Tosia H Zraikat

Who do you Serve?

 

"Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse to bow down before them, but few indeed have been found to resist the crowd, to stand up alone before misguided masses, to face their implacable frenzy without weapons and with folded arms to dare a no when a yes is demanded."

(Hannah Arendt in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism').

 

 

“It is indeed a frightening thought that man also has a shadow-side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foible, but of a positively demonic dynamism” (the will to power). Yet how necessary that he knows, for he likes to imagine himself a fairly decent fellow, “But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only a tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages

(Carl Jung in 'Will to power').

 

Life requires that we think more deeply about who we are, what we believe, and who or what we serve. That we find and strengthen our centre, our resistance to mass-thinking. We don't have to be certain. Doubt is Ok, and so is change. But we need to clarify a few clear core values to hold us steady when we are besieged by the loud, insistent demands of the crowd....So we can stand in our own sovereignty.

Spiritual Core Strength

Much attention is paid to the development of core strength, but having a strong centre, a strong trunk is about much more than fitness or abs. Core spiritual strength concerns our whole being. It is, indeed, the key to living a fruitful, balanced and deeply fulfilling life.

 

 

Just as a strong tree trunk is essential for the wellbeing and functionality of the tree's roots, branches, and leaves, psychological strength is fundamental to every aspect of our being - body, mind, and soul. 

 

 

Without that strong inner centre, our energies cannot help but scatter and dissipate. We cannot help but waste them on inessential, unproductive, and too often, on harmful thoughts, feelings and actions.

 

 

Most of us know what physical core strength is and why it is important. It stabilizes your body, and allows for optimal transfer of energy between different parts of the body so that it can function well. A strong core also is protective, allowing you to move and be active without damaging muscles, bones and organs. Most of us are also aware of different ways to develop core strength: yoga, tai chi, qi gong, dancing and gymnastics, for example.

 

But can you see the parallel between developing and maintaining core strength of your body, and creating a strong psychological and spiritual core?

 

Psychological and Spiritual core strength are just as vital for our overall wellbeing, our fuctionality and wholeness as body core strength is for physiological wellbeing.  A strong spiritual centre provides the same benefits - strength, optimal flow of energy and information, protection - on an even deeper level of being. 

 

Elements of psychological strength include resilience and adaptability; the ability to see things realistically, and to respond appropriately; ability to cope with and eventually resolve strong emotions like hate, anger, passion; taking responsibility for feelings and actions; seeing things from a wider perspective instead of thinking that it's all about us; being able to empathise with others and consider their needs and wants; learning how to listen, communicate and express ours feelings and expectations instead of feeling victimized. 

 

It is, however, a strong spiritual centre that gives us the extraordinary strength, endurance and guidance that enable us to face life's toughest challenges, and to be radically transformed into a higher level of human being. This is where the key to transformation of the world is to be found.

 

A strong spiritual core does not eliminate pain, loss, or despair, for these are part of la condition humaine, the human condition. But it does impart to us the strength to endure and eventually to emerge from even the darkest abyssal experience, not only intact but wiser than before.

 

A strong spiritual centre, religious or not, gives us moral backbone, the courage to stand up for what we think is good and true, to keep our resolve in the face of inner or outer threats, and not to buckle in fear, even when we are afraid.

 

Woman in peaceful confrontation with police in Louisianna.  Image: indianews.com

 

Throughout history, individuals with strong minds and hearts have drawn on their inner divinity, the True Self, to endure the unendurable, to become beacons of hope and peace for others in the very worst of situations. These individuals illustrate for us the enormous sustaining and supportive power of deep psyche, and the capacity in each of us to draw on its spiritual power.

 

 

Image: Courage, Jody Hewgill

 

If you are serious about becoming a Whole, a fully functioning human being, do not treat your spirituality like an addendum, something additional to your life, a cloak you take on and off. It is You, or it is nothing.

