Friday, April 24, 2009

Science and Religion: Part II – CREDO LXX

   
In Part I of “Science and Religion” (CREDO LXVIII), I related that as a ten-year-old I lay out in a field looking up at the stars and declared that when I grew up I wanted to unite science and religion. Well, by now most of you know that I have been an astrologer for sixty-five years, having started out considering it, as many people do today, “superstitious twaddle for nincompoops.” I am grateful for this because I can understand the scoffers. However, when I had my chart done by Hermes, the one who introduced me the following morning to M, the epiphany was too profound. I went from the despair of thinking there was no answer to the conviction that there is an answer! What that answer is cannot be defined by the ego but only approached in the “vast certainty” intimated by the Self.

However, to share what I have come to understand calls for a new definition of astrology – what euphemistically people now term Cosmic Science, a far cry from Madame La Zonga and the popular predictions in newspapers. We don’t reject Shakespeare because you can find some of the same English words he used in the funny papers! And after years of studying Jung, I knew I was on the right track one great day when I discovered his serious interest in astrology!

Here is my definition: Astrology is really a symbolic language of archetypal processes. It functions in both the unmanifest and the manifest worlds and unites them in the Unus Mundus. As for the individual chart of a person: The chart reveals the unique way an individual is likely to process experience. It is a gift that we can become conscious of and that can help us psychologically and spiritually, or not. This is the way I have taught astrology’s usefulness at many Jungian institutes and centers. In that sense, and by virtue of my age of 86, I suppose I am considered by some to be a pioneer, but I studied with Marc Edmund Jones and read Dane Rudhyar, to say nothing of Jung, and honor all that I learned from them. Today, astrology is much more widely accepted as an adjunct to psychological analysis and a guide to spiritual growth.

Thousands of years ago, early humankind discovered the dual abstract processes of light and dark, expansion and contraction, birth and death, masculine and feminine, hot and cold, wet and dry, and so forth. They sensed that these were universal, therefore divine, and needed to be named. So they gave them the names of gods and goddesses. These names differed in different cultures and in different eras, but in all the millennia, the processes themselves have never changed! No one has ever said Mars is really Venus or Zeus is really Kronos.

Once anything is named, the next step is to personify it as an archetype with human attributes. It is then further reified by temples and rituals, and thus enters the manifest world, eventually becoming a religion yet so encrusted with material thinking that the process is virtually lost! Then the old religion is supplanted by a new “Age,” and a new cast arrives on the scene – but the archetypal processes they represent remain because you cannot kill an archetype! The worst that can happen is that one is banished and moves into a fairytale. An example is the masculinizing of the Holy Spirit (Hagia Sophia) into the Latin Spiritus Sanctus (which has a masculine ending!), thus rendering the Christian Holy Trinity all male! So feminine Wisdom took refuge in fairy tales and became the Fairy Godmother. Why is she always a helpful figure, mediating between the invisible and visible worlds and giving practical advice? Why is she called the Mother of God? The answer is that Wisdom is universally feminine in all other cultures. But the Virgin Mary is loved for her sweetness and compassion rather than her wisdom. The powerful feminine archetype, as in the goddesses Isis and Kali, was split and the negative projected onto the pagan “witch.” The root of the word witch is wisdom. Symbolically, Mary as archetype is a human goddess. But she presents a challenging model for many Catholic women who cannot be immaculate mothers in the flesh, as some have protested in writing – to say nothing of the exclusion of women from Roman Catholic priesthood. Nevertheless, I am personally deeply affected by the Virgin Mary, perhaps because my moon is in Virgo.

I will give just a single example of opposite archetypal processes, expansion (astrologically Jupiter) and contraction (astrologically Saturn), as they appear on different levels. Note that any process carried to excess can become negative, so the listed characteristics may be positive or negative.

  Expansion – Yes! We can!

Psychological: + extraversion, enthusiasm, optimism, positiveness, joviality; – inflation.

Mythological: Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, Indra, Ganesh. – Bacchus?

Religious:+ Pope, St. Peter, St. Nicholas, the Baal Shem Tov, the Dalai Lama, imams, rabbis, priests, preachers who are spiritually encouraging; – fraudulent gurus of all faiths.

Secular: + Santa Claus, “emperors,” CEOs, coaches. Falstaff, Winnie-the-Pooh! Thursday! – Midas, Elmer Gantry, dictators, Madoff.

