Symbolism: Wolf

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

The vulgarity of eating

Symbolism: Flying

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

The vulgarity of eating

Symbolism: Earth

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

The vulgarity of eating

Symbolism: Body

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

Symbolism: Eyebrows
The vulgarity of eating

Symbolism: Food/eating

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

The vulgarity of eating

Reference: The vulgarity of eating

Because wolves are the personification of hunger – one is hungry as a wolf. So when he protects the corpse from the wolves, he [Nietzsche] is protecting it from being eaten by the appetite in himself which he tries to forget. You will remember he says of his hunger before, “And all day it hath failed to come: where hath it been?” This means that he did not realize his hunger for his body; he forgot his body altogether. Therefore, the body died; he overcame it. But the hunger ought to convince him that he should eat his body; then he would return to his humanity and become an ordinary human being. If you want to be an extraordinary human being, don’t eat: people who eat become vulgar. Therefore, many people make a point of not eating before others.

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Sipphas [followers of a religious sect] believe that it is indecent to feed before each other, so they turn their backs when they eat, or find a place where nobody sees them. To them it is just as indecent as the opposite functions of the body. Eating before others is understood by many people as a sort of taboo; there is mana in it which can easily turn into its own opposite. And here Zarathustra protects his body against the wolves because he tries to make sure that his sanctity or his superiority shall not become injured through the vulgarity of eating, which would put him down to the level of common humanity. To fill himself with physical matter would make him heavy and he could not dance any longer. He could not fly, he would be fettered to the earth. Therefore, in ascetic forms of religion people refrain from eating in order to attain spirituality; in a certain season of the year, or on certain day of the week, they make themselves light by not filling the stomach. They assume that in eating they consume all the dirt of the earth and are fettered by the earth by the heaviness of the belly. So eating is a sort of symbolism…

- C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra



Symbols:
Food/eating
Body
Earth
Flying
Wolf

See also:
Anorexia Mirabilis

Symbolism: Diagonal lines

Diagonal lines give a feeling of dynamism, as well as a lack of balance. By comparison, vertical lines are associated with righteousness and moral rectitude; they are “upright.” From the post on the symbolism of the plumb line, which measures the vertical line:

Plumb-lines are reliable and objective, and offer the user a true vertical reference. They’re also a measure of an “upright” life, and helps us judge our actions based on objective standards.

"Isaiah 28:16-17: In verse 17, the plumb-line is defined as justice and righteousness. We have seen that already in our word “upright,” a synonym of “vertical.” What is upright is righteous, and God will judge according to that standard. He will set us up so that we can see—and He can see—how close we are adhering to godly judgment and right doing. He and we will see how much we are living by the standard.

"Amos 7:7-9: In construction, the plumb-line tests whether what was erected is perpendicular to the square, that is, if it is straight up and down, if it is upright. It provides a standard against which one can measure what he has built. Metaphorically, when God draws near with the plumb-line, He is looking for those people who are living and abiding in His grace and His law. The Israelites' moral standards had degenerated, so their religious profession was not verified by the right kind of works. They were not upright; they failed the test."

John W. Ritenbaugh, “Prepare to Meet Your God!”

"The 'Plumb' admonishes us to walk uprightly in our several stations before God and man, squaring our actions by the Square of Virtue, ever remembering that we are traveling upon the Level of Time, toward 'that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.'  The divine requirement for uprightness and rectitude in all walks of life."

Symbolism: Plumb-bob


Diagonal lines also suggest motion:

Diagonal lines are unbalanced. They are filled with restless and uncontrolled energy. They can appear to be either rising or falling and convey action and motion. Their kinetic energy and apparent movement create tension and excitement. Diagonal lines are more dramatic than either horizontal or vertical lines.

Diagonal lines can also appear solid and unmoving if they are holding something up or at rest against a vertical line or plane.

Compared with vertical lines:

Vertical lines are perpendicular to the horizon. They are filled with potential energy that could be released if they were to fall over. Vertical lines are strong and rigid. They can suggest stability, especially when thicker. Vertical lines accentuate height and convey a lack of movement, which is usually seen as horizontal.

They stretch from the earth to the heavens and are often connected with religious feelings. Their tallness and formality may give the impression of dignity.

The Meaning of Lines: Developing A Visual Grammar (Vanseo Design)

The diagonal line is one of my favorites. Unlike the steady vertical or placid horizontal, it’s the line of dynamic energy and motion. It's the relationship of the diagonal line to the frame edges of the image that gives it energy. Something is going up, or coming down. It’s a rocket shot into the air and the fall of a roller coaster.

A diagonal line tends to create triangular shapes as it interacts with the frame, thereby creating the sensation of  “three’s.” The number 3 is psychologically powerful, sometimes even mystical. Think of parents and child, the love triangle, the Pyramids, the Holy Trinity. Think of the Three Stooges and the Three Little Pigs.

Diagonals are most interesting when they interact with horizontal lines and an opposing diagonal, which creates complex sets of triangles that may converge on an element in the image, lead the eye in different directions, or create an intricate mosaic and constellation of facets, like crystals. Long diagonals may create big triangles that act as arrows that lead the eye to the corners of the image, which may or may not be a good thing.

Although some people think that strong diagonal lines can be too obvious and a bit contrived, they do catch the eye and drive home a point. More subtle diagonals created by delicate lines, background patterns, or psychological connections among elements (like a person’s line of sight), can lend a subliminal feeling of energy to the image.

The Diagonal Line (True Center Publishing)

Diagonal lines are lines of movement; compared to vertical or horizontal lines, they are dynamic, either going up or sliding down. They also suggest a certain moral flexibility, compared to the “upright” vertical line, or the lackadaisical horizontal line.


(Image from True Center Publishing)

Symbolism: Eyebrows

Eyebrows seem to express one's personality - sharp, angular eyebrows, or softly rounded ones; high eyebrows or low - when one thinks of a face, their eyebrows tell a story about that person's character.

In Chinese physiognomy eyebrows are one way to determine a person's temperament[1]:

• People with long eyebrows are righteous, helpful, and friendly. those with short eyebrows are restrained and have few friends.
• Thick (as in width) eyebrows are masculine, active, impulsive, and focused on the big picture. Narrow eyebrows are feminine, passive, indecisive, and detail oriented.
• Dense eyebrows are sweet-tempered and active, although if overly bushy they're cunning and self-centered. Sparse eyebrows are cool and unemotional.
• High eyebrows are sweet-tempered and family oriented. Low eyebrows are realistic and consider immediate rather than long term interests.

