a German writing Faust or Also Sprach Zarathustra? Both play upon something that reverberates in the German soul-a “primordial image”, as Jacob Burckhardt once called it- the figure of a physician or teacher of mankind. The archetypal image of the wise man, the saviour or redeemer, lies buried and dormant in man’s unsonscious since the dawn of culture; it is awakened whenever the times are out of joint and a human society is committed to a serious error. When people go astray they feel the need of a guide or teatcher or even of the physician. These primordial images are numerous, but do not appear in the dreams of individuals or in works of art until they are called into being by the waywardeness of the general outlooks. When conscious life is characterized by one-sidedness and by a false attitude, then they are activated-one might say, “instinctively”-and come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists and seers, thus restoring the psychic equilibrium of the epoch.

In this way the work of the poet comes to meet the spiritual need of the society in which he lives, and for this reason his work means more to him than his personal fate, whether he is aware of this or not. Being essentially the instrument for his work, he is subordinate to it, and we have no reason for expecting him to interpret it for us. He as done the best that in him lies in giving it form, and he must leave the interpretation to others and to the future. A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says: “You ought,” or: “This is the truth.” It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions. If a person has a nightmare, it means either that he is too much given to fear, or else that he is too exempt from it; and if he dreams of the old wise man it may mean that he is too pedagogical, as also that he stands in need of a teacher. In a subtle way both meanings come to the same thing, as we perceive when we are able to let the work of art act upon us as it acted upon the artist. To grasp its meaning, we must allow it to shape us as it once shaped him. Then we understand the nature of his experience. We see that he has drawn upon the healing and redeeming forces of the collective psyche that underlies consciousness whit its isolation and its painful errors; that he has penetrated to that matrix of live in which all men are embedded, which imparts a common rhythm to all human existence, and allows the individual to communicate his feeling and his striving to mankind as a whole.

Odd Nerdrum. Night Guard, 1983

The secret of artistic creation and of the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to the state of participation mystique-to that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual, and at which the weal or woe of the single human being does not count, but only human existence. This is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, but none the less profoundly moves  us each and all. And this is also why the personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to his art-but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task. He may go the way of a Philistine, a good citizen, a neurotic, a fool or a criminal. His personal career may be inevitable and interesting, but it does not explain the poet.

C. G. Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul – Psychology and Literature

Lately I have thought a lot about darkness. It seems timely as November feels like the darkest time of the year. It might be. But while darkness begins to wrap around us at an early hour, I see the familiar emphasis on light wherever I look. We all want to be in the light  at all times and if we are not, move towards it as fast as possible. Darkness is the unwanted stepsister.

We experience darkness psychologically as depression, as the “hour of lead”, as the poet Emily Dickinson once wrote. A fitting image reflective of the heaviness, the stuckness and the dull, all consuming despair of depression.  Why would anyone of sound mind find any value in the darker moods ?! Mainstream psychology seems to agree and focuses primarily on the eradication of  symptoms via the help of pills, pills and more pills. Make no mistake, there is a place for medication in the treatment of depression, but I abhor the unquestioning carelessness with which our culture medicates its citizens, particularly its most vulnerable members, the poor and poorly educated.

But even the well-off are seduced by our culture’s one-sided infatuation with the lighter, more pleasant moods. It is so much easier to escape into substances or addictive behaviors.  No joke, it is. Nonetheless, I argue that practioners of the healing arts need to rediscover the value of depression and the darker shades of being, because they are as much part of nature, our nature, as the darkness of November is in the cycle of a year.

I recently read that “you can’t discover light by analyzing the darkness”. This was written by an internationally best selling author and spiritual teacher. A very successful person and presumedly helpful to millions, but in this instance he simply did not get it right. But I can see why the message of tolerating difficult feelings and searching for meaning in the muck of one’s psyche is a much harder sell.

But is there a spark in the darkness? On a cosmic level,  science has shown, literally, with the help of an x-ray observatory that a glow with the intensity of ten billion suns pours out of a black hole into the surrounding universe. For a long time scientists believed that no light beam could ever escape a black hole. They were wrong.

Is there meaning to be found in depression? More often than not there is. It might be helpful to differentiate the nature of the darker mood. Is the depression related to a loss that needs to be mourned? It could be the loss of a person or an abstract idea, such as the loss of youth or health, hopes, or the loss of the illusion that life is meant to be an uninterrupted state of happiness. Freud got it right when he said that our whole life is a process of mourning. Think about it, when you allow yourself to feel deeply into your being, are we not always mourning something or someone, even if we are simultaneously quite content and “happy” with our lives?