 

 Attend to your soul. Look  deep within your shadows and bring them to light. Cultivate a relationship with your True Self which is Life itself, its Light, the is God within, your inner Sun. 

 

Instead of settling into comfortable, feel-good spirituality that asks nothing much of you, do what is required to establish a strong, firm foundation to support your personal growth and transformation. Choose a path that you can commit to and walk it every day.

 

 

Seeing Differently

Judging from how many of us go to books, classes and teachers to learn spiritual truths, we should expect to be well acquainted with Truth and Wisdom, and know how to recognise them. We should find enlightened souls all around us. But we do not. Nor are most of us - no matter how deep our spiritual practice - intimate with the spiritual dimensions of being. Heaven knows, it's not for want of trying.

It's not that we cannot find Truth, but that our usual ways of looking and experiencing do not allow us to see it.

"It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing." – Carl Jung"   (The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung).

“Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand" (Matthew 13:11)

 

Wanting and intending to know, and accepting the ideas of the Divine and Oneness might point us to the path of transformation, but they are not enough. We must experience for ourselves, viscerally and intimately, the profound and inner shift to a new level of awareness that transforms our consciousness, and if we are to continue to grow, we must experience it over and over as consciousness becomes more and more refined, more expansive and awake.

"He who has eyes to see, let him see, and he who has ears to hear, let him hear."   Matthew 13:13

What are these “eyes to see” and “ears to hear”?

They are metaphors for awareness, that is, consciousness: the willingness and ability to recognise the reality in which we live ...not our conditioned reality, or the reality that we have agreed upon, not only the small insights that are honestly received and spoken, but the fundamental Reality of our nature, which is both biological and spiritual - human and Divine. 

We like to think we know this Reality, but the majority of us do not. We try to see it, and some of us may even catch a brief glimpse of it, but too often, we fall back into old ways of seeing and thinking ... because we are not transformed. The Truth is right here before us, within us, we are told, but for all our efforts, most of us do not really see or experience it....nor will we until we are change our ways of seeing.

Most of us are like the boy in the Grimm brothers' story of the Goose Girl. In this story, a mis-used princess disguised as a goose girl speaks daily with the head of her dead horse, who laments her suffering. Every
day she combs out her hair which shines as brightly as the sun (symbol of higher or awakened consciousness), and every day when the boy tries to pluck a hair, she summons the wind to blow off his hat and carry it over the fields.

He knows this is strange, yet all he sees is an irritating goose girl. Like all of us who do not know the language of soul, he remains blind to the mystery being revealed to him, and to its invitation to step into greater awareness. 

Fortunately for the princess, the king (symbol of the Self) recognises the truth and marries her. 

“You cannot see Me with your present eyes," Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita,"Therefore I give you divine eyes.”

Just as those who do science must learn to see and experience the world in new ways –that is, scientifically - those who would be awakened must learn to see with more conscious eyes.

Ordinary mind, the mind of the material self, is perfectly attuned to outer reality. Used properly, it enables us to function according to the laws of this reality at a much higher level than we presently do. To experience spiritual reality, however, we must engage spiritual dimensions of mind, with their unique attributes and processes.

We do it unconsciously in dreams, intuition, inspiration, sudden insights, and those numinous moments when we feel totally connected to nature, others and the world - but we can learn to do it consciously. And that requires opening our inner gates of perception, and accepting what enters.

Most of us, though, are easily frightened or angered by anything that doesn't fit our beliefs about what is possible or real, that doesn't come through ordinary channels. Instead of opening itself to the unfamiliar and allowing itself to experience the mystery of the unknown, the conscious mind blocks it out, shunts it into our unconscious to remain hidden.

But eventually, even the most rational, materialistic seeker of Truth might come to a door where sensory perception and reason fail. Often, this occurs in times of crisis, or in those dark nights of the soul when we feel terribly lost.

