Friday, May 24, 2024
3:55 a.m. Ready if you are. Still reading Jung on Active Imagination, a work compiled by Joan Chodorow from different things he wrote here and there. I never realized that “the transcendent function” he wrote about meant connecting conscious and unconscious – or, in our terms, 3D and non-3D, in a way.
This is an example of your seeing things differently in light of what you have been given. It would take a foolhardy person to claim or pretend that Jung didn’t know what he was talking about, and an equally foolhardy one to say, “Yes, he did, but it doesn’t have anything to do with this.” No, if what we have given you over the years is a true way of seeing, it must change the context for everything, enriching it, as for instance in the way Jung revivified and explained the subject of alchemy by understanding it in light of the new emerging science of psychology.
We don’t always say it explicitly, but I bear in mind what you pointed out sometime, that we aren’t after any “The Truth,” which is beyond attaining, but a closer approximation, a “Closer to the truth.”
Let’s look at that subject.
[Long pause.]
I may not be together enough for this at the moment.
It isn’t that; you are paying more attention to the fantasies and flashes that come to you, attached to a stray word or thought or line of thought, just as Jung’s book said. It is distracting you, but – kept in its place – will become as helpful as any other techniques and awarenesses that have come to you during this long process.
Let me perhaps talk to Dr. Jung himself.
Yes, better. Notice that if we had jumped in when you thought we were ready, this might not have occurred to you. And in such case, either we would have had to suggest it, or Jung would have had to come in unannounced, as he did originally.
[Different “voice”] You will see that one’s learning carries one along at its own pace, in its own way. It may perhaps exact a toll for crossing the river. Knowledge rarely comes for free. If you wish to buy the pearl of great price, you will have to pay for it; saying “Thank you very much” will not suffice. You may pay by work, or attention, or forfeiture of alternative opportunity, but in some way you will give value to obtain value. That is the law of life.
Like the supposed invisible motto of the Senate: Nothing for nothing.
You must keep in mind, anyone is agent for the whole. No one’s life is his alone. No one’s work is his alone. You are each on borrowed time,, using borrowed resources, paying with borrowed value to receive something of borrowed value, and that temporarily. As your friends often say, “and nothing wrong with it.”
Everything I learned – including the great deal that I learned but did not find occasion to put into works published – came to me and I went to it. It did not descend from the clouds as a free gift. I did not construct it from my own intelligence and application. The work and I met in the middle, one might say.
In another time, in another place, you wouldn’t have come up with the same thing.
That is one way to see it. Equally, if I had been in another time, another place, the information would have had to find someone else, or would have had to wait, perhaps forever. Just as there is no ownership of ideas (from the 3D standpoint), so from the non-3D standpoint receptive minds are not interchangeable. It makes a difference.
We can clearly see how important it was that Freud and you initiate so vast a revolution in the West’s view of the psyche. I think you aren’t quite saying, “It’s always like that,” but are saying something like, “You can never know.”
You will remember Emerson as an older man, reflecting that he as a younger man had entertained ideas that were radically different from those accepted at the time, yet had lived to see them accepted widely. How can anyone know the value of the gift? How can they know that anybody else can and will nurture it, if they do not? More than anything, how can they know what they are doing, what it will lead them to, and what it will lead others to? There is a valid psychological reason why Moses cannot quite enter the promised land.
I take that to mean, roughly, that pioneers are still shaped by the beliefs and experiences they started from, and only those who get to live by the newer understandings can go farther, because free of the earlier pioneer’s cultural baggage.
To make a mundane example, a very isolated individual, an Emerson, a Bob Monroe. They help free successors who continue along that road, a Thoreau for Emerson, a Bruce Moen for Monroe. And even these are what you might call first-generation descendants. Nor of course did Emerson or Monroe spring into the world without antecedents.
And a much larger example would be one Carl Jung and his intellectual and spiritual descendants.
Yes, yes, but the number of potential examples is endless, because that is how the world proceeds. Any new truth, or we should better say any new way of grasping truth, any new facet of the gem that may appear, will be apprehended singly. One man, one woman will get a glimmer, and will follow it, mixing that idea with everything within them. I do not mean to say that this will happen only to one at a given time, there could be many. But to each it will be a private struggle. And of course, as each person is different, so each way of seeing that same idea will be different.
Understand this well. Bringing fire to humans is always a private affair, and is always likely to exact a cost from each Prometheus. Yet what better fulfills man’s nature than fidelity to a great task, undertaken not for external (one might say extraneous) reward, but for very love of the endeavor? If your work is not a gift of love, whatever else it may be, then God help you.
And of course worse for us if we shrink from the struggle, thinking ourselves unworthy.
“Struggle” is perhaps over-dramatic. Simply, “the task” will do. But yes, if you bury the one talent you have been given, for fear of being inadequate to it, things will not go well for you. Much better a thousand blunders and backslidings than a confining of yourself only to what you are sure you can do skillfully and successfully.
I think of how hard it was for you to take the subject of alchemy seriously, but how you persevered.
Well, you know, I had to! I was being urged in that direction, and I knew by then that such persistent urges are not to be denied or ignored. But yes, it was very difficult for quite a while, trying to find the pearl hidden in the dunghill. I would think, “Why must I waste my time and effort on this nonsense?” But another part of me knew better. The ego self can be quite opinionated, and is very ready to raise objections and emotional barriers against anything it does not understand, or disapproves of, but it must not be allowed to prevail. Its legitimate function is to work the material that comes into your life, but it is not its legitimate function to decide in advance what is or is not worthy of your time and attention. That is for a wiser, more experienced, more broadly connected part of you.
I know that you do not mean this only for the few who are in a position to revolutionize people’s thought, but perhaps the wider implications for us all haven’t yet been spelled out.
Well, it is simply that you never know. Just as you never know when your death-date will be, and you never do find out until that day, so you never know just what of your efforts may turn out to be valuable to yourself and your fellows. The doodles you make while on the telephone may prove to be the point, and the conversation merely the occasion, as was pointed out.
By Gurdjieff, I think, or perhaps Ouspensky.
The authorship doesn’t matter. The content matters. And this is the point here: You never know what you or anyone else may be capable of doing, and you never know what may hinge on your own efforts. Bear it in mind.
Thank you. Enough for the moment?
Yes. Pay attention to your life; it is only lent to you, and you will have to account for your stewardship.
Sobering thought/
Also, perhaps, an encouraging one. Very well.
Our thanks to you and all, as always.