But there can be black holes in our psyche that can not be explained by insufficient mourning. When Saturn clutches the soul  causing wounding and despair too much to bear. How tempting it is to abandon the soul to her suffering and find refuge in medication that quiets her screams. Jung descended into his own darkness/madness and brought forth the insights and techniques that today constitute the School of Analytical Psychology. We Jungians value the darkness. We know that only by bearing witness to suffering and by extracting meaning from it can a new morning dawn. Spring will follow winter, but in the middle of November there is no memory of that.

For those who are interested in a unique Jungian perspective on darkness and its psychological implications I have a wonderful book to recommend. “The Black Sun, the Alchemy and Art of Darkness” by Jungian analyst Stanton Marlan. It was in this book that I found the information on the discovery of light in the black holes. The book, like its subject matter, is illuminating the dark.

And with Emily Dickinson, wherever she is now, I would like to share that the old alchemists knew that the lead of Saturn holds a hidden promise. When made into a fine powder, it ignites all by itself. There is indeed a spark in the darkness of our depression.

WORD

animus [an-uh-muhs] n. 1. strong dislike or enmity; hostile attitude; animosity 2. purpose; intention; animating spirit 3. (in the psychology of C. G. Jung) the masculine principle, esp. as present in women

BIRTHDAY

Martin Luther (1483), Winston Churchill (1871), Russell Johnson (1924), Richard Burton (1925), Ennio Morricone (1928), Roy Scheider (1932), Russell Means (1939), Saxby Chambliss (1943), Tim Rice (1944), Sinbad (1956), Linda Cohn (1959), Mackenzie Phillips (1959), Neil Gaiman (1960), Michael Jai White (1967), Tracy Morgan (1968), Warren G. (1970), Brittany Murphy (1977), Eve (1978), Miranda Lambert (1983)

STANDPOINT

While I’m not writing this blog or reading a book or doing something of a social nature or whatever the hell else I feel like, I am a bartender. I like being a bartender. I like serving drinks, talking to people and making them laugh. It’s important to like what you do. For those of you out there who don’t like your chosen occupation, get out while you still can. That’s my advice to you. So there.

In any case, there’s one aspect of bartending that grates on my fucking nerves – listening to people drone on and on about something that matters so little to everyone everywhere and no one yet realizes it.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of pointless nonsense about one subject in particular. You see, I bartend in a little town called Skippack. Down the road a ways is a slightly-larger, but no more important, town named Collegeville, cleverly because of the fact Ursinus College is located within it.

But nowadays, no one’s talking about Ursinus. To be fair, it’s likely they weren’t anyway. Nevertheless, there’s only one thing everyone wants to talk about no matter what: the grand opening of the Wegmans, a supermarket that, apparently, has the ability to capture the collective consciousness of everyone within a 45-minute drive.

It’s all anyone can talk about. So automatically I hate it. In general, I have a problem with anything that no one has a problem with. That’s mainly my problem with almost everything.

Here’s the thing. I don’t want to talk about a place you can go to buy food. (a) I’m not particularly dazzled by recollections of an, until now, never before seen selection of cheese. Also, (b) I’m not entirely impressed by the fact there’s a pub inside a supermarket. In addition, (c) I’m not remotely interested in the largest selection of seafood in the area. (These three things, by the way, are almost always offered as the main reasons one would ever go to Wegmans, although not the only ones.)

Granted, I am a single, 35-year old male (temporarily) living in an area greatly overpopulated with parents and children. For parents, it is a unique opportunity to provide for your family and afford yourself a few drinks while doing it, instead of having to wait to get home, unload the groceries, make dinner and put the kids to bed before opening a bottle of wine, or four, and get your buzz on. I am not ignorant of this fact. As I’ve been more exposed to parents as an adult, I’ve figured out that good parenting is directly proportionate to the amount of weekly alcohol consumption. It wasn’t that way when I was growing up but that’s the way it is now. At least, for the most part. Not saying all you parents out there are getting bombed every night. But a lot of you are. I can’t blame you. If I were a parent, I would probably be within your ranks.

In any case, hearing people swap stories about their first (and second and third) trip to Wegmans is about as depressing a level of converation that can be reached.

