Another Week

Yesterday, after work, I made up my mind that I was going to return Jung's "Red Book" to the library. It was a day overdue and it's hard to get an extension on inter-library loan books. Plus, I've got plenty of books and magazines around here to read but not enough time to read most of them as it is. But when I got up to the counter to hand the book off to the librarian I changed my mind. I asked her if I could keep it for another week and she didn't think it would be a problem, they just had to do some paperwork on it. Once again, I walked out the library with "The Red Book." This time not feeling excited but slightly obligated and overwhelmed.

This morning, to justify my keeping it, I was determined to randomly open it and just start reading a section or some footnotes. So, I did. The first paragraph that I layed my eyes on was underlined in pen by someone else. It read:

"It is better to be thrown into visible chains than into invisible ones. You can certainly leave Christianity but it does not leave you. Your liberation from it is a delusion. Christ is the way. You can certainly run away, but then you are no longer the way." [Pg. 293]

I think it's noteworthy because this is more or less what I've been getting at in some of my posts after the sermon from my fundamentalist neighbor. I also wrote down another quote that I think is somehow related to telephone sermon:

"Like everything healthy and long-lasting, truth unfortunately adheres more to the middle way, which we unjustly abhor." [pg. 293]

Seeing more blue herons around here. Time to go add to my firewood pile.

From Jung to Uecker

I had someone tell me the other day that I had to let the telephone sermon with the fundamentalist, firewood cutting neighbor go; that I should just let it roll off my back. I don't know if the person thought I was wounded or hurt or what. Somehow I got the feeling that they thought I needed support in this. Or perhaps that I needed protection. That's not the case at all. I'm geniunely interested in some of the things the guy had to say. Of course, when you're interested in anything there is focus, attention, emotion and values and so on. And anyone that knows me knows that I don't just let things go. I can't. It's impossible. I still brood and think on things that were said to me 25 years ago. Anyway...

During the conversation my neighbor said that he hears the prophetic voice of the lord on a daily basis. I think the guy does hear voices. And I'm not saying that in a contemptuous way. I don't think he's a nutcase. Granted I don't agree with some of the things that his voices are telling him, but I'm interested that he's hearing voices. Why? As I've mentioned before, I'm reading bits and pieces of Jung's "Red Book", and that's what the whole thing is about. It's an account of a man dealing with the voices of his internal figures. He's telling those of us in the Western tradition that we all have internal figures and voices that we hear. That's your soul. And we need to get to know and discern which figures are saying what. I think that's what good fiction writers do by the way. I've heard authors say that the characters they create actually take over their life at times.

All of that interests me.

Last night, while I was grilling burgers, I saw two blue herons fly over and heard some Canadian geese off in the distance. I'm not sure, but I think I heard sand hill cranes as I was getting into the Park Avenue to head off to work. There's still alot of standing water and snow around here. Our old horse barn finally caved in.

Oh, and Bob Uecker thinks that Justin Upton beat B.J. to the table quite a bit when they were kids.

Those are some of my thoughts and observations before I head out to cut firewood on this gray day.

A Two-Thousand Year Curse

The other day I posted about the telephone sermon that my firewood cutting, fundamentalist Christian neighbor felt that he needed to give me. I'm a bit worried that come across as anti-Christian or anti-religious or just beyond all of that at times. I don't think I am. I was born and baptized a Christian for gods sakes. I may proclaim that I'm not Christian on the surface but below I am. The great thinker and psychologist James Hillman convinced me of this last year, and he alluded to it here in Lament of the Dead (A conversation about Jung's Red Book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in Jung's work.)

"When I'm talking about the Christians, I'm not only talking about those who are denominationally officially Christian, or go to Church or whatever. We're all Christians. We're all suffering the two-thousand year curse that has been laid on us by what you all like so much, the early Church." (Pg. 218)

Perhaps, I'm just one of the billions suffering from the two-thousand year curse.

