Hungry Ghosts skittering across the snow

My out-of-body bliss,
merging as one with
Jenness Pond's

shimmering expanse 

of ethereal whiteness, 

is suddenly broken by 

a flock of fallen leaves

skittering toward me 

 like hungry ghosts.

Violence in America: Jung & What's Really Real

 Abu Ghraib haunts my woods, lives in my dreams
CC by Jean Stimmell

Our current national discussion on gun violence in the U.S. prompted me to reread an essay[1] by Carl Jung written at the end of World War II, predicting that our modern age of science and rationality would spawn a cascading increase in societal violence – not a benevolent new order of peace and sanity as envisioned by leading social scientists.

Rather than our new Age of Reason eliminating “the fantastic, mythological world of the Middle Ages,” Jung argues that it simply switched place from outside in Nature to inside our psyches. Rather than nature spirits like fairies, witches, devas, demons and the rest “that terrify and tease mankind: man himself has taken over the role without knowing it and does the devilish work of destruction with far more effective tools than the spirits did.”

Or said another way: “We have lost our superstitious fear of evil spirits and things that go bump in the night, but instead, are seized with terror [by] people who, possessed by demons, perpetrate the frightful deed of darkness.”  The New Town school massacre of twenty, first-grade children is but the latest example.

Writing in 1945 in the aftermath of World War II and Hitler’s reign, Jung says such atrocities are characteristic of the new dark age we find ourselves living in. He calls such violence “psychic epidemics” and notes that it is only when we have completely internalized Nature’s demons that, “the age of total blood baths, total demonization, and total dehumanization could begin:”  

“Even the torture chamber – that staggering achievement of modern times! – has been reintroduced into Europe…Finally, the invention of human slaughter houses –  compared with which the Roman circuses of 2,000 years ago were but a piffling prelude – is a scarcely surpassable achievement of the neo-German spirit.”

Looking at the scope and intensity of increasing psychic epidemics since WW II can only serve to confirm Jung’s prediction. By way of example, let’s look at the racketing up of violence starting with the horrific 911 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York, rapidly followed by our equally horrific response of waging two misbegotten wars resulting in tens of thousands of innocent civilians dead. Extraordinary rendition. Secret torture centers set up around the world including Abu Ghraib. And continuing assassinations around the world, even of Americans, by our drone attacks.

Many intellectuals, such as Henry A. Giroux[2], are baffled by this explosion of violence that  “appears to lack any rational organization.” What is startling, he adds, “is that the logic of war and violence have become addictive, a socially constructed need that we simply cannot get away from.”

Jung position, of course, is the opposite: that this violence is caused precisely because our modern age suffers from too much rational organization, causing us to suppress our evolutionary psychological history still imprinted within us, stretching all the way back to our animal past. And even more grievous, we have lost respect and understanding for the most mysterious and miraculous part of our collective unconscious: Nature Herself.

Despite certain postmodernist claims, we are not solely a “socially constructed self” fashioned from a blank slate: As Charlene Spretnak [3] says, some things are “really real:” the innate wisdom of our bodies, our sense of place, and Nature Herself. We can only deny the “really real” at our own peril.

xxx

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[1] Jung’s essay, Marginalia on Contemporary Events, reprinted in C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life, by Meredith Sabini pp. 130-132.

[2]http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/violence_is_deeply_rooted_in_american_culture_20130122/?ln

[3] The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in the Hypermodern World by Charlene Spretnak

Restoring Nature's Divinity

Photograph taken along the Merrimack River in Concord, NH, Spring of 2011

“Matter in the wrong place is dirt. People get dirty through too much civilization. Whenever we touch nature, we get clean” – C. G. Jung. 

"You may not associate such bold, earthy sentiments with Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung, but he was, in fact, deeply concerned over the loss of connection with nature. He considered natural life to be the 'nourishing soil of the soul.'" So says Meredith Sabini in her illuminating book, The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life.

She continues, "Those of us destined to live through this turbulent period of history, the declining phase of Western civilization, could perhaps use a wise elder [like Jung] who stands slightly outside the modern world yet knows it well enough to offer guidance."

SILENCE

Photograph taken through dense fog: Wagon Wheel Farm: 01/12/13

According to Joseph Weissman in his blog Fractal Ontology:

 Silence may be grasped as “the enthusiastic proclamation of energy itself as pure potentiality – a blank canvas, upon which thought dares to create.”

