All my friends are tired of hearing from me that Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” However, it is true, and the more you consider it in your own life, the truer it appears.

A few other thoughts from one of the wisest men of the Twentieth Century.

.1.

… people are content to keep some outstanding personality, some striking characteristic or activity, thus achieving an outward distinction from their immediate environment…. Usually these specious attempts at individual differentiation stiffen into a pose, and the imitator remains at the same level as he always was, only several degrees more sterile than before. In order to discover what is authentically individual and ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality in fact is.

• “The Assimilation Of The Unconscious,” in “The Relations Between The Ego And The Unconscious,” in Two Essays In Analytical Psychology

.2.

The idea of rebirth is inseparable from that of karma. The crucial question is whether a man’s karma is personal or not. If it is, then the preordained destiny with which a man enters life represents an achievement of previous lives, and the personal continuity therefore exists. If, however, this is not so, and an impersonal karma is seized upon in the act of birth, then that karma is incarnated again without there being any personal continuity….

I know no answer to the question of whether the karma which I live is the outcome of my past lives, or whether it is not rather the achievement of my ancestors, whose heritage comes together in me. Am I a combination of the lives of those ancestors and do I embody those lives again is to mark have I lived before in the past as a specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life and I am now able to seek a solution? I do not know. Buddha left the question, and I like to listen that he himself did not know with certainty.

… When I die, my deeds will follow along with me — that is how I imagine it I will bring with me what I have done. In the meantime it is important to ensure that I do not stand at the end with empty hands.

• Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp 317-8

.3.

Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about the daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the short-sightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upwards from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

• Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp 326

.4.

Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence. We stand perplexed and stupefied before the phenomenon of Nazism and Bolshevism because we know nothing about men, or at any rate have only a lopsided and distorted picture of him. If we had self-knowledge, that would not be the case…. [W]e have no imagination for evil, but evil has us in its grip. Some do not want to know this, and others are identified with evil. That is the psychological situation in the world today: some call themselves Christian and imagine that they can trample so-called evil underfoot by merely willing to; others have succumbed to it and no longer see the good. Evil today has become a visible great power. One half of humanity battens and grows strong on a doctrine fabricated by human ratiocination; the other half sickens from the lack of a myth commensurate with the situation. The Christian nations have come to a sorry pass; their Christianity slumbers and has neglected to develop its myth further in the course of the centuries.

• Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp 331

.5.

The communist world, it may be noted, has one big myth (which we call an illusion, in the vain hope that our superior judgment will make it disappear). It is the time-hollowed archetypal dream of a Golden Age (or Paradise), where everything is provided in abundance for everyone, and a great, just, and wise chief rules over a human kindergarten. This powerful archetype in its infantile form has gripped them, but it will never disappear from the world at the mere sight of our superior points of view. We even support it by our own childishness, for our Western civilization is in the grip of the same mythology. Unconsciously, we cherish the same prejudices, hopes, and expectations. We too believe in the welfare state, in universal peace, in the equality of man, in his eternal human rights, in justice, truth, and (do not say it too loudly) in the Kingdom of God on Earth.

The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites — day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.

…

These two archetypal principles lie at the foundation of the contrasting systems of East and West. The masses and their leaders do not realize, however, that there is no substantial difference between calling the world principal male and a father (spirit), as the West does, or female and a mother (matter), as the communist do.

• Man and His Symbols, pp. 73-85

.6.

These psychic evolutions do not as a rule keep pace with the tempo of intellectual developments. Indeed, their very first goal is to bring a consciousness that has hurried too far ahead into contact again with the unconscious background with which it should be connected…. It is a task that today faces not only individuals but whole civilizations. What else is the meaning of the frightful regressions of our time? The tempo of the development of consciousness through science and technology was too rapid and left the unconscious, which could no longer keep up with it, far behind, thereby forcing it into a defensive position which expresses itself in a universal will to destruction. The political and social isms of our day preached every conceivable ideal, but, under this mask, they pursue the goal of lowering the level of our culture by restricting or altogether inhibiting the possibilities of individual development. They do this partly by creating a chaos controlled by terrorism, a primitive state of affairs that affords only the barest necessities of life and surpasses in horror the worst times of the so-called “Dark” Ages. It remains to be seen whether this experience of degradation and slavery will once more raise a cry for greater spiritual freedom.

