Lecture 6- Red Book Study Group - The Anchorite / Dies II March 30 - April 13 - ARCHIVED-Red Book Study Group with Jungian Robert Bosnak

Gunni-Britt Borden April 14, 2013 at 5:36am

A very 'cool' photo for this lecture. Thank you for sharing. I wonder if you would send it to me directly. It has personal meaning. gunnibritt@comcast.net If you choose not to, I understand. Britt

Gunni-Britt Borden April 14, 2013 at 5:31am

Ooops...looked up silent generation, it is 1925 - 1942. I had previously been told it was to 46, and I was born in 45.

I grew up in Europe, so I am not sure if any of this applies anyway. I have never heard anyone there talk about generational names. The environment I was born into, did not have much in the way of opportunity. I grew up believing I had nothing to contribute to any discussion, and It was likely true at the time. And now, I still hesitate - here are so many things to consider before saying anything about anything : ).

The grief I struggle with, having processed much from my personal past, is connected to environmental destruction, and my own lack of faith.

In God's Answer to Job, Jung seems to come to the conclusion that God needs to experience the world of limitation through us? This may explain the folly and horror of events, but is not much consolation. How long does it take God to understand suffering and destruction?

I am not sure there is a way to get through grieving planetary destruction. I will think about the 9 steps by Susan Carter. Is she missing 3 steps? I thought all addiction healing had 12 steps : ). Am I addicted to grieving? just a thought. Means I don't have to get on with living.

Sorry, I did not mean to turn this into self-analysis.

Best wishes, Britt

Linda AK Thompson, PhD > Gunni-Britt Borden April 14, 2013 at 2:06pm

Good afternoon Britt - growing up in Europe, Post-wars; all the devastation/destruction - horrific. Your a child survivor, arising phoenix who saw/heard plenty, came into the land of opportunity with plenty to share with us.

Yes, there is much to consider before expressing oneself, however, we joined this forum call ,of free will, have a great leader, Robbie and two wonderful moderators - Janet + Chris plus we have each other. I have never done anything like this before and required a great leap of courage/faith to plunge into the depths of the work of the master himself, especially and in light that I am a novice in the Jungian way, but not depth.

I will need to ponder God's need to experience the world of limitation through us. Unable to wrap my head around that one phrase. According to some scripture, there is nothing new under the sun, however, humans continue to recycle follow and horrific events, hence and perhaps, man ought to listen to Jung's wisdom concerning 'unlearning.' It is shocking the Korean people are so indoctrinated, controlled and dominated by a dictator/military regime, so familiar and not that far back - Jung's time, our parents time, and we were born post-WW2.

Unable to even comprehend God's understanding, but do consider how long it took me to understand deep suffering and destruction.

Europe was able to rebuild and many civilizations have been annihilated. I am very upset about the plastic in the earth's water and what it is doing to the creature who live in the ocean. They have created a plastic that disintegrates, so why is the other, non-degradable plastic, not annihilated from use on the globe?

That is good you will ponder the 9 themes (not steps) to the phenomena of grief. To be honest with you and to date; I have not encountered a person addicted to grief! Anyways, great soul food for thought, no need to apologize, self-analysis is a natural process when one has a moral compass intact, our moderators directly ask all of us for our thoughts and I love that you are vocal too.

I have spent enough solitary time in my own work and desert experiences and how appropriate for all of us to 'come out' within a forum setting with master Jung's great works and sharing of fruit. Regards Linda

Janet Fortess April 13, 2013 at 8:28am

Hi Gunni Britt,

I have forwarded your test link problem to Rene. Technical issues about the course go to info@jungplatform.com.

Good to hear from you. Thanks for sharing your time constraints and your involvement with the Red Book. The lectures and the RB are deep and dense material. I appreciate how much mulling and percolating it can take to feel I have something substantial to comment on. Yet, as Chris and I keep saying, it is fine to share one passage that particularly moves you even if you can’t say how/why. Or one way in which the material seems to be affecting your life (dream or waking).