From an excerpt of Lauren Valenti's article "What Your Eyebrows Say About You,":

1. Curved: "A creative person." 2. Straight: "A confident and assertive person — if a woman has straight brows she can be quite masculine." 3. Angled: "Sensitive and private, but women with apex eyebrows can also be stubborn." 

1. Bushy: "Masculinity and an excess of male hormones in a woman's body. If the hair is shiny, it reflects an individual with high sexual energy." 2. Thin: "A feminine, gentle personality."

1. High: "If they are too high, they are dreamers." 2. Low: "They look too carefully at everything and often don't have time for others."

"What Your Eyebrows Say About You," Lauren Valenti (Marie Claire, November 2014)


In style identity (David Kibbe's system is popular but there are many), examining one's features tells us what fashion style helps us look our best. Although our actual personality may be different, each style identity is definitely associated with a certain kind of temperament. The styles are:

Dramatic: These people appear to be intense and theatrical

Grace Jones

Natural: Laid back and friendly


Jennifer Anniston

Gamine: Playful and boyish


Audrey Hepburn

Classic: Proper and reserved


Zhang Ziyi

Ingenue: Sweet and girlish

Elle Fanning


Romantic: Sexy and confident


Christina Hendricks

Ethereal: Spiritual and otherwordly


Cate Blanchett

(From "Style Identities," (Truth is Beauty))

Of course, while one's style identity can be different from one's actual personality, it definitely does give a certain impression to others. Someone who's dramatic will be judged to be unconventional and perhaps over-the-top, while an ingénue will probably be assumed to be sweet and adorable (even if these things aren't true). Eyebrows are an important part of this perceived personality typing.

The only thing about eyebrows in mythology or religion that I could find was the proscription against plucking eyebrows in Islam:

Hair which we are forbidden to remove, which includes the eyebrows. The action of removing the hair of the eyebrows is called al-namas. It is also forbidden to remove the hair of the beard.

The evidence for that is the hadeeth of ‘Abd-Allaah ibn Mas’ood (may Allaah be pleased with him) who said: I heard the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) say: “Allaah has cursed the woman who does tattoos and the one who has them done, the woman who plucks eyebrows (al-naamisah) and the one who has it done (al-mutanammisah), and the one who files her teeth for the purpose of beauty, altering the creation of Allaah.”

(Narrated by al-Bukhaari, 5931; Muslim, 2125)

- Islam Question and Answer

Here eyebrows, or altering them, is seen as a way to heighten a woman's sexual appeal. This seems to go along with the Muslim practice of women covering themselves. These are both seen as ways for a woman to preserve her modesty.[2]

There's another element to the proscription; it can also be interpreted as encouraging people to be natural, be oneself, the self that God gave you. It is rejecting what society tells you. Others may say that something about you is a flaw, but that thing comes from the Self and is, therefore, a part of the authentic you. To try to change that is an offense against the Self, and your truth. Look at Cara Delevigne, or how important Frida Kahlo's unusual eyebrows were to her art, and her self-expression. Painting herself with her thick, unconventional eyebrows was a statement to the world, that she'd rather be herself than fit society's idea of what was beautiful... and that arguably made her even more beautiful.

Some people are beautiful in appearance and some are not; that’s just how it is and the entire matter is entirely in the hand of Allaah. Therefore, it is essential that you be patient and seek reward with Allaah, and not transgress His sacred limits for the sake of your looks. Just think….even if the whole world were to tell you that you look beautiful with your eyebrows shaped, would it even be worth a dot or an atom, if in Allaah’s eyes you were ugly? And if the whole world were to tell you that you are ugly, would it really matter as long as you were beautiful in front of Allaah????

- "Plucking Eyebrows: A topic we pretend does not exist," by Asma bint Shameem


So, eyebrows reveal (or seem to reveal) one's temperament and personality. In addition, highly groomed eyebrows are associated with sexuality, while natural ones are modest, further adding to the association of eyebrows with personality. What a person does with their eyebrows is a reflection of how they present themselves; do they "shape" their eyebrows/personality to fit societal values? Or do they present themselves in a natural, authentic way?

1. Meanings of Eyebrows in Physiognomy
2. "What is the Hijab and Why do Women Wear it?," (Arabs In America)



Outside link:
Face the Truth - What Can You Tell Just by Looking at Someone?
Narcissists have thicker, denser, more distinct eyebrows, according to a new study
Whom do we fear or trust? Faces instantly guide us, scientists say

Symbolism: Aging

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]




Posts:
Jungian Views on Aging

Quote: The Supreme Meaning of Death

The spiritual climax is reached at the moment when life ends. Human life, therefore, is the vehicle of the highest perfection it is possible to attain; it alone generates the karma that makes it possible for the dead man to abide in the perpetual light of the Voidness without clinging to any object, and thus to rest on the hub of the wheel of rebirth, freed from all illusion of genesis and decay.

Life in the Bardo brings no eternal rewards or punishments, but merely a descent into a new life which shall bear the individual nearer to his final goal.

But this eschatological goal is what he himself brings to birth as the last and highest fruit of the labors and aspirations of earth

~Carl Jung; Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead; Psychology and Religion, Pages 524-525

The Supreme Meaning of Death ~Carl Jung

Article: Jungian Views on Aging

Hermaphrodite with Egg

[Image from The Alchemy Website]

“For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. Only as a secondary consideration does he hope that some benefit may accrue to himself from the transformed substance as the panacea, the medicina catholica, just as it may to the imperfect bodies, the base or 'sick' metals, etc. His attention is not directed to his own salvation through God's grace, but to the liberation of God from the darkness of matter.”

― C.G. Jung


This is an exploration on the importance of aging - it's vital place as the time during which we find meaning and develop our connection to the Self - by Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett. I believe that dreams tell us things that are true, and this dream is telling us something true about a time of our lives that is totally denigrated and, quite honestly, reviled. It's so important that this significant period of our lives be rescued from the garbage heap that we as a society have tossed it on.

Also, school has started once again so I can't promise that there will always be regular updates to the blog, but I'm going to try to post something every Friday.


