“Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery…” Jung’s Red Book and other mind breaths and meditations.
March 18th
“If I pass a mirror, I turn away,
I do not want to look at her,
and she does not want to be seen. Sometimes
I don’t see exactly how to go on doing this.”
“Known to Be Left” - by Sharon Olds
@rdiskinblack and I read poems all afternoon, chatting, sharing his works as well as Sharon Olds’ homage to living on her own, enjoying the garden in springtime. The cats ran about, feeling the spring in the air.
March opened a feeling of spring renewal, plants and trees growing, stories popping from the ground, old sensations, into the day.
Robby and his crew dropped by and we told stories about Pete Seegar, MC5 and nova Scotia sea shanties as Shannon and Nico looked, listening intently.
At book group, we talked about Jung' s Red Book. Nico was particularly interested in what Julie had to say. Don’t be a hero says Jung. Celebrate the ridiculous.
Moving through a nervous breakdown after his break with Freud, Jung looked inside at dreams and myths, male and female selves, ever dueling, gods and heros, shadowns, and conflicts. At some point in 1913, he started channelling dialogues with Solome and the Oracle of Delphi, drafting notes of his active imagination, some hallucinations, others dreams, others fictions, dialogues and monologues with gods, in his head, integrating the madness of everyday life, drawing the outlines for his ever evolving theories of the self.
The result was the Red Book or Liber Novus named for the red leather binding drafted by the Swiss psychiatrist from1913 and about 1930, and first published nearly five decades after Jung passed on June 6, 1961, Küsnacht, Switzerland.
In much the same way as Ariel’s song in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, traces a metamorphosis into something rich and strange, by the sea, the Red Book reminds us we carry something magic inside us, something abundant, something rich and strange, ever changing bones of coral, eyes of pearls.
Lean into the darkness, learn from it, he wrote.
“Men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they go mad and one lays blame on the other…” says Jung, in The Red Book, p. 200. “If one half of mankind is at fault, then every man is half at fault. But he does not see the conflict inside his own soul, which is however the source of the outer disaster.”
I can never quite get away from that conflict.
Micah talked about this tension at Judson on Sunday, beginning with an invocation:
“A Prayer for This Cross You Carry That right there, That weight that whisper-screams, That heft you fear only you can hear, Let it soften you, So it has nothing left to hurt. Look down from the hill you’ve decided you must die on. …Find one face that hasn’t hardened. It’s there and it might even be yours. Eradicate all executioner energy from your own exhausted frame. Give in to your prophetic power without making yourself a martyr. Taste water where once only vinegar reigned. That right there is the lightness, Filled with brilliant breath, Tough enough to deny these nails And bring you back your life.”
Dismantle the empire inside ourselves, said Micah. Account for the harms and dangers, the words that injur, he says, recalling “The Three Gates of Right Speech,” a Spiritual Practice by Eknath Easwaran, “The Sufis capture this idea [of how to stand guard over the gate of the mouth] in a splendid metaphor. They advise us to speak only after our words have managed to issue through three gates. At the first gate we ask ourselves, “Are these words true?” If so, let them pass on; if not, back they go. At the second gate, we ask, “Are they necessary?” They [our words] may be true, but it doesn’t follow that they have to be uttered; they must serve some meaningful purpose. Do they clarify the situation or help someone? Or do they strike a discordant or irrelevant note? At the last gate we ask, “Are they kind?” If we still feel we must speak out, we need to choose words that will be supportive and loving, not words that embarrass or wound another person.”
I think about the words that I use, that I have used, that injur, the short sited words I didn’t mean, that caused damage, wishing I had had control of my speech, the words that came out of my mouth.
“Be silent and listen,” writes Jung in the Red Book. “have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”
Let it move through you, through us. Lets go there, learn from it, look at her, learn from her. Don’t turn away.
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