Excerpts From The Depths

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

While unquestionably accepting the convention that personifying is pathological, we spoil our actual friendships, marriages, loves, and families by looking to people for redemption. We seek salvation in personal encounters, personal relations, personal solutions. Human persons are the contemporary shrines and statues where personifying is lodged. The neighbor's nod is the numen. Our cult worships or propitiates actual people---the family, the beloved, the circle of encounters---while ignoring the persons of the psyche who compose the soul and upon whom the soul depends.

James Hillman, “Re-Visioning Psychology”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

the dark seeks relationship

This was no dark, disordered world, basically antipathetic and committed to war on consciousness. Where it was dark, it had its own form of starlight and moonlight for the probing spirit to steer by, and laws of order and determination as precise as those that kept the stars in their courses in the universe without. The negations came only when man’s conscious self ignored his dependence on this world of the collective unconscious which had so mysteriously brought it forth and tried to establish some kind of independent tyranny over what ultimately only sought to nourish and increase their partnership.

Trouble started only when the part of the human personality which was conscious behaved as if it were the whole of man. There was nothing this unconscious world abhorred more than one-sidedness. When one extreme of spirit attempted a monopoly for itself another extreme sooner or later rose titanic in the unconscious to overthrow it. That is why the history of man was so much a swing from one opposite of spirit into another as Heraclitus had observed milleniums before.

Laurens van der Post, “Jung and the Story of our Time”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

Whenever we do something unconsciously, ritualistically, personally, and imaginatively to sanctify an environment, there, usually, is where the spirits live with greatest vitality: the woman who places a picture of her family on the bedside table of her hotel room, the man who places an acorn next to a photograph, the child who says good night every day to the same objects, the lighting of a candle at night for dinner. We think we have left religion and spirituality, but many of us have simply brought the spirits closer to home.

Shaun McNiff, “Earth Angels”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

So historically the extrovert had tried to achieve meaning by form shaped to contain, the introvert by change and moving outward and on. One sought his meaning mainly within, the other without; the one, as it were, be breathing in, the other by breathing out, but neither making the whole being of man. What life demanded was a state of man whose spirit breathed both in and out.

Laurens van der Post, “Jung and the Story of our Time”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

soul misplaced=gods in persons

Through the worship of the personal, personal relationships have become the place where the divine is to be found, so the new theology asserts. The very condition that modern rational consciousness would dissuade us from---personifying---returns in our relationships, creating an animistic world of personified idols. Of course the archetypally loaded relationships break down, of course they require constant propitiatory attention, of course we must turn to priests of this cult (therapists and counselors) for instruction concerning the right ritual for relation to persons. For persons are no longer just human beings; they have been dehumanized by being divinized. Our weekends of encounter, our group sessions and sensitivity workshops, are religious phenomena: they attest to where the divine persons now reside---in human beings.

James Hillman, “Re-Visioning Psychology”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

Denial of metaphorical vision breeds obsessive literalizing

Where are the angels and demons and archetypal configurations, now that these persons have been refused admittance to the theological, natural, and psychological worlds?

Of course we find the missing persons in psychopathology. There they are at least recognized as authentic even if they are identified with sickness. But personifying appears mainly today in personalizing---the magnification of personal life---which is perhaps a sickness disguised as health. Personifying, having been dismissed from consciousness, returns surreptitiously as personalizing.

An axiom of depth psychology asserts that what is not admitted into awareness interrupts in ungainly, obsessive, literalistic ways, affecting consciousness with precisely the qualities it strives to exclude. Personifying not allowed as a metaphorical vision returns in concrete form: we seize upon people, we cling to other persons. They become invested with repressed images so that they grow in importance, become idealized, idolized, while the psyche finds itself more fascinated, more glued and stuck to these concrete individuals than it would have been to the metaphorical persons that are at the root of projection onto people. Without metaphorical persons, we are forced into desperate clutching literalisms.