I also enjoyed Linda’s sharing: “grievers who do their grief work, make great lovers of life. Here I am 45 years later and that thought/ideal remains a mainstay for me: as long as I can walk, talk, breathe and poop - everything else in life is gravy.” Especially as I age and feel my (& others’) mortality each moment of well being—a deep breath, a flowing movement-- I embrace with gratitude when I can remember.

This resonates with what Robbie says in lecture 7 about the man in a group session faced with awful destruction—how the therapists in the group were all looking to lighten his pain. But he says we need to have a cruel eye to move into the preciousness of life in each moment. “We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end….If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life…Joy at the smallest things come to you only when you have accepted death.” RB 274-275/266-267

More coming from Lecture 7!

Janet

Lauren Schneider April 12, 2013 at 10:01pm

Hello again, this is Lauren. Linda, I had not seen your reply when I responded to Janet. thank you for your greetings and input about your consternation with the black/white mind/body duality without inclusion of spirit/soul. I agree completely. When I came into a masters program in 1983, I did not understand how one could attend to "psyche" without attention to "soul". I did my thesis on using Tarot and I Ching as tools of psychotherapy in a very conventional school for family systems therapy. They certainly did not teach Jung. There is much I would enjoy sharing about my work but I want to stay quiet in the desert. The image of the desert reminds me of an image that came up in working a dream with Embodied Imagination. In the dream, I was extremely angry at my husband because he bought a home in South Beach Florida without asking me. When I worked the image of my screaming at him, suddenly I became very still and felt as if my head had turned into a bust made of sand and slowly the wind blew the sand away from the top down until my head had completely vanished with the wind. It was an amazing experience to feel the slow dissolution of my "self" through drying out and blowing away: my identity, particularly the identification with my emotions dried to the point of nothingness. The drying out, ("sec like wine", Robbie said) is an important alchemical and maturation process. I realized after the work with Embodied Imagination that I was angry at my husband because he became an old Jew without asking me -- he had aged before I was ready to face my own aging. The sand blowing away put me in touch with my own mortality and the meaninglessness of my anger in the larger timeframe. I too am only grains of sand.

Lauren Schneider April 12, 2013 at 12:09am

Dear Janet,

Thanks for the welcome. And hello to Chris and the other participants. And thank you Janet for bringing me into Chapter six with the play of the dark and the light that Jung is experiencing. As I said, this is a different embodied experience for me that I can feel grief, truly despair at times for the state of the world, and then a sense of peace and acceptance of everything. This is coming from my dream life and not from habitual consciousness or a consciously desired result. It bubbles up from the depths, completely spontaneous. So for me, the desert has been coming up in my Tarot images as the Hermit; it is a place of individuation, confronting my true (truth) aloneness. Again this is an internal state for outwardly, I have deep intimate friendships and love. But I still have to confront the desert of my soul, a place where I am not co-opted by another. I want to read back about the discussion of measure before I can comment on this. But, please say more what you mean, Janet.

Janet Fortess > Lauren Schneider April 12, 2013 at 3:26pm

Hi Forum Members,

Before we segue to Lecture 7 this weekend, here are a few questions to ponder:

1.Anchorite: “I’ve spent many years alone with the process of unlearning. Have you ever unlearned anything?—Well, then you should know how long it takes.” p269. Fac., 247 RE.

2.He gives you a small insignificant fruit, which has just fallen at his feet. It appears worthless to you, but if you consider it, you will see that this fruit tastes like a sun which you could not have dreamt of…. And you yourself want to be that solitary who strolls with the sun in his garden, his gaze resting on pendant flowers and his hand brushing a hundredfold of grain and his breath drinking the perfume from a thousand roses. P. 269 Fac, 249 RE

What is the seemingly small, insignificant fruit of your solitude that reveals a nature of unexpected abundance and wonder?

