Posted by Bonnie Bright on November 8, 2012 at 1:06pm
The Earth has a Soul by Meredith Sabini" C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life
“Matter in the wrong place is dirt. People get dirty through too much civilization. Whenever we touch nature, we get clean.”
You may not associate such bold, earthy sentiments with Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung, but he was, in fact, deeply concerned over the loss of connection with nature. He considered natural life to be the “nourishing soil of the soul.” Who has time for a natural life these days? What would it look like if we did? Those of us destined to live through this turbulent period of history, the declining phase of Western civilization, could perhaps use a wise elder who stands slightly outside the modern world yet knows it well enough to offer guidance.
Jung shows the knowledge of an historian who understands how the dissociation from nature came about; he reaches out with the empathy of a healer who shares our plight; and he advises with the common sense of a country doctor how to live “in modest harmony with nature.” Jung addresses not only the individual but also our culture as a whole, as an entity that itself is suffering and in need of help.
The title of my book, The Earth Has A Soul, is taken from a 1958 letter in which Jung refers to "the old idea that every country or people has its own angel, just as the earth has a soul." (Letters II, p432) We find that Jung uses the words soul, spirit and psyche somewhat interchangeably. “Psyche” is Greek for soul, life, and breath; so psyche is Nature itself. In the Visions Seminars that he gave in the early 1930s, Jung remarked that “the earth has a spirit of her own, a beauty of her own." (Interpretation of Visions, 133-4) Spirit is the inside of things and matter is their visible outer aspect. Jung’s main contribution is restoring to Nature its original wholeness by reminding us that “nature is not matter only, she is also spirit." (Collected Works, 13, par 229) A brief anecdote illustrates Jung’s apperception of the living spirit within Nature...
Read more at: http://www.ecobuddhism.org/wisdom/psyche_and_spirit/sabini_jung/
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