Astrological: planet Jupiter, ruler of Sagittarius, ruling + religion, teaching, and preaching, wealth, succeeding, graduating, traveling, giving, enjoying; – boasting, gluttony, greed, excess of any kind.

Scientific: heat expansion, multiplication, growth, swelling, obesity, inflation, eruptions, surplus, thunderstorms, floods, hurricanes.

Culinary: cooking, boiling, roasting, feasting, celebrating.


  Contraction – No! Wait a minute!


Psychological
: + introversion? logic, philosophy, rationality; – negativity, pessimism depression; caution, fear, denial.

Mythological: + Kronos, Saturn, Shiva; – Beelzebub, Satan, Mephistopheles.
Religious: + Moses, Solomon, Hammurabi, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; – Judas, Savonarola , Inquisitors, Hitler, Stalin?

Secular: + judges, lawyers, philosophers, scientists, accountants, pathologists; – Silas Marner, Scrooge, Darth Veda, Eeyore.

Astrological: planet Saturn, ruler of Capricorn, ruling + manifestation, business, time, money, diamonds (reflect Sun most brightly), construction, frontiers, restraint, discipline, outlines, old age, grammar, philosophy, logic, law and justice, Saturday! – failure, poverty, debts, limits, imprisonment, sickness, death.

Scientific: structure, cooling, solidification, carbon, ice; geology, geography, proofs, skepticism, matter, material, weight, volume, lead, earth, snow, rock, caves, bones, foundation, limits, ends, results, accomplishment!

Culinary: + salting, cooling, setting as with Jello; – hunger, dieting, starvation.

(* This is not a description of a person born a Capricorn! Only the archetypal process as such. Capricorns are often serious as children and grow younger and more beautiful as they age.)

Here is a lovely description of the two processes in balance:
When you expand think of contraction and your work will have form. When you contract, think of expanding and your work will have the feeling of effortless ease.
     – Chinese advice to any artist.

lovingly,
ao

Friday, April 17, 2009

Quantity and Quality – CREDO LXIX

   
There seems to be a universal law in nature and in human affairs that extremes are self-regulated. We see it in the seasons and in the laws of opposites. A familiar symbol for this is the Yin/Yang: two curlicues, white and black, each containing a small circle of the opposite color, and all contained in the unity of a circle.

The Greek name for this phenomenon is enantiodromia – running into the opposite. You can find it in a huge pendulum that hangs, I think in a museum in Paris, which swings to and fro over sand, and is moving perpetually owing to the rotation of the earth. An example in history is the Inquisition, during which a group of fanatical monks tortured people to drive the devil out of them, thereby inviting the demonic energy, so to speak, into themselves by the backdoor!

This compensatory process now seems to be applying culturally to most of the civilized world. The emphasis during the last two hundred and fifty years, ever since the Industrial Age, has increasingly been on quantity. We call it materialism. To be successful as a person is judged by having a bigger bank account, a bigger house, car, professional rank, and so forth. The extremes come with avid collections of one kind or another, with greed and competition to have or be the “mostest” of anything, including the expectation that the United States should be the Leader of the World. This seems an unwise attitude at the moment when we are struggling in a swamp of multi-trillions of fiscal debt! We are already being challenged by other nations, which could lead eventually to armed conflict. The best model at the moment seems to be the EU, with its rotating chief, or the United Nations. These function in a circular and inclusive way avoiding opposites.

The most striking shift, which affects us all, is the catastrophic global financial collapse of the last few months. And yet that could be yielding a potentially positive future consequence, namely the enantiodromia of quantity into quality! Quantity measures materials, quality implies meaning and relationships, which cannot be measured; they can only be felt. Most of us are being asked not to run off and do more stuff, which is a way of escaping the deeper realities of life, but to take the time to get to know each other better. Perhaps the generation that has turned to drugs of different kinds has been trying to escape from a seemingly meaningless life. Now there is much reference to the “kitchen table” in the news, a place to discuss family problems but also a place where families can share food and togetherness. Curiously, our word “economy” comes from the Greek oekonomia, which meant "household management."

