Carl Jung : Where are Your Symbols?

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

So You Think Your Life Was Wasted – Part Three (7)

[I had been discussing Reconstruction with Claude Bowers, author of The Tragic Era, whose take on things differed considerably from mine. And I had been sending out the transcriptions day by day to a list of friends. Then one day I got a massive shock: There I was talking to Carl Jung.]

Thursday March 9, 2006

9 a.m. All right, Mr. Bowers.  Hard to really get going this morning. All right, shoot.

You can see from your emails [received] that the material is meeting response. This ought to suggest to you that a significant part of your national story is going untold. That is, if any one point of view is systematically suppressed for whatever reason, tensions build up – for the unconscious knows and the conscious does not, and it is a great drain of energy to maintain a state of not-knowing if you once invest in so doing. This is a major source of much of the craziness in your politics and public life. It is particularly disruptive when not one stream but many are being suppressed, for this means that different rivers of consciousness – call it that for the moment – suppress different parts while others elevate precisely those parts (suppressing others that they themselves do not wish to see). Hence your rivers of consciousness – that is, your factions, your ideologies – do not describe the same world, and meaningful exchange and compromise become ever less possible.

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So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (33)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This completes the second section, “Shaping Ourselves,” of my projected book to be called So You Think Your Life Was Wasted. Next week we’ll start on Part Three, “Society and the Individual.”

Life and Achievement

Friday, August 10, 2007

5:45 a.m. somehow frittered away three quarters of an hour doing — what?? Story of my life, that.

Joyce, where do I go from here? If psychic powers and abilities aren’t an end in themselves — and clearly they aren’t, any more than anything else is — and if no form of external achievement is my focus —

Continue reading So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (33)

So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (32)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

“If you missed some chances, so what?”

At the cost of some slight embarrassment, I offer this for those whose life situation it may echo, who may take encouragement from it.

August 9, 2007

Joseph, my friend, long time no see, but I just got the sense that I ought to contact you.

You will notice that you are listening repeatedly to the Paul Potts album and finding tears in your eyes when he sings “Time to say goodbye.” I don’t think it’s because that’s the only line in English, do you?

Continue reading So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (32)

Jung: “We must begin to learn about man”

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

It is precisely my objection to politics and ideology, that they encourage people to look outside themselves for the source of life’s problems. But, as Jung in his wisdom told this reporter, each of us has within us Mr. Hyde. Our job is to learn what we are

From an interview with the English journalist Frederick Sands in 1955.

“It seems to me we have reached the limit of our evolution — the point from which we can advance no further. Man started from an unconscious state and has ever striven for greater consciousness. The development of consciousness is the burden, the suffering, and the blessing of mankind. Each new discovery leads to greater consciousness, and the path along which we are going is merely an extension of it. This inevitably calls for greater responsibility and enforces a great change in ourselves. We must draw conclusions from what we know and discover, and not take everything for granted.

“Man has come to be man’s worst enemy. It is a clash between man and God, in which man’s Luciferan genius has produced in the H-bomb the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient God could. We must begin to learn about man until every Jekyll can see his Hyde.”

Jung: “You can experience God every day.”

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

C.G. Jung is an example of the fact that great men’s influence lengthens and deepens, rather than diminished, with time. It takes a while, when a great man dies, for us to see just how great a tree has fallen. But it becomes easier over time. Just as the dead tree decays and fertilizes the earth it lies upon, a man’s influence comes to permeate the lives of his successors until it has reached its natural limits.

With some, that limit may not extend beyond the family, or perhaps a business or similar enterprise. For others, though, it extends far beyond — and in any case, as the guys upstairs are perpetually reminding me, we never have the data to judge another person’s life. For all we know, the people all around us are making a huge difference, just by leading their lives.

In any case, I can’t see that there can be any question of the greatness of this particular man’s influence.  From an interview with the English journalist Frederick Sands in 1955:

“Without knowing it man is always concerned with God. What some people call instinct or intuition is nothing other than God. God is that voice inside us which tells us what to do and what not to do. In other words, our conscience.

“In this dark atomic age of ours, with its lurking fear, man is seeking guidance. Consciously or unconsciously he is once more groping for God. I make my patients understand that all the things which happen to them against their will are a superior force. They can call it God or devil, and that doesn’t matter to me, as long as they realize that it is a superior force. God is nothing more than that superior force in our life. You can experience God every day.”

And,

“All that I have learned has led me step-by-step to an unshakable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take His existence on belief — I know that He exists.”

“I exist, you exist. But mankind is only a word.”

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

It is no pleasant thing to spend an entire lifetime watching one’s beloved country descend into insanity, but this has been my fate, and of the fate of any who have come into consciousness within the past half century. I say “who have come into consciousness,” because it is not enough to live; it is necessary to understand what you are living, if only after the fact.

So many people around me are giving in to fear — nameless fear, formless fear, often enough the product of mistaking television for reality. Many others continue to believe in political or ideological panaceas that are, and must be, nothing but illusion.

Obviously these two phenomena are connected, and connected in an unsuspected way — they stem from the loss of meaning which in turn stems from loss of sure spiritual connection. For 150 years at least, and gathering momentum as it proceeds, the descent of our culture into materialist superstition has cut cord after cord that used to tie us to sanity. So now we are in the position of being spiritually rootless, incapable of perceiving what is reality and what is illusion, fearing shadows and continually sowing the dragon’s teeth that spring up as armed men, and wondering why we have no peace.

Why is it that people will follow every sort of leader but the ones who offer wisdom? The following quotations are from an interview that Carl Jung gave in April, 1934. He could be talking about us today:

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So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (26)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I have added subheads to this record of an altered-state conversation, merely to assist clarity

C.G. Jung on exploring and mapmaking

[May 16, 2006]

(7:50 a.m.) Dr. Jung, can you provide some context for what is going on here? I’m beyond suspecting that I am “making this up” except that the more I think about it the less I have any idea what’s really going on, how I should really be looking at all this. I’m not really simple enough to take all this at its face value either as legitimate contact or as construct of my own mind. No, that isn’t the way to put it. I mean to say, I am not simple enough to be sure of anything! So, I would appreciate how it seems to you – even while recognizing that asking your opinion is like – well, anyway –

You are in deep waters, and you prefer to be able to stand firmly on the bottom.

Boy that’s the truth!

And yet you want to go sailing. Very well, if you wish to sail and you cannot swim, it is well for you to not fall out of the boat, or else go sailing wearing always a life preserver! But life preservers are not much fun, so you must learn to swim, or be sure to not fall out of the boat, or stay ashore.

Continue reading So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (26)