 

 

(We come to a door that can only be entered by those willing to leave familiar ways of knowing behind).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When this happens, we might try to climb back onto familiar ground where things used to make sense, and refuse the opportunity to see things more truly. But some brave or desperate souls will accept this sacred invitation to accept not-knowing, walk through the wide open gate newly humbled, and surrender mind to the deep mystery of Self, of Being ... asking, Who am I? What is this?

Eventually, if we keep asking, answers will come. And what do we do meanwhile?

Amidst the Troubled World

Part of me has always wanted to become a monk, to live away from the world, a reclusive life that would allow my mind to soar to great heights. But I know, I just know that we are here to learn to uncover our inner light and share it with the world, not as a saint but as just another human being.

"Make of yourself a light." (said Gautama Buddha just before his death)

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” (said Jesus. Matthew 5:16)

Awakening is not about tuning away from the world, shutting it out; it’s about tuning into the world, recognising that you are part of it, biologically, psychologically, and spiritually, and that your actions or non-actions in the world count.  Cutting yourself off from the world is shutting off part of your own being.

Yet that is exactly what most people do, trying to ignore problems right under our nose, to numb ourselves from our own pain and pain of others.

We don't allow ourselves to see or feel the pain of the world because it terrifies us, and we feel helpless before it.

But as long as we close our eyes and our hearts, we will never heal. The world cannot heal, and it will not change. The forms of misery might change over time, but the sickness, the suffering will remain.

How, then, do we live and grow in a world whose societies perpetuate human suffering, societies run by handfuls of powerful and wealthy who benefit from the misery of the millions and human despair?

First. Do what aeons of sages, prophets and masters have told us: Look within. Know Thyself.  Recognise the pain, trauma and denial on which you have built your own psychological patterns and perception of the world. Give yourself the acceptance and love that your heart needs to open up and feel.

Then bit by bit, consciously (and as slowly as it requires), acknowledge the suffering of others, and allow your heart to respond with compassion and love.

 Your heart aches when you hear of refugees drowning in wild seas. Don’t pretend it doesn’t.

You are horrified by pictures of starving or bombed children on your television. Don’t be ashamed of your pain. Express it. Ask others, how can we allow this?

You suppress the wave of compassion that arises when you pass by a homeless person. Don't. Allow yourself to feel that compassion, and to act on it.

We are not asked to bear the pain of the world, to suffer with it, or feel guilty. No one is asked to be a martyr. But we are asked to witness what is, both within and without. For only then can we feel the heart's urge to comfort, to be kind, to give what comfort we can, to help heal this world. 

Acknowledge our common humanity. Not one of us is perfect or blameless. Learn and practice daily to treat others respectfully, truthfully but without moral judgement, regardless of your emotional reaction to their words or action. 

Don’t give up on yourself. Don't give up on the world.

Transformation begins in you. In me. In your neighbour. In millions of people refusing to be numb and blind to the unacceptable costs of their social order, in those millions and millions of kindnesses that people show to each other and to other living things.

(Image from The Little Prince Movie — http://www.TheLittlePrinceMovie.com )

reblogged

 

 

Working with a Dream image

I've been watching heavy rainfall all morning, reading Jung and listening - again-  to Dr Edinger speak on 'the New Myth of Meaning', a talk that I find deeply moving and inspiring, so although outer-world tasks require my attention, I want to write about a dream, and what I have drawn out of it. It gives an idea of  how, as a devoted Jungian, I work with dreams. 

The dream July 26 2024

 A woman in dark clothes with black hair is very antagonistic towards me. She resembles me very much (I have black hair and dark clothes in the dream), and wants to get into me and replace me because she thinks I am not living my life as I should, sort of just inhabiting my life and not being fully myself in it. She is shooting at me with a thing that fires laser beams that don't hurt, but weaken me. I shoot back with the same kind of weapon. Then another woman is there, with long wild blonde hair and wearing a long white dress. She more or less takes over the dream.