We can measure quality in life by happiness and gratitude, affection and kindness, and generosity toward others in loving personal service. We saw a demonstration of that briefly in the aftermath of 9/11, and certainly in the quiet heroism of men and women in floods, fires, earthquakes, and tornadoes – all four elements! Certainly, this is another proof of the intensity of opposites. But quality also depends on loving and appreciating nature and all her gifts, given so freely but now, in our ignorance, being polluted and poisoned daily by manmade plastics and toxic chemicals of all sorts. But there is hope and a solution: a conscious willingness to shift from the emphasis on quantity to one of quality.

Just yesterday, I received a letter from a 24-year-old young woman, a Smith graduate, working in a NGO program in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She writes:

I’m getting involved with the Green Sanctuary Committee and am organizing a voluntary simplicity class for May/June. It’s much more enjoyable to live intentionally – to acknowledge that I’m CHOOSING to spend this year volunteering and CHOOSING to receive the small stipend that comes along with it. And it is amazing how rich this year has been! I’ve made some new friends, shaken the dust off my spirituality, done some hard work, learned a lot about things that bring me joy that don’t cost money, and can feel good about what I am doing when I take this perspective! It is amazing how much of life is about attitude, and how contagious attitudes can be.

She is articulating so eloquently what a great number of young men and women in our country are already doing, as well as many in other parts of the world. Now a great-grandmother myself, I am limited in joining them, but it is her letter that inspires me to share these thoughts with you. That much I still can do.

lovingly,
ao

Friday, March 27, 2009

Science and Religion – CREDO LXVIII

   
First, study the obvious, the physical nature of things. The second step is to study the interiority of things, to go inward. The third step is to study the relationship between the two. By drawing on the first three steps, you can come close to knowing the deepest secrets of the universe.
       – His Holiness, the Dalai Lama

When I was ten years old in a Swiss boarding school, a friend and I managed to lie out in a field before bedtime. It was a clear night and we looked up at the stars and asked each other what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told her solemnly it was to reunite science and religion, and I was looking up at the stars! It was a prophetic moment; my mother told me I started on a book titled The World as it is and the World as it ought to be! The first sentence apparently was, “A fish has no neck nor any voice at all....” I guess I got sidetracked.

Later, in 1944, when I was twenty-one and first met my Teacher M in New York, I went back to the hotel on Washington Square. I woke up at midnight with a strange urgency to write. I found myself drawing two facing hemispheres, barely separated, and labeling them Hemi and Demi. Above them an arc embracing both to the middle of both sides, labeled Super omnium. The writing explained that the Demi represented the visible world and the Hemi, the inherent invisible meaning of it. The arc hinted at the resulting insight of joining them into a complete circle! And if you drew a horizontal line joining the two points of the arc, it made another hemisphere to which you could add its counterpart and on and on. I had no conscious understanding of what I was writing at that moment! When I asked M about it, he just looked pleased as punch and said, “Keep it up!” Much of that and what came further is to be found in my book The Web in the Sea, p. 64.


                                 
Now, seventy-six years later, I realize that this has been my life’s work: Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace!
I have already written that religion and science, faith and reason, were opposite factors (as they have continued to be!) until the Age of Reason, when science repudiated religion at the time of Descartes. When this happened, religion lost its proof and science its sense of the sacred. This sums up one of the agonizing dichotomies of the entire departing Age of Pisces, now perhaps being healed by the theoretical physics of the coming Age.
Lately, Jung’s idea of hanging on consciously to the opposites and allowing the Transcendent Function, the healing third, suggested a triangle with science and religion as opposite points on the baseline and the resolution at the apex. That suggests a vertical motion! This resulted for me in an attack of insight. Bear with me.

Science legitimately limits itself to three basic steps:
As the professor Ravi Ravindra remarked. The greatest discovery of modern science is the discovery of its own limitations.”

I have tried to summarize it below:
        Abstract / metaphysical
           Religion
             ^
             ^
     --------------------------------------
           Physical
           Science
             ^
             ^
      Step 3: Repeating & sharing
      Step 2: Experimenting
      Step 1: Observation
             ^

When we find the same archetypal processes at work in both science and religion, the result is spiritual insight! We begin to understand the unus mundus and find science and religion united by the symbolic experience of those archetypal processes (verbs!). Remember sym-bolos = putting together! This is how we achieve the coincidentia oppositorum that Jung proposed, in a nutshell, and here very oversimplified!!