The problem cannot be solved collectively, because the masses are not changed unless the individual changes. At the same time, even the best-looking solution cannot be forced upon him, since it is a good solution only when it is combined with the natural process of development. It is therefore a hopeless undertaking to stake everything on collective recipes and procedures. The bettering of a general ill begins with the individual, and then only when he makes himself and not others responsible. This is naturally only possible in freedom, but not under a rule of force, whether this be exercised by a self-elected tyrant or by one thrown up by the mob.

• The Archetypes And The Collective Unconscious

 

I have been on a reading jag lately, and I find myself reverting time and again to Colin Wilson’s work, currently his novels. Re-read Ritual in the Dark yesterday; re-reading The Glass Cage today. Probably I’ll go on to re-read Necessary Doubt, the novel of his I go back to most often. Once in a great while, I re-read The Mind Parasites, but not too often. That book changed my life: In an odd sort of way, to re-read it too often would be almost to devalue it. (I don’t claim this makes sense. It’s just how I feel about it.)

I remember Colin with such fondness and gratitude. It is literally not possible for me to imagine what my life would have been like, had I never come across his work. If I had never met him, never become friends with him, never published any of his books, he would still rank among the most important influences in my life.

Few things he wrote about failed to interest me. (His books on wine and on music didn’t do anything for me, but that is a fault of my testes, rather than of his readability.)

First for me came The Mind Parasites, in 1970, when I was 25 years old. Then, for decades, I read everything of his that I could find, fiction or non-fiction.

Finding those books wasn’t as easy as you might think, back in those pre-Amazon days. In my early years, economics mandated that I buy very few new books, almost none of them hardcovers. What I could afford was second-hand books, or books from libraries. For years and years, I carried a list of titles in my wallet, against unforeseen opportunities, because finding what you want by haunting used bookstores was chancy. You had to be in the right place at the right time (they didn’t have indexes of what they carried, so you were at the mercy of their alphabetizing) and had to work hard to be sure you weren’t missing something right under your nose. And of course, used bookstores were shrines to the Three Princes of Serendip, which often meant that the book that lightened your wallet wasn’t anything you had hoped to find.

As to libraries? Municipal libraries were likely to have a few of his books, but never many. Academic libraries were better prospects, but of course they weren’t a sure thing either. (And for all those years when I did not live near a university library, the opportunity was only theoretical.)

So suppose you’ve never read a single Colin Wilson. On the one hand, so much the worse for you. On the other hand, what a prospective feast you have in store for you! In no particular order except how they come to my mind:

(novels)

The Mind Parasites; Philosopher’s Stone; Necessary Doubt, The Glass Cage, and perhaps Ritual in the Dark. The Personality Surgeon (though it lets down badly in the final chapter, the rest is excellent). . The four-volume Spider World series.

(non-fiction)

The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel; Voyage to a Beginning; Alien Dawn; Dreaming to Some Purpose; The Books in My Lif;, the Starseekers; The Occult; Mysteries; After Life; Access to Inner Worlds.

If you can’t find entertainment and provocation in even one of these, you’re hard to please. But even if so, don’t give up. He wrote more than a hundred titles. Look around a little.

 

I know of no better mirror than the record other people leave of their life stories. Some things are very familiar to us; other thing are about as far from our reality as they could be. But either way, if we pay attention, we learn something about ourselves. Consider Colin Wilson’s battles with depression, and his way of working himself out of it – and then consider what happened when despair led him to set out to kill himself.

Wilson, a born intellectual without the social advantages that would have allowed him to go to university, as a young man found himself in dead-end jobs that held no interest for him, a long way from the world of books in which he longed to live his life. Anyone who has ever slogged through a meaningless workweek without any clear hope of escaping to something better – particularly anyone who has done it at a young age – will recognize the bleak hopelessness that threatened to engulf him.

But then he made a discovery: From Dreaming to Some Purpose: An Autobiography, pp. 2-3.

