Some months ago, I posted this sketch on facebook with these words from Jung:
"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are" and "The most terrifying thing is to accept ourselves completely."
I was studying Jung at the time - again - and had thought I was about done with recognising certain troublesome aspects of my self-perception, especially in regard to truth and self-deception/illusion.
Going through my sketch books yesterday, however, I came to this, and realised that I am nowhere near 'done' with Self, nor will be until I have wrestled with Eros, Love - not what Marie Louise von Franz once described as "this Christian all-pardoning, sweetie-pie, strawberry-sauce love" but Love as Eros, the imperative, overpowering, aggressive force which Jung considered "might well be the first of cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself" ('Late thoughts' in Memories, Dreams and Reflections).
Those little figures and life forms in the drawing represent not Nature, as I had supposed, but teasing intimations of those fierce/tender, chthonic/divine forces of Eros that have been plaguing me.
How it will play out, I cannot tell. Paul Selig's guides speak a river into which one must step in order to distinguish the small-self's love from True Love, which is divine.
"The moment you say, 'I am truly willing to know love,' what love is not will make itself known. And the pain of this, in many cases, is shattering to the structure of personality who only thought love could be a certain thing. .....True love means you are realizing the action of love that expresses through you and you are no longer deciding that it is you who is the lover. You have become both the recipient of divine love and the expression of it." (Paul Selig,'Opening to Love', youtube).
Shattering, indeed. But I am here, wading into the river because I want to be borne by Love.
And here begins the really hard work of letting go of preconceptions, illusions and sentimental wishful thinking about Eros, Love, something I will write about when I am ready.
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