The Sufis speak of the theophany of the Absolute in the relative, a more concise summary of what St. Paul also hinted at in I Cor. 2:11: For what man knows the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him/... which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom [science?] teaches, but which the Holy Ghost [Hagia Sophia] teaches....

What occurs to me is that what unites the below and the above is the little word meaning. To make it absolutely simple, let’s take an egg for an analogy.

Step 3: outcome repeatable, can be eaten safely by humans. Yummy!
Step 2: can be boiled, poached, scrambled, fried, etc .
Step 1: Oval object, comes from a bird.
            ^

The meta (beyond) physical or spiritual aspects of the egg are so numerous, they take up a whole page in a book on universal mythology! The universe itself is said to come from a World Egg in many cultures. For me the outer shell conceals endless potentiality. In religion, a sacrament is described as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” Grace can be further interpreted as spiritual meaning. So I am back to my belief that the Sacred is hidden in the Commonplace, or the outer shell of an egg conceals literally limitless life and symbolically a universe of meaning for all humanity, hatching out in time and space!

This can shed light on the Easter egg, which is honored on the Sunday following the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox and the sun’s entrance again into Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, all of which invites the constellations of heaven to participate though hidden (!) in the grass and the game of trying to find one. Part of playful (Holy Wisdom) Hagia Sophia’s fun.

This is just a fraction of what science could lead us to if it included the clues to Spirit hidden in matter.

As Agrippa, the alchemist, put it: Virtutes divinae in res diffusae: divine powers are diffused in things. Look for Part II in my next CREDO! I hope to further demonstrate how this can be proven. There is a lot to ponder in this one, so reread as the alchemists advised: Lege, lege, lege et invenia – read, read, read and discover!

lovingly,
ao

Monday, March 23, 2009

My Wooden Spoon from Iona – CREDO LXVII

   
I got it in 1967 in the gift shop of the Abbey. It sits humbly in a holder to the right of my stove, showing signs of years of use stirring porridge, pea soup, and the like. I have made twenty-three trips to this tiny Hebridean island west of Scotland. Many of the summers I led small groups of my teenage students on tours of the British Isles, and the wooden spoon became our teacher. One boy had commented on the ubiquitous motif in Celtic art and manuscripts of characteristic interwoven patterns, often including animals, birds, and human figures. How come? was the question and the spoon answered:

I am just a plain wooden spoon, but consider the tree from which I came and the millennia of ancestors that provided the seed for me. That tree was cut down by men, whose ancestors stretch back through time, as well. The woodcutters wore clothes that were made by other people of materials that had to be grown in other fields and transported . . .

Now the students laughed and began to contribute the history of the ship that brought the spoon to Iona, the building of the Abbey in the eighth century, the founding of the Abbey by St. Columba who brought Christianity to Scotland from Ireland . . . Then came the question of how Mrs. Howell came there in the first place, inspired by a visit to her small house on Long Island by a one-time visitor called Margaret Stuart who asked her if she had a picture of St. Martin’s Cross in her library. In the search I first learned of Iona’s existence, and bells began ringing in my soul.

You get the idea. If you own anything to which you have associations, it can conjure the world entire, if you choose, and this is what the Gaels, the Scots and Irish Celts were trying to convey. Everything is interconnected, and so this provides the mana or magic inherent in simple objects. Thus is a sacred meaning to be discovered in the commonplace. So by being conscious and grateful for this, as I stir my porridge here in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the porridge tastes that much richer!

I have another habit that I have developed lately. I inherited a most beautiful Persian carpet. It hangs at the top of the stairs in my house. It belonged to my Teacher M and portrays a mysterious robed Sufi master sitting on a throne being attended by two men who are floating. Above them is the figure of Abraxas. All this is knotted into a large carpet of rich dark browns and golds. Lately, every morning as I go down to breakfast at 5:30, I have taken to stroking the carpet with my arm and enjoying touching something that those carpet makers must have imparted symbolically in designing it. I murmur “God bless the day!” as I do so. Foolish or not, it connects me through the centuries that may have passed since it was made. I assume it was Persian because Arabs are prohibited from depicting human figures.

