Tosia H Zraikat

Taken by Eros

Who is this Eros who demands my attention and pushes me to yield to his wild, sweet, terrible energy? Who has confused everything I thought I knew about myself and my capacity to become wholly myself?

If you do not consciously feel the force of Eros, consider yourself fortunate, for you can go about your usual way in relative peace. But if you have been suddenly, unexpectedly, overwhelmingly taken by this wild god, there is nothing for it but to enter the river and let yourself be carried.

For despite his popular image as a beautiful youth or as the little cherub, Cupid, the god Eros is no child. Though personal intimacy and sexuality are of vital importance, Eros is god of far more than these. Eros is the infinite terrible ecstatic power and mystery of Love in all its forms, without whose fierce arrows there could be no connection, no relationship, no urge to grow, no regeneration of life.

 In his Theogeny, the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod said this of Eros: 

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.” ( ll. 116-138)

 

 

“EROS was the primordial god (protogenos) of procreation who emerged self-formed at the dawn of creation. He was the driving force behind the generation of new life in the cosmos. He was also equivalent to Thesis (Creation) and Physis, (Nature).” (theoi.com).

Jung said, “Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so. … He belongs on one side to man’s primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he thrives only when spirit and instinct are in right harmony.” (Jung, Eros Theory).

and that "Eros …might well be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself."  (MDR)

"He [Jung] showed that individuation [becoming wholly oneself] is not possible without the differentiation of Eros" (ML v Franz, Feeling Function). How true!

"Generally we identify feeling with affect and emotion, but that is only inferior feeling. ….. Differentiated feeling, on the contrary, is to love that unique person for his or her uniqueness. It is difficult, for it presupposes that you are capable of seeing the uniqueness of the other person, of getting rid of all schematic psychological judgments. It is ultimately something irrational that has to do with one's own development."  (MLvF, The Way of the Heart).

I can tell you from experience that "getting rid of all... judgements" about Love - what it is, how it should be expressed, what we expect from it...etc. is damn hard work. It requires being totally honest with ourselves, and taking responsibility for ourselves, which most people are too lazy or apathetic to do.

"It is ... the incapacity to love which robs mankind of his possibilities. This is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido [his psychic energy] towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them." (Jung, 2016)*. 

With a long-repressed dominant feeling function, I confess that I am far from freeing myself from popular conceptions of Love as romance, being wanted, possession, obsession, and of 'spiritual' love as pure-hearted, unconditional, good. So it is, my hard task ahead.

*Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections

*Jung, “The Eros Theory,” CW 7, par. 32

*Marie-Louise von Franz,  The Way of the Heart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXQTDTcup04&t=73s).

*ML von Franz, 1986, 'C. G. Jung’s Rehabilitation of the Feeling Function in Our Civilization.'

*Jung, C. G. (2016). The Psychology of the Unconscious: a Study of the Transformation and Symbolisms of the Libido.

 

 

 

 

The Soul is an Artist

We glide like stars through dreams that we erect

touching with desire universes that our visions expand. 

We create as we go the world in which we breathe.

Our breath the wind of it, our hopes its stars, our depth, its seas

and even as the air leaves our mouths, the universe pours in.

 

Thoughtlessly we stroke visions from the inside out

twinkling in the dark like streams of galaxies.

Reality flows like water from our thoughts

and if we harbour fear and despair or if we dwell on love,

what else shall we find?

 

We are singers whose notes rise up on their own

to ride the air that loves them, 

and blend to form the bright blue sky.

How could earth sing so sweetly our grand chorales 

if love were not its voice?

 

Mountains of mind, oceans of soul,

and having boats to sail, we naively believe

that we sail the sea.

Like a tender hand, the sea of soul supports us

Like a lover, the holy breath embraces us

In the gentle arms of earth we are sustained,

we dreaming creatures whose very breath is love.

1987

Consciousness waking

The Mysterious Garden, Margaret Macdonald Macintosh

1

So you dare to dream

Not here, not for you

All that potential and where was I?

