Tree of the Art of the Mind

Posted: under --daily living, --symbolism, Alchemy and transformation, Earth Stories, Love and bits of magic..., Personal evolution, Physics, a Case for synchronicity..., magical people, magical places, our solar system and global evolution.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

*

*

how about reading a little magic story while sipping your tea? one of those that when finished you’re you’re really glad you did  :)

i

*

*

*

*

i leaned on the tree, julia kay

*

*

*

*

Tree of the Art of the Mind

*

*

–Tom Weidlinger



For several months I had been anticipating a meeting with Dorothy, my benefactress, in which I would present a funding proposal for a new project. Dorothy’s family foundation had been supporting my work for nine years. I’d made six films with her sole support-a wonderful circumstance, compared to my pre-benefactress decades when I spent as much time raising money for films as I did actually making them. Though I worked hard and did my best to be worthy of this munificence, I sometimes felt guilty about my good fortune. But not so guilty as to prevent me from presenting the proposal for film number seven.

Usually I talked with Alex, the foundation director who is my de facto boss, though he gives me complete freedom to make each film the way I want once the topic is approved. The last time I spoke with Dorothy was three years ago. In her mid-eighties, she was almost deaf and increasingly erratic. Alex told me she had changed. He suggested that I write a proposal for a multi-year project. Once approved, it would not depend on Dorothy’s continued possession of her mental faculties. This, most likely, would be the final plum.

I was extremely anxious about this meeting. I was not ready to accept, quite yet, that this good thing could come to an end. I worried that I was too soft to go back to the nail-biting uncertainty of being a freelance, independent filmmaker. And the competition is so very young these days. I was determined to get my idea for the new project across to Dorothy, despite her hearing difficulties. I brought my laptop to our meeting and typed on the screen in a very large letters: IT’S IMPORTANT THAT YOU BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND ME. WOULD IT HELP IF I TYPED WHAT I WAS SAYING?

Dorothy consented with a smile and a faint nod. I began typing and speaking very loudly and slowly at the same time, telling Dorothy about an award that one of our films had just won. She clapped her hands girlishly and said: “You are angels! I think you should all have halos!” Dorothy’s son chimed in and suggested he might find some at a local costume shop.

I continued typing, starting to describe my proposal for the new project. Suddenly Dorothy looked at me and asked, almost apologetically: “How much do you cost?” I was flustered. Was she asking me about the fee her foundation paid me or was she asking about the budget of the new project? I tried to make light of it, typing out that I was a bargain–the producer, director, writer and editor–all for one salary. “But how much do you cost?” she asked again.

I looked to Alex for guidance. He shrugged. So I launched into a rational for the cost of my proposed project. I didn’t get very far. Dorothy stopped me again. “Who are you?” she asked.
I typed:  “I’m the guy who’s been making your films for the past nine years–the films funded by your foundation.”

“But what do you do?” Dorothy asked.
“Well,” I said, “I’m the filmmaker. I actually make the films.”
“Really?” Dorothy’s expression was half-quizzical, half-skeptical.

Both Alex and Dorothy’s son did their best to confirm that I was who I said I was. Gradually they realized that Dorothy thought I was a transcriber, hired to record the meeting. Recently she been presented with an exorbitant bill for just such a transcriber and was none too pleased.




I was horrified to discover that the woman who had been responsible for making possible a good quarter of my life’s creative output no longer knew who I was. Yet at the same time I felt strangely calm, even amused. The absurdity of pegging my hopes for my future on her seemed suddenly hilarious–like something out of a surreal play.

I thought maybe I was in a state of shock. Imagine falling from a great height. You land. The wind is knocked out of you. You are feeling no pain, but you know that in a moment, when you try to move, pain will come flooding in. The only solution is to remain very still. This is what I did, literally and metaphorically. That night I sat in front of the TV until my wife finally told me to go to bed. In the morning I did not want to get out from under the covers. But eventually I did.

I thought I would find solace in nature. I picked up a sandwich at a deli and headed for the hills above the UC Berkeley campus where a network of fire roads and trails winds up Strawberry Canyon. Lately I had been preparing for a summer trek in the Sierras by taking my weighted backpack with me. There is a steep stretch of trail, about a half a mile in, that I sometimes walk up and down several times. That day a work crew was weed-whacking the slope adjacent to it. To get away from the racket I just kept walking, going much farther up the trail and into the hills than I usually do.

I tried to keep my mind empty. Not to worry about what life might be like after Dorothy. I wasn’t very successful.