The dream occurs when the dreamer is in her early 60’s:

A Voice informs me that it is now going to teach me about the process of aging. An illustration appears before my eyes. It represents the rejuvenated Godhead. Underneath it, live, is the head of a very old man. A connecting line is drawn from the old man’s head to the divinity. The illustration is black on white, a sketch. The illustration is a sketch but the head is alive. There is an outer elongated square and an inner circle. At the bottom of the inner circle is a crescent. Out of the crescent arises two heads on long necks that look almost identical. I know they share the same body, which is not shown. The Voice explains that this is an abstract of the rejuvenated Godhead. The right head represents the male aspect and the left the female aspect. The two heads are in absolute harmony with each other. There is something esoteric about them. They look like spirits, somewhat ethereal. I perceive their facial expressions as aristocratic, blithe, somewhat curious, unemotional. They do not look authoritative but the Voice is. The top of their heads is shaped like an indented crown with three prongs that I can see on each head. The old man looks quite ordinary and sort of earthy. The Voice explains that in our society we still do not understand the process of aging. The purpose of our maturation is to enable the Godhead to rejuvenate, if we could only understand that. When we are born God is old; when we grow old, God becomes young; and when we die, God experiences rebirth. And this goes on and on, but not in the sense that the Godhead is feeding on us, but the whole thing is rather a natural process which is not yet too well understood. It is absolutely essential that, particularly in old age, we do not lose or have lost our connectedness with the Godhead for otherwise we not only deprive God of our share in His rejuvenation, but may actually disturb the cosmic ecology which, in turn, affects us. Ideally, so the voice says, we gain wisdom as we grow older, but only few people do. I understand wisdom to be a conglomeration of life experiences, a priori and acquired knowledge, and the awareness and acceptance of one’s inner child. To accumulate knowledge per se is not all that important; what is important is that we are connected with the Godhead or the Divine, and let it live within us, even though it is also outside of us. Belief in a cosmic Supreme Being or Power constellates the inner child and thus furthers the divine rejuvenation process. If we ignore the divine element, it sinks into itself and ceases to be conscious of itself. As we grow older we often lose the child, and as we lose the child we are apt to simultaneously sever our ties to the divine. There was also some indication that the birth and the death process are actually the same except that as little children we seem to be contained in the Divine element, whilst in old age we are apparently expected to be a container for the Divine element.

It’s clear that as we get older there are a series of different demands that society makes on us, our bodies alter, and constant adaptation is required. Interpersonal relationships change their quality; our career interests and our avocational interests all change. The problem is how do we move out of mid-life into old age? How do we accomplish that transition?

As you go through different stages of the life cycle there are new circumstances in each stage. And development always requires two things: it always requires that you relinquish something, that you let go of something; and that you learn something new. If you think of it, the baby has to let go of the bottle and the diaper, has to relinquish that, and learn all the new tasks, and that is true with every stage and the transition into old age is no different. You have to relinquish certain things, and you have to learn certain things.

In the last 20 years there’s been a considerable increase in vigor and longevity in people over 65. It used to be thought that if you plotted vigor against age that it was just a straight line down but this vigor curve isn’t a straight line down, it’s more rectangular. Between 65 and 85 vigor is well preserved, and declines only very slowly, and then it tends to decline rather rapidly after the age of 85. It’s that 20 year period, which is as long as childhood and adolescence, that’s very important.

It’s not a period of remorseless decline; certain functions decline, many functions do not decline, and especially in the psychological realm and the spiritual realm continuous growth occurs, and this growth and development makes very exacting demands on the personality. It’s not easy to do it properly.

Because we don’t know very much about the developmental psychology of late life what clinicians do in particular is they take criteria that are good for mid-life and they apply them to old people in terms of normality. That would be equivalent to judging middle aged person as if he or she was an adolescent. The developmental necessities are not the same, and it might be fine for a 50 year old to be going into work every day and struggling still but for an 85 year old to be going to work for 8 hours a day may mean something quite different, it might in fact mean that he or she is quite neurotic. So they tend to use norms that are not relevant to the age, and they don’t know how to guide people into age appropriate behavior.

Now, because the culture over values youth and under values age the unconscious assumption is that what you’ve got to do to be good in old age is constantly behave like a young person, so you have lots of television ads telling you about old skin and young skin, but of course age spots are not on the skin, they’re in the psyche. If you think that you constantly have to behave like a young person, what happens is you get developmental arrest. You get stuck constantly trying to behave like a young person and you avoid what I’m going to talk about, which are the developmental tasks of late life.

What happens to you in old age is partly a function of what happened to you in youth and middle age. If you’ve always been character disordered and peculiar, you’ll likely to be character disordered and peculiar in late life. People say that if you want to be a nice little old lady you have to start when you’re sixteen. I want to go through the developmental tasks of late life but I want you to understand that they represent ideal goals. It’s like the idea of individuation; nobody can quite do it, but it’s something that one can think about as an ideal goal. It’s impossible virtually to attain all of these.

Early in life – because of the demands of work and marriage and school and so on – only a part of our personality is able to come into the world but at some point the rest of the personality presses for recognition, and any unused talent that we haven’t used so far can be started to be developed. The development of unused potential is one of the main developmental tasks. That’s why having as broad as possible a cultural and educational base in young life is very important. The best thing you can do to help somebody into old age is to give them a reasonable childhood and as broad an education as possible, because then later on in life they can start to pick up threads that they may have started but had to drop earlier in life.

This is not only important in terms of things like playing the piano, but also things like unused psychological functions. This is referred to in Jung as the development of the inferior function. I’m sure most people here are familiar with typology so I won’t go into details but people who’ve been good at being sensitive to people’s feelings - good at relationships, good with children, feeling tasks - might find it important to start being involved in a discipline that requires abstract thought, rigorous thought. People who’ve always been very good at abstract thought and logical thought might start to work more on interpersonal relationships, and their neglected feeling side. Down to earth, here and now, practical people (sensation types) might take an interest in things like mythology and religion that are more dependent on intuition. And intuitives, who’ve always been interested in ideas and possibility and living in the clouds, might benefit from taking up something like gardening or photography or something which is much more hands-on and down to earth.

The second important task is simply the development of meaning; to look back on one’s life and say “What does it mean?” When you think about your life there are lots of thematic contents that seem to recur because we have complexes, we have neuroses, and because we have neuroses we keep doing the same thing again and again. So we have patterns in our life. When we look back and we think about all our suffering and our relationships and sacrifices and struggles we can get, first of all, a sense of identity by looking at them all. But then, by looking at the kind of patterns that we’ve weaved, in the sense of life as a tapestry, we can start to understand a little bit more about the meaning of our life. Then we can start to understand what is the relationship between what’s happened to me in the world and what I’ve done, and what I’m like on the inside, and what’s the inner/outer connection. How has what’s happened to me on the outside been the same as what’s happened to me on the inside? This is called by Gerhard Adler the synthesis of nature and consciousness; consciousness finally discovers what this particular nature was all about.