 

This woman in white also fires laser beams at me, but with more hostile intent, a kind of viciousness that the other woman does not have, and I fire back. This one also wants to take over my life, but she wants to kill me. She wants my destruction; there is something savage, cruel about her. Though I fire on her and strike her, the strikes only slow her down. Then she puts a small bright red ball in her mouth, which if she bites down on it, will release poison that she wants to spurt out in my direction without harming her. She keeps coming closer, though I shoot, and I know that she wants to get close enough to release the poison into my mouth...sort of with a kiss. The other woman who resembles me is now  standing by, hardly visible, watching. I am the one being targeted. Somehow, I feel through all this that we are all related.

 

Active imagination 

(This is a method Jung taught for exploring dream or other images from the psyche. Robert Johnson tells that one will “go into [one's] fantasy or vision, participate consciously in it, and make it into an active exchange between the conscious and unconscious energy systems," (Inner Work). 

Very brief conversation with the woman in white:

 

"What do you want from me?

You are not worthy of your life. I want it.

"What do you want me to do?"

Get out. I want you out.

"What do you want to do with my life?"

 

I feel a powerful surge of her desire, a kind of primal desire that feels selfish, cruel, insatiable. However she has a sweet face. She frightens me so I do not continue. Later, it occurs to me that she probably represents boundless or unmodified instinct without the ameliorating influence of love, relationship, or containment, which Jung said can be dangerous. She is, I think, the compensatory and exaggerated opposite of my own fear and distrust of feeling and desire. After this, I did some reading on instinct in books mostly by Marie-Louise Von Franz.

 

Amplification

(Amplification of a dream symbol means "doing research on the meaning of the symbol," exploring associations with "myths, fairytales, or folklore" to "gain a deeper understanding of their meaning." (nathanbrandon.com).

I found it difficult to associate the character of the woman in white with stories or myths other than stories associated with death: the spirit of the dead, or that appears to warn of death or to be death, which doesn't feel right to me. I don't get that impression from her. On the contrary, she seems to me to represent repressed instincts and drives demanding expression: sexuality, desire, stifled creativity, anger, the power drive, primal energy etc. But during this exercise, I realised that she comes with such vehemence, such venom because the repression was to her like death, and she burst into my dream demanding life - my life - that I had denied her. In that dream, where I was all in black with black hair, I was her shadow as I thought she might was mine. 

Visualising the red ball in her mouth through which she wanted to spit poison at me, I was reminded of a serpent, and also, paradoxically, of something beautiful, a glowing ruby that had appeared in another dream some time ago associated with my wolf guide, a jewel associated with fire, energy and the warrior, which to me signifies the energy of life, libido, passion. So her poison might have been intended to kill but like a homeopathic medicine, it can restore balance and heal. Here I see the play of opposites - life and death, killing and healing, destruction and revivification. 

Unexpectedly, this took me into remembered recent dreams. A lion carries me, unconscious, on its back from darkness into light. A tiger comes at me and instead of harming, takes my whole face into its mouth gently, so that I breathe its breath, taste its saliva, become almost one with it. And a pack of wild wolves runs around me, pushing me forward. Now here, the woman seeks to spit poison into my mouth that I now feel is like medicine.

I am being brought to life. I am being helped to see that in repressing/denying parts of me through shame, guilt, fear, I lost, maybe killed, parts of my soul that I can now to some degree recover....wounded but alive. I had thought I was only being told to reclaim my instincts but it is much more than that. My psyche is also showing me that I am cared for, that I have an inner tribe of friends that care for me and love me. I cannot say how much that means to me.

Later- I found further confirmation of my interpretation just this morning. I came across Marie-Louise von Franz's comment on white - that though it can be "either positive or negative depending upon the situation," it can indicate the instinctual impulse's "natural direction towards consciousness', a force which "tends to bring things up into consciousness." (in Shadow and Evil in Fairytales, p. 303). Now I understand why the white dress felt so important to me. I feel that there is still more to this dream, and that it will continue to enlighten me, but already, I feel enriched, expanded. 

