OK, another huge Session. As Janet said, “ This would make a great play.” or Robbie saying it could be a dadaist movie. This section alone could be one. Wow!
I love the recaps Robbie does. This one really helped me in seeing the necessity of after the big activity of creation one needs to disassociate from the identity of Creator [God] and connect with the painful reality of ordinariness in order to continue on.
Well here are some notes I took that stood out for me.
The whole The Imitation of Christ section.
“If I thus truly imitate Christ I do not imitate anyone, I emulate no one and go my own way and will also no longer call myself a Christian.”
We cannot follow anyone’s model. Cannot be a Christian, a Jungian .....
Nothing predictable about his life, walking with his author.
Emancipation.
Author of your being writes your story.
Being a gay person I was forced to emancipate from Christianity, as well as the laws of our government.
Thank god[dess] I found dream work.
To me the author of my being writes my dreams.
So then we let go of all the teachings and “ ... begin down there, where I stood.”.
...and we begin in the “kitchen.”
..”not for man to choose his lot.”
Surrender to grace / faith / hope.
“We have to divine the wishes of the author.” To me it is surrendering to / waiting on & for my dreams[the creative spirit]
.. “live as noble a life as you [I] can.” ... of course figuring out how to live it is the trick (in the mercurial misleading world of dreams!)
“Let go daimon, you did not live your animal.”
The men in the white coats come to continue on the burning times of the early European witch hunts. (locking up those connected to the Other worlds, and of course that attitude continues on to this day.)
“I accepted the chaos, and in the following night, my soul approached me.”
Leading us into the amazing session 12, divine madness, the ancestors, the Dead!
Chris
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Good morning Janet - thank you for sharing the youtube with pictures from TRB accompanied by some unusual music! I too was touched by Lauren's offering and her 'moment to moment' being state resonated deeply with the magical child, alive and well, inside me. Her reference to God's thumbprint and I add birth imprints plus my lifetime blueprint events. Simply complex! We are all so uniquely and creatively evolving along our own way within the grand scheme of so many things. Peace + love Linda
Thank you all for shares, images and the exciting conversation about fractals. Linda, your personal story about going into psychic hell with your son touched me very much and triggered my own reflections – I have had a number of my own dismemberment experiences but none so searing as when my son fell into depression and rage at age 11. His journey into the underworld took me into the depths as well where beyond fear, I had to finally trust my intuition as a mother. Instead of “pathologizing” my son (who would have been a poster child for ADD) I trusted his truth and innate intelligence; I recognized as toxic the public school environment, which required him to fit into a box. I pulled him out of the public school system. This began a most wonderful journey of following the boy’s passion wherever it led; it opened our whole family to the world of improvisation, literally and metaphorically.
It is true that ultimately each of my journeys into the underworld have been regenerative, followed by greater authenticity and liberation.
I find this section about faith very beautiful and humbling. How does one accept life as it is?
I am subservient to the author of my fate, waiting upon/walking with dreams and divination tools as roadmaps to guide my unique path.
Yet, I have not “lived my animal”, My body is depleted. I sense that all the physical symptoms – low thyroid, insomnia, and not metabolizing nutrients—are patterns of a core issue. I survived as a child by dissociating from pain and keen awareness. I appreciate how my childhood psyche was protected in these ways and how the childhood wounds are gifts from “the author of my fate”; shattered family bonds led me to seek connection in the soul realm and fall in love with dreams. I learned to live with one foot in each realm. But the instinct to shut down continues as a form of survival even when there is much love and beauty in my personal life. To be fully embodied and visible at long last is terrifying to my soul who dashes away like Eros does when Psyche turned on the light. I still give more attention to a psycho-spiritual practice than physical activity. While I trust living by intuition, my body is not metabolizing life.
I feel both hope and fear in anticipation of going to a healing sanctuary. Can I trust in God’s mercy and rely on the kindness of strangers, friends and teachers? Can I go to that level of vulnerability?
I understand the idea of God’s mercy in another way. I see all of the players and events of waking life as patterns (fractals) of the Creative Life Force. I am awed by this Great Design of the Universe. (As Linda pointed out, I am beginning to sense the blueprint of many lifetimes.)
