A Delight to Spend a Solstice Season Day with You in Jung-Job-Land
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Dear Seminar Participants: A delight to spend a Solstice Season day with you in Jung-Job-Land. Here is the promised PDF with some extra theme relevant quotes, images, and relections to hopefully expand our beginning conversation on the God image in Jungian thought and practice. Warmly, Terry Vanessa Perez Playing Chopin Op 28, # 15 Even when we don't desire it, God is ripening. Rilke PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION II Seminar for Professionals Seattle June 2, 2012 I have landed the great whale; I mean “Answer to Job.” I can’t say I have fully digested this tour de force of the unconscious. It still goes on rumbling a bit, like an earthquake. C. G. JUNG As Jung demonstrated and recommended to those who could stand it, one must meet the numinosum head-on and see what it has to say and whether one can integrate it. DAVID SEDGEWICK Post Religious Recovery and Reanimation of the Anima Mundi I behold you, noble, glorious and whole woman, the pupil of purity. You are the sacred matrix in which God takes great pleasure. The essences of Heaven flooded into you, and the Great Word of God dressed itself in flesh. You appeared as a shining white lily, as God looked upon you before all of Creation. Your flesh held joy, like grass upon which dew falls, pouring its life-green into it, and so it is true in you also, o Mother of all delight. Now let all Ecclesia shine in joy and sound in symphony praising the most tender woman, Mary, the bequeather/seed-source of God. Hildegard of Bingen SIDEWAYS Directed by Alexander Payne It all begins with the anima mundi, the bridge of connection and being between woman and the gods. In Carl Jung’s famous commentary The Philosophical Tree2, he reflected on a patient-generated series of tree drawings by persons in deep engagement with the depth psyche. Within that rich canon of therapeutically-generated image Jung found a whole healing cosmology, a cosmology that goes all the way back to Plato and through Plato to our shamanic cave origins. The tree is a living imago of Plato’s ancient world soul. Jung explitizes this connection of tree, symbol, and soul. The ancients called this Uber-earth spirit the Anima Mundi, the spirit of the world, one of the oldest consistent psycho-spiritual ideas in the west. The earth is pure psycho-spiritual space. This notion about the primary vitalism that underlies all sentient experience on the planet probably is as old as the Paleolithic cave sanctuaries, but certainly as old as Plato. It is a notion that the planet is alive, that she is Mother, Breast, Home to us all. The Tree stands as an essential demotic of Soul.3 Toward a Healing Merger • Religion and Science • Jung and Freud A Brief Topical Whirlwind Jungian Analysis is a weak theology, a clinical theology of doubt. When gold is in the mountain and we've ravaged the depths till we've given up digging, it will be brought forth into day by the river that mines the silences of stone. Even when we don't desire it, God is ripening. The Book of Hours I, 16 Rilke Yahweh said to Satan, "Where have you come from?" Then Satan answered Yahweh, and said, "From going back and forth in the earth, and from walking up and down in it." Job 1:7 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 for worse. (Jung, 1959, BBC interview) As a young man, I spent evenings looking at the sky and planets. I came away with enormous respect for the power of the universe. The planet Saturn has a unique and appealing beauty for me with its outer ring. I have always been drawn to this shape and wanted to create it in glass, a technically difficult feat. No one had ever attempted a shape like this. I had to work out the technique in my head for many years before I dared to attempt my first one. I finally succeeded in bringing my vision of Saturn, the most original and perfect organic form, to life in the mid-1960s. Since then, I have tried to represent this planet in the medium of glass with the utmost love and respect. --Lino Tagliapietra These materials are for private learning use and not to be distributed or copied in any form Full Power Point available for personal study after July 1 at: www.terrilllgibson.com Click on Downloads Tab on Left Column Click on relevant PDF By Seminar’s end, each participant should have a crisp introductory insight into these three major seminar objectives: To more fully understand perhaps Jung’s most difficult and most significant text—Answer to Job. To delineate an arguable theoretical case for Jungian analytical practice as inherently a product of and major contributor to the Psychology of Religion discipline. To frame a view of Jungian Psychology as BOTH empirical and theological practice, both art and science, both scientific and religious enactment. [Accepting a Creator alone, dualist universe worldview] without considering that in so doing we view life as a machine calculated down to the last detail, which, along with the human psyche, runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules. In such a cheerless clockwork fantasy there is no drama of man, world, and God; there is no “new day” leading to “new shores,” but only the dreariness of calculated processes. My old Pueblo friend came to my mind. He thought that the raison d’être of his pueblo had been to help their father, the sun, to cross the sky each day. I had envied him for the fullness of meaning in that belief, and had been looking about without hope for a myth of our own. Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence—without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being. Jung, C. G.; Sabini, Meredith (2011-06-28). The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Bild ist Seele When images manifest, they manifest as the self, and though they cannot be controlled or even predicted, they can be trusted. As Jung pointed out, the power and energy of the self manifests as an almost irresistible urge to be oneself. The self pushes one to the experience and expression of one’s own uniqueness; to this end it must order the archetypal world. The archetypes are collective forces, and the images that they produce are universal. An individual might simply follow these images, and, thereby, have numinous experiences. Yet he or she would never create the manifest self, which is unique and individual—and the central tenet of Jung’s model is that one must become one’s self. Raff [Jung, 11] The Liminal and the Numinal We swim in it. .psyche is something we swim in inside and outside ourselves. Thomas Singer The Liminal: The mediating fluid of the embracing Matrix The Luminescent: The glow, the radiance of personally and collectively achieved moments of Individuation—effervescent and elusive but so precious Unconsciousness has an animal nature. Yahweh is a phenomenon. Par 600, ATJ Despite current theories to the contrary, just being with the image is not sufficient; the ego must derive meaning from the experience. Raff [Jung, 19] JOB Revealing the Divine in [Wo]man The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the cooperation between the conscious and the unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable— perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that "God" is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in [wo]man. MDR The Numinal: The uncanny, embodied, terrifyingly-pleasant experience of the activated embracing Matrix The Sacrifice Andrei Tarkovsky • NECESSARY CLASH OF NECESSARY GOOD AND EVIL • INDIVIDUAL RESPONSE TO PERSONAL/ COLLECTIVE ANNIHILATION THREAT • INCUBATING INTERCOURSE IN SERVICE OF THE DEUS INCARNATUS With the departure of those with a native religious sensitivity and/or developed mind, collective religion is largely abandoned to various forms and degrees of fundamentalism in both West and East. The numerical surge of institutional fundamentalism bears stark witness to the baser lusts of humanity collective religion so often serves, namely, the need for instant certitude collectively reinforced in the face of the anxiety and fear of living with doubt. [Dourley, 44] Edinger’s Six Stages in the Evolution of the Western God n Animism n Matriarchy n Hierarchical Polytheism n Tribal Monotheism n Universal Monothesim n Individuation—The Discovery of the Psyche Yet, Jung was a great teacher. In the model that he presents for spiritual exploration and transformation, the world acquired a great legacy.