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December 11, 2020 - February 26, 2021
Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness.
Heroic journeys always lead through dark valleys and difficult confrontations. But if we persevere, we find a new possibility of consciousness.
Dreams are the messengers of the unconscious mind. Through them the unconscious communicates its contents and its concerns to the conscious mind.
In the evolution of consciousness, our greatest problem is always our richest opportunity.
The unconscious mind seeks to move its contents up to the level of consciousness, where they can be actualized and assimilated into a more complete conscious personality. Each person’s psyche has an inborn evolutional urge to grow, to integrate the contents of the unconscious, to bring together all the missing parts of the total individual into a complete, whole, and conscious self.
We must be able both to handle power and to love, both to exert control and to flow spontaneously with fate—each value in its season.
Death, in a myth or dream, means something has left the conscious mind; yet it rests in the unconscious, waiting to be reborn into consciousness.
As a society, we keep trading Blanchefleur away.
Power without love becomes brutality. Feeling without masculine strength becomes woolly sentimentality.
So there is hope for the child of sadness. Tristan is also the child of hope. The child as a symbol always represents a new possibility, a new consciousness that has been born into the human psyche.
We have his sadness, we have his challenges, and we have his hope.
Soil forth—steer for the deep waters only, Reckless O Soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. O my brave soul! O farther, farther sail! O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? O farther, farther, farther sail! —Walt Whitman, Passage to India
When the time comes for the ego to set forth on its journey toward wholeness, strange and paradoxical things happen; fate chooses strange emissaries.
when we grow wiser we learn that the disasters of life are often the genius of the unconscious, forcing our egos into a new experience of the self.
If a man or woman clings to the dominant patriarchal attitude and refuses to make peace with the inner feminine, then she will demand a tribute:
We must sail forth and steer for the deep waters, risking all, yet strangely safe upon those seas of God.
The job of the hero is specific: to undertake the inner journey, to face the dragons and giants there, to find the hidden treasure.
the most heroic task of all can be undertaken by any person, regardless of his or her external circumstances. Anyone can make the inner quest and take on the burden of becoming whole.
The harp represents the power to develop a sense of values, to affirm what is good and true, to appreciate the beautiful; the harp enables a hero to put the sword in the service of a noble ideal.
To give up the oar and sail means to drop personal control and give oneself over to the will of God.
To take up the harp means to wait patiently, listening to a soft voice within, for the wisdom that comes not from logic or action but from feeling, intuition, the irrational and the lyrical.
“Only what is separated may be properly joined.” When two things are muddled together they need to be separated, distinguished, and untangled so that they may later be rejoined in a workable synthesis. This is the correct meaning of “analysis” in psychology; to analyze is to separate out the entangled threads of one’s inner life—the confused values, ideals, loyalties, and feelings—so that they may be synthesized in a new way. We analyze romantic love, not to destroy it, but to understand what it is and where it belongs in our lives. Analysis must always serve synthesis in order to serve life;
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Symbols do not flow from the unconscious to tell us what we already know but to show us what we have yet to learn.
This is why men and women put such impossible demands on each other in their relationships: We actually believe unconsciously that this mortal human being has the responsibility for making our lives whole, keeping us happy, making our lives meaningful, intense, and ecstatic!
On that day, the two opposing armies in the Western psyche take up their swords and go to war within him. The two moralities begin their duel.
Romantic love is an unholy muddle of two holy loves. One is “divine” love, of which we have spoken before: It is our natural urge toward the inner world, the soul’s love of God, or the gods. The other is “human” love, which is our love for people—flesh-and-blood human beings. Both of these loves are valid; both are necessary. But by some trick of psychological evolution our culture has muddled the two loves in the potion of romantic love and nearly lost them both.
When a man experiences a fantasy of ultimate peace and wholeness, he needs to understand his fantasy as a statement of what he can achieve within himself. But usually he will project his image of paradise on a woman, unconsciously asking her to fulfill it, to bring it into some physical actuality, to deliver it to him.
