Replies

  • Douglas F. Williamson August 27, 2014 at 8:33am

    Hi Willene,

    Thanks for your response. I agree with everything you've said. My big takeaways are the stress Korten puts on acting with responsibility and morality. The applied ethics aspects implied in the practical side of adopting a new story is where I very much agree. I am a practical person concerned with social values change, and doing so embedded in a story of reverence, respect, interconnectivity or universality is for me a strong affirmation in this paper.

    I agree that the scope of the paper reduces things excessively, that we're operating on more storylines than the ones presented, that probably we all experience bits and pieces of each of the stories to some degree, and the separation is reductionist in a way that he argues against. I don't really fault that aspect of the paper. The storylines are broad and help to frame some of the larger issues discussed in the paper.

    I don't think Korten is trying to write the new story, but also provide some guidelines or broad storylines for the rest of us to do it. Or as you say, the artists, poets, musicians, dancers. The point that I also take away that I feel is very important and crosses over with your observation is the power of individual creativity. The point about the ego being a part of creation and not something to be reduced or detached as is taught in some spiritual traditions is excellent. I think the way he frames our individual creative and independent agency but embeds this within a larger unity is very affirming to me personally and to the work I am doing trying to help people unleash their creativity precisely for working on new narratives that will reflect a lot of the values that Korten and I share in our visions for a sustainable and flourishing Earth Community.

    Thanks a lot for your critique and the discussion. I really appreciate that you took the time to read and reflect and share your insights with me and the class. You rock.

    Douglas

  • Craig Chalquist, PhD August 25, 2014 at 3:33pm

    Jung recommended something along these lines: Get comfortable in a state of daydreamy reverie, then invite in the image you wish to engage. Let it firm up in your imagination. Watch it like a naturalist watching an animal. Eventually it will move around, transform, perhaps even speak to you. Engage in conversation with it. Once the picture is clear and solid, feel free to actually step into the imaginal world of this figure and interact with it.

    Have you heard of Jung's Red Book? It's basically one long series of active imaginations. The imaginal figures often tell you things that will surprise you. One such figure told Jung, in essence: You are not creating me; I am my own being. It can be uncanny, but it's always so helpful to get a multi-perspective view rather than the ego depending only on itself.

    • Douglas F. Williamson > Craig Chalquist, PhD August 26, 2014 at 5:51am

      Thanks, Craig. I will give it a try.

    • Bonnie Bright > Douglas F. Williamson August 26, 2014 at 1:50pm

      Doug, I don't know how easy it is for you to get your hands on books in Costa Rica, but if you find a way to get Robert Johnson's "Inner Work," it has some good information on Active Imagination and some guidelines, too. As he notes—and Jung before him—you want to go into the process very consciously and intentionally. Johnson even suggests he puts on a special jacket when he's going "in" to set a sort of threshold for himself as I recall.

  • Willene Jaqua August 25, 2014 at 7:50am

    PS - I've printed the article you sent and look forward to reading it today!

    hasta luego!

    Willene

  • Douglas F. Williamson August 25, 2014 at 7:30am

    I get the google search, but can't get to the website.  I think there's something wrong. Maybe it's trying to access from Costa Rica, because I've tried from home and work, and nada.

    No matter. Have a lovely day!

    Douglas

    • Willene Jaqua > Douglas F. Williamson August 25, 2014 at 7:46am

      Hi Douglas,

      if you google red book images, you will get many of the most famous paintings.

      Also, here's a Youtube of the images. The quality of these photos of Jung's paintings is not as good, but still you will get the idea. www.theredbookprints.com link is to the people who actually did the reproduction work for the 2009 publication of the red book. When you get to the US, do try to check them out which is as close as getting to see the real thing.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp8SQrBrQj8

      Also, here is the famous quote from Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections (his autobiography) about this time when he was in his process of active imagination, first through his "black books" and then culminating in the "red book" which he called Liber Novus:

      "The years... when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then."

  • Douglas F. Williamson August 24, 2014 at 7:15pm

    Thanks for the great reply, Willene.

    I can't get that red book link to work. Can you check it and resend it if it's wrong above.

    I'm still unclear about active imagination exercises, although I have experienced lucid dreaming, which I have really enjoyed.

    In any case, I want to thank you for taking the time to respond and share and make recommendations to me. I find that really valuable.

    I also want to share something with you and I'd be happy to have your thoughts.

    http://www.yesmagazine.org/pdf/kortennewstory.pdf

    Have a lovely evening and more soon!