Out of sight      not seen       secretive     

Avoid       a   void 

Moats between you and me

I fly up from the castle and look down unseen

Don’t see, don’t hear, don’t care

Lead feet and shattered wings

I want to be the bird, also the tree

But the tree is water and the bird doesn’t really fly.

2

Absent, O Soul? That came as a surprise

I’m always here, the shadow at your feet

the ghost upon the wall

and every thought returns to you.

But them, I leave waiting for that cup of tea 

Wild horses properly corralled

break free

Birds drown, crying the Holy Name 

I watch the scattered sunlight on the ground

Willing them  to rise. They always do.

3

I climb through tangled branches, leaves, 

Pilgrim in the thorny wilderness. 

I watch from the side

bees dream around their nests

I guide the child past

Slow, alert, cautious 

I watch other watchers, 

Curved beaks, fierce eyes shimmering like opals in the leaves

Still but for their eager breath, waiting.

I am the child... I am the watcher that guides...

...the waiting birds...

I am the tree and the bees unaware.

I am consciousness waking

And there is no fear

 

Honouring the Wild Gods

Many of us are going through the painful, difficult processes of awakening to who and what we are, not the personas we put on to fit into society and play our various roles, but our authentic selves.

Those who choose to be conscious and live life instead of sleep-walking through it are also learning to recognise and respect mythic, archetypal forces that work in and through us. We learn by allowing our feelings to flow instead of hiding or repressing them. We learn by being genuine, by respecting our own sovereignty as well as the sovereignty of others. We learn by attending to our dreams that tell us what we do not know about ourselves, and treating them as important messages from our unconscious, and sometimes, we learn the hard way that when those archetypal forces are ignored, like offended gods they can turn against us. 

What gods have we offended? Mainly, I think, the wild gods, the forces of bodily instinct, our primal nature. Though we consider ourselves civilised, we are heirs to animal nature and thousands of generations who continue to affect us, and too often, fail to honour and give expression to those ancient influences.  We fail to consciously and respectfully acknowledge our animal nature, to express our animal instincts or behave as part of nature. Instead, we can be self-indulgent, hedonistic, grasping, utterly selfish, and mightily destructive of nature and life, making a thousand excuses for  this gross immaturity, calling it freedom, self-expression, genetic selfishness, liberation or progress. 

Nature has an order in accordance with which all other creatures except man exist and live. There is a natural dignity and grace in wild things that we humans have lost, and must find again before it is too late. Homo sapiens sapiens might once have lived in harmony with Nature within and without, but we have fallen low, and lost the natural grace that is the birthright of all living things.

By not honouring Dionysus, god of physicality, not consciously, intentionally giving life-affirming expression to our anger, our sexuality, authentic feelings, the soul’s urgings to transcendence, we are less than the animals in our unconsciousness. When we neglect Dionysus, we may be driven to wild excesses, to madness, to meaningless selfish sex, to rages and insane violence. We become destroyers, murderers of  ourselves, others, and our society.

 

Caravaggio's Bachus / Dionysus                                            a wilder Dionysus on a cheetah

 

We offend Pan as well, the great god of Nature to whom Socrates prayed. Though the Great God Pan was declared dead, he was simply being put aside by the later Greeks who had turned away from a nature-centred attitude towards greater worship of power, cities, man-made laws, exclusivity and conventionality. Pan still is, shaking his divine head at the savagery and utter selfishness of our attitude to nature, including our own true nature… The major religions got it wrong. Nature is not there for us. We are here to serve her, our Mother, without whom no one of us would live.

 

Pan and Psyche, Edward Burne-Jones                                  by Jacob Jordaens

 

We can still bring these gods back into our lives, not necessarily as gods but as forces. We can do it by tending respectfully to our bodies, our instincts, our intuitions and dreams, by living more harmoniously with all living things and nature. We can honour the great Earth Mother in any of her forms, as Gaia, as Hathor or Isis or as Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. Certainly, there is a great need in western culture for the energy of the feminine with its dark, lunar, emotional, generative-destructive, earthy, nature-oriented, receptive, introverted qualities. 

