As I approach the one year mark in this space, I think it’s important to spend some time in a prospective mode (Yes, I know, yesterday’s post was focused on memory and now I’m flipping things forward).

Much of prospective visioning is tied to intentionality.  The ability to bring things into reality, to sculpt realities as it were, can at times seem like an esoteric art.  Indeed, much of our popular notion surrounding this mode of engagement gets expressed by the fortune tellers and psychics who take up shop along the boardwalks and boulevards.

The unconscious itself has a tendency to anticipate.  At times it’s clearly appropriate to read the dream as a lens into a possible future.  This most notably occurs when the conscious perspective fails to sense either the opportunity or danger in a given situation.  Also, when I difficult choice is looming, the dream will often weigh in with a response that looks further down the road.

So some prospective “what if’s?” concerning this blog.  What if…

• …the community that participates here became more in control of what unfolded?
• …the platform of this blog could truly take on the quality of “an end in itself?”
• …the each encounter with this blog included the explicit invitation to a deeper engagement?
• …having learned all the best practices of this space, moving forward the stated goal was instead to find the unique path regardless of the “rules”?

In the cafe where I’m writing this, Lou Reed just came on over the speakers.

“Anyone who ever had a heart
And wouldn’t turn around and break it
Anyone who ever played a part
And wouldn’t turn around and hate it”

While it’s still vague, the seeming randomness of Lou Reed showing up has a great deal to do with the image that is beginning to take shape for where this blog is heading…

Did I hear the word pie?  My grandfather would never get through a holiday meal with out making the comment “I never knew a Reeve that didn’t like pie.”  I relish memories like that.

Picking berries is a great way to rediscover memories.  The mind tends to wander and lost memories get a chance to resurface. It creates a condition a friend once explained to me as analogous to the slack tide.  That’s the time when the tide is neither coming or going, and when the things held down beneath the surface by the current tend to pop up as surprises. Connecting to memories of former times has a therapeutic effect.  Measuring the distances, noticing the changes, feeling the losses.

Feeling is relatedness.  Memories allow us to feel our way into our past.

When following one’s dreams quickly the reality sinks in that the whole show has a director beyond our conscious control.   The image of entering into the forest or the dark wood, as in Dante, is a fitting analogy.  Surprises await at every turn.

While much of the attention in popular culture given to dream analysis gets focused on the individual images and symbols, it very useful to consider the rhythm of the dream series.  How does each dream follow upon the previous one?  And even more interesting, how does the next dream “correct” the ego’s interpretation of the previous dream?  Much of the dynamic that emerges is what Jung defines as the compensatory aspect of the unconscious.

For those wishing to explore further, one of the most interesting texts concerning the interpretation of the dream series is the Seminar on Dream Analysis by Carl Jung.   What is truly fascinating in this book is witnessing Jung’s skill at translating the language of the unconscious and how his decades of experience analyzing dream series’ gives him insights that can anticipate the next dream that will occur.

We have had so much rain over the last month that it seems like Summer has had a tough time getting Spring to move on out.  But summer camps have begun, the sleeping patterns of the kids has changed, and when I look to the Western sky at 9pm I can still notice the fading light of day.  So what if the temps have remained relatively mild?

Seasonally it is a time to encourage the mind to wander.  I’ve been dipping back into my own archives, looking at files and notebooks from a decade ago and trying to reconnect with what I was probing for then.

From a notebook while camping along the Rio Chama in New Mexico in July, 2000:

The thunder speaks : “I – don’t – care – what – you – think/but – I – do – know – what – you – love.” And but for a few sporadic drops of rain each day, the thoughts of the rainy season engender a time of longing.

In more ways then one, I realize how I have stepped into my rainy season…

Many discussions in our home surround the topic of color. Many of the discussions focus on color theory as it applies to painting.  Here I’m laying out a series of quotes, some food for thought, that takes a decided turn toward the symbolic.

“It was not the tail alone that was depicted, but the whole bird.  Since the peacock stands for “all colors”… Carl Jung, CW XIV, par. 391

“Eating the peacock’s flesh is therefore equivalent to integrating the many colours (or, psychologically, the contradictory feeling-values) into a single colour, white.” Ibid., par.388

“The stages of the work are marked by seven colours which are associated with the planets.  This accounts for the relation of the colors to astrology, and also to psychology, since the planets correspond to individual character components.  The Aurora Consurgens relates the colours to the soul.” Ibid., par. 390

And finally:

“This means – to employ once more the simile of the spectrum – that the instinctual image is to be located not at the red end but at the violet end of the colour band.  The dynamism of instinct is lodged as it were in the infra-red part of the spectrum, whereas the instinctual image lies in the ultra-violet part.  If we remember our colour symbolism, then, as I have said, red is not such a bad match for insticnt.  But for spirit, as might be expected, blue would be a better match than violet.  Violet is the mystic colour, and it certainly reflects the indubitably “mystic” or paradoxical quality of the archetype in a most satisfactory way.” Carl Jung, CW VIII, par414.

I can’t wait to see what throwing this into the mix produces.

scythe at the barn door

I always find it hard to pick my favorite season, but clearly one of my favorite times in the summer revolves around pulling the scythe out of the barn, finding the sharpening stone, and heading down the back hill to make some hay.