After about an hour I got to a ridge top that I’d never been on before. It was hot. I headed down the ridge, looking for a shady spot to eat my sandwich. I saw a large tree, standing alone, about one hundred yards off the edge of the trail. It had a great view: a vast swath of the East Bay stretching away to San Francisco with the Golden Gate in the distance. Not a bad place to be homeless, I thought.

I ate my sandwich and then looked up at the tree. For the first time I noticed what appeared to be bits of white rubbish scattered around its trunk and throughout its branches. Dismayed by this blight, I decided to collect the trash and put it in my pack. When I moved closer to the tree, I discovered that it wasn’t trash, but bits of canvas crudely stretched over small rectangles of plywood, some as small as playing cards, some as large as a magazine.

As far as I could see there was nothing on the canvases except patches of black and grey mold. Whatever had once been painted on the surfaces had apparently been eradicated by sun, rain, and wind. Then I moved closer and picked up the smallest canvas, leaning against the base of the tree trunk. There was something on it after all. Typed in tiny and now faded Courier letters was this inscription:

Welcome to the art of the mind

What a pathetic excuse for conceptual art. Obviously the “artist” who left this here would never get noticed in the real world, so he or she had to come here and litter the landscape with it. I picked up another canvas, resting in the “y” between two branches. It read:

I was put together but then I fell apart

Hmm, I thought. I know the feeling. I went on to the next mildewed board, resting sideways against a branch. It said:

Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
Not everything will be ok.
But something will.

Yikes! Suddenly I was feeling a certain kinship, a connection with this anonymous artist. These words were speaking to me. I picked up the next canvas.

What are you doing with your freedom?

A shiver ran down my spine. What indeed? There were several more canvases that were blank except for the marks of the elements. But the last one I picked up read:

With Tao under heaven,
Stray horses fertilize the fields.
With Tao under heaven,
Warhorses are bred on the frontier.
There is no greater calamity
Than not knowing what is enough.
There is no greater fault
Than desire for success.
Therefore,
Knowing that enough is enough
Is always enough.

I walked away from the tree of the art of the mind feeling very different from when I sat under its shade to eat my sandwich. I no longer had to keep very still inside for fear that Fear itself would come rushing in.

Was it mere chance that just after one of the most dismaying things to happen to me in years, in which I felt my personal and creative sustenance to be gravely threatened, I should encounter a tree in the middle of nowhere that told me exactly what I needed to hear?

Was it mere coincidence that there happened to be weed-whackers on the slope that day? Was it mere coincidence that, therefore, I would walk up a section of trail I’d never been on before? And what about the person who made those canvases? What moved that anonymous figure to create them and place them in that tree?

A friend suggested that I Google “Tree-Art of the Mind-Berkeley.” In the age of the Internet everything is knowable, is it not? But the search turned up nothing. No name. No hint of the person who put those canvases in the tree. The oracle of the Web was silent. I found this comforting.

I am an agnostic. Even if I were a believer, I would think it the height of arrogance and hubris to assume that God orchestrated causality to teach me a lesson. And yet I am left with the feeling that there is nothing mere about this experience. I spoke about this with a wise old friend of mine who referred me to the work of Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who wrote:

God is not always silent, and man is not always
blind. In every man’s life there are moments when
there is a lifting of the veil at the horizon of the
known, opening a sight of the eternal…. But such
experiences are rare events. To some people they
are like shooting stars, passing and unremembered.
In others they kindle a light that is never quenched.

I don’t understand what happened. For me, at the core there is a mystery. If I clasp it too tightly I fear I will extinguish its light. Which is why I am telling you about it, writing it down. Maybe in doing so, I can give it air to breathe. The rabbi concludes:

The remembrance of that experience and the loyalty
to the response of that moment are the forces that
sustain our faith. In this sense, faith is faithfulness,
loyalty to an event, and loyalty to our response.

