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Part Six: Telemachus and Heracles

Telemachus

The story of Telemachus takes place within the broader context of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus experiences a series of initiations (all of them, curiously, by female figures) and evolves from a one-dimensional, heroic figure to a mature, archetypal king. Early on, the gods make repeated comparisons between Telemachus and his cousin Orestes. Neither had seen his father since infancy. Telemachus knew of Odysseus only through the memory of the citizens,

Don't miss this blisteringly brilliant one-minute clip of Jung speaking about man's need for myth:

“A man is not complete when he lives in a world of statistical truth.

He must live in a world of his biological truth.

Man has always lived in the myth.

And we think we are people to be born today and to live in no myth – without history.

That is a disease.

It’s absolutely abnormal because man is not born ‘every day.’

He is once born in a specific historical setting with specific historical qualities and

Part Five

Pentheus

…nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent – Yeats

Orestes killed his mother, but Pentheus’ mother killed him. Dionysus drove the women of Thebes mad because they hadn’t respected him. His cousin, the adolescent King Pentheus, tried to imprison him and defeat the mad women, who were led by Pentheus’ mother Agave and his two aunts. In his rigidly masculine stance, the king was blind to the fact that a god (or, if you prefer, an unacknowledged part of himself) stood befor

The meeting between lover and beloved is heart to heart, like that between sculptor and model, between hand and stone. When we fall in love we begin to imagine romantically, fiercely, wildly, madly, jealously, with possessive, paranoid intensity. And when we imagine strongly, we begin to fall in love with the images conjured before the heart's eye — as when starting a project, preparing a vacation trip, planning a new house in a different city, swelling with pregnancy. . . . Our imaginations dra

Part Four

With Oedipus as our primary example, let’s consider how Greek myth imagined three other young male heroes in more detail: Orestes, Pentheus, and Telemachus. All three boys were the only sons of heroic kings, yet none of them knew their fathers. Pentheus’ father Echion was absent or dead. Agamemnon, Orestes’s father, was gone ten years at Troy and murdered immediately upon his return. And Odysseus, father of Telemachus, wandered for ten more years before returning. But seen with a mythop

"We were born before the wind, also younger than the sun...let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic." There's nothing like the mystic when it comes to healing ourselves. It reaches deep within, and takes what is in need of enlightenment, shines a bright light, and the process begins. Without a doubt, inner depths that form the rich, loamy, soil of the mystic can be off putting. We're scared to go down so deep, into the mystic.

We're scared, until we're in need,sometimes badly in need. James

Part Three

Perhaps we need to look backwards toward old forms and old stories to re-imagine approaches to this dilemma. Greek myth is a tangled amalgam of stories, some of which date from the pre-patriarchal eras when, it is imagined, the genders lived in harmony. Over time, myths that justified the rule of men replaced most of the older tales. But we can still find the archetypal theme of initiation in many of them, because all stable societies have had to address the need to make a boy into a m

Pacifica's Ladera campus bookstore is now selling my portfolio of Illuminated Letters. This limited-edition portfolio contains 22 of my detailed and luminous artist prints of the Hebrew alphabet and corresponding 22 illuminated prayer poems . The images are hand crafted from the original watercolor paintings, using the highest quality of archival pigment based inks on imported archival papers. Please stop by and take a look when you are next at Pacifica. (The related text is: "Illuminated Letter

Mythologist Michael Meade describes sacred occurrences as those in which the "seal that separates the worlds" is broken and Spirit enters through that break. In Doorway sessions, clients go through a portal into a sacred, interior place where they tap into their own metaphoric inner wisdom. The messages from this realm are clear, direct and immediate. Once we've received an image, there is no further analysis or thinking that we need to do.

Valuing My Time: How a Metaphor Instantly Shifted Thi

Part Two

Barbara Ehrenreich argued in 1983 that the “breadwinner ethic” had more or less collapsed in America. Men who avoided marriage were “deviant” in the fifties; now they are considered quite normal. By 1990 one third of all children (sixty percent of blacks) lived apart from their fathers, and fifty percent of children of divorced families saw their fathers once or twice per year, or not at all. Fifty percent of all children spend part of their childhood with one parent. Researchers conclud

A relationship with the mystic in life, nature, the way of all things ushers us into a healing connection with self and significant others. It proves itself a balm in the midst of pulls to find answers outside of self, as is the case in addiction. I remember as a teenager a yogi telling me that mystic consciousness is "the natural high." Now, fifty years later, his words continue to ring true and satisfy my soul!

Lisa Miller of Columbia University recently wrote in the New York Times (2.11.14)res

A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free! – Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

Part One

The problems of our modern condition threaten to overwhelm us: meaningless work; broken communities; environmental degradation; rampant consumerism; religious literalism; the collapse of democracy and constant warfare, both abroad and in our streets. Despite being overloaded by media images and distractions, we have a diminished imagination of the possible, because we live i

Barbara Holifield

On February 22, 2014, the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco will offer the first of a series of eco-psychology seminars and workshops on the environment crisis. These workshops will be from differing perspectives but of one piece: the necessary crisis of consciousness in earth changes and what we can/must do. In this first workshop, Indwelling: Our Human Participation in the Dream of the Earth, analysts Barbara Holifield and Carol McRae will lead participants into active im

On February 22, 2014, the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco will offer the first of a series of eco-psychology seminars and workshops on the environment crisis. These workshops will be from differing perspectives but of one piece: the necessary crisis of consciousness in earth changes and what we can/must do. In this first workshop, Indwelling: Our Human Participation in the Dream of the Earth, analysts Carol McRae and Barbara Holifield will lead participants into active imagination states t

 I have a client who loves history. Before working with this client I’d never thought much about history. I like watching historical movies, but I disliked history as a subject in school and I always did poorly in it because it required memorizing information (names, dates, places) that felt dry and dead to me. But when my client talks about history, it’s anything but dry and dead. For him, history is alive—it’s something he engages with, something that challenges him, something that has continu

Seeds of potential present themselves in everyday life events. The moment, each moment, gives us a seed, maybe more. There's something to see about ourselves or others or the unfolding dimensions of our life. These are seeds and they carry life potential. To be able to see them, spot them, can be as simple as raising our awareness.

Awareness works the soil, takes us into the digging under and the under going of what it is that needs to speak to us. Without awareness we traipse along going through

Dr. Thomas Kirsch has just written a review of my book on Amazon. A respected elder in the Jungian world, past president of the San Francisco Institute and former longtime vice president and president of the International Society of Jungian Analysts, Dr. Kirsch writes: "I am writing a memoir myself, but it is much less personal than this one. The author writes about her falling in love with her patient and what she did about it. She went to a lot of therapy and supervision, and she was still in

Donald says that he remembers a year when the hills did not turn green. He was forced to pump water from the lower pond, which fills first and quickly, to the upper, much larger pond, to capture and save what rain water he could.

This has not happened in the 20 years that I have lived on our ranch, but I do remember drought years in the late '80’s, and some before in the mid '70’s. We were living in Marin County at the time, and the reservoirs went dry. We were put on water rationing, only 40 gal

"The root of all influence lies in one's own inner being: given true and vigorous expression in word and deed, its effect is great.." The I Ching speaks to inner psychic energy influencing our outer life. Our energy is off, our life is off. There is no way to back away from this inner truth or pretend it's not there. We try to run from inner truth, it gets us smack dab in our everyday life.

Ever felt like something is so wrong and you just can't put your finger on it. That something is always on