My Big Red Friend

I spent some time with my big, red friend this morning. I ran across this statement that Carl Jung made in a seminar back in 1930.

"We are prejudiced in regard to the animal. People don't understand when I tell them they should become acquainted with their animals or assimilate their animals. They think the animal is alway jumping over walls and raising hell all over town. Yet in nature the animal is a well-behaved citizen. It is pious, it follows the path with great regularity, it does nothing extravagent. Only man is extravagant. So if you assimilate the character of the animal you become a pecularily law-abiding citizen, you go very slowly, and you become very reasonable in your ways, in as much as you can afford it." [Pg.296, The Red Book]

It's interesting to note that the other day when I called into Wisconsin Public Radio the guest from the Wisconsin Towns Association kept repeating throughout the program that local ordinances must be reasonable. I'd say that if the citizentry assimilates the "character of the animal," as Jung recommends, a very reasonable response to any potential harm moving into a community is to simply say NO. You cannot mine our sand, spray pesticides on the fields, spread shit across a 1000 acres, or pack close to a thousand head of cattle on less than adequate acreage.

Jung's Red Book

Yesterday I got the chance to pick up Carl Jung's "Red Book" from my local library through inter-library loan. The book is huge. My wife says it's bigger than a sheet-cake pan and it looks like a real page turner. She also said it'll also cure me of falling asleep in bed with a book. It's possible that it could give me a concussion or a bloody nose if I hold it just right and doze off. My son laughed at me when he walked by the kitchen table as I was reading it. He said it looks like a giant wizard's book. When I walked out of the library with it I felt like a boy again. Similar to what it felt like when I walked out of the grocery story with a new pack of baseball cards thirty years ago. Part of it, I think, is because of the sheer size of the book and the other is that I'm giddy about having it in my hands. I'm interested in reading about an intense conversation between a man and his soul.

Like usual I was looking through the footnotes and found this quote: "If he [A Man] accepts the feminine in himself, he frees himself from slavery to woman."( pg.263) D.H. Lawrence once said something like if a man doesn't organize his life around his vision he will become a slave to a woman's sex nights. I'll have to look the quote up again. I probably murdered it. I wonder if this is why some men can't live without pornography. They have a hard time accepting that other half of themselves.

That's my amatuerish psychological insight for the day.

Belief and Believing in God

I read the quote below to my 14 year old son this morning. He's a big fan of The Percy Jackson series (My wife is actually reading it right now) and the rest of Rick Riordan's work. And he occasionally wonders out loud if the Greek Gods actually exist. The answer I usually come up with usually is: Well, Carl Jung use to have a latin saying above one of his doorways that said: "Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit. ... Summoned or not summoned, The God is present."

Also, the quote below also reminds me of deer season a few years back. On the afternoon of Thanksgiving, my dad and I were in the bar having a couple of beers after registering a deer I'd just shot that morning. There was a guy about my age (I'm 39)sitting across from us that was close to falling-of-his-barstool drunk. He looked over at me and asked if I believed in Bigfoot. I shot back with, "I don't believe in anything." It just came out.

"James Hillman: Belief is captured in the realm of religion and Christianity makes a big deal of it. Credo. And the Christian God, you know, starts with the credo, I believe in Jesus Christ, and so on and so forth. That's part of the testament of faith. And I often wondered what would happen to the Gods of Christianity in no one believed in them. They require belief. If the God says you have to believe in me, then belief is what supports the God. The Greeks did not ask people to believe in their Gods. The Gods asked for certain rituals, or not to be forgotten, that was the most important thing. Not to be forgotten.