    Douglas

    • Willene Jaqua > Douglas F. Williamson August 26, 2014 at 6:05pm

      Hi Douglas,

      Finally I have read the Korten piece in its entirety. Yesterday I had to go to Port Townsend for a quick day trip and so I was able to read some of it on the ferry there and back, and got the rest read this afternoon.

      With such a long essay, (29 pages) it's hard for me to organize my thoughts. First, thank you for sharing it with me. I wonder what I would do if I were trying to make such a huge gesture of summarizing past worldviews and offering a new one. So one of my first responses is appreciation of his effort.

      I think the essay itself cannot do the work of a new myth, in its current genre of writing. Do you experience that too? The writing itself is not beautifully expressed in the way we need our myths to be, even though it is very clear and very earnest. We need our artists, I guess, our poets, to help us with the storytelling. The importance of the symbolic level in our storytelling that is not just persuasive essay form.

      Personally, I shy away from sweepingly reductive accounts of something like the huge variety of religious and scientific experience. The attempt to reduce such experience into neat categories feels doomed to me. I don't know what the alternative is. Can we talk about the new story without these obviously inadequate accounts of the old stories? My father is a profoundly religious man in the protestant tradition. He has devoted his life to trying to understand and obey the will of God. I do not share his worldview, but I respect his life. The Distant Patriarch story in no way resembles the Judeo-Christian story my father is living. In my own life, My husband is an embedded system electrical engineer with a lot of physics background. Most of his career has been working with scientists, mostly on oceanography projects. His love of nature is profound in a completely different way than my father's spiritual search, but similarly devoted, and deep, and thoughtful, and humble. I don't think either of them would get past the opening sections of David Korten's essay. I think they would end up agreeing with a lot of what David ends up saying...I just don't think they'd get that far into the essay. It's a difficult dilemma.

      I don't think David Korten has much to say about the psychological condition of human beings. Our loneliness, our despair, the strange contradictions of good and evil that we each are. Here I think Jung has so much to offer to the systems theory discussion of how we should live. Even if we all agreed that the way to live is to adapt from centralized power to distributed, local decision-making, how do we deal with the phenomenon of contradictions in human behaviour. That's a real question for me. What about my shadow? To say that "caring and sharing" are the traits of our true nature is not the whole picture. It's part of the picture, but not all of it. I think that kind of one-sidedness is the weakest thing throughout the essay.

      I LOVE the  Discussion Guide Questions at the end of the essay. I think it would be fun to have a party and invite participants into that conversation, even without reading the essay. I also really appreciated the biography at the end in which the more personal details of David's search are shared. That's a clue to me. We need to tell out stories, our cosmologies in a personal way, somehow. It feels much more like truth then, on a heart level.

      I want to tell you what was most exciting to me in the essay. And I'd be interested in what is most exciting to you. For me, David does a great job of explaining what can go wrong with the Buddhist devaluation of the ego. On pages 11 and 12, he talks about how the ego and the illusion of separation are essential to the creative process. I think that is a super important insight. And it is something that the West has to offer to the Earth Community, if we can get back on track. The last 400 years of Modernist experiment did allow us to separate. We now really value what the indigenous peoples' worldview offers that we have lost. But is there something new possible, something really NEW that is not a return to the indigenous perspective, but a synthesis of that perspective with our new separated more autonomous egoic sensibility? In that way, maybe we are on the cusp of a wholly new sense of our partnership with the divine. Again, for me one of the most radically exciting ideas I have ever read is Jung's proposition that "God" is becoming conscious and moral through our experience. I think David picks up this theme really well in his section on Divine Purpose. I think it is a very huge and important idea.

      Sorry this is so long. I think I have trouble writing brief responses. I want so much to reply in a way commensurate with the importance of the presentations. I really appreciate your sharing the article with me and I learned a lot. It definitely speaks to the journey I am on.

      I'm also glad you asked about Active Imagination! I thought the responses you received today from Craig and Bonnie were both really great! And it helped me too. 

      I'm looking forward to our next class on Friday! Maybe we'll get to discuss in real time then!

      happy evening,

      Willene

    • Willene Jaqua > Douglas F. Williamson August 24, 2014 at 9:07pm

      Douglas,

      not sure why the link isn't working.

      if you google theredbookprints.com it should come up!

      at least it does for me.

      I'll check out your pdf from yes magazine tomorrow.

      take care,

      Willene

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