When a man tries to live his soul within his finite marriage with a woman, his soul puffs up and distorts his view of both wife and marriage.
If he could learn to keep it there, to see it as symbol and experience it as symbol, then he could live correctly with his soul. He could follow his soul in his inner life toward the infinite but stay within the limits of the finite in his relationship with his wife.
On the path we have trod, in the presence of powerful symbols of transformation, we begin to see clearly what at first was unthinkable: The path that leads to an understanding of romantic love also leads inevitably to our religious nature, to the spiritual side of our being that we have so zealously sidestepped.
This dream answers us in clear and vivid language: “Put the divine part of yourself back into the cathedral where it belongs and live the human part of yourself where it belongs—in ordinariness and simplicity.” We must take our soul out of romantic love and return it to an inner place—the inner cathedral.
Deep within each of us is such a place, a crystal chamber “all compact of roses and the morning,” a great basilica where true-voiced bells wait to announce the return of Soul from her wanderings.
It means to take that burden off an external person and place it within the powerful inner edifice that was made to bear it.
Sometimes dreams are given us at a time when we must face a “death of ego”—a sacrifice of some level on which we have lived—to compensate our fears and our dismal expectations.
Dreams give us a sense of proportion and lend us courage by showing us the beauty and glory of the thing we do, which we can’t see for ourselves, and the splendor of the life th...
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People become so wearied of the cycles and dead ends of romance that they begin to wonder if there is such a thing as “love.” There is. But sometimes we have to make profound changes of attitude before we can see what love is and make room for love in our lives.
Love is distinct from my ego; love was here before my ego came into the world, and love will be here after my ego departs. Yet love is something or “someone” who lives within me. Love is a force that acts from within, that enables my ego to look outside itself, to see my fellow humans as something to be valued and cherished, rather than used.
Therefore, when I say that “I love,” it is not I who love, but, in reality, Love who acts through me. Love is not so much something I do as something that I am. Love is not a doing but a state of being—a relatedness, a connectedness to another mortal, an identification with her or him that simply flows within me and through me, independent of my intentions or my efforts.
More often than we realize, love works its divine alchemy best when we follow the advice of Shakespeare’s Cordelia: “Love, and keep silent.”
But as we learn love’s characteristics and attitudes, we can begin to see love within us—revealed in our feelings, in the spontaneous flow of warmth that surges toward another person, in the small, unnoticed acts of relatedness that make up the secret fabric of our daily lives.
When one truly loves the human being rather than the projection, one loves the shadow just as one loves the rest. One accepts the other person’s totality.
Love is utterly distinct from our ego’s desires and power plays. It leads in a different lirection: toward the goodness, the value, and the needs of the people around us.
Real love begins only when one person comes to know another for who he or she really is as a human being, and begins to like and care for that human being.
Human love sees another person as an individual and makes an individualized relationship to him or her. Romantic love sees the other person only as a role player in the drama.
Friends, genuine friends, are like Kaherdin: They want to affirm rather than to judge; they don’t coddle, but neither do they dwell on our inadequacies. Friends back each other up in the tough times, help each other with the sordid and ordinary tasks of life. They don’t impose impossible standards on each other, they don’t ask for perfection, and they help each other rather than grind each other down with demands.
People can’t ask of their friends that they carry all their projections, be scapegoats for all their moods, keep them feeling happy, and make life complete for them. Why do couples impose these demands on each other? Because the cult of romance teaches us that we have the right to expect that all our projections will be borne—all our desires satisfied, and all our fantasies made to come true—in the person we are “in love” with.
We can learn that human relationship is inseparable from friendship and commitment. We can learn that the essence of love is not to use the other to make us happy but to serve and affirm the one we love. And we can discover, to our surprise, that what we have needed more than anything was not so much to be loved, as to love.