We can embrace the wild god Eros, the primal god of connectedness, the life force of generation, growth, expression, and also of transcendence. Eros is god of the life force, of libido, love, of genuine relationship between individuals, us and our society, us and nature.  … Give this god our respect, allow him to work in and through us, and we are in tune with the great thrust of life and love in the world.

Isn't love also destructive, painful, full of anguish? Yes, when we mistake love for possession, ownership, satisfying one's needs, expectation, as we mostly do. It is very difficult to love without all those preconceptions, but, like all things that hinder, inhibit and deceive us, they must eventually be released so that we can love another person simply for who he or she is. It is, after all, a fundamental truth in this life that in order to grow and evolve, we must experience many deaths .... the old - old habits, old ways of thinking, old expectations, our old needy selves - must be destroyed to make way for the new. No one ever said that Eros is easy. 

Allowing the gods into my life has meant allowing them to work in me, not for me but in me.

As I've written in other posts, Eros is hugely significant for me right now, and I have been learning to work with, and slowly integrate his great energy. After a lifetime of denying his influence, I have allowed myself to be swept up in that fierce, loving, sometimes dark energy, and try to express it - through art, writing, learning tango, talking about it with a trusted few.  

To honour Dionysus, I have begun drinking wine (first time in my life) and make a small libation each time. I dance despite a bad hip. More important, I allow my emotions and sexual urges to rise and fall and course through me without shame or guilt, allowing myself to sometimes be not-respectable, not correct, socially unacceptable, but always genuine.

I honour Pan when I sit in nature, accept a little wildness in my garden, touch another living thing with deep appreciation of its uniqueness and innate beauty. I speak to him sometimes.  

I have no altar to these gods, but however I can, I allow them to live in me, to express through me, a tiny cell in the immense body of the universe.

 

 

 

Sophia, Divinity in Matter

Pistis Sophia by Talon Abraxas

 

I have recently discovered that a mythic personality is working in me, through me. She is not a goddess, as Athena is; she is not classified as a goddess except in some Gnostic myths, though she can be partly recognised in mythic characters such as Isis and Innana, but she is Sophia, meaning wisdom.

May I emphasise with Gnostic scholar, Stephan Hoeller, that Sophia is a very specific character with specific qualities and mythology, not to be mixed up with other feminine or earth goddesses (in lecture series, The Wisdom of the Gnostics).

In the Gnostic text, Pistis Sophia, she sees the higher light, and seeks to achieve it, but being misled by the Self-Willed one, the demiurge, she is lured to a lower level, to the depths of chaos, where she is afflicted by forces who hate her for seeking to attain the higher level of light. In her suffering, she calls out to the light in which she has faith, and passes through twelve hymns or repentances. 

"For they have taken my light from me, and my power hath begun to cease in me and I am destitute of my light." 

Eventually, she is rescued and returns to her proper place as twin to Jesus, who is called the First Mystery, for he is indeed a mystery beyond the understanding of humankind in these times. 

However, due to her suffering and her redemption because of her faith in the light, Sophia creates and maintains a deep abiding connection with the lower levels, with the world of matter and the human race.  

"She never really completely leaves us"..."She becomes the mother of the world ... because this world has in a sense come forth from her power ... She is a sort of salvivic being" (Stephen Hoeller). 

In Aurora Consergens, a medieval text discussed by Marie-Louise von Franz in vol. 7 of her collected works, Sophia is the earthly counterpart of God, who manifests in her own existence the divination or sacrilization, you might say, of the body, of nature, of matter. That is, she represents the divine realising itself through flesh, through matter, the serpent rising.

In Gnostic texts, Sophia falls through her own weakness into the shadows of the world; in Aurora Consergens, though, she is more like embodied Spirit working through flesh, through matter, to bring its inherent divinity to the light. At one point of her redemption, she says yes to being raised to the Higher Light, but instructs, ‘do not remove my dirt,’ for she understands that the divine is also in the dirt, in matter, in the body and its desires and instincts, that there is no aspect of being in which the divine is not.