When I taught history I developed another game called “Touches Away.” It went like this: When my father, who was born in 1894, was a little boy, he was taken to the St. Louis World’s Fair. There was an exhibit of a very old black man who had been born to a woman slave of George Washington. He had held the baby, so the old man was one touch away from Washington. For a nickel, my father shook hands with him, that’s two touches; my father puts me three away, and I would tell my students that when I touched them, they were only four touches away from our first president! This made the human connections through time meaningful and fun. One of my special touches comes from meeting a very old lady in Basel, Switzerland, called Emily Bardach. I was sixteen. She had been the last love of the great Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen, then a much older man, who moved in international literary circles in the early 1800s . . .

I won’t bore you with the number of truly famous people, it has been my privilege to be two touches away from like Freud, Adler, and, many times, Jung, or the meetings with the Dalai Lama and Muktananda in India. Given my childhood of traveling constantly with my parents, I even sat reluctantly by invitation on the lap of Mussolini at Ostia. As both my grandfathers were writers and William Dana Orcutt, was a publisher, he met Henry and William James, and Cardinals in Rome, and Mark Twain , whom my father met when he was nine, come to think of it.

Nowadays, many of you reading this, have no doubt very much the same experience, and some scholar has pointed out that everyone on earth is probably connected by only seven other people.

The point I am trying to make is that we are one, a truth perceived by the Gaelic Celts and taught me fortuitously by my wooden spoon from Iona!

lovingly,
ao

Monday, March 16, 2009

The Secret of Words – CREDO LXVI

   
Existence is beyond the power of words
To define:
Terms may be used
But are none of them absolute.
In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately
Sees the surface,
The core and the surface
Are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder to wonder
Existence opens.

   — from the Tao teh Ching of Lao Tzu: The Way of Life, 1, trans. Witter Bynner

In the ’60's, I started a serious study of Jung in English, and the result was a sudden eruption of poems placing gods/goddesses in modern settings. What I didn't realize was that these would prefigure my subsequent life's work sharing the fact that the Sacred is to be found in the commonplace because archetypes are divine processes (verbs!). As Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, pointed out, Panta rhea, everything flows. These processes are hidden in both the unmanifest and manifest worlds. The latter separates and concretizes them the minute they are named! And yet the hint is there in the Latin origin of name, nomen = noun, and the Latin word for word, verbum!! (Thus does Mercury, the Trickster, fool us.)

Naming things separates them the way a movie (motion picture) actually separates motion into separate sequential images on the film. According to Genesis in the Torah, the correct evolutionary sequence is established in the first chapter. What I notice especially is that God creates by speaking the words Let there be LIGHT, a unity. Now, science can answer a lot about the whats and the hows of light but not the fundamental question Why? Then God sees by that Light that it is good. I quote from the original Hebrew Torah, which the Jews have always interpreted symbolically, not as my mother’s old Bible dated creation as occurring in 4004 B.C.!

            GENESIS
1When God began to create the heaven and the earth—the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water—God said, “let there be light”; and there was light. God saw how good the light was, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, a first day. God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, that it may separate water from water.” God made the expanse, and it separated the water which was below the expanse from the water which was above the expanse. And it was so. God called the expanse Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.
 God said, “Let the water below the sky be gathered into one area, that the dry land may appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters He called Seas. And God saw how good this was. And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation: seed-bearing plants, fruit trees of every kind on earth bearing fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: seed-bearing plants of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw how good this was. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.
 God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night; they shall serve as signs for the set times—the days and the years; and they shall serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights, the greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night, and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth, to dominate the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw how good this was. And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.
 God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” God created the great sea monsters and all the living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms; and all the winged birds of every kind. And God saw how good this was. God blessed them, saying, “Be fertile and increase, fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.
 God said, “Let the earth bring forth every kind of living creature: cattle, creeping things, and wild beasts of every kind.” And it was so. God made wild beasts of every kind and cattle of every kind, and all kinds of creeping things of the earth. And God saw how good this was. And God said, “I will make man in My image, after My likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.” And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.”
 God said, “See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food. And to all the animals on land, to all the birds of the sky, and to everything that creeps on earth, in which there is the breath of life, [I give] all the green plants for food.” And it was so, And God saw all that He had made, and found it very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

2The heaven and the earth were finished, and all their array. And on the seventh day God finished the work which He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work which He had done. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation which He had done. Such is the story of heaven and earth as they were created.