“I had listened to a radio programme about Samuel Pepys, and decided to start keeping a journal – not just a diary of my daily activities, but a record of what I thought and felt. I had borrowed from the library a book called I Believe, full of statements of faith by people like Einstein, Julian Huxley, and H. G. Wells. One Saturday … I bought a fat notebook, and settled down to writing my own statement of what I believed about my place in the world.

“I wrote for page after page, with a sense of freedom and release. I was objectifying doubts and miseries, pushing them to arm’s length. When I put down my pen, after several hours, I had a feeling that I was no longer the same person who had sat down at the writing table. It was as if I had been studying my face in a mirror, and learned something new about myself.

“From then on, I used my journal as a receptacle for self-doubt, irritation and gloom, and by doing so I wrote myself back into a state of optimism.”

 

Of course it wasn’t as easy as all that. Recurrent swings of optimism and pessimism threatened to overwhelm him, until finally he decided on suicide.

“I felt angry with God – or fate, or whoever had cast me down into this irritating world – for subjecting me to these endless petty humiliations. I did not even believe human life was real; it had often struck me that time is some sort of illusion. But surely, I could turn my back on the illusion by killing myself?”

He knew just how to do it, too. He had only to drink hydrocyanic acid, easily available to him at his workplace, and he would be dead in half a minute. He procured the vial and stood ready to drink.

“Then an odd thing happened. I became two people. I was suddenly conscious of this teenage idiot called Colin Wilson, with his misery and frustration, and he seemed such a limited fool that I could not have cared less whether he killed himself or not. But if he killed himself, he would kill me too. For a moment I felt that I was standing beside him, and telling him that if he didn’t get rid of this habit of self-pity he would never amount to anything.

“It was also as if this ‘real me’ had said to the teenager: ‘Listen, you idiot, think how much you’d be losing,’ and in that moment I glimpsed the marvelous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons.”

And that was the passing of his lowest point. From that moment on, through ups and downs, “I no longer felt trapped and vulnerable.”

 

University of Virginia’s Alderman Library reopened yesterday, after being closed for a long four years. I went to take a look, and i was not disappointed.

Mr. Jefferson, in his old age, said, “I can not live without books,” and of course this was true his whole life. Life-long readers know the feeling.  About the only thing that could tempt me to want to live forever is the prospect of unlimited access to an academic library.

In those same final years, Jefferson was the man above all others responsible for the creation of the University of Virginia. He centered it physically, as well as conceptually, around the library, which was housed in the Rotunda.

One or two things have changed since the early 1800s, and the university library system today is not one but many, including the Charles L. Brown Science and Engineering; Clemons; Fine Arts; the Harrison Institute (Special Collections), and Music libraries. But first and foremost is Alderman, the main library. Built in 1938, later expanded, it served the university and the wider community until 2020, when it was closed for a complete overhaul.

And what a job they did!

The library building as it was may be envisioned at two boxes, joined by a common wall, each oriented east-west  That is, there was the original building and the expansion built directly behind it, which housed the new stacks. (The new stacks greatly increased the number of books that could be housed. ) The renovation made the two boxes one, oriented north-south.

The stacks used to be the same as university stacks have always been : poorly lit, very bare-bones, something between an attic and a storeroom . In the new building they are front and center, the entire space suffused with air and light.

As it happened, an entire generation of UVA students – those who entered in 2020 and graduate this year – missed the Alderman experience. But for those currently enrolled – and, more to the point personally, for those of us in the surrounding community who know how to value our access to this wonderful resourse –  the best is yet to come.

Don’t take my word for it. Look at these lovely photos.  https://www.library.virginia.edu/news/2024/renovated-main-library-set-open-january-8

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Let’s begin with a thought I had early yesterday and did not transcribe from my journal.

9:15 a.m. Well, I have escorted Herbert Hoover to the end of his presidential term, with, as usual, a great deal of sympathy. When I was a young man, I absorbed the liberal and academic party line about Roosevelt, and it took a long time to realize that as usual there was much to be said for the other side of every controversy. It is fascinating now to see so plainly how the personal and the “external” interact unpredictably, so that it appears that little things have large consequences, and small chances produce great detours. It all looks so different now, after decades of reading various conflicting accounts, and absorbing the point of view of so many biographies and being tutored by so many sources: Jung and TGU and Seth not least. “Go, my son, and see with how little wisdom the world is governed.” It’s still the same.