Of course, psychologically sophisticated people in the Jungian community will start to see mythic themes in their own lives, having been repeated, and then one is able to locate one’s life against the wider cultural background. But this process, which is called Reminiscence Therapy, is not an easy process. It’s very difficult. Initially, when you try and do this with people the memories are very disjointed, or they’re very meaningless, and the discovery of a sense of process and the discovery of connections between the events might be very difficult. Often all the events seem isolated and meaningless, especially if there’s a great deal of bitterness in the person’s life. A great deal of guilt and grief can get stirred up, and, when they start to look back and they see the discrepancy between promise and achievement was enormous, they may feel actually worse. So this is not a process to be undergone lightly. It can, in fact, make people worse and it can lead to despair, but when it’s successful then it leads to accepting of life without excessive regret. The capacity to let go of goals that cannot be achieved, and the refocusing of energy on what is attainable and on further development, as in this dream.

Jung said that things don’t happen for no reason in nature; there wouldn’t be such a thing as longevity unless it had a meaning for the species. He said the fruits of biological life are children, but the fruit of psychological life, especially in late life, is meaning. What old people have to do is make meaning and make culture, make new ideas, not compete with the young. They have a different responsibility, and their fecundity is a spiritual fecundity and the production of new meaning, not competing with young people. It’s very important because our culture the first part of life requires competitiveness and assertiveness; making family, making social status, productivity, and so on. But there are huge pressures towards conformity so it’s very difficult in late life to say “Well, I’ve done all that now. I’m going to stop doing that and I’m going to sit down and see what it all means.” Because the tendency is not to encourage introspective values, and the cultivation of inner life, and contemplation and so on. These things are not valued in the culture and it’s hard to go against the tide of the culture. If we want that to happen we have to make that happen; that would be one example of making culture.

Another thing is to develop wisdom. The Psalmist says “so teach us to number our days that we may get us a heart of wisdom.” In other words, it takes a long time to get wise, to get smart. Jung also wrote that the natural end of life is not senility, it’s wisdom. Now, it’s very hard to define wisdom. He said it’s becoming who you are, aligning your conscious life with the stream of inner images so that the inner and the outer, and your conscious synthesis of the two, become one person. It just means developing the wholeness of the personality and becoming who you are, really. He also points out that the antidote for suffering is wisdom, that bitterness and wisdom tend to exclude each other. So the more wise you are the less you’ll be bitter and the less you’ll suffer.

Other writers have written differently on wisdom; [Heinz] Kohut has written about wisdom being the acceptance of your limits, renouncing unmodified narcissism. [Erik] Erickson, of course, wrote that wisdom is the detached yet active concern with life itself in the face of death. His idea is that you want to convey to oncoming generations your sense of life’s integrity and fullness and meaningfulness. In spite of it being in the face of death, it’s still worth the while. You have to convey that idea to oncoming generations, that’s his idea of integrity, instead of despairing and saying it’s all not been worthwhile.

The best definition actually, which at first I thought was the most naive definition, is the definition of Meister Eckhart, but it’s the hardest of all to achieve. His definition is that wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it. I find that’s probably the most profound definition but the hardest, because usually what you have to do next is some crap that you don’t want to have to do. So that’s very hard to get to. But if you do get to it, then it has a certain meaning that we’ll perhaps come to.

The next point is the development of spiritual values. Here I don’t mean adherence to some kind of traditional religious creed or belief in dogma or anything like that. I’m not excluding that but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the search for meaning and values, and an attempt to understand the depth of experience, and to transcend preoccupation with the personal and the local. That’s very important. If the traditional religion that you grew up in or acquired does this for you then that’s fine, but if those myths don’t have the original energy that they had then you still have to confront the meaning of life and death and good and evil and suffering and loss. How do you do that? That is the pursuit of spiritual meaning, of the spiritual life. So whatever your concept of divinity is some kind of rapprochement, however it manifests in your life, is very important. In Jungian terms we call this contact with the Self. A relationship with the Self in late life is absolutely imperative; if this doesn’t happen old people become bitter and full of self-pity. The dream is about how this is done, one way that this is done.

In a paper written last year by a man called Cole who said that there is a hidden catch in criticizing prejudices about old age. If you emphasize a healthy old age and you say “Well, lots of old people are healthy, and that’s wonderful,” you perpetuate an unconscious dualistic attitude. What you imply is that healthy old age is good, and sick old age is bad. It’s very dualistic, and he says: How do we imbue sickness and death and decay and those ill old people with moral and spiritual significance? How can we say old people who are demented and ill and decrepit are still valuable, and still meaningful, not just say that only the well old people are what we want. We don’t want to have a dualistic attitude. So, that’s what I think this dream is really all about.

There are no social provisions to help you into this transition. There’s a lot of turmoil, a lot of ambiguity, and you don’t know how to do it. We know from pre-technological cultures the importance of initiation into new parts of the life cycle, and the rites of passage that they perform are to help people move across the threshold. They seem very primitive but the rites of passage perform very profound social and psychological functions. They are not a coincidence. We don’t have anything like that to take us into old age. We also don’t have anything like it to take us into adolescence very often, or any other part of the life cycle. But the point about these ceremonies is to protect the emotional health of the individual, and of the society to make sure that people keep developing. What you do is you integrate the biological necessity, the social necessity, and the psychological necessity to keep moving through the life cycle. That’s what these rites of passage are for in primitive cultures. We don’t have them and that’s why people get screwed up at developmental epochs, like adolescence, and moving into old age, and so on.

In our culture we don’t have anything like that to help us get into old age. In her early sixties our dreamer has this dream, and I’m going to suggest that this is an example of what Henderson calls in his book on initiation “autoinitiation,” where the Self motivates from within. The Self knows, perhaps, that there’s some difficulty about moving into this threshold period, and if nothing happens she may regressively stay psychologically into mid-life because of her anxiety about the future. So this image from the Self comes up to initiate her. It’s a symbolic impetus, if she takes it seriously. In that way she can reconcile her own consciousness with what Campbell calls “universal will.”

I think this dream is a miniature initiation ceremony. It represents the re-uniting of a divine unity, and the re-establishment of a state of totality; it reflects the state of affairs prior to the creation of the individual, when there was no differentiation, and this state, prior to the creation of the individual, is now regained but this time with the addition of consciousness. She’s brought into relationship with an image of divine unity, which is one of the things that initiation does. It reveals the sacred to you. While she’s related to the sacred she can transcend the personal, and, at the same time she can emphasize her individuality.

