2011
Hildegard of Bingen, medieval abbess, physician, philosopher, naturalist, composer, poet, author and linguist, describes a vision she had about the Divine Feminine.
“I heard a voice speaking to me: ‘The young woman whom you see is Love. She has her tent in eternity… It was love which was the source of this creation in the beginning when God said: ‘Let it be!’ And it was. As though in the blinking of an eye, the whole creation was formed through love. The young woman is radiant in such a clear, lightning-like brilliance of countenance that you can’t fully look at her… She holds the sun and moon in her right hand and embraces them tenderly… The whole of creation calls this maiden ‘Lady.’ For it was from her that all of creation proceeded, since Love was the first. She made everything… Love was in eternity and brought forth, in the beginning of all holiness, all creatures without any admixture of evil. Adam and Eve, as well were produced by love from the pure nature of the Earth.”
Hildegard is only the fourth woman in history to be declared a Doctor of the Church, joining the names of Catherine of Sienna, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Therese of Lisieux.
Gaia
“Once Gautam Buddha was asked, ”Why don’t you teach your people to pray?” It was an obvious question – a religion without prayer is simply inconceivable to many people.
And the answer Buddha gave is as fresh today as it was twenty-five centuries before, as new and as revolutionary. He said, “I don’t teach my people to pray because their prayers will harm them. Right now they are not conscious enough to ask for anything, and whatsoever they ask will be wrong. First, let them become conscious enough. I teach them how to become more conscious and then it is up to them.
“When they are fully conscious, if they want to pray, they are free. They are not my slaves. But I can say one thing: that anybody who is fully conscious has nothing to ask for. He has got everything that one can ever ask for.”
yes, reading Jung’s Red Book now is fascinating and fine, but…isn’t about time that we update our model of inner psychic relating from domination to relationship…?
This:
“Jung considered that health came from merely making the unconscious content conscious, i.e., becoming aware of what was contained in the unconscious. It is curious that this narrow perspective has never actually been challenged. This process certainly gives the intellect the capacity to talk about elements that may have been unknown, but it does not promote true health any more than being aware that you have a neighbor next door creates community.
What Jung termed the unconscious (both personal and collective) is a dynamic aspect of our functioning in this lifetime. What is required of us is that we voluntarily enter into a dynamic relationship with it, relating to it as a partner, rather than merely observing it from the window of our intellect.
When Jung says, for example,
“…once the unconscious contents break through into consciousness, filling it with their uncanny power of conviction, the question arises of how the individual will react. Will he be overpowered by these contents? Will he credulously accept them? or will he reject them? (I am disregarding the ideal reaction, namely critical understanding).”
Jung speaks of “annexing” aspects of the unconscious, or “adding to” the unconscious, of “impiously overstepping” a barrier, of “robbing” the unconscious of its fire, or “something that was the property of the unconscious is torn out of its natural context and subordinated to the whims of the conscious mind.” What kind of language is this? Either impersonal or aggressive. Is “critical understanding” the ideal outcome? But what about partnership? What about the likelihood of developing a respectful relationship?
Eligio Stephen Gallegos, Animals of the Four Windows: Integrating Thinking, Sensing, Feeling and Imagery
Just as the childish person shrinks back from the unknown in the world and in human existence, so the grown man shrinks back from the second half of life.
It is as if unknown and dangerous tasks awaited him, or as if he were threatened with sacrifices and losses which he does not wish to accept, or as if his life up to now seemed to him so fair and precious that he could not relinquish it. Is it perhaps at bottom the fear of death?
That does not seem to me very probable, because as a rule death is still far in the distance and therefore somewhat abstract.
Experience shows us, rather, that the basic cause of all the difficulties of this transition is to be found in a deep-seated and peculiar change within the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 777
Odilon Redon