As I have said before, I have in the past year been taken, possessed, one might say, by Eros whose powerful energy has pushed me out of my tight resistances to feeling and close connection into an overwhelming emotionality and desire for love - not just love for one particular person but the most intense love for all life, for humankind, for nature, for my own soul. Overpowering, and somehow not grounded; so I had been feeling like a herd of wild horses running amuck. But I had a dream in which an older shaggy-haired female creature (I was an animal as well) was practically force-feeding me soup from a very roughly hewn bowl with a rough spoon. We were in the undergrowth of a forest. I took that as a message to connect more deeply with nature, with my natural instincts.

Something someone said to me, though, make me realise that I was also being told to connect with my femininity, and to do it consciously, earnestly through deeper connection with, and grounding in my body, in its animal instincts, its sensuality and Eros energy. And I recognised in that Sophia, not the pure chaste woman at the side of the Christ as depicted in the icons of Orthodox Christianity, but the Sophia of body, flesh, mud, grime, of sensation, of the instinctual, who raises God from the very cells and tissues of my body, from the ground beneath my feet and lifts it to where the divine in me can shine.

So. As Woman, I know what I am. I am free. and I finally know why that inner voice told me not too long ago that Everything Matters. Yes. It does. Matter contains everything, from the lowest to the most numinous. Matter matters.

 

 Sophia in Russian Orthodox Icon

Why I Love Jung

I could write a whole book telling why I love and am devoted to Carl Gustave Jung, and continue to dive into his writings for answers to my big questions and for guidance when I am lost .... which is so often. 

It is not only his theories and ideas that I love, though for me they stand as some of the most profound, original and magnificent ever spoken or written, and I am deeply grateful to have them often at my fingertips and spoken from his own mouth in videos. May those thousands of scribes, editors, publishers, film-makers, interviewers and their teams who have made such wealth available to us be forever blessed.

But I love also the man himself, as he is seen on those precious videos and depicted by those who met him, knew him, also loved him: Jung the friend, the peasant, the deep thinker, the healer, the eloquent writer, the jokester, lover, sinner, the sculptor, the artist, the complete human being ... Like the esteemed Edward Edinger, I see dear CJ as an epochal human being, one of those who come every thousand years or so to bring transformative wisdom for those who will listen. Not a saint or an angel but more, I think, because he was also so totally, genuinely, heartfully, imperfectly human. 

And like any devotee, I gather all I can of his wisdom, taking into my heart what little of it I can understand. I have dozens of books by or about Jung and his wisdom, and by his long-time devotee and colleague, Marie-Louise von Franz, who also loved him. I watch films of their interviews. I read writings and watch videos of others who knew them.

(Jung and the young ML von Franz. I cannot find the source of this image)

Recently, I began reading von Franz's book, Jung, His Myth in Our Time, and have been making my slow appreciative way through it, a richly detailed, earnest summary of Jung's work that just rounds it out for me even more. 

I love her too, Marie-Louise von Franz, who once said that she knew on their first meeting when she was eighteen years old and he in his fifties that she would never meet another of his stature. How brave she was, that intellectual young woman, to surrender to the creative Eros that drew her into the circle of Jung. I suspect that Jupiter, lord of higher truth and meaning and wise Sophia who touches God through the body and the mud of earth were also in the mix.

Others have claimed to know Jung as he is not usually known. In his prodigious Catalfaque, Peter Kingsley, scholar of ancient philosophy, Mystery and Magic, on which he has written several books, writes that Jung has not been recognised for the  shaman, the poet, mystic and prophet that he was. But though CJ shied away from such descriptions, he was recognised as such by Marie-Louise von Franz, Laurens van der Post, Henri Corbin, Karl Kerenyi and others who knew him. He was instantly recognised as such by readers in our times, not all, but by people like me who knew from the very first reading of his work that they were entering into a wider, deeper, more magical, mythopoeic world than was usually presented. 

