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Any ego not dwarfed by the magnitude within is simply non-reflective, or unconscious altogether. It is an abiding respect for this disproportionate relationship between the ego and the unconscious that no doubt led Jung, when asked for the thousandth time, his definition of God, sometimes called The Wholly Other, to reply: “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”6
Nothing we have ever experienced is wholly lost. It is ingrained somewhere in our neurology and stored in the vaults of the unconscious even if it is not available to memory.
Modernism may arrogate to itself the powers of the gods, but in the end, the work of the gods will always humble, surprise, and invite us to the next layer of mystery.
“Nothing human is alien to me.”
Never begun, life is already finished, and only dull repetitions trail behind us.
Churchill said that when one find’s oneself lost in a dark wood, keep walking. Jung said that at the bottom of every depression, and there is always a bottom there, one will find a task, the addressing of which will take one’s life in a new direction. And so I, and so many others, have found directives arising from those most dismal soul-swamps.
The loneliness of that place is where the soul is found.
whatever the losses, whatever the disappointments, whatever the discarded expectations.
What of my suffering, has not found it's meaning?
Any psychology which asks us to die, in some profound fashion, will never tempt the mass market from its deceptive but seductive soporifics.
Our ego-state exhibits fundamentalist tendencies; terrified by ambiguity, it wishes for clarity, certainty, control.
The complexity and autonomy of life are such that it remains forever beyond our control.
Jung added, “There is no change that is unconditionally valid over a long period of time. Life always has to be tackled anew.”
This is freedom l
we can take these patterns and work backwards to assemble a pretty good idea of what “idea” or premise has been triggered within us. At the end of that silken thread snaking through the thickets of our psychological history, there is a complex, an affect-laden script with a behavior attached. When catalyzed, it enacts its script, and the attached behavior enters the world. In time, these mechanisms become behavioral patterns, and even when brought to our awareness, we may rationalize them and simply say, “O that’s just who I am,” or “I have always been that way.” Seldom do we surmise that what
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no wonder we sometimes feel ourselves strangers to ourselves.
No wonder so often we feel “stuck,” burned out, adrift, bored. Desuetude is the loss of directing energy, and when we are in the grip of this history and its adaptive patterns we are rudderless, and are carried by the streams of our past.
This is why change, growth, individuation is so difficult. All require our leaving some seeming safe place for some place more exposed. No wonder we often stay stuck.
But all of us retain swampland areas of vulnerability.
As Freud put it once at the end of a lecture, our task is to move from neurotic misery to the normal misery of life.
In the engagement with the inherent and inevitable traumata of overwhelmment, we have three basic options: avoidance, compliance, and seizing power if possible.
The most primitive of primitive defenses is denial.
Behind denial is simple avoidance.
procrastination.
Freud called this “the return of the repressed.” And the repressed, like a slain monster in Act II, always returns for its moment of truth in Act III in our lives.
We all squander these precious hours we are granted in wallows of stuckness.
Only in this way can I share the journey of Tennyson’s Ulysses who reminds all of us, “tis not too late to seek a newer world.... Some work of noble note may yet be done, / not unbecoming [those] who strove with gods.” Only in this way can our world be made new.
Fictions are tools we have found to help us stand in relationship to all that which is ultimately inexplicable.
In ca. 1800, Immanuel Kant reminded us that we never know the Ding an Sich, the “thing in itself,” but rather the experience of our subjective renderings of it. Since each of us has a different subjective terrain, a different series of histories with their imposing analogical templates, our “stories” about the same event will often vary so greatly. (Think of the number of stories witnesses provide after observing a traumatic event.)
The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire once wrote in Cors de Chasse that memory is a hunting horn whose sound fades along the wind.
complex. While he did not coin the term, he made it his to explain how any triggering moment in our outer lives can catalyze a splinter of our history.
Long has humanity recognized the spectral energy that passes over us, possesses us for a short while, and then recedes back into the unconscious.
How can we know what is unconscious until it invests itself in an image? Once the image is present—in a bodily state, a dream drama, a behavioral pattern—then we have a shot at getting into that invisible world. Until we smoke these stories out, we are doomed to repeat them.
What wants to enter the world through me? This latter question is a movement beyond the iron grip of history into some enlarging service to the summons of individuation.
Jung put it this way, “Individuation…means intense consciousness of conflict. You never will be saved from conflict as long as you live, otherwise you would be dead before you die. Conflict cannot be removed. If it seems to be removed, that is imaginary. Conflict must be, if one lives at all. But the way you deal with it, that is the question—whether you are overcome by the conflict, whether you get drowned in it, whether you get identified with one or the other side of the conflict. Individuation simply means you find your place amid the turmoil; you keep yourself in the midst of the
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(Neurosis, he also said, is suffering that has not yet found its meaning.)
Having big bodies, big bank accounts, and big roles to play in life does not an adult make, as we see all around us.
All of us, in varying degrees, are riven with self-doubt, insecurity, debilitating complexes, all of us—myself included, to this very day. It never goes away. The question, then, is do we show up and meet the demands of life when they come or remain mewling children looking for some parental figure to fix it all for them?
The pragmatic questions always are what does fear, self-doubt make you do or keep you from doing with your life?
personal dignity and spiritual independence are never lost unless we give them away.
Whatever we of ourselves can lift off our partner is an act of loving them.
Immature folks, and any of us under considerable stress, cannot. We expect the other to take care of it for us. As understandable as this may be,
it is not realistic, not loving the objective otherness of the Other, and just not going to happen.
it is natural that the child within, or the intimidated adult, will look to a guru out there, an authority of some kind, given that one traded away one’s personal authority a long time ago. This is why the recovery of personal authority, namely, sorting through the incessant bombardment from the exterior world, and the immense traffic within, to find the voice of our own soul is so necessary.
The simple question is, “If I don’t live this life, the one I have now, according to my inner lights, why am I here in the first place?”
the concept of the numinous.
I have come to this conclusion: If we do not experience the numinous within, amid the many cacophonous claims upon us, it will come to possess us through our projections of it onto the secular world, or turn inward as malady and percolate to the surface later through our symptomatology.
if the life of the spirit is not nourished, it will pathologize, or as Jung once observed, the gods will enter the solar plexus of the modern and become diseases.
This is not really religion or spirituality; it is psychopathology on parade with fears and stuck places calling the shots.
Those who deny the accumulated knowledge of our species, who ignore the findings of modern medicine, astronomy, physics and so on, and those who shun self-examination at every moment,
live in a world of denial, “confirmation bias,” and an ever-diminishing spiritual horizon. Their gods hate the same people they hate; their catechisms collaborate and conspire with their complexes; and their understanding of self and world as “other” is manipulated into a conformity with their fear-based agenda, resistance to change and ambiguity, a reflexive prizing of certainty...
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The Self is the organic and organizing energy that drives our lives. It