It puts her existence in relation to the eternal, it puts the death idea into a new perspective. A psychological transformation is often imagined in dreams as death and rebirth imagery. It illustrates a point of [Mircea] Eliade, that initiation always gives death a positive value. His phrase is that “death prepares for new birth into a mode of being not subject to time.” So this emphasizes to her the transitory nature of chronological time, but images for her an ongoing relationship to sacred time, and to eternity.

It initially reminded me of a statement in the Gospel of Thomas: for every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven. Now, this was not intended as a sexist remark, it was intended to point out the need to develop an androgynous consciousness, this bisexual consciousness. The other thing the dream said, if you remember, is that one head is male and one is female. The Gospel of Thomas also reports Jesus saying that the kingdom of God is not a physical place, and doesn’t occur at the future time, but is found inside the individual. So the kingdom is actually an image of transformed consciousness. Jesus says that when you make the two one – when you make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below,”(all these images of uniting) and when you make the male and female one and the same – then you will enter the kingdom. You will enter this place of transformed consciousness.

The Gospel of Thomas also points out “if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” So if you don’t get out the inner potential, that inner potential will turn toxic and kill you. This is a clear image of the necessity to bring into the world as much of the potential of the Self as possible.

There’s a nice comment in Lao Tze that amplifies this as well. He says, “He who knows the male and yet keeps to the female becomes like space containing the world. As space containing the world he has the Eternal Cow, which leaves not, and he returns to the state of infancy.” There again you hear the necessity for becoming both male and female in your consciousness, and how that returns you to a state of infancy. Here we have an image of a miniature model of the individuation process completed, and also a mandala of aging, I think. This is the answer to that criticism; this is how we imbue age with considerable significance.

Now what I want to do is go through the individual themes in the dream. First of all, the image of androgyny; the masculine and feminine Godhead. The Godhead here is half male and half female, or both really. Of course this is an image of what Jung calls the coincidentia oppositorum, the opposites unite. Often imaged as the union of heaven and earth, of king and queen, masculine and feminine, but the opposites come together without any conflict.

In alchemy, of course, the Great Work consisted in the production of the perfect androgyne, and was often symbolized by male/female figures, the two faced king and queen, or the red man and his white wife. You notice the head of the man has a red tinge to it. The alchemical opus, according to Jung, is the individuation process; producing the philosopher’s stone represents, in fact, the realization of the Self, or all the opposites united. Eliade says that hermaphroditism is an archaic form of divine bi-unity. If you look in the mythology, particularly with the creation mythology of many cultures, the initial divinity is bi-sexual. There are lots of images of that in mythology and religion and shamanism: there’s image of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, in Cypress, wearing a beard; in Persian mythology the god of time is androgynous; there are pictures of African and Egyptian gods that are bisexual; Zeus is often dressed as a woman; the Chinese god of night and day is androgynous; and in the Kaballah the divinity has male and female aspects, and, of course, the Tai Chi symbol from Taoism also expresses the same idea. In Hindu mythology Shakti and Shiva are depicted as half and half female, and so on. Christ, in the Christian tradition, is also imaged as an androgyne. Astrologically we find the idea in Gemini, the twins, and in Plato’s Symposium he writes that man was originally created in the form of a sphere, two bodies and two sexes.

Importantly, the hermaphrodite and the androgyne are not the same. In the Visions seminars Jung writes that the hermaphrodite precedes individuation, so this is an androgyne, not a hermaphrodite. What’s the difference? According to Charles Ponce the hermaphrodite is an image of masculinity and femininity drawn in a sexual body, but the androgynous is an image of the archetypal realm in the subtle body; with differentiated consciousness. In other words, conscious bisexuality.

The hermaphrodite is unconscious, with an emphasis on genital sexuality; the androgyne is an image of differentiated consciousness. So, the hermaphrodite would be the image of the unconscious union of opposites that you start with; the fetus, the human fetus of course; the baby eventually has masculine and feminine aspects too but is undifferentiated and is unconscious. Here, in late life, is the achievement of androgyny, where that process occurs; instead of being physically and sexual it occurs in consciousness. You see the difference, the differentiation and the awareness. [James] Hillman also points out when he’s talking about Dionysus that he was a bisexual god, and one of his main representations was as a child. So his idea in the “Myth of Analysis”, the ultimate goal of psychotherapy is the wholeness of consciousness, undivided into spirit and matter.

[Edward] Eddinger points out, interestingly, that consciousness, entymologically, means the same as coniunctio. Coniunctio of course in Latin means “joining,” joining together. But consciousness means “con scire”, knowing with. So, knowing, the Logos aspect, and the “with” implies witness or relationship, or Eros. So consciousness is in fact an image of coniunctio, of joining together, of uniting, of Logos and Eros, or masculinity and femininity. It seems that when you unite Logos and Eros, the male and the female, that’s how you make consciousness, which is what you have to do in late life.

Also, I’ve found in Stan Grolf’s [sp?] work the experience of androgynous consciousness during LSD trips, particularly when people were re-experiencing their original birth. Very interesting because what LSD does, of course, is simply amplify what’s in the psyche. It doesn’t make something new happen; these drugs are amplifiers for mental processes. That will be more evidence that this androgynous type of consciousness, where male and female are united and joined in an unconflictual way, exists as a potential in the human unconsciousness. In Grolf’s words, it’s part of the map of the unconscious; it belongs there. Apparently, this archetypal potential was activated in our dreamer when it was necessary for her in order to help her further her development. It’s like the Self is saying, “Look, this is what you have to do next.”

The square is an expression of quaternary; firmness, stability, honesty, integrity. “Be square with me.” “He’s a square.” An image of organization and construction. It’s like a brick; it refers to matter, earth, and rationality. It’s an old image of the order and stability of the world. It has four elements, four seasons four stages of life, the four corners of the earth… so it’s an image of God manifesting in matter, in creation. It may also represent, I think, death; fixed, as opposed to the dynamic circle of life and movement. Because the square has limits it represents form, and permanence, and stability.

The circle is often an image of the sun, of heaven, and perfection, and of the Self in its more impersonal aspects. It corresponds to an ultimate state of oneness, whereas the square, I think, more represents the plurality of man, without any inner unity. And the Tai Chi, of course, says there’s always something of the masculine in the feminine, and something of the feminine in the masculine, and so on. The circle is also an image of time in the sense of cyclicality, recurrence, birth and death, infinity, eternity, also of time - because it has no beginning and no end - time enclosing space. Timelessness, no beginning and no end, and also of spacelessness since it has no above and no below.