In Jung, his Myth in Our Time, p. 62, the erudite von Franz whose dominant thinking function chastened what was so clearly her immense admiration and love for this man, writes:

I fell in love with Jung from the first book I read, his Memories, Dreams and Reflections, which I read sometimes weeping with joy at having found someone who knew, understood and valued the reality I had sometimes inhabited, who hugely expanded it, enriched it, sacralised it, and even more, could explain it. Here I am over forty years later, still picking up gems, still finding treasures of deep insight, still caught up by the Eros energy, Sophia's cthonic, profoundly feminine divinity in Jung's vision of the human psyche and the world. 

“Eros is a mighty daemon”

(C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology)

(Marie-Louise Von Franz, Barbara Hannah, C.G. Jung)

 

Must the Animus always be Male?

Last year, I think it was, I dreamed I was on a ship and a strange-looking woman with orange wildly flyaway hair and the protuberant eyebrows one often sees in old men was helping me dress for dinner.

Later in that dream, she was going downstairs hugging a man in a black jacket (I never saw his face, but she turned to me with a very mischeivous smile), and I got the impression that they were interconnected, that he and she were one person. God knows why, but I thought of the goddess Athena who was never so outlandish or playful, as far as I know. 

In my youth I was strongly drawn to Athena who represented for me the clear thinking, practical, creative aspects of woman. I came to see her as a level-headed aspect of men’s anima that advises and guides a man who is open to her influence, a guide that keeps Odysseus from becoming yet another egoistic, war-loving, glory-seeking hero, that appreciates his loving relationships with his wife and son, his love of home, and of wisdom.

Yet I wonder whether this particular goddess could also represent a positive aspect of a woman’s inner masculine energy, her animus, my animus, one that could ameliorate or balance the negative animus that has exerted such a big influence over me.

She is for me, after all, a mix of masculine and feminine, born jumping fully armed out of Zeus’ head, child of the Alpha male deity with logos, creativity, ingenuity, rationality, detachment, toughness, and also of mother Metis, goddess of wisdom, creator of crafts, with feminine qualities. Can  a being with both male and female qualities serve as the animus in a woman's psyche, I wonder?  Must the animus always be male?

Early in life, I came to devalue femininity - its softness, loving, desiring intimate connection and deep feeling aspects - in favour of male qualities that I strove to develop. Girl, woman, lover, mother, I was possessed by a negative animus that told me to be highly suspicious and distrustful of Eros in all its forms, ashamed of my deep feelings, embarrassed by my hidden unexpressed longing for connectedness and intimacy, and see worth only in my intellect and intellectual acheivements. It has taken years of inner work to be able to finally recognise the necessity of Eros and to surrender to its energies.

But now, the negative animus is making itself felt again as a strong, judgmental resistance to the Eros energy that I have finally embraced and am working with. This negative animus speaks as an inner critic, a ‘voice of reason,’ sarcastic, derisive, fear-promoting, blaming, and some days, I find it very hard to ignore.

Marie-Louise von Franz in The Way of the Dream has been helping me to see its action on me more clearly “The negative animus mainly manifests as an opinionated resistance against having feelings of love,” she says and “The worst about it is that she experiences it as if she thinks it herself…. It thinks in her.”

So. That criticism is not my inner wisdom talking, as I had once thought, because my inner wisdom is telling me in all ways to embrace Eros, whatever it brings - positive and negative. It is the archetype thinking itself in me: I do not have to accept what it says. 

Now what would Athena say?

Wholeness

For Carl Jung, the aim of psychotherapy and individuation was not perfection but wholeness, a state of psychic integration based on psychological awareness, self-knowledge, and Self-acceptance. 

 

 

Too often, though, people speak of wholeness, of oneness as something easily achieved through practices like lighting candles, burning incense, yoga, retreats, and 'spiritual' language. While probably beneficial in themselves, these are simply trappings of inner work yet to be done, work that challenges our misconceptions about ourselves and reality.

 

Achieving wholeness is not easy... It is the work of a lifetime ... of lifetimes.  It requires courage, humility, and patience.

 

“... the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is a longissima via, not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labryrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors.” C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

 

 

 

 

 

Projection: Is that too, me?