James Hillman, “Re-Visioning Psychology”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

And this connection between love and psyche means a love for everything psychological, every symptom or habit, finding a place for it within the heart of imagination, finding a mythical person who is its supportive ground.

James Hillman

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

If we are apt to take our partners and intimate human companions for granted, we are even more likely to move through anesthetized routines within our physical environments, missing their communications. The familiar spirits are the ones we are less likely to see. 

Our most basic tendencies can be reimagined as expressions of soul---the way we arrange things, or don’t arrange things, in refrigerators, shelves, drawers, closets, counters. Every home is packed with unconscious ritual acts---heating water in the morning, dusting the table, mowing the lawn, feeding the cat, reading before bed.

Even people who deny the presence of angels and describe beliefs in spirits as old superstitions nevertheless carry on archaic spiritual practices unintentionally. In looking for spirits, pay more attention to what people do than what they say. Spirit is a quality of an action, something that emerges spontaneously and unwatched, as distinguished from thoughts of what we think we are doing. Walk into any home and you are likely to sew conscious and unconscious shrines invoking spiritual animation.

-Shaun McNiff, “Earth Angels”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

Every image has a distinct spirit. Our most sacred altars are typically these unconscious displays of artifacts arranged in homes or rooms away from home.

Shaun McNiff

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

“I” as soul-eater...the plurality of psyche in place of a unitary whole

...the first hurdle to be taken is psychological. We can do little exploration of the imaginal until we have surmounted our own egocentricity, that capital I appearing in the monotheism of consciousness (Jung), in monotheistic science and metaphysics, and in the root of all: the monotheism of Christian humanism with its tolerance for but one historical, unique divine personification. 

The egocentric psyche with its one eye fixed on wholes and unities may grudgingly admit personifying as a figure of speech, but never that the imaginal realm and its persons are actual presences and true powers.

We are driven, therefore, to learn something from psychopathology, taking imaginal persons as seriously (if not as literalistically) as does someone with his delusions or hallucination. Then our idea of personifying would include its full “pathological” implications. This means nothing less than dethroning the dominant fantasy ruling our view of the world as ultimately a unity---the real meaning, real beauty and truth require a unified vision. It also means that we would abandon a notion of our personality as ultimately a unity of self. Instead of trying to cure pathological fragmentation wherever it appears, we would let the content of fantasy cure consciousness of its obsession with unity. By absorbing the plural viewpoint of “splinter psyches” into our consciousness, there would be a new connection with multiplicity and we would not longer need to call it disconnected schizoid fragmentation. Consciousness, and our notion of consciousness, would reflect a world that is diverse and unsettled.

Not merely would our psychological ideas about self, consciousness, and even God change shape; not merely would precise differentiation of qualities replace the measurement of quantities as the method of psychological knowing; but we would find ourselves no longer alone in our subjectivity. Our possessive notion of ownness, our private notion of privacy---the private self---indeed the very notion of the unit as basis for the fantasy of ourselves, would no longer provide the model on which our house of splinters is built. All would depart together: unity and uniqueness, identity, integration and integrity as simplicity, and individuality and undividedness. And with the departing dominant unitary fantasy would go as well its dominant emotion: loneliness.

-James Hillman, “Re-Visioning Psychology”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

Jung’s psychic objectivity

Henceforth, Philemon accompanied him as a kind of archangelic guide throughout his journey, as Virgil had been for Dante. He represented superior insight to Jung and we shall find him in due course honored, calm, and authoritatively installed in that tower and fortress of the being of himself he was to build in his house of stone at Bollingen on the upper shores of Lake Zurich.

From him, Jung says, he was to learn real psychic objectivity. It was he who taught Jung how there was a dream, as it were, dreaming him, and that what he had regarded as his own thoughts were no more his own than tables and chairs encountered in a strange room. Just as Jung would not think of claiming that he had manufactured such pieces of furniture, Philemon would tell him, he could not claim that he had made, unaided an alone out of his own conscious self, the thoughts that were in his mind. They too were objective events within him; they were thoughts thought through him and his conscious self. He was not their creator but observer and at most guardian and pilot in the world without.