So you see why circle and squares were ancient images of divinity. As the sun, the circle, was masculine, but as the soul it was feminine and maternal. So the circle in fact can be both, sometimes, depending on the context. The dream picture also has a sun/moon image, see that crescent at the bottom is a moon. Jung says whenever an unconscious content becomes conscious this is the equivalent of a coniunctio; solis et lunae, an equivalent of a sun/moon conjunction. So this is constantly, many different ways imaging the coming together of these different aspects of consciousness, emphasizing the masculine and the feminine, the eternal and the temporal, the spiritual and the physical, in all these different images.

Squaring the circle, which is what happens here, is an alchemical preoccupation about the relationship between the circle, which is a cosmic symbol of heaven, and the earth, imaged as a square. It’s an image of how you unite the opposites into a higher synthesis, where the opposites don’t opposite anymore, where they now synthetically somehow a unity. Their idea was to obtain unity of the spiritual life and the material world. For Pythagoras the circle itself was an image of the soul, and, in the hermetic tradition, the alchemical tradition, that square with the circle in the middle was an image of the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World. To have an image of the soul, the soul of the person, and the soul of the world... you see how many superimposed images of apparent opposites joined together in an attempt at synthesis. It’s a profound mandala of the joining of all these opposites.

Jung also wrote about this squared circle as being an image of salt in the alchemical literature. It’s a double totality symbol; the circle represents non-differentiated wholeness, and the square discriminated wholeness. In alchemy one meaning of salt was soul, used by the alchemist to mean soul; understanding and wisdom, and relationships if the salt has lost its savor, and so on. So, it means relationship, understanding, and soul. Christ sometimes in the Christian tradition is spoken of as the salt of wisdom, that which makes wisdom, and so on.

The triangle is an implicit triangle, it’s missing on this side. There’s clearly an implicit triangle. You see there’s a figure missing… on the man’s left side there’s a missing figure, and guess who belongs there. The base of the triangle is between what should be the two human figures. The triangle in alchemy was an image of man, it was an image of soul, body, and spirit. A triangle in a circle is an image of forms held within the circle of eternity.

When it’s pointing upwards in alchemy it was an image of fire going up; an image of ascent, and the urge to get up from below. A circle within a triangle within a square, if you can imagine that, is an image of the relationship; the triangle between the square and heaven as a circle, how those things are brought together. So that, I think, is reflected here as well. If you finish the triangle I think you’d put the dreamer’s head down there, and finish the triangle, and then you’d have an image of the relationship between humanity at the bottom and divinity at the top. That, of course, is what is called in Jungian psychology the “ego-Self axis.”

Now I want to talk about the transformation of the Self, or the transformation of God, and the creation of consciousness in late life. In the second part of life you don’t need to be as rigid about yourself as you do in the first part of life. In the first part of life to build the ego, to build reality and a place in the world you have to develop preferentially. But you can let go some of that defensiveness and rigidity in late life. You can widen your identity and your sense of who you are, and the more you do that the more you discover your full potential, of course.

Now, all your full potential was present when you were a baby, and what you’re trying to do now is realize more of it in late life. You had to sacrifice it for the sake of adaptation and ego development. There’s nothing wrong with that. The child is often imaged by Jung as a symbol of the Self. Jung also talks about the hermaphrodite as a symbol of the child because the child is sexually undifferentiated; he’s the equivalent of Freud’s polymorphous perversity. It’s an image of pre-consciousness in early childhood, and of course what he calls the post-conscious essence of the child by analogy is an image of life after death.

Anyway, the child is an image of psychic wholeness but undifferentiated and relatively unconscious. Just as there’s an inner child, or an archetype of the divine child, so I believe there’s an archetype of aging, or an inner elder. Just as the child can be imaged as hermaphroditic, in an undifferentiated sense, or certainly the fetus can, so the old person can be imaged here ideally as androgynous. That’s one of the meaning of the phrase “God gets younger; as we get older God gets younger;” the Self in late life becomes as androgynous as the Self in childhood.

So the dream images God as an androgyne, and invites the dreamer to develop likewise. If she takes her rightful place in this relationship she’ll complete the analogy of divine to human. God gets younger also refers to the fact that the Self in late life becomes more similar to the primal Self, the Self in infancy, because that Self in infancy contains all potentials but without the boundaries and the categories. What ego consciousness does is it makes categories, but they weren’t there in infancy. In both cases, the Self in infancy and the Self in adulthood, all those opposites and conflicts are all there but in late life the Self is incarnated, it’s come into flesh. It’s come into the world. It doesn’t just exist as potential, it’s been transformed by human consciousness, by ego.

Individuation means on the one hand incarnation, and on the other hand differentiation. It means both. As the images come up from the unconscious throughout life as revelation, that makes new consciousness possible, and new ego consciousness makes that process happen. The ego/Self relationship is circular: the Self births the ego in childhood - the ego somehow comes out of the Self - but then in late life the ego returns the compliment. It’s as if God makes the baby in childhood, but in late life it’s reversed because as ego consciousness develops it helps more Self to come into the world. The Self in the baby of course is very old - it’s Jung’s 200 million year old man - but it’s relatively unconscious as far as the baby’s ego is concerned. So, by realizing its potential the developing ego allows the Self to constantly get born, and this is what Meister Eckhart means by “the birth of God.”

One of the major difficulties that we have is the ego thinks that ego knows how the individual ought to be. The difficulty in old age is that the losses of old age and the physical changes of old age change our identity, and we get very upset. But we are not who we think we are. It’s very important for us to let go of our ego ideas of who we think we are and not have too fixed a smaller self-concept because we need to discover more how the Self thinks the ego ought to be. So the function of old age is the culmination of this lifelong process of clarification, what Freud and Scott Maxwell calls “discovering your essence,” and making conscious all your disparate parts of yourself with the aid of ego consciousness, or, as Jung says, helping the creator to become conscious of his creation. Or developing the ego into a model of the Self, which it really is, or as he quotes Silesius: “I am God’s child and son and He is mine.” That’s what that means psychologically. The Self that’s present at birth can become more conscious of itself throughout life. Then psychological development and spiritual development are absolutely synonymous, only the words are different, but the process is the same.