"Sonu Shamdasani: Belief automatically valorizes disbelief. To say 'believe in something' is a statement: the addressee is starting from a position of disbelief, or nonbelief, and is asked to move from that state to one of belief. This is the whole shift that Jung completely tries to discount. It's not a question of belief, nor was it a question of disbelief." [Pg.128, Lament of The Dead]

The Soul and Imagination

I had a guy tell me the other day that he didn't believe that we have souls. I don't know if we do or not. But I found this quote referring to Carl Jung and "The Red Book" interesting:

"...actually what he [Carl Jung with his Red Book] reestablished was that the psyche is a living world of imagination and that any person can descend into that world. That's your truth, that's what you are, that's what your soul is. You're in search of soul, and your soul is imagination. As Blake said, Jesus, the imagination, meaning the very creative power, the redemptive power, the strength that you are, is given to you by this remarkable thing that Coledridge called the esemplastic imagination, this force that presents itself figured. They are your teachers, they are your motivators, and they are your landscapes. That's what the habitations of your depths are. This seems to me the prophecy. I think this is the teaching that DOES come out [of the Red Book]."--James Hillman, Pg. 114, Lament of the Dead

Listening To The Dead and Adulthood

"It is an adult perception to understand that the world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. They created it, they wrote its literature and it songs, and they are deeply invested in how children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them."--Robert Bly, pg. 238, The Sibling Society.

"The work is [Carl] Jung's 'Book of the Dead.' His descent into the underworld, in which there's an attempt to find the way of relating to the dead. He comes to the realization that unless we come to terms with the dead we simply cannot live, and that our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions." Sonu Shamdasani, pg. 1, Lament of the Dead

No Mommy, Daddy, Me

Ever since hearing James Hillman mention in one of his talks that when he did therapy he always tried to make sure his patients talked about their grandparents instead of their parents, I have been fascinated. He said one thing that this did is help move the patient's mind away from so-called concrete events and into fantasy and imagination which is basically all it is anyway. In other words, what I'm hearing him say is our behaviors, habits, and emotions are fantasy based. Here is what he has to say in the Lament of the Dead. If I understand it right this was the final project he was working on before he died.

J.H:"When I was doing therapy, back in another period of history, I always tried to escape the parents, which was the story that the person always wanted to tell me--what their mother did and what their father did. You notice Jung hasn't a lot to say about them anywhere in the Red Book."

Sonu Shamdasani: "There's no 'Mommy, Daddy, me,' as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would put it."

J.H: "But to go and ask people about their grandparents and their great-grandparents and imagining all their great-grandparents sitting down at a table. That would be eight people. Could they eat the same food? Could they talk the same language? Could they even sit with each other? But the ancestors in the book--see the reason being that it shows the enormous complexities in human nature and the incompatibilities in human nature. And the fact that your actual parents whom you think cause everything are actually the result of those tremendous incompatibilities themselves. It frees them up too." --Pg. 3, Lament of the Dead

How Do They Do It?

Yesterday I was talking to a friend about Thomas Moore's book, Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism, which I read two summers ago. During our talk I mentioned to my friend that I'd heard Moore mention in a radio interview that I downloaded last year that he felt compelled to write that book because he'd just started out practicing psychotherapy and a lot of his patients were coming to him with dreams filled with kinky sex, death, and murder. It has always fascinated me how an analyst can handle sitting across from a patient and listen to them reveal the different dimensions of their soul. Well, this morning, while reading James Hillman's biography I ran across this quote in a letter that he wrote to his mother in his early thirties:

"To be an analyst is a hell of a burden, since the questions one must face are not to be answered easily, else the patient himself would have found the answers. Every hour of working with someone involves the whole personality, with all it weaknesses especially in this Jungian method where the two people sit face to face, and not where one does all the talking lying down and the other hides behind a note book out of sight.. So this autumn I have been depressed over facing all the implications of my work, my shortcomings, mistakes...It has never been clear sailing but the difficulties become more apparent as one gets nearer the port. One can only have an effect on the other person if one can experience certain symbols and certain problems and certain wounds. In ancient times the physician was symbolized as having a wound himself, or the same disease as the patient. Or he carried or caught the patient's disease and thus by curing himself cured the patient. Since most of the illnesses brought to the consulting room are the standard illnesses of our day, illnesses which everyone has and shares, I have to work these things in myself before they can be of any use to anyone else."--[James Hillman in a letter to his mother in 1957, pg. 441, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman]

On a different note but somewhat related. Yesterday I ordered Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung's Red Book. It was the last project James Hillman was working on before he died.