What I take from this so far is a newly certain awareness of the Self, an intelligence within me that is not mine, a force much greater than my small personality, something wiser that extends beyond me, and that I am seen, valued and driven by that greater being into the process of individuation. My task then is to accept and interpret what it is given through instinct, feeling and reason, and use my ego's decision-making capacity to apply it appropriately in my everyday life, for in so doing, Jung says, I become more conscious and contribute to the consciousness of the world.

Surrounded by Wolves

I am surrounded by wolves. I feel them running around me, pushing me forward, their bodies hard and breath hot on my skin. I am not frightened, because one of my animal guides, Lobo, runs with them, close by.

Lobo is a wolf who entered my dream a couple years ago and has helped me to recognise unpleasant and difficult aspects of myself. Though he is now dear to me, a companion, Lobo is not the sweet-faced, metaphysical symbol of femininity, or peace and love that one finds all over the internet. He is like the  “growling wolf within, the iron grim” described so well by C.G. Jung's colleague, Marie-Louise Von Franz. I wrote about that in my chapter of the book, Psychological and Philosophical Studies of Jung's Teleology: The Future-Orientation of Mind, edited by Garth Admunson, from which the following passages are taken.

" “The wolf … often represents a capacity which is very closely connected with people who have a wolf problem, namely, a general, all-devouring greed ….. the wolf is always the victim of his hungry stomach. When that gets the better of him, he loses all intelligence ….. In his paper on the transference  …[Jung] says the very often such a terrific greed awakes in people that they want to eat everybody and everything - for example, to eat their analyst completely. It is not even on the level of a sexual transference, but on an even more primitive level, for it is to “have” the other: to have everything…… This great desire to eat everything is very often the result of great frustration in childhood, which had built up a kind of bitter resentment on one side, combined with the greedy desire to have and eat everything. The “grim” then is a kind of sulky resentment because one can’t have the thing. …. They get caught in a kind of vicious circle of cold resentment and greed, which is often fittingly symbolised by the wolf” (von Franz, 1990, pp. 202-203)."

She was describing an aspect of me, that part of the inner child who still felt that  resentment and insatiable longing. Continuing:

".....Wolf is also an "initiating animal; he has this significance in Canto I of Dante's Inferno" (1970b, P.39, p. 141). In his mid-life and a 'dark night of the soul,' Dante finds himself in a dark forest looking for "the straightforward pathway," and thinks to take a mountain path that seemed to lead up to the light. But "almost where the ascent began," he finds his way blocked by a panther, then a lion, then "a she-wolf, that with all her hungerings Seemed to be laden in her meagreness… brought upon me so much heaviness…Which, coming on me by degrees Thrust me thither where the sun is silent.""

                   (art: Antonello Vinditti)

 

"The shade of the poet Virgil appears, full of harsh words about the wolf that blocks the way upward and offers to guide Dante along another road down through hell (Dante, The Inferno, Canto 1). Only by going into the dark place of the unconscious where he will encounter the shadow side of humanity and himself can Dante climb to the light.

"At first we cannot see beyond the path that leads downward to dark and hateful things," writes Jung ".. but no light or beauty will ever come from the man who cannot bear this sight" (Jung, 1955, p. 215). So must we all who want to redeem our lost souls go into the dark shadow, not voluntarily but pushed onto that road by fear or heaviness of spirit or desperation.

"Virgil reviled the she-wolf that blocked the mountain path, but she was a helper, forcing Dante onto the path he had to go, as Lobo pushed me to where I would rather not go." 

and here I am, being pushed again in this inner life, towards I know not what.

How deep is deep enough?

"Man as a spiritual being is made human by essence (hsing). The individual man possesses it. but it extends far beyond the limits of the individual" (Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower).

 

Something has been weighing on me these past few days, and this morning, in an effort to understand what it is, I did an Active Imagination on a recent dream that involved rescuing two children. Active Imagination is a technique used in Jungian therapy to 'drop into' one's unconscious. I have used it before to gain deep insights into a particular image or experience.