Yet, I cannot digest the chaos of our world falling into greater madness (that last shooting in Santa Monica was very close to home.) Jung responded to the collapse of his world by going inward. He offers a recipe for sustaining humanity/sanity: digest the poison of Innocence crushed by Evil; go not up into inflation (Big collective dreams inflate me with false ideals like “I have to help save the world”); ground not in logic or science which cannot answer or remedy why there is this insane destructiveness in the world, but into the realm of faith and prayer. I get that. I have to entrust myself to Creative Spirit to alchemically dissolve the inner blocks (petrified emotions) which would allow the Life Force to flow in and through me.
To feel everything (personal and collective) is overwhelming. Am I afraid of going mad? No, not really -- I am afraid of what others would think of my unique form of madness.
How does Jung go from seeing the Murder and Madness in his world to finding peace and humor in Divine Madness.
Divine Madness – can we unpack this some more?
Good afternoon all - Ric I missed seeing your offering of an introductory to the lecture photo and my anticipation with curiosity remains high hoping I can encourage you to forward us one. I do so anticipate and look forward to same. While listening to Robert in this Lecture; I heard him state the title of the movie 'Fear + Loathing' and notice I lost connection with any on-going lecture content and immediately recalled memories from my time as to why I first watched this movie. That movie was so disturbing to me at that time - the characters behaviors - absorbed in major overdosing, substance abuses of cocaine - such a nasty drug! So, now I need to go back and re-listen to that point in time where Robert names this movie and ponder how the content of that movie fits in with Jung and this particular part of TRB.
Awe yes, my naive innocence concerning hard core drugs is shining through, but there go I by the grace of God. I surrendered long ago, and do hold onto faith, hope and most of all - love! Regards Linda
Chris, Thank you for piecing together so beautifully the Christ passages – it is very meaningful. I am so touched by your personal journey and what an act of courage it is to own your uniqueness.
These Red Book lectures take me into deep contemplation and I identify very much with this part of the story, lectures 10 and 11, (as I understand it.) Thank you, Jung, and thank you, Robbie.
In my experience, every achievement is followed by collapse. When I reach a certain peak, the ego wants to grab hold and claim victory, but inflation is quickly squelched. For example, I give a presentation and it goes extremely well but then, I don’t follow up on the enthusiastic response with return phone calls. (I just had the novel idea that this is false modesty, i.e. hastening the collapse to deny my grandiosity and ambition.) My ego doesn’t like the confrontation with ordinariness and so takes charge of the narrative, dancing on my head and chanting “you are a failure as a therapist!” When ego is melting like the wicked witch of the West, it isn’t pretty.
My “magical inner child” thinks that every momentary success is finally going to fix the hole in her soul. When it doesn’t magically heal, she is crushed.
This segment reminds me of a dream from several years ago: In the dream, I am told to watch a movie. It is about the Son of Sam who is on a killing spree. He cannot be stopped. The movie goes back to the beginning of where his killing first began. I watch, a silent witness, as he takes the hand of a small girl, about two years old. Then I see his hulking body from the back; he stoops over something; he moves back to reveal the small girl dismembered.
I realized that the force which cannot be stopped is the Dark Face of the Divine. The Divine Child must be dismembered. She cannot live in suspended animation forever, always in her potentiality but never fully digested. My adult self has to accept defeat because I am not God, I cannot fix the wounds. I have to digest and accept the evil that fell upon my Divine Child. I am no more above evil doing and no more entitled to perfection than any other human being.
Dismemberment is happening now as three years training in Embodied Imagination culminates. I feel the stripping away of self-images developed in early childhood–nice girl, caretaker, therapist, rebel and spiritualist. These self-images keep my soul constricted and separate from real aliveness. I think this parallels Jung’s realization he cannot be an “ian.” The Creative Life Force needs an authentic connection and not a construct, moment to moment.
I am bound to reenact the patterns of my early childhood repeatedly until finally I surrender and accept the wounds and gifts life has dealt me as God’s thumbprint.
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Thanks Donna for bringing the Red Book to us. Definitely adds something to the discussion and the forum.
Chris
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