Again, sorry about the delay in introducing this lecture, posting something soon! Feel free to start without us!
Chris and Janet
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Again, sorry about the delay in introducing this lecture, posting something soon! Feel free to start without us!
Chris and Janet
You need to be a member of Depth Psychology Alliance to add comments!
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Good morning fellow travellers - I have returned from a wonderful vacation, at the close of lecture 10, and into the depth of hell (the devil - beauty is in the eye of the beholder). I will admit this was not my previous understanding of the phrase 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' Thanks Ric for sharing the amazing, mythology painting with explanation concerning another story concerning the 'eating of liver.' This brings a whole new perspective to historic, simple(?) enjoyment of eating liver sautéed in onions, something I used to be served in childhood.
I only have the Reader's Edition, so have not seen the images, however, Robert presented great 'ramblings' which I was able to imagine. Hell/Sacrifice remains very difficult/hard to digest material indeed!! Regards Linda
Thanks, Janet, for sharing your postpartum after the EI training. I continue to feel some grief around the ending.
As I listen to Robbie describe the way that emptiness craves beauty and that one has to look at the demon that lives within humanity, I must explore my own demons.
I had a dream last June (2012) that showed me the alien in my psyche and collective psyche.
I am in a suite of offices that are glass and chrome; it seems that I work here. There is the "alien" creature skirting around the office floor. It goes into one of the smaller offices and I see blood splatter. It goes into another office and again, there is a spattering of blood on the walls. Back in the common room, I try to step on it and to suffocate it in a plastic bag. But I cannot kill it. I realize that this alien might be vicious because it is out of its environment. Perhaps it needs love. I gather others and put my hands up to beam love at the creature. John Lennon's spirit appears next to me and begins to sing "Imagine."
When I embodied the dream, I felt in the glass and chrome a way of seeing through things that is like a crystal mirror, orderly and clear. I felt in my belly the “alien”, a fetus-like creature that has a ravenous hunger. I recognized that this creature wants “blood and guts” vitality and authenticity, which my “professional” persona is not fulfilling.
As I look at this dream now, I must accept that what seems alien is in me – a voracious hunger to fill inner emptiness. How have I cannibalized colleagues by wishing to be more like them?
The “tower” image has come up a number of times in dreams and today, I threw the hexagram, Tower, with the I Ching. The I Ching describes the tower as the way we see ourselves, people and situations. When I hold someone on a pedestal, how am I trying to get validation and stature from them? I have to recognize that craving validation and acceptance pulls on others’ energy. When I envy someone else’s creativity, might I be trying to steal it rather than looking for the creative force that resides in me?
The I Ching says that seeing from a “…height can give an overall view but it is incapable of the kind of creativity that springs from a feeling relationship with things at their base.” The I Ching, like the dream, suggests that real vitality and creativity develops from a deeper relationship with feelings and basic instincts rather than staying stuck in the glass and chrome tower of self-reflection, i.e. the mind.
I realize in the dream that I cannot kill the hungry bugger and so, offer love at a distance. Ultimately, I have to love the embryonic demon within so that its daemon will birth into life. In the dream, a creative force emerges in the Spirit of John Lennon who sings “Imagine.” When we find ourselves confronting an evil that cannot be killed, “Imagination” is offered as remedy to our predicament. This brings me back to the work Jung is willing to do in the Red Book—through the reality of the Imaginal realm, he faces the ugliness in life and digests it as a part of himself, in order to tend to the evil and suffering in the physical world. If we dissolve all duality – the belief that self is separate from the collective, and that waking life is completely separate from the Imaginal realm--then loving the ugliness in ourselves might bring about some sort of collective transformation.
Thanks Lauren, brilliant, beautiful and powerful.
When you talk about "trying to steal " another's creativity it reminds me of a book I was talking about today in a class at school, Johnsons, Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection, where he talks about giving our own Gold [creativity] away to another because it seems like to much for us to hold [own]. Well, knowing how amazing you are I can see how you have been taking back your "Gold", so, GET READY WORLD!!
LAUREN IS IN THE HOUSE!!
another MLK with a "Rainbow" vision.
Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California also murdered after "giving birth to a god."
The Times of Harvey Milk
I think this just went out as a message, thought I would post it.
A message from Janet Fortess to all members of Community Education-Red Book Study Group with Jungian Robert Bosnak on Depth Psychology Alliance!
Dear Forum Members,
How are you doing in a “world depopulated of the gods... where science declares the imagination unreal”? At this hallway point in The Red Book, the path seems steeper, darker, perhaps more despair.
I’ve been absent from the Forum and realize I’ve been experiencing postpartum at the end my three year training in Embodied Imagination. I imbued the god of Embodied Imagination with 10 trips from NY to LA, dream swapping with 9 of my 13 classmates, brief depth with both Robbie and Jill, much supplemental reading and in our last session in early May I gave a presentation of what has happened to/in me from working with Embodied Imagination since 1995. Now I just want to garden, cook, feed visiting family and avoid my “work”. Has the embodied imagination work in me gone into the world leaving me empty? I should be glad I’m not experiencing a more hellish afterbirth—the dreadful deformed brother of the god/vision. Even the weather has been like the counterforce of the vision—leaving LA 94*, arriving in Ithaca in the 20*s.
There, I'm back! Feeling always for the relevance of what Jung and Robbie are talking about in my life.
More soon,
Janet