Projection. An automatic process whereby contents of one’s own unconscious are perceived to be in others. (Jungian analyst, Frith Luton @ frithluton.com)

One of the tasks of consciousness is to learn what is 'I' and what is not. For the personality, that means distinguishing what is Me, and what is not Me. It is nowhere as simple or as easy as it sounds, because of a natural psychological mechanism called Projection. On the level of personality - small self - we often project much of the worst - and of the very best - of us in others. "What a liar man that is!" "She is so disagreeable!" "How creative he is!" "I wish I were as desirable as that woman!"

 

Negative projections blind us to shadow aspects of our own personalities that need to be recognised, and for which we need to take responsibility. In so doing, they hinder our psychological maturation, trouble our relationships with others, and foster misconceptions and prejudices that prevent us from recognising and appreciating the true nature, qualities and potentialities of the person, race or group onto which we have projected.

 

Positive projections can hold us in destructive patterns of self criticism, helplessness and unworthiness, keeping us ignorant of our qualities. They also hinder us from seeing the person on whom we have projected as who she really is, which means that we do not genuinely relate to them.  Until we recognise and claim back our positive projections, we remain ignorant of totally acceptable, desirable or even exceptional qualities, and our unexpressed, undeveloped potential, so that we fail to grow into the person we could be.

“Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naïvely suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. . . . All the contents of our unconscious are constantly being projected into our surroundings, and it is only by recognizing certain properties of the objects as projections or imagos that we are able to distinguish them from the real properties of the objects. . . .Unless we are possessed of an unusual degree of self-awareness we shall never see through our projections but must always succumb to them, because the mind in its natural state presupposes the existence of such projections. It is the natural and given thing for unconscious contents to be projected.”

Carl Jung, "General Aspects of Psychology," par. 507.

“ Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.” ( Carl Jung, Archaic Man). 

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, as veils are dropping and exposing to me so much that I had thought was real, but is not. My ego is taking quite a beating, and it is not pleasant, though necessary.

"The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do," said Jung, "is to withdraw the projection of our own shadow onto others.” 

It feels a lot like finding fine silken threads in the mud, and one by one, drawing them out. No Aschenputtel (Cinderella) trying to pick lentils or peas from out of the ashes ever had to work so hard. 

Where are my birds?

Multidimensional Personality

As a uni student many years ago studying world history, cultural anthropology, geography and psychology, I was suddenly struck by the realisation that everything - everything - is interconnected and affects everything else. The flutter of a butterfly's wing might not seem to cause a hurricane but in the greater scheme of things, nothing in this world - not culture, not history or human thought - remains untouched by the reflected light of a tiny jewel on Indira's universal web.

 

(image from radiant child yoga)

 

That insight changed my view of the world. The world of separate nations, cultures and histories that I had lived in before simply ceased to be.

 

This week, I was overwhelmed by another aspect of this insight, this time regarding human psychology. In response to a question about Jung's approach, a psychotherapist friend wrote "it might be helpful to add something about Organismic Theory. It was a view developed in Biology that emphasized the holistic-developmental nature (as opposed to the reductive-deductive approach) of all living organisms."

 

That was it! I felt it. Something had hit home... so I did a little investigation.

 

Organismic theory is described by the APA* as "an approach to psychology that emphasizes the total organism, rejecting distinctions between mind and body. It embraces [an] ... approach that takes account of the interaction between the organism and its environment." *(American Psychological Association).

 

How obvious! yet until then, I had not really understood it, not in my bones, not viscerally. Now I did. I felt it in every cell of my body, which rang like a bell at the knowing that I am not a discrete object but an ever-evolving confluence of everything I have ever experienced, consciously and unconsciously: the texture of a wall, scent of a patch of earth, family, society, food, air I have breathed, every person to person interaction, mistakes, misunderstandings, regrets, hopes, belly laughs, people passed on the street .... Everything is connected, and I- all of what I am, could be or will be - am one tiny but valuable part of One Infinite Consciousness.

 

It is not enough to know it intellectually, all this talk about holism and oneness. I had to feel it in the cells of my body, in my gut, in my deepest heart to Know it.