Note that after the creation of the unity of Light, in the very next step, God divides creation into the duality of opposites and names them Day and Night; Earth and Sea , Sun and Moon , fish and fowl, Man and Woman, and blesses them and gives them basically all the gifts of nature. This is significant because now that there is duality physical creation can continue, which also requires the feminine.

The seventh day, God takes a break and rests and is pleased with it all. This is the first version of creation. It is a happy version.

The second version is far more complicated! It involves the Garden of Eden, the two trees of Knowledge and Life, the temptation of Eve, and the expulsion caused by the duality of consciousness of good and evil, and the beginning of guilt and shame: for Catholic Christians the origin of the so-called Original Sin.

The point I want to stress is the connection between naming and separating, which is also the message of Lao Tzu. Both convey the idea that the duality necessary for manifestation is feminine – Mother Nature indeed! She renders the ego the illusion necessary for our living in the earthly world of opposites. Jung calls the healing the necessary coincidentia oppositorum, the bringing together of opposites by virtue of the Transcendent Function of consciousness. We struggle to unite outer experience with inner meaning between our birth and death.

Think zipper! It makes two out of one going up and the wee tab is the Transcendent Function! Psychologically, this counters the emphasis of orthodox Christianity of favoring Virtue and denying Sin, which wrecks the necessary balance that the Transcendent Function of consciousness offers. The result is that the sins we deny go into our personal unconscious and get conveniently projected out onto others! For instance, if the Roman Catholic Church could accept the human feminine as sacrosanct as the masculine, then priests could marry and there would not have been the scandalous sexual abuse that has proved costly on so many levels. (And here the opposites of Scorpio [sex] and Taurus [money] are yet again revealed.)

So what does this mean for us personally? Probably an honest admission that we all have stuff to work out and become conscious of; that, as Jung points out, to try to appear to be too good is bad for us; that to believe, as do Judaism and Celtic Christianity, that by being natural we can acknowledge that any Good we do comes through us as Light from our Divine Guest, not out of us! This solves the problems of ego inflation as well.

The word kind comes from the Anglo-Saxon kinde as in Dame Kinde = Mother Nature! So to be kind is to act naturally. If you check this with Lao Tzu’s wisdom, he too attributes the opposites expressed in words as coming from “the womb of matter,” and matter comes from Latin mater = mother! Even the Egyptian goddess of Wisdom is called Maat.

I guess I cannot stress enough the value of etymology or the study of the origin of words. As my friend Russell Lockhart, the Jungian analyst, and I wrote, Words are eggs. They hold incredible secrets when hatched in a dictionary!

lovingly,
ao

Monday, March 9, 2009

Sacrifice – CREDO LXV

   
The word sacrifice comes from the Latin and means “to make holy.” It was a concept that I struggled with for many years. During Lent, the idea was to give up something one especially liked. At one point in an English boarding school in Italy, I decided that my favorite food was bread. So I gave up bread, only to be placed in a double bind by the Lord’s Prayer in which we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”! So I gave up giving up right then and there and decided sacrifice made no sense. In addition, the custom in olden times of sacrificing great numbers of animals to God smacked to me of bribery and cruelty. None of it seemed logical. That is until I read Jung’s magnificent essay on “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass.” It is a piece I have reread several times over the years, and I plan to reread it this Lenten season.

Somewhere Jung solves the purpose of sacrifice in the following way: we cannot offer up something we do not already have. So in the symbolic and psychological sense, it is in sacrificing that we become conscious of what we have. That makes sense to me and puts my confusion to rest.

The giving up of food is an act of self-discipline carried to extremes of fasting, especially in Islam. During the month of Ramadan, Muslims deny themselves food and drink, from the moment before dawn when one cannot distinguish the color of a thread to sundown, with exceptions for children and the sick. Catholic Christians used to be obliged to give up meat on Fridays, generally, and during Lent, except for Sundays.

I remember the agony my father’s father, a Bostonian agnostic, put the Irish family cook through by ordering her to roast beef on Good Friday! I found her in tears in the kitchen fearing she was committing a mortal sin. It did not endear this grandfather to me at the time. My mother’s father, an Episcopal priest and a vessel of kindness, would never have dreamt of doing such a thing. But Grandpa Billy seemed to relish the cook’s discomfort as she carried in the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. It took away my appetite.