*

*


-Tom Weidlinger is a documentary filmmaker, living and working in the Bay Area. You can visit his Web site at www.moiraproductions.com

–by Tom Weidlinger; Jun 17, 2010

*

*

*

*

* this story and many other fascinating forward thinking articles are at jeff hutner’s blog “new paradigm digest”  *  http://newparadigmdigest.com/  *

*

*

*

*

*

Comments (0) Mar 02 2011

a fine example of not seeing magic

Posted: under --daily living, Alchemy and transformation, Earth Stories, Love and bits of magic..., Personal evolution, Physics, magical people, magical places.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

you know, i try to illustrate where magic exists. i do that for the logic that if more people could see it, not only would we learn to work with it better, also, it would prove to have been, there, continuously occurring, all along.

one of the most dangerous of human issues is, lack of perspective.

otherwise referred to as ignorance.


it cuts us off at the knees in respect to knowing of and working with our own awesome power and potential for creating more magic, love and happiness in our, and to an effect, those around us, daily perceptions of reality. and reality, oh so much of it is, simply, perception.


anyhow, the email below continues to occasionally appear in my inbox so i decided to read it again. it’s truly a fine example of how we see so little of what is happening right in front of us.

the illustration of that point, is notably supported by this story of this all too common phenomenon occurring within an experience that was so overtly multi sensory that it would seem impossible to miss, like the proverbial elephant in the room… a very telling picture.

the rereading of this did make its mark on me once again. further refining my understanding of our “mass psychosis,” as it is referred to by ram dass :)

having lived in dc and taken the metro i can imagine the sound and it’s resonance as it played around and up those high walls and ceilings. i wonder about the acoustics and how i wish i had been there to experience that…

…which brings to mind a memory of mine that forever left its mark and deeply moves me still…

it was a washington d.c., fall evening in a smithsonian museum anti-chamber a beautiful intimate, golden wood paneled space. i was attending a very private concert performed by three string masters (2 violin one cello) on the most prized of antique instruments in display at the museum. these instruments were as excited as were to have them come out from their cases and play once more.

a new layer of the magnificence and beauty of life opened up

tears streaming, i was utterly and forever transformed.

to me, that is magic.


i ; )

*

*

*

*** In Washington , DC , at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, a man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes.  During that time, approximately 2,000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.  After about 3 minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing.  He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule.

About 4 minutes later:

The violinist received his first dollar.  A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

At 6 minutes:

A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

At 10 minutes:

A 3-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly.  The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head the whole time.  This action was repeated by several other children, but every parent – without exception – forced their children to move on quickly.

At 45 minutes:

The musician played continuously.  Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while.  About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace.  The man collected a total of $32.

After 1 hour:

He finished playing and silence took over.  No one noticed and no one applauded.  There was no recognition at all.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world.  He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars.  Two days before, Joshua Bell sold-out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each to sit and listen to him play the same music.

This is a true story.  Joshua Bell, playing incognito in the D.C. Metro Station, was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities.

This experiment raised several questions:

*In a common-place environment, at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty?

*If so, do we stop to appreciate it?

*Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made . . .

How many other things are we missing as we rush through life?

Enjoy life NOW .. it has an expiration date.


*** this story is inserted as it was received in an anonymous email ***

*

Comments (2) Feb 09 2011

how i see ll

Posted: under --daily living, Alchemy and transformation, Love and bits of magic..., Personal evolution, Physics.
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

*

in the present, i feel the moments as they slip by one after the other as anyone.

but when i am in review i can not see the time line nor the length of distance traveled. everything is collapsed.

for example, driving from santa fe to nh was quite a distance which took several days. i say “several” days because without stopping to really consider and think about it i can not relate exactly how many days. as when i think of the road traveled i do not see the “length” of it.

in my mind and mind’s eye it collapses into one point of reference.

a dot.

this is only an issue when i am in front of people and required to spout dates, times, locations, etc. that’s just not going to happen with any guarantee of accuracy! to relate that type of data i need to prepare in advance by creating a document that details the points in a linear fashion.

in preparation i am precise.

when i was young it was challenge dealing with seeing so differently from what is considered the norm. teachers called me a dreamer… “she’s bright, intelligent, but such a dreamer.”

one extreme example was a winter ski afternoon with my two sons, then 9 and 11. the 9 year old had collided with another skier. while to the eye he seemed o.k., we knew to have his head checked, and so i found myself in an emergency room scenario. the admitting nurse was asking me simple questions like dates, birth dates, address, etc. i was having quite a time giving the information required (ad a little stress and everything is pronounced). i was quite embarrassed and at a loss when my 11 year old stepped up to the plate, recited all the information, and rescued me. my hero.

on the other hand… put me in a dialogue with a physicist, or dealing with transformational concepts, in a transpersonal situation navigating the psyche, the world of energy, and dimensional worlds, and i’m a fish in water. i really do understand when it is said that time is NOT linear.