Then came Saturday’s session, transcribed and put onto the blog. This morning, after salivating over the forthcoming reopening of UVA’s Alderman Library tomorrow, I noted that it’s already like the old days (that is, a few years ago!) in that I have a list of books and call letters and am ready to go.

5:30 a.m. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe I had been thinking about [my prospective] “Thoreau and Mr. Emerson” from the wrong end, all these decades. No wonder I couldn’t get anywhere with it. I don’t need to read everything they wrote, or understand Transcendentalism even abstractly, let alone how they understood it. I certainly don’t need to go about it in an academic manner, with apparatus of scholarship I scarcely know how to employ. It should be personal. What they say to me, here, now. What we know and can guess about how they affected each other. Their impact on people like Joseph, factual or not. That could perhaps be accomplished. Swell, one more not-yet-deceased project.

[5:50 a.m.] I was downstairs reading The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which I am determined to finish this time, and I got a thought about my reading of Seth on the one hand, and history on the other. (Session 818, 2-6-1978.) Seth referred to his “constant state of growth, expansion, and development.” That struck something in me. I remember the guys telling Rita she would never be bored unless she wanted to be, that there is always more to learn. I think this requires an extensive quotation.

[Quotes from between pages 87 and 90:]

“Much of this is difficult to explain, again, for information and knowledge is constantly transformed – almost completely reborn, so to speak, through characteristics that are inherently a part of thought itself. Knowledge is changed automatically through the auspices of each consciousness who perceives it. It is magnified and yet refined. It is a constant language, yet one that transforms itself…. You do not understand or perceive the ways in which your reality contributes to the foundation of the mass-world reality that you experience. Unconsciously, each individual participates in forming that world.”

Really too much to quote but right on point:

• “While our meetings take place in your time, and in the physical space of your house, say, the primary encounter must be a subjective inner one, an interaction of consciousness that is thus physically experienced.”
• “Portions of your consciousness are alive in mine.”
• “You are carried above the land of your usual perception so that portions of you glimpse subjective states.”
• “Your intents and concerns, your interests, your needs and desires, your characteristics and abilities, directly influence our material, for they lead you to it to begin with.”
• “If you can, try to sense this greater context in which you have your being. Your rewards will be astonishing. The emotional realization is what is important, of course, not simply an intellectual acceptances of the idea.”

I perhaps got carried away with the Seth quotations, but the point is that I am realizing that absorbing any branch of knowledge, or absorbing any mixture of first- and second-hand experience, is an active creation, a “doing” that may show no external signs and who cares. Worthwhile and satisfying in itself.

 

Jane Peranteau passed this on to me, and I pass it on to you as well.

[From Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1, by Jane Roberts, Notes, Session 891.] Seth:

“I wish you a MERRY NEW YEAR, into which I hope you manage to insert a touch of light-heartedness now and then.

“Now if I were you, making a list of resolutions, my list would include feelings and attitudes. Things to do are well and good—very good indeed—but the feelings and attitudes are at least as important.

“I would not presume to make a list of resolutions for you. But in an imaginative endeavor, this is what I pretend I would list if I were you. Though this is a new year, there is nothing really new about the list.

“One: I will approve of myself, my characteristics, my abilities, my likes and dislikes, my inclinations and disinclinations, realizing that these form my unique individuality. They are given me for a reason.

“Two: I will approve of and rejoice in my accomplishments, and I will be as vigorous in listing these—as RIGOROUS in remembering them—as I have ever been in remembering and enumerating my failures or lacks of accomplishment.

“Three: I will remember the creative framework of existence in which I have my being. Therefore the possibilities, potentials, seeming miracles, and joyful spontaneity of Framework 2 will be in my mind, so that the doors to creative living are open.

“Four: I will realize that the future is a probability. In terms of ordinary experience, nothing exists there yet. It is virgin territory, planted by my feelings and thoughts in the present. Therefore I will plant accomplishments and successes, and I will do this by remembering that nothing can exist in the future THAT I DO NOT WANT TO BE THERE.”

(Words that were originally underlined are capitalized)