There is, of course, another way of looking at the whole matter. How can giving up something material make it holy? The act of self-denial is more a matter of self-discipline. But what if were to give up a fault or a destructive habit, some negative psychological tendency, like anger or gossip or criticism? By giving up these, we would be transforming them by making them conscious, thus perhaps making them a holy offering. One could start by examining one’s unconscious projections such as labeling other people or defaming them . . .

Well, today is Mardi Gras, so I now will go in and have lunch and enjoy every bit that I can chew at my age, and before nap I will commence the great pleasure of rereading Jung’s “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass.” As he was a Swiss Protestant, it is a remarkably profound explanation.

Jung had a fascinating “complex,” it seems, with Rome. He could not bring himself to go there, and yet he studied and commented extensively on Roman Catholicism and carried on an extraordinary and lengthy correspondence with Father Victor White. It seems that on one occasion Jung and Toni Wolff were visiting Ravenna when the following incident occurred:

Even on the occasion of my first visit to Ravenna in 1913, the tomb of Galla Placidia seemed to me significant and unusually fascinating. The second time, twenty years later, I had the same feeling. Once more I fell into a strange mood in the tomb of Galla Placidia; once more I was deeply stirred. I was there with an acquaintance, and we went directly from the tomb into the Baptistery of the Orthodox.

Here, what struck me first was the mild blue light that filled the room; yet I did not wonder about this at all. I did not try to account for its source, and so the wonder of this light without any visible source did not trouble me. I was somewhat amazed because, in place of the windows I remembered having seen on my first visit, there were now four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty which, it seemed, I had entirely forgotten. I was vexed to find my memory so unreliable. The mosaic on the south side represented the baptism in the Jordan; the second picture, on the north, was of the passage of the Children of Israel through the Red Sea; the third, on the east, soon faded from my memory. It might have shown Naaman being cleansed of leprosy in the Jordan; there was a picture on this theme in the old Merian Bible in my library, which was much like the mosaic. The fourth mosaic, on the west side of the baptistery, was the most impressive of all. We looked at this one last. It represented Christ holding out his hand to Peter, who was sinking beneath the waves. . . .

I retained the most distinct memory of the mosaic of Peter sinking, and to this day can see every detail before my eyes: the blue of the sea, individual chips of the mosaic, the inscribed scroll proceeding from the mouths of Peter and Christ which I attempted to decipher.
(Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 284–285)

Jung then goes on to say that later he asked a friend to send him pictures of the mosaics. The friend responded that he could not find any pictures and was told that no such mosaics existed! And yet both Toni and he saw them in a strange blue light! This combination of events—the vision and the inability of Jung to travel to Rome during his lifetime—suggest to me some traumatic event, perhaps in a previous life connected to the Roman Catholic Church. I am so struck by this that I am hunting down an article by A. Plaut titled “Jung and Rebirth.” Perhaps Plaut had the same idea.

It is now almost a week since Mardi Gras, and I have decided I am becoming conscious of a tad of negative scrupulosity. It comes in the form of dealing with all my sins of omission! The things I ought to have done and have not done! This is one of the psychological abysses. Another, as I may have mentioned before, is the little phrase “If only . . .” Aaaaaaaaargh!

We are in the midst of a mega-snowstorm – actually beautiful to look at through a window in a warm house, but bad news for all who drive.

lovingly,
ao

Friday, March 6, 2009

The Unconsciousness of the Unconscious – CREDO LXIV

   
Jung defines the ego as the center of consciousness and tells us it is a very small part of the psyche as a whole. We all have to have one when we are awake and have to function in the world. And more importantly, while we are at it, we are identifying with it and thinking this is “I" am. Thus in my diagram it is the little circle on the circumference of the larger mandala or circle of the psyche. It is bisected by the circumference, one half looking out to the outer world and the other looking inward to the unconscious entirety of the Self, whose center point is focused like the wick in a candle to hold the universal flame of Spirit (our Divine Guest). As Jung points out, the problem is that the Self dwells in the unconscious!

So it is safe to assume that most people in this world are completely oblivious that they are unconscious of the Unconscious, and really all of us were until Sigmund Freud came along and explained it. Somebody pointed out that as Freud was doing this, the dark unknown interior of Africa was also being discovered. Certainly, one of the most important discoveries in recent times was Freud’s discovery of the ego, thus making it possible for us to be conscious of the Unconscious! He divided the psyche into three parts: the ego, the id, and the superego, and Jung, his early disciple, broke with him because it left Spirit out. (I am oversimplifying!)