I refuse to participate.

So I’m not going. Even it means never talking to anyone again. Or, at least, until I move downtown in January. Then, I’ll have to talk to all the single folks about how fresh everything at Whole Foods seem to be. But, somehow, it doesn’t seem like it’ll suck half as much.

QUOTATION

The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look.  It works in reverse, too.  When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person. → P.J. O’Rourke

TUNE

Sometimes, all it takes is a killer line in a song to make listen to it about 93 times – over and over. Such is the case with Mike Doughty’s tune, “I Just Want the Girl in the Blue Dress To Keep On Dancing.” It’s a good and quick song that features the line, “I’ll assess the essence of the mess…” Not sure why I like that so much. But I do. And that’s that.

GALLIMAUFRY

→ If you haven’t seen the video footage of University of New Mexico’s women’s soccer player, Elizabeth Lambert, you should. This chick is so completely crazy, I’m surprised I’ve never dated her.

→ Just want to officially thank the Philadelphia Phillies for coming oh-so-very-close to winning back-to-back World Series. I know the whole organization has been waiting for me to weigh in. Once again, I will state Philadelphia is a “baseball town.” I will keep saying that until everyone believes it. Because it’s the truth.

→ In a world gone mad, sometimes I read some news that alleviates all the numbness and actually allows me to feel again. The fact Steven Tyler has officially left Aerosmith was not that kind of news. I’m sure there’s a large group of people out there who care when a middle-aged singer leaves a band that hasn’t contributed anything musically solid in decades. I’m just not a member of that group.  

As reported in the New York Times Magazine, the Jungian analyst Stephen Martin, a nonobservant Jew, once responded to his daughter’s question about his religion with “Oh, honey, I ‘m a Jungian”.  No, Jungian psychology is not a religion and the Jungian world is not a sect, at least not if it’s definition involves a specific dogma under a doctrinal leader. Jung’s comment of “thank God I am not a Jungian” is often quoted in this context. And yet, let me be the devil’s advocate for a moment, Jungian psychology always views the dynamics of human behavior from a perspective that is larger than the ego. In Jungian thought, all phenomena are understood in relation to the archetype of the Self, which some translate as the equivalent to God, although that  is not quite correct. This distinction was very important to Jung. Whatever the outer reality may be, all we have is a psychic image, including a psychic image of God. Whether the image is Christ, Yahweh, Allah, shamanic spirits, Buddha, the Great Goddess, or the “image” of an atheist belief, depends on one’s culture and personal inclination. From a Jungian perspective all these images are rooted in the archetype of the Self, which can be imagined as a vital psychic core that bridges humanity with a larger, transpersonal reality.

Psychology is the science of the soul. It does not set out to prove or disprove that metaphysical entities exist. In Jung’s self-experiment, he recognized that his entire life was the expression of his soul. “I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul” he writes in the Red Book,(RB)p.234. In this search for his inner truth he discovered that even, or especially, the people we love the most are ultimately symbols of that search for soul. I do not think that Jung wanted to diminish the reality or intensity of human love, but rather add another dimension to it. One, I’d like to think, true lovers always sensed. The search for soul does not lift you into ethereal heights. It leads right into fleshed out life. To know your soul,  you have to live your life to the fullest. Consider the following quote from Jung: “ To know the human soul one has to hang up exact science and put away the scholar’s gown, say farewell to his study and wander with human heart through the world, through the horror of prisons, mad houses and hospitals, through drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling dens, through the salons of elegant society, the stock exchanges, the socialist meetings, the churches, the revivals and ecstacies of the sects, to experience love, hate and passion in every form in one’s body” (CW 7, para 409).

Go out and live your life, Jung seems to say.  Do not deny your darker impulses. They are part of your soul’s life. I do not believe Jung meant that we literally all have to end up in prisons and “madhouses”, although it may happen, but that we need to find the compassion, the “Mitgefuehl”, which means “feeling with the other”, of what it is like to be there. To connect to another in compassion is an expression of soul, which weaves a net between us all. Soul partakes of all experiences humanly possible.

In other instances, internalized collective judgments and values may prevent us form pursuing our heart’s desire. What part of myself do I not dare to live? Do I need all the prisoners in society so I can feel morally superior? “Consider that your heart is both good and evil, Jung wrote in the RB, p.234. It takes courage to acknowledge evil in the first place, it takes even more to see it within oneself.