Posted at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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?
Posted at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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 )
Posted at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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
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.
Posted at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
Posted at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
"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?
Posted at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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
Posted at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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!!
Posted at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)