Jung on Yoga And Eastern Religion

Carl Jung on practicing yoga:

"The European who practices yoga does not know what he is doing. It has a bad effect upon him, sooner or later he gets afraid and sometimes it even leads him over the edge of madness."-- Carl Jung, Pg. 346, The Ideas of James Hillman

You've got to wonder if this psychological insight still holds true today to some degree.

American Marriages

A curious thing:

"American marriages are the saddest in the whole world, because the man does all his fighting at the office." -- Carl Jung

Fishing and Essence

Henry David Thoreau once said, “The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover that it was not fish you were after.” Carl Jung, I think, was getting at the same thing by saying, "In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted."

I remember hearing someone say that Carl Jung thought that this is what the second half of life was about. James Hillman didn't think so. He thought it could be realized earlier (The Souls Code describes this well), especially in adolesence. It just takes the right person to see that fish or essence.

Gods and Porno Flicks

Could it be that Aphrodite finds her way into one's home through the porno flick? Maybe Jung is right, if we look hard enough we'll find the gods in our diseases.

Number Two

I was going to write more on yesterday's subject, but I got sidetracked. Over the winter I read Carl Jung's autobiography Memories Dream and Reflections. And after reading and returning it to the library I remembered two quotes that I regretted not writing down, so I thought I would have to take some time during the upcoming winter to reread it. But while my wife was shopping at a local thrift store a few months back I found one of the Jung quotes while I was paging through Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul. I just opened the book up and there was the quote. I felt lucky. That day I ended up buying two good looking copies of Care of the Soul and Soulmates, both by Thomas Moore.

Well, this morning, the second Jung quote revealed itself to me when I opened up Care of the Soul:

"When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I'm under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and distant ancestors."--Carl Jung

There are times when I do to.

Just Appeared

This quote found its way into my hands again yesterday. I thought I would have to go searching for it ever since I read Jung's Memories, Dreams and Reflections a few months back. But to my surprise, while I was reading through Thomas Moore's Soul Mates at a second-hand store in Rice Lake, and I ran across it. Actually, I opened up the book and there it was.

"Other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection."--Carl Jung

Inside and Outside

Saw and heard the first robins this morning. Always a welcome and pleasant sound this time of year.

This quote caught my attention while reading Loose Ends earlier today:

"'The soul functions in the body, but has a greater part of its function outside the body...(and)imagines many things of the utmost profundity outside the body, just as God does'." [Jung talking about the alchemist Sendivogius's perspective on soul, Pg. 153, Loose Ends]

Many Gods

I woke up this morning with a plan to post a simple quote with an article talking about the acidification of the oceans, and than I ran across this excerpt in James Hillman's "Loose Ends." The excerpt shook me up a little, and is important to me, because I learned in reading his autobiography a few months back that Carl Jung's house was being haunted for a brief period until he finished the book this excerpt was from. In other words, the invisible beings were not going to leave him and his family alone until he finished the book, atleast that is the conclusion he came to upon reflection of the experience.

"For me, to whom knowledge has been given of the multiplicity and diversity of the gods, it is well. But woe unto you, who replace these incompatible many by a single god. For in so doing ye beget the torment which is bred from not understanding, and ye mutilate the creature whose nature and aim is distinctiveness. How can ye be true to your nature when ye try to change the many into one? What ye do unto the gods is done likewise onto you. Ye all become equal and thus is nature maimed...The multiplicity of the gods correspondeth to the multiplicity of man."[Carl Jung, Seven Sermons of the Dead]