This time, however, I was met with darkness, a deep, impenetrable darkness and a terrible smell of my early childhood, the complex mix of flesh, blood and other things that usually accompanies early childhood memories. Looming on the edge of the darkness was the ominous outline of a square tower. 

Go no further! Stop here! 

It was as clear as if spoken, but it was a feeling, a presentiment, a warning in my body, so compelling that I obeyed. 

Since then, I have been asking myself how far one must go into one's past, or into one's own unconscious to know oneself. Is there a limit to how far one can go without being sucked into the unconscious as into a whirlpool or lost there? In the quest to know oneself, must one choose between Scylla or Charybdis?

Has Jungian therapy taken me as deep into the shadows of my childhood as I need to go? Should the children I seek to rescue in dreams sometimes be left in the past? Are they sometimes murdered potentialities that cannot be rescued?

Or might they only sometimes be aspects of my childhood still able to be released from their darkness and allowed to develop in new directions?

Is there a limit to what we must know, or even seek to know? How deep is deep enough?

 

 

 

 

The circus of our times

I have recalled few dreams of late, but seen a waking nightmare of crowds adoring a man and moved to passion by his wound as though it were the bleeding wound of the Christ on the cross.
Such colour, such noise, such songs of praise and worshipful hands and faces.

 

Beside it, I recall a black and white image of another time when adoring masses desperate for a saviour worshipped a different man who also promised to make his country great again, and led it and much of the world to disaster. Our modern man sometimes even uses the language of that earlier one, "referring to his political opponents as 'vermin' and saying illegal immigrants are 'poisoning the blood of our country' (abcnews.go.com).

 

I see all this outside of me, in the world, yet it resonates powerfully within me like the deep ring of a great bell. My moods have been dark of late, rising and falling. They feel full of portent. I want to cry for the world.

 

What, I have to ask, fills me with dread, outrage and at the same time, almost unbearable sadness? The archetype of mindless masses is upon us again. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silence

Recently, I watched an Irish movie called The Quiet Girl about a girl in a rather dysfunctional family who goes for a time to live with a kindly older couple.  In one scene, where, typically, she does not respond to the older man's question, he says, "You don't have to say anything. Always remember that. Many's the person missed the opportunity to say nothing, and lost much because of it."

I kept returning to that moment again and again, for his words spoke of the right to be silent, and the value of being silent, something I was often as a child criticised for. I have always longed to simply be, without feeling any need to satisfy someone else's desire for conversation, or the social expectations I put upon myself.

A solitary, generally quiet and unsocial child, I nevertheless eventually learned to speak up, speak out and become thoroughly socialised, for that is what the world and later, my family, expected of me. Becoming more outwardly verbal, however, disconnected me from the inner voices, the intuitions that arose to guide me. So many misjudgement, wrong decisions, so many errors that might have been avoided.

I am weary of that, and now in my later years, I am quiet again. It disturbs people sometimes, especially family, who expect me to help fight their battles, have strong opinions, to be amusing, clever or whatever else I used to be, but I am weary of being an extrovert.

The real me finds silence, withdrawal, introspection so much easier, so much less of a strain on my energies, more liberating. The more I breathe into each moment, sink into myself, the more spacious my inner world - the whole world, in fact - becomes for me. And in that spaciousness, my long-ignored intuitive self can be heard. And I listen. More and more, I listen to it, rather than to the ego chatter of shoulds and opinions, and as much as I love them, to the expectations of those around me.

Sometimes, I do go too far. It is a secret indulgence

Voyager 1 still alive!

(Image credit: NASA)

After some problems in Nov 2023, "NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is fully operational once more, with all four science instruments returning usable data to Earth" (by Stefanie Waldek at Space.com).

Launched in 1977, this plucky little machine has gone far beyond NASA's expectations. I was so excited when she entered deep space in 2013 (see my post at https://mythologos.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/our-place-among-the-stars.html), and now, she is in the constellation of Ophiucus, 24,357,977,715 kilometers from Earth, and still sending information. I am in awe!!