Later, Jung added the complexes of anima/animus, Shadow, persona, etc., and wrote extensively about them in his Collected Works. The result has been that even today there are many who think of Jung as “wooly-minded,” but we and an increasing number of others see him as a prophetic man way ahead of his time. In fact, he seems relevant in many areas besides psychology.

Perhaps we forget that every night the Unconscious tries to come to us in dreams, which is why, even long before Freud, they are mentioned throughout history. The oldest work of fiction in the West, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, is an example. It has come down to us on clay tablets written in cuneiform more than three thousand years ago.

This unconsciousness manifests itself in all Shadow projections, both personal and collective. Politically and professionally, it can appear in what I call the “Guru Disease,” in which people identify with the Guru being projected upon them, while the Guru, at the same time he is busy castigating his disciples, is brought down by revelations of destructive personal indiscretions! Here Jung’s insights can be so helpful. As I began to lecture around the world, I myself received a good many projections of “Wise Woman” or “Fairy Godmother,” and I will repeat the help that I got from analyst Edward C. Whitmont. I went to him in fear of inflation. He wisely said, “Don’t deny it. (!) Count to ten and offer it up.” He could have put it another way: don’t identify with the projection! Since then I remind myself and others that I am only wise in one respect: I know for certain how much I don’t know!! And as I age, the vastness of my ignorance in all directions threatens to overwhelm me. I have forgotten who said it, but I agree with the certainty of nothing but the heart’s affection.

Knowing about our Unconscious also helps us to understand the wisdom of loving our enemy. Our “enemy” often is receiving our projection, and if we can see that we can learn what it is we abhor in him/her, we might be able to find what we are denying in ourselves. Jung says that he recognized this in himself when the person made him “hot under the collar”! If the person is truly evil, our reaction should be dispassionate compassion, knowing full well the karmic suffering of eventual consciousness that awaits him or her in the future. Father forgive them, they know not what they do.

Psychologically, there is also the “White” Shadow, which consists of hero worship of all kinds. It’s when we admire the good characteristics of others and envy them, not realizing “It takes one to know one!”


Jung distinguished between the personal and the collective Unconscious, the personal having to do with our own individual psyche and its challenges. As we deal with them and grow, we may tap into the collective. This has been reflected in some of the unusual dreams some of us occasionally have. Ira Progoff, I believe, uses a helpful analogy: he likens the personal Unconscious to a well and the collective to that underground stream that feeds all our wells.

The simple stories attributed to the individual life of a Teacher demonstrate this. Take the story of Jesus and the woman at the well. A man talking to a woman at a well is a common occurrence, but that conversation has gone down through two millennia. Or think of his observation about our seeing the speck in another’s eye but not the beam in our own. (He was a remarkable psychologist!) The reason parables, fables, and fairy tales endure is that they raise common individual experiences to a collective level. They reflect archetypal situations that repeat themselves through the ages. They, like the works of some enlightened authors, become classic! Shakespeare, for one.

I see a good reason to rejoice in the step offered us by psychology in the evolution of consciousness: It’s not that the truth has not always been there, but now some of us can say, “I am now conscious that I was unconscious of the Unconscious!” Wow!

The biggest problem remains the fact that the Self itself dwells in the Unconscious. It has now become the object of our ultimate yearning and what “Individuation” is all about, as well as the original intended goal of every religion. The problem with the great Western exoteric (extroverted) religions is that so much of them depend on the conscious ego to achieve this, but the ego is disqualified because it functions through duality .It can only point the way. (God is experienced as “outside” of us, and you have to follow our rules and definitions to find Him.) But, as Jung puts it in one of his letters, “I don’t believe God is all that interested in theology”! Esoterically (introverted), the mystics without exception tell us that our heart knows the only way to approach the Mystery. In other words, Love. Perhaps that is why astrologically the physical heart is ruled by the golden Sun, center and only star in our solar system. Ultimately, it justifies those famous words in the New Testament: She can be forgiven much because she loved much. Or the Dalai Lama’s “My only religion is kindness.”

Just give a moment’s thought to some of the people you have known that you remember who were dear to you. What did they have in common? How did they bless you by being in your life?

Time for lunch. Yum!

lovingly,
ao