What about suffering in late life? As [Edward] Eddinger points out suffering in any age can be understood by the ego as the attempts of the Self to incarnate. The way it feels to the ego when we’re suffering is unpleasant but it’s often simply God trying to incarnate. It means this process trying to occur from below so to speak, because the ego doesn’t know the intention of the Self. If the ego knew the intention of the Self it wouldn’t hurt so much. Jung writes about this; he says as we extend our consciousness into the unconscious we contact spheres of a not yet transformed God, so as the ego in later life brings this material up and thinks about it and articulates it, that helps to transform the Self or helps to transform the as yet unconscious God, or aspects the Self. I don’t mean God literally here, I mean the way Jung meant it, as an image of God in the psyche, or the Self.

The losses of old age, which seem very painful, actually enhance our own differentiation. As Jane Will writes, we have to take back our projections from the world. We project onto the world the way we think it is. When all those things die off those projections have to be taken back, and we see things the way they really are. We have to find what was lost on the outside, symbolically, on the inside. That’s the idea of finding the whole world in the microcosm, or, as the Gospel of St. Thomas also says; whoever finds himself is superior to the world.


Link:
Jungian Views on Aging, by Lionel Corbett

"I wish I had loved more"

What will you regret most at the end of a long life? Like many people, the Rev. Lydia Sohn was curious so she posed a simple question to a man in his 90s.

"Do you wish you had accomplished more?" she asked.

"No, I wished I loved more," he responded.

The answer was just one of the poignant, beautiful and haunting responses Sohn received when she interviewed a handful of her oldest congregants and their friends at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Arcadia, California.

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They also wished they had taken more risks to be more loving — both in being more open about their feelings for new people and being more affectionate with those already in their lives. The wished they'd listened better, had been more empathetic and more considerate, and spent more time with people they loved, she noted.

"It's quite illuminating that when you get to that age, the things you long for the most, the things that make you happiest are those close relationships with family and friends," Sohn said.

The elders' answers here were a surprise to Sohn, who had read about the "U-bend" theory of happiness. The research found people's psychological well-being generally dipped in their 30s, reached a bottom in their mid-40s, and then rebounded after 50.

But the 90-somethings she interviewed contradicted those findings. They reported being the happiest from their late 20s to their mid-40s, when their children were still at home, their spouses were alive and the family lived together.

Sohn, who is in the middle of that whirlwind time right now — she's married with a small child, has a full-time job, and she and her husband would like to have another baby — was a bit incredulous.

"These are definitely the most stressful times in my life… Weren't those the most stressful years [for you]?" she asked the elders. Yes, they told her: "It's stressful and chaotic, but so wonderful and fulfilling."

The lesson here seems to be: Enjoy the chaos of right now, Sohn said. Yes, babies are fussy, children take over your life, teens are moody, the commute is taxing, the days are hectic, work is crazy and free time seems to be non-existent — but savor every minute. People measure happiness differently when they assess themselves in the moment than when they think about life retrospectively, Sohn said.

She uses the elders' perspective as a reminder to appreciate everything she has now.

"One thing I've learned to ask myself is: What will I miss about this time of my life when it's all gone? Then all of a sudden, things become so much more wonderful," she said.

- A. Pawlowski, “'I wished I loved more': People in their 90s reveal their biggest regrets”


I often jokingly tell people how I can’t wait until I’m retired so I can finally catch up on all the video games and books and such that I don’t have any time for now, with work, school, and working on my Jung stuff. But what if, hidden in the hectic craziness of our busy years, are the very best years of our lives?

Some Hillman quotes

Fatalism accounts for life as a whole... Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There’s no need to examine just how events fit in.

― James Hillman, The Souls Code: In Search of Character and Calling  

I’m the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I’m a victim again. A result.

― James Hillman

To be sane, we must recognize our beliefs as fictions.

― James Hillman, Healing Fiction  

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

― James Hillman

To the question, Why am I old? the usual answer is, Because I am becoming dead. But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death.

― James Hillman, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life  

Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.

― James Hillman

Our dreams recover what the world forgets.

― James Hillman, Animal Presences  

Our "underdeveloped countries"

Our conscious realm is like a room with four doors, and it will be the fourth door by which the shadow, the animus, and the anima and the personification of the Self will come in. They will not enter as often through the other doors, which in a way is self-evident, because the inferior function is so close to the unconscious and remains so barbaric and inferior and undeveloped that it is naturally the weak spot in consciousness through which the figures of the unconscious can break in. In consciousness it is experienced as a weak spot, as that disagreeable thing which will never leave you in peace but always causes trouble, for every time you feel you have acquired a certain balance or inner standpoint, something happens from within or without to throw you off again, and it is always through that fourth door, which you cannot shut. You can keep the three doors of your inner room closed, but on the fourth door the lock does not work, and there, when you do not expect it, the unexpected will come in again. Thank God, you can say, for otherwise the whole life process would petrify and stagnate in a wrong kind of consciousness. It is the ever-bleeding wound of the conscious personality, but through it the unconscious can always come in and so enlarge consciousness and bring forth new experience.

As long as you have not developed your other functions, your auxiliary functions, they too will be open doors, so in a person who has only developed one superior function, the two auxiliary functions will operate in the same way and will appear in personifications of the shadow, animus, and anima. It is only when you have succeeded in developed three functions, in locking three of your inner doors, that the problem of the fourth door still remains, for that is the one which is apparently not meant to be locked. There one has to succumb, one has to suffer defeat, in order to develop further. So if you attend to your own dreams, you will see that these inner figures, if they appear personified as real persons, tend to choose such personifications. Another kind of personification, which naturally has to do with the shadow, is that the fourth function is contaminated with personifications from the lower levels of the social strata of the population or by the underdeveloped countries. That is a beautiful expression – the “underdeveloped” countries. It is just marvelous how we Westerners in our superior arrogance look down on the underdeveloped countries and project our inferior functions upon them! The underdeveloped countries are within ourselves, and therefore, naturally, because this is such an obvious symbolism, the inferior function for a white person often appears as a wild Negro or a wild Indian. Frequently also the inferior function is expressed by exotic people of some kind: Chinese, Russian, or whoever may give that quality. The unconscious tries in this way to convey the quality of something unknown to the conscious realm, as if it would say: it is as unknown to you as the Chinese are unknown in your culture. The shadow, animus, and anima appear very often projected onto Asian or African or “primitive” people.

- Marie Louise von Franz, “Psychotherapy”

This is why it's so important to come to terms with the people (and creatures) that live within our unconscious; the "primitive" is within us... the criminal, the underdeveloped, all of it is us. Until more of us start to realize that our prejudices are actually the fear and hatred we have of our own shadow, we will continue marching down the road of violence.