Best to you all,

Janet

Lauren Schneider April 10, 2013 at 4:37pm

This is Lauren Schneider from Southern California. I am very grateful for the lectures on the Red Book and am taken deeply into my own process. I have read the forum entries and feel inspired, intimidated, and moved by people’s shares. I find it easier to talk but writing has a tendency to paralyze me. Now that I have waited for so long, looking over the cliff and contemplating whether or not to step out, it is even harder (this was written while following lectures one and two so it is completely out of sequence. But that seems perfectly suited to the theme of all hell breaking loose.) Here goes…I want to jump in by introducing how I am coming to the Red book. As Jung wrote, timing is everything. I received the Red Book two years ago as a gift and never opened it, knowing that I couldn’t chew it on my own. I missed Robbie’s lecture series but in the meantime I have been in training in Embodied Imagination. Recently and most likely as a result of my work in EI, I have taken the plunge into the depths -- I am underwater, flooded with dreams of tsunamis (“big” collective dreams) and many dreams of the past twelve years are popping spontaneously into embodied experiences– it is creating a lot of energy, emotions, dissolution and integration. I see that there has been a non-linear intelligent design all these years dreaming “me” and as it comes together in an embodied mosaic, I observe shifts in my outer life. At the same time as I am filled with epiphanies and awe I worry about surrendering to the process without a “grown-up” (therapist/teacher) to hold my hand. (I would not have gotten here without the alchemical work with Robbie Bosnak and Embodied Imagination.) But now, do I dare trust my inner life and a thirty year psycho-spiritual practice with dreams, Tarot and the I Ching to guide me? I am perfectly timed to come to the Red Book study with all of you.

The last dream I had in the brief depth process with Robbie: I see through a small window the Empire State Building in the distance. In the next moment, I am sitting at a simple wooden table in a cafe high up in the Empire State building. Robbie Bosnak sits next to me on my left at the corner of the table. He has had an epiphany and explains it as much to himself as to me. He says "the self-concept doesn't develop fully until one immerses oneself in the collective." I am trying to digest what he said because I thought it was the other way around. I look down and see the ocean below the Empire State building (it must be on stilts) where whales breach and swim. Because my perspective is so high up, the whales look no more than three inches long, pink and cartoon like. Then I am in the ocean. I do not see the whales. In the distance I see a tsunami building and coming towards me. I imagine the Empire State building will be toppled by the wave. I think, "So this is what it is to die. If I close my eyes, it will all be peaceful in a moment. It is only the transition that is difficult. On a collective level, the dream speaks to me about an Empire falling to the tides of change – our empire seems to be in a state of economic, political, social and moral chaos; perhaps we are experiencing a leveling of hierarchal and patriarchal structures. At a personal level, I experience letting go of the head, my idols, and the heights on behalf of the depths, the body, “flow”. Like ice caps melting, I experience waves of feelings thawed out of the deep freeze of childhood.

I use tarot as a tool for reflection and access to the imaginal realm, much like calling forth a waking dream. I randomly drew an image of a person on her knees in front of a large dark animal headed God like Anubis. I take my seriousness, my terror, feelings of inadequacy and bafflement to this God and ask “it” to finally be in charge of this wounded soul. I have strived to heal all my life through survival strategies (such as the delusion that I am responsible for healing others, and seeking outside validation) I feel the release of this adaptive persona dissolving into the deep waters of a larger Psyche. The personal and collective intermingle.

The discussion of the pus brought up an experience on Sunday night when I accompanied my daughter and husband to a romantic/comedy/zombie movie (her choice, which was actually clever and sweet.) I was overwhelmed by preview after preview of apocalyptic/zombie movies. I believe that our Hollywood dream machine is churning out collective nightmares and that we live in a culture that is terrified of the end of the world. The collective unconscious is teeming with hungry ghosts. We have a cultural mindset which has not ritualized living with the ancestors, dancing with death, or dealing with its collective history. I wonder: Might the zombies and vampires who populate our movies say as in Jung’s dream, “We are not symbols, we are real.” Are we living with a profusion of souls from the whole of human history who have suffered or died violently and are not fully at rest? Is the spirit realm reaching a tipping point of overpopulation as in the waking world? Not that I am really worried about zombies but I found myself very disturbed by these public dream images and hesitant to talk to most people.

