I sent this message the wrong way before. Since a couple of you have tried to respond, I am reposting essentially the same message in a discussion thread. Just something to think about, since we on the Alliance board are so committed to extending depth psychology to the masses. Here is the original message
Sending a message to the Alliance board probably isn't the right venue for this message, but I consider my esteemed colleagues, here, to be about the coolest and most generous peeps on the planet!
So . . . this lazy Saturday morning, as I was reading up on my news for the week, I came across two quotes that really peaked my interest from a depth point of view:
1) Tiffany Zhong, an 18-year-old analyst for a successful venture capital firm insists that "consciousness is synonymous with connectivity" for her generation.
What do you think about that?
2) From an article about the talk that caused his election to Pope by his fellow cardinals: "we need to think about the church that goes out to the periphery--not just geographically but to the periphery of human existence . . ."
And, what do you think about that?
As I go about my very ordinary life, fragments such as these provoke a quickening in me on a very visceral level. Somehow, they also make my collaboration with all of you and hard work on behalf of the Alliance a lovely thing!
Replies
Very nice. I realize how difficult it has been for me to connect over the past two weeks. I have attended two conferences in a row, which have been inspiring, but also draining. I also feel a generational gap here. Connectivity in the age of Facebook, the WWW and other things I am ignorant has redefined 'connectivity.'
Hard to say what Tiffany meant, but it reminds me of Jung's essay, "The Undiscovered Self" where he warns against mass consciousness: “The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.”
― and-- “...in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hand of a single madman.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 1957