Mood of destruction and renewal

A mood of universal destruction and renewal… has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos – the right moment – for a “metamorphosis of the gods”, of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science… So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of the modern man.

- Jung, CG, (1970) Civilization in Transition



See also:
Apocalypse

"The Fate of Depth Psychology in the New Millenium"

Analytical psychology is a celebration of becoming. I believe that the image for becoming is the child, and I propose that in this image is to be found our future, and the hope of our work. I’ve been thinking about the child as reality, as image, and as archetype for some time now. This is because I am working on connections I have with my own childhood home, a house on the Connecticut shore where my mother still lives, and where she and her parents spent each summer after her 12th birthday. Where my father courted her. Where my grandmother and my parents and I and my children made four generations together year after year. A house in which I have spent at least a part of every one of the 64 summers since the year after my birth. And this returning and returning and returning of mine has as well a parallel in our work, in the ongoing and returning pattern of analysis.

I go through the front door of my mother’s house and I am surrounded by a slightly sweet, slightly musty atmosphere that has never changed. I walk into my analyst’s office and sit down and begin to enter a timeless realm, sealed off from ordinariness, from the press of things and obligations. Or, a person in my practice finds my office inhabited by her past, the same constant atmosphere, the same air laden with projection, and memory, and image. I walk into the summer house and, if the door to the terrace is open, I can feel the salt breeze from the sound and I can hear small waves breaking and dissolving into foam among the tangles of seaweed and rocks that line the shore just below the house. In the space of analysis the sea, the tides, the wind, the sun rising and setting are the rhythms underneath the work, we go out and we return from dark to light to dark. A child such as I was returning each summer to the same place becomes lost in sameness. I made my own time as an only child will because my parents had their own life more fun and more rewarding for them than a small boy was. So I created a world for myself and then lived in it quite happily. What I was missing went into the dark in the ways you all know so well. Time stopped and the moment of the house stretched out the past of school and schedules was gone and the future became unnecessary or irrelevant all summer long. As in analysis a dream is constellated from a timeless place, it hangs timelessly in the air between two people. It may excite or frighten or seem crazily useless, it may open a deep space. We fall into a shock the surprise of the utterly new.

In the house a storm, in fact a hurricane in 1938, shook the walls wind and rain stripped the leaves from the trees and plastered the south side of the house with them. A gigantic willow tree fell. Gales peeled shingles off the roof and water streamed into the attic and then the bedroom and living room ceilings. Waves and the high tide bent the terrace doors and sea water washed through the hall. We could not hear ourselves over the voices in the wind. The storm passed, the repairs were made. The house like psyche itself is both unchanging and vulnerable, safe and threatened, moving and unmoved. I the child and the timeless realm of summer dropped into the timeless archetypal ground, but that same child growing and exploring this unvarying space found himself caught up in the inexorable flow of time represented by learning to swim, learning to ride a two wheeler, learning to drive, to kiss. One summer an aunt sleeping peacefully died. A few summers later my grandfather, surrounded by medicines and IVs, died in another upstairs room. Years later when my father, a lover of landscapes and gardens, lay dying in that same room he could see outside his window a maple tree I’d just had planted for him. It flourishes now, shading the terrace. Oh, as I was young and easy under the apple boughs time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea. So in our work we go in and out of time, and thus in every session the child in us experiences both inexorable change and eternal presence. Each year I grew older but each year the tide pools among the rocks filled and emptied, each year the sun sets into the sound beyond Griswold Island or Hatchett's Point. And each year in the gathering darkness the herring gulls and the black crowned night herons squawked their nightly choruses from distant rocks and from a rookery on a nearby hill, shrieking and innocent, and then quieting mysteriously only to start again. Each year lying in the dark with the bedroom window open to the air I listened and wondered. In our work we descend into such dark, timeless realms and we return to the mundane daylight. We provide a place where this is safe and, indeed, honored work. We provide the safety of return together with the threat and the reality of moving toward something as yet unknown to us and to the people with whom we work. We are trained to find these things out for ourselves with necessary help. Tennyson’s Ulysses speaks to us:

“Something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

And here is TS Elliot describing a world both inner and other, a world to be forever explored:

“The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
    The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
    Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
    Its hints of earlier and other creation:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated, the dead and the living. Here and there does not matter; we must be still and still moving into another intensity, for further union and deeper communion, through the dark cold and the empty desolation.

"We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time."

We know these things. This is what we honor in our work. We provide a space both safe and hazardous, known and unknown, all at once; a space charged with all the contradiction and opposites but nevertheless humane and sympathetic, a space in which the gestures and images of the inner life are honored and sustained, the whole informed by an idea of order. It is the space we deserved as children but seldom, if ever, had. Such a space has unmeasurable value. We provide it; this is why we have a future.

- Dan Lindley, PhD, LCSW (Jungianthology Podcast, 1/1/18)


See also:
House
Child
Ocean
Journey


Links:
Dan Lindley, PhD, LCSW (CG Jung Institute of Chicago)
"Ulysses," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Four Quartets," by T.S. Eliot
"Little Gidding," T.S. Eliot

The Archimedian point

Do things happen accidentally, or do we call them to us? An easy, and true answer, is yes to both; to only believe that one is true is to become one-sided, the great sin of the psyche.

Another good, and true, answer is to say yes... but it’s not in a blaming way. If we call negative experiences to us then it’s not our conscious, not our ego (“ourselves”) that’s doing it but another part of us, one which is as alien and other as another person entirely.

The other thing, and probably most important thing, is that these opposites - “It’s all your fault if bad things happen to you!” And “How dare you say it’s someone’s fault! Are you saying an innocent child asks for bad things to happen to them?????” - these opposites are secretly united. This is why, for example, Erykah Badu’s response that even Hitler has something good about him both irritated but also failed to arouse the truly strong, almost violent, reactions that others got. The sinner and the righteous warrior of goodness and purity are two halves of the same whole. The light, by it’s very existence, calls darkness into existence. One half can never defeat its other half... or if it does it risks self-annihilation. This why we must find a dialectical solution, one which gets beyond the pair of opposites. An Archimedean point outside the battle. It’s only when you get beyond sinner and saint that a true peace can be attained.

Status update

Apologies! I lost track of what was going on here due to school stuff. I noticed there have been several comments and I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to write.

I have several projects in the works: amazing excerpts from some of my favorite books, and more symbol posts. The problem is, everything takes so much time! ;_;

In the mean time, I'm trying to post smaller things while I work on these other projects. And I will be sure to respond to your comments!