-Laurens van der Post, “Jung and the Story of Our Time”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

Foolishness, simplicity, naivete almost to the point of Dostoevsky's concept of idiocy, [Jung] stressed, was a divinely inspired state and had to be served as such.

Laurens van der Post

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

Will be resuming posts soon!! I was thinking and want to incorporate a journal of my dreams into this blog, as I’ve begun some heavy reading and diving into dream imagery lately. Thanks to the beautiful aid of jungian and depth ideas/concepts/practical applications! I’ll post the unedited dream with the associated image (this painting I did is in oil) of its impression upon my waking consciousness. This will also act to help me be more active in the commitment to listening to my inner voices and participating in an active dialogue with them.

**I highly recommend The Dream Story by Donald Broadribb, it’s part of the Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts Series if you’re already familiar with the basic premises of depth dream interpretation. I loved this book because it puts theory into context by providing real examples from an analyst’s practice and how he and his clients worked with them to uncover their contents and meaning over time. And most importantly, how to integrate them into real life instead of leaving them as abstract images of intellectual contemplation :)

———————————————— 6-19-16

“Virus, see it enter my hands, makes me seize in my body, they wrap me tight all around my body with a blanket I’m breathing through the thick layers– I start hallucinating, I’m fed lsd—were outside, something out of the sky is falling it’s dangerous people get out of the way it falls and kills someone, something hits me on the head like a concussion, owner didn’t bother to tell me that I had the virus in me, the virus began with the white rings around my two fingers”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

I said, “People insist that the spirit is ‘real,’ standing right next to them, and ‘not imagination.’ It does not have to be this way. Whether or not it is actually present is irrelevant to me.”

Literalizing the angel disparages the imagination, which is the primary faculty or intelligence of the spiritual consciousness.

I continued, “I can accept what people say about spirits actually standing next to them, touching them, and guiding them away from dangerous situations, even though I do not have these experiences in my life. I am sure a physicist or a banker will see the creative spirit in ways quite different from me.

Although the things of the world express themselves autonomously to everyone who contacts them, our individual faiths and visions will shape how we see the angel, who is an expression of the soul’s desire for intimate and individuated experience. The angel appears within the frame of how we imagine the world.”

-Shaun McNiff, “Earth Angels”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

An ethical fraternity, with its mythical Nothing...is a pure vacuum and can never evoke in man the slightest trace of that age-old animal power which drives the migrating bird across the sea.

C.G Jung, from Laurens van der Post’s “Jung and the Story of Our TIme”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

“Understanding is a fearful binding power,” he [Jung] wrote, “at times a veritable murder of the soul as soon as it flattens out vitally important differences. The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which is snuffed out when it is ‘grasped.’ That is why symbols want to be mysterious; they are not so merely because what is at the bottom of them cannot be clearly apprehended...All understanding in general, which is a conformity which general points of view, has the diabolical element in it and kills. It is a wrenching of another life out of its own course, forcing it into a strange one in which it cannot live...True understanding seems to me to be one which does not understand, yet lives and works...We should bless our blindness for the mysteries of the other; it shields us from devilish deeds of violence. We should be connivers at our own mysteries but veil our eyes chastely before the mystery of the other, so far as, being unable to understand himself, he does not need the ‘understanding’ of others.”

-C.G. Jung on understanding, from Laurens van der Post’s “Jung and the Story of Our Time”

[intothedepthsofpsyche]

“Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood,” he [Jung] told me once, with a twinkle of mischief in an acute glance and an almost Mona Lisa smile of the inspired irony native to living wisdom. “One would instantly be deprived of one’s personal raison d’etre if one were. I’d hate it myself. I learnt very early on at the Burgholzli how hurtful it could be to my patients to give them a feeling that I knew and understood them better than they did themselves.”

-Laurens van der Post, “Jung and the Story of Our Time”