About five days each year are committed to this task.  The hay is then stored in the barn to dry.  In the fall it gets used as mulch o protect the gardens through the winter.

Getting the swing back always seems to prompt some strange imaginations concerning the Grim Reaper, though the act of reaping for the farmer does not have the built in sense of death surrounding that hooded figure.

The other thought that always comes back to my mind is how our various lawn mowing contraptions remove us from what is in my mind a fundamental agricultural act.  We need to find ways to keep the fundamentals in.

If you’re so inclined: the Scythe Supply and the Scythe Book.

Everybody has an opinion of what’s wrong with the show.  We can’t help at times to scan our surroundings and want to proclaim like Marcellus in Hamlet, “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”  Our instinct on the matter is nothing new.  In many ways the historical conflicts and schisms we are living through are reflections of our interior states.

Putting a finger on the problem, and even harder, doing something about it, seems at times impossible.  I take comfort in the fact that Jung articulated how he saw the problem back in 1929.

“If science is an end in itself, man’s raison d’etre lies in being a mere intellect. If art is an end in itself, then his sole value lies in the imaginative faculty.  If making money is an end in itself, both science and art can quietly shut up shop.  No one can deny that our modern consciousness, in pursuing these mutually exclusive ends, has become hopelessly fragmented.  The consequence is that people are trained to develop one quality only; they become tools themselves.” Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, par. 731

My sense is that many of us have come a ways toward integrating these aspects in the way we live our lives.  Feeling like a tool lately?  What are you going to do about it?

In the back of the Elementary Latin Dictionary is a table of roots where you will find this curious combination gna- strung together.  Gna- forms the root of our gnosis and know. And gnaw perfectly captures the process of transferring energy through the body.

I was keyed into this root by Charles Olson who often jotted it into the marginalia of the books he was reading when he’d find a puzzle piece to the knowledge he was pursuing.

In the following passages from Jung’s Religious Ideas in Alchemy, Olson gnawed heavily on the text.  The marking from paragraphs 375 to 379 are heavily underlined and dated 1/16/66, 1/21/68 and 5/19/69.  It’s clear that Olson was finding a key to his understanding of the importance of analogy, for the marginalia notes include  “analogy is mind working on matter” and “like to like” and  “likeness : analogy.”

Photocopy of Olson's markings on Jung

And these specific passages get marked up:

He must accomplish in his own self the same process that he attributes to matter, “for things are perfected by their like.”  Therefore the operator must participate in the work.  Carl Jung, CW v. 12: Psychology and Alchemy, Religious Ideas in Alchemy, par. 375

Through time and exact definition things are converted into intellect.  Ibid., par. 376

The assumption underlying this train of thought is the causative effect of analogy.  In other words just as in the psyche the multiplicity of sense perceptions produce s the unity and simplicity of an idea, so the primal water finally produces fire, i.e., the ethereal substance – not (and this is the decisive point) as a mere analogy but as the result of the mind’s working on matter.  Ibid., par. 377

and finally:

By studying the philosophers man acquires the skill to attain this stone.  But again, the stone is man.  Thus Dorn cries: “Transform yourselves from dead stones into the living philosophical stones!”  Here he is expressing in the clearest possible way the identity of something in man with something concealed in matter. Ibid., par.378

It’s a great deal to chew on, and Olson’s repeated return to the same pages as he approached his death shows that this content continues to remain vital through repeated visits.  The “something” is the objective psyche we’ve been referring to here as of late…

It’s always a cool thing when the narrative of what one is attempting to articulate seems to fall into ones hands on it’s own accord.  As a followup to the previous post concerning the objective psyche, and the “what if” I posed, this nugget jumped from the page.  It tosses the ball I’m playing with here further down the field.

“The full significance of synchronicity is still to be discovered.  We already have hints from what is so far known that at some point the objective psyche may emerge with the outer physical reality to form a unitary reality transcending the antithesis of subject and object.” Edward Edinger, An Outline of Analytical Psychology, in Quadrant, 1968 (reprint 1, pg.12)

And what would that look like? …the force be with you.

“The alchemical opus must be understood as a phenomenology of the objective, autonomous psyche enacting its drama of transformation on the stage provided by the material world, the objective nature of which must remain unknown in order for the play to continue.” Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel, pg.36

The subtlety of the wind, can you grab hold of it?  Can you pin it down and so know it?  Or do we encounter it as experience?  The psyche will ever elude our attempts to define it by our rational concepts.  Just as we become confident in our firm grasp, it will slip from our grip.  Or like an opossum it will play dead so convincingly we will be sure all we hold is but a corpse of the sought after.

The mercurial analogies for psyche are accurate.  The quicksilver is indeed quick.  Yet like Cheetham’s claim above, we must need to champion the cause of the objective psyche.  Collective consciousness is so trained to dismiss the realms of psyche and the imagination, or more accurately the imaginal, as a “nothing but.”  It was just a dream.  It’s was simply a crazy idea.  It was nothing,…really.

Can we afford to move into the next dawn as a society with this prejudice closing us off from this aspect of reality?  What do you think might happen if together, not just a few of us, but all of us helped each other take the blinders off?  A hunch: it’s beyond our wildest imagination.