I cannot help think about the relevance of TRB coming to us in these times. I do think there is a strong parallel between the calcified culture of 1912 that broke into WWI and the polarized and dysfunctional social-political structures that we are experiencing in 2013. From the chaos and breakdown of civilization, Jung discovered the collective unconscious. Are we on the brink of a paradigm shift and does the red book show up now as the “red pill” to wake us into a new lucidity in this matrix? Could a unified consciousness emerge out of the intense polarization and chaos of our times? Might we dissolve the illusion of the separation between matter and spirit?

Another dream came on the morning of December 22^nd (the day the Mayan Calendar ends):

I am in the home of a South American family; there is a gathering of community, the family is back in the kitchen and I feel welcome although I am a stranger in this modest home. I see my husband across the living room; he is younger, taller and slimmer with dark curly hair. I feel so much love for him. We are lying down together, our legs entangled.

Next scene: I am in the passenger seat of a car in an area that looks like Santa Monica. I am awed by the perfection of this sunny day and the beauty of place. Suddenly there is a Tsunami wave of clear water as big as a building in front of us. There is no time to react. We are engulfed by the wave. The car fills with water as I am trying to kick out the passenger door. I sense that we will not escape.

I embody the images and feel: connected at the belly with love for my husband/teacher and energy moving like a double helix up and down the entwined legs, a new and vital rootedness. In my heart, I feel welcome among strangers; this open heart can be welcoming as well as belonging among strangers. I feel the warm light of the sun and a sense of joy at the beauty of the day. Then I am under water and all reason is gone.

In the imaginal realm it feels as if the Great Feminine’s water has broken. I got a call this week to give a major presentation on Water. Were it not for the dreams, I could not imagine why I would be asked to present.

I am reminded of Jung’s images of blood flowing over the whole of Northern Europe. It is now the image of water that overwhelms the cities. I feel waves of grief that this all might end and awe for the perfection of life. This sense of the beauty and rhythm of the light and the dark is new. I am not habitually Pollyanna-ish. I have carried the shadow of my Jewish family, the undigested history of family dis-membered in Pogroms and generations later, divorces, suicide and psychic dis-associations. A child of the seventies, I have carried the American shadow through many CIA backed dictatorships and illegal wars.

I will try to catch up with being in the desert but for now, I am under water, still breathing and pleased to finally join you.

Linda AK Thompson, PhD > Lauren Schneider April 12, 2013 at 7:31am

Welcome aboard and good morning Lauren - I too pondered the calcification of culture and the intense polarization and chaos noted in Jung's time; into our times and also believe we are in a paradigm shift. During my PhD studies (1987 to 1996), a new paradigm shift was asserted in the form of Ideodynamic Healing: Mind-body therapy that entertained inclusion of advances gleamed from the neurosciences and Quantum physics. In hindsight, it is interesting my Masters thesis was named Transforming Counselling Theory and my dissertation: Matrix of Trauma.

The black and white [polarized/linear] concrete thinking with conceptualization of human nature as bifold [mind/body] with disregard for spiritual essence/phenomena was problematic for me. My deep belief is we are triune beings: mind/body/spirit and that each dimension has a way station suspended in states/time; essential ground that matters and potential to serve self/other.

You currently express yourself as an underwater child of the seventies and I was a frozen child of the sixties [suspended by NDE's in profound sense/gift/state of innocence] until 1983, when profound phenomenal experiences [referred to as rude awakenings] started my melt into embodied revere.

So good to meet you as we continue to breathe under the water and ice. Regards Linda
Gunni-Britt Borden > Linda AK Thompson, PhD April 13, 2013 at 5:31am

Could someone please re-send the test link which came from Rene. Mine deleted itself!

Thanks Britt

ARCHIVED-Red Book Study Group with Jungian Robert Bosnak

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