so, i’ll never be an accountant, it would be too much work! but i’m really good at what i do

do  :)

the point of this story is to encourage you to use your inherent talents no matter how obscure or unconventional they seem to be — find them — apply them — and much to your surprise their utility and your joy will unfold.

bless…

*

*

*

*

Comments (0) Dec 24 2010

how i see l

Posted: under --daily living, Alchemy and transformation, Personal evolution, Physics.
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

how i see . . .

i don’t run into many people that see and translate the world as i do. i focus internally and decipher stimulus, primarily and sometimes exclusively, by energy and vibration. as a consequence i don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the physical manifestation of things unless it is a part of my in-the-moment attention.

i notice many, what seems to others invisible or small, magical instances, items and synchronicities that most do not. and, i can, not notice many large, and what seems significant, objects, geographic locations, etc.

physical reality seems to us to be the primary, and often consciously exclusive, reference from which we determine our impression of the world.

not me.

i see dimensionally and energetically from inside out not outside in.

to see what is not seen, and navigate dimensions, no problem! read a map and navigate a car, can be a challenge.


the other day my mother said, “did you notice your garage space was again available?.. (my vehicle had been banished to street parking for temp. construction) …and it’s been that way for almost a week? i was waiting for you to notice.”


well, no, i didn’t notice.


in spite of the fact that i walk through that garage daily.


it’s a good she told me.


it might have taken to the first snow before i’d take the up my consciousness with that consideration.


there are some small adjustments to make; like crossing the street of a busy nyc sidewalk with friends — they know to take my hand.

all of those dimensional realities and energies lying upon each other! distinct in frequency, in fantastic multiplicity, and all that manifesting!

it’s all so amazing and all encompassing, so much data!

my friends know i might not notice a car.


funny.


and how fortunate i am to have someone to take my hand.

internal…

eternal…

external.


bless,

:)

*

*

*


Comments (0) Dec 11 2010

H A L L O W E E N ; )

Posted: under --symbolism, Alchemy and transformation, Earth Stories, Love and bits of magic..., Physics, a Case for synchronicity....
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

*

*

Consciousness experiencing

*

*

*

*

*

*

itself .

*

*


*

*

*

Happy Halloween !

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

Comments (0) Oct 28 2010

jung quote

Posted: under --daily living, Alchemy and transformation, Personal evolution, Physics, magical people.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

Comments (0) Feb 03 2010

alchemy

Posted: under --daily living, Alchemy and transformation, Personal evolution, Physics, Poetry and Verse, magical people.
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

*

*

what we see we create,


what we believe, we see,

*

*

*

infinityblog

thanks to hareesh for the image

*

*

where the loop intersects


at the point of inception


is the place of power…


the power of transformation.


i

*

*

*

*

*

*

Comments (0) Nov 28 2009

Reality as art…

Posted: under --daily living, Alchemy and transformation, Earth Stories, Love and bits of magic..., Personal evolution, Physics, Poetry and Verse, magical people.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

*

cat&roostersm

*
*

best to tarry not with thoughts of competition…

*

…nay treachery.

*
*


we ourselves are oftnot

conscious in,

and about,

our actions.

*
*
*

and

when presented with another happier option,

do willingly,

and

happily

go  :)

*
*
*
*

offer and allow

for this to happen.

*
*
*

many bless,

ing  :)

*
*
*
*

Comments (0) Nov 13 2009

Have no fear…

Posted: under --daily living, Alchemy and transformation, Earth Stories, Love and bits of magic..., Physics.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

*
*

one of my personal commandments

*
*
*

of course the mouse knows the leopard is there. the mouse knows the leopard. there is no denial on the mouse’s part he is clear about what he’s dealing with and has no fear. when dealing with something that seems to and could be dangerous diffuse the situation. learn it, know it well, every living thing/being exists to be understood, “gotten,” then turn and face it with no fear.

*

live the experience to the fullest, make the most of life. love it completely in every moment.

*

that is what life asks of you in every moment.

*

to be known is what spirit craves.