Our Good Ship, Mother Earth: Beached and Vandalized

This image from photo I took at Adams Point, Durham, NH: 01/0613

“It’s possible to regard climate change as a consequence of mental health. Not in terms of strict cause and effect, but as systemic consequences. You tune out the built environment, you buy more stuff to distract yourself. We’re living and participating in a system that industrializes the destruction of the world.”*

* Quote by Craig Chalquist, co-editor with Linda Buzzell of Healing with Nature in Mind.

* Click here to see: Ecopsychology: Whole Earth Mental Health from Utne Reader.

The lifespan of our sunflowers document the cycle of life

Mission accomplished, our sunfrowers welcome the first snowstorm, 

bowing to the New Year

Seeds dropping as cold strengthens

First frost

Luxurating in summer's lush bounty

Saluting the Sun

Dreaming of coyotes, qi, and holes in my head

A photoshop reconstruction of my dream image

On the day before Christmas I had this dream.

I was driving up a steep, overgrown jeep trail in my four-wheel drive truck. To my right, I saw a pack of beautifully proportioned, playful coyotes with magnificent multicolored hair, like that of calico cats. Then to the left I saw another pack of coyotes, deformed and misshapen, sullen, snarly, and gnashing their teeth.

Near the top of the mountain, I suddenly and impulsively pulled off the road next to an unkempt, falling-down house just as an ancient, beat-up pickup truck came charging up behind me out of nowhere, slewing to an abrupt and menacingly stop inches from my rear bumper. Two disheveled looking, indigenous men piled out of the truck, falling to the ground, writhing and flopping around, unable to stand.

They were cordial to me but disturbing to look at. I could not help but observe that they had no pants on, exposing their bare asses and legs which appeared fused together and tapered like a fish’s body. Their faces were deformed and the one I could see most clearly had a large hole in his head (see the image I drew from memory above).

The indigenous men said nothing more, just continued to flop and writhe.  It was exquisitely embarrassing to watch. I felt ashamed but, not knowing what to do, I got back in my truck and drove on. At the top of the mountain, I came across a picture-book village, looking like a set from a movie or a real life version of a theme park like Disney Land where everything works and problems do not exist.

Although it was moving too slowly to be perceived with the naked eye, I clearly sensed that every part of the village was in rhythmic, coordinated motion, meshing together perfectly like the sections of a world-class symphony or the many assorted gears in a 21-jewel fine watch.

Not only that, transcending human rationality, I could see the whole village was powered by a single source. A crude sense of what I mean is the old water powered factories, like the old Amoskeag Mills here in New Hampshire where a myriad of different machines and processes, driven by an endless number of belts and pulleys, were all powered by a single, super-human source, the Merrimack River.

The village I had entered was like that, but at the same time, infinitely more. I had an irresistable, overwhelming desire to reach out and manipulative the parts to see how they worked. But, before I could act, a powerful inner voice like a god spoke out to me: Thou shalt not touch.

The voice did not tell me why but at an unconscious level I knew. Without doubt, this village scene represented our Earth, the complex, self-regulating, living entity that James Lovelace called Gaia. [1]

I listened to the voice and obeyed. Like a kid in a fine crystal glass store, I put my hands in my pockets and did not try to touch a thing, just staring in wonder. And so the dream ended.

I interpret my dream as a warning against my own hubris as well as that of the whole modern human world: While the hidden, immanent life force that vitalizes our world can be infinitely powerful, it can, at the very same time, be phenomenally fragile and easily derailed.

I'm still working on the significance of the coyotes in my dream. However, I have had reoccurring dreams about fish and indigenous people. See below for what I have written about these other dreams:

For Kafka fish must have been the very flesh of forgetting...: Fish for Kafka must have been the very flesh of forgetting: their lives are forgotten in a radical manner;”

Requiem for a fish...or is it for us all? The message resonates with me in terms of interpreting my dream: "Yes, it may be a requiem for many indigenous peoples and the life forms associated with them, but–no matter how great our grief– we can’t drown in our sadness.”

The Hidden Hand of the Marketplace

XXX

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[1] I could clearly sense – and almost see – that our village was powered by a single vital force, primal energy like what the Chinese call “Qi.”  The danger was that if I intervened I might extinguish that life force causing the village to fall silent. And the danger for human kind is that if they keep intervening in Nature, they will extinguish the vital life force that causes the winds to blow and the currents in the oceans to flow. And that will be the end of everything.