Jung at Heart — I.School

If Carl Jung was my therapist.

Jung: What brings you in today?

Me: Well, I’m tapped out Mr. Jung. I’ve tried many therapist because I have many ‘dis-orders’ according to society- I’m “Abby Normal”. I’m neurotic, but I also have a sense of euphoria. I feel crazy, and am told that I am, and at the same time I kinda like it, but I may need treatment.

Carl Jung- Please call me Carl, and “The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character. “

Me: I need to consult my dictionary, be right back.

Numinous: having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.

Pathology: mental, social, or linguistic abnormality or malfunction.

Me: Interesting. I’m with you on that Karl. Devine pathology. I feel a duality. Me, the individual, verses society’s demands that conflict.

Carl: “Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations…”

Me: True that. Let me ponder for a while and get back to you.

Part Two:

Hey Carl?

CJ- Yes?

Me: I like reading about the shadow. I’ve been studying dreams and it seems there are some dark archetypes. It can be overwhelming, but I’m drawn to it like a moth to a light.

CJ- “To me it seems risky, on the whole, to bring too many of these dark things to light; but sometimes a wanderer in the darkness of night is grateful for the faltering yellow glow of a lone lantern.”

Me: A lone lantern. Look for the light in the darkness for truth? I’m changing, and I’m excited, and at the same time transformation is scary.

CJ: “The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness. It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness. In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden spring-time, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests."(Carl Gustav Jung, Vol 14, par. 623)

Me: Cool, cool, cool. It does fell like a hidden secret happiness. (and I go by she) A wanderer among the mazes. I’m concerned about future generations. What can I do to help children?

CJ: “If you are too concerned about your children, you simply burden them with the debts you have contracted. While if you contract no debts, if you live simply and make yourselves as happy as possible, you leave the best of conditions to your children. At all events, you leave a good example of how to take care of themselves. If the parents can take care of themselves, the children will also. They will not be looking for the happiness of the grandchildren, but will do what is necessary to have a reasonable amount of happiness themselves.”

C. G. Jung - Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra

Me: Leave the best of conditions to your children. Take care of myself. Live simply. Leave a good example- to show children to take care of themselves.

Thanks Carl.

Part Three:

Are you there Carl? It’s me Ingrid.

Me: It’s like, I want the best for kids, students. It seems like I want it more than they do! A flourishing life, but they don’t know how, and they have been conditioned, too beaten down. Carl, do you have some advice for me?

CJ: "Never forget that you are a man and therefore you must bleed for the goal of humanity. Listen, you are still too juvenile for your age. You should get older, the years are dwindling and yet your work has not been accomplished.

Practice solitude assiduously without grumbling so that everything will in time become ready. You should not die unfulfilled. Your years are numbered and many years are still needed for your fulfilment. You should become serious and your work sink heavy as iron into the ground of mankind.

Let go of too much science. There lies the way that is not the way. Your way goes toward the depths, toward the rarest and deepest." C. G. Jung - Black Books.

Me: Wow. Ok. I am a woman, and thanks for the advice. You make sense! You are good!