*

many bless,


ing  :)

*
*
*
*

leo1sm

*
*
*

leo2sm

*
*
*

leo3sm

*
*
*
*

Comments (1) Nov 03 2009

Gathering Together in the micro: jung & ing

Posted: under --daily living, Alchemy and transformation, Book Reviews, Personal evolution, Physics, magical people.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

*
*

Wholeness by Individuation: Jung

*
*
*

Evolution in Polarity: Ing

*
*
*
*
*
lightthecoredarkness“The Light at the Core of the Darkness” from C.G. Jung’s “Red Book”
*
*
*
*

INDIVIDUATION: Jung believed that most of us have lost touch with important parts of our selves. Through listening to the messages of our unconscious in dreams and waking imagination we contact and reintegrate our different parts. His thought was that the goal of life is “individuation”, the process of coming to know, giving expression to, and harmonizing the various components of the psyche. If we realize our uniqueness we can undertake the process of individuation and tap into our true self. Each human has a specific nature and calling which is uniquely his or her own fulfilled through a union of conscious and unconscious derived through a thorough exploration of the shadow self. If the imperative for this union is ignored a person becomes mentally, physically and/or emotionally ill.

*
*
*

EVOLUTION IN POLARITY: in polarity in which we exist, recognition, attention and understanding (the formula for love), is paid to the part to realize the whole, to the dark to know the light, to unconscious reality for the optimal experience of conscious reality. exclusive attention given any being or focus, at the negation of another, generates an opposite and equal force demanding to be seen and known. the universal law of balance is immutable.

true at every level — the individual/micro, or global/macro — in the seen and unseen, every being, every thing, or energy existing within this evolutionary process, requires acknowledgement and understanding. in this way, it seeks confirmation of it’s existence in order to know that it indeed does, and that it has meaning and purpose. otherwise, what is the point of existing? in existence denied, absence of attention, and/or judgement of, very painful feelings of abandonment generates fragmentation. from this state of extreme discomfort the being perpetrates increasingly urgent and desperate acts and manifestations, craving the relief and comfort of inclusion into the whole. liberation and elevation occur at the moment of being seen and understood… loved; this is the alchemical moment of transformation.

*
*
*
*
*
*
*

RedBook

*

Carl Jung’s, previously privately kept, psyche memoir called “The Red Book” — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.”

*
*
*
*
*
*
*

below is an excerpt of a ten page article on Jung and his long-held private book, written by “New York Times”, Sara Corbett…

*
*
*

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again…

…What happened to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche haunted by troubling visions and hearing inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”

He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.

The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.

He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”…

…The central premise of the book was that Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism — what he called “the spirit of the times” — and over the course of many quixotic encounters with his own soul and with other inner figures, he comes to know and appreciate “the spirit of the depths,” a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams.

*
*

about the viewing and copying of the red book for its publication:

…there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and crocodiles. The other side was filled with a cramped German calligraphy that seemed at once controlled and also, just given the number of words on the page, created the impression of something written feverishly, cathartically…

…The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed frozen in a kind of awe, especially Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but then finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it. When the art director called for a break, Martin leaned in, tilting his head to read some of the German on the page. Whether he understood it or not, he didn’t say. He only looked up and smiled…

…It turned out that nearly everybody around the Red Book was dreaming that week. Nancy Furlotti dreamed that we were all sitting at a table drinking amber liquid from glass globes and talking about death. (Was the scanning of the book a death? Wasn’t death followed by rebirth?) Sonu Shamdasani dreamed that he came upon Hoerni sleeping in the garden of a museum. Stephen Martin was sure that he had felt some invisible hand patting him on the back while he slept. And Hugh Milstein, one of the digital techs scanning the book, passed a tormented night watching a ghostly, white-faced child flash on a computer screen. (Furlotti and Martin debated: could that be Mercurius? The god of travelers at a crossroads?)

Early one morning we were standing around the photo studio discussing our various dreams when Ulrich Hoerni trudged through the door, having deputized his nephew Felix to spend the previous night next to the Red Book. Felix had done his job; the Red Book lay sleeping with its cover closed on the table. But Hoerni, appearing weary, seemed to be taking an extra hard look at the book. The Jungians greeted him. “How are you? Did you dream last night?”

“Yes,” Hoerni said quietly, not moving his gaze from the table. “I dreamed the book was on fire.”

…In the Red Book, after Jung’s soul urges him to embrace the madness, Jung is still doubtful. Then suddenly, as happens in dreams, his soul turns into “a fat, little professor,” who expresses a kind of paternal concern for Jung.

Jung says: “I too believe that I’ve completely lost myself. Am I really crazy? It’s all terribly confusing.”

The professor responds: “Have patience, everything will work out. Anyway, sleep well.”

*
*
*

philemonjung

*
*
*
*
*

article in full length: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
spiritualpilgrimwoodcutIn two places at once … Spiritual Pilgrim, Woodcut, anonymous German artist, circa 1530. Jung, CW 10, plate VII
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

Comments (0) Sep 21 2009