Thea Euryphaessa

Oh yay! It's one of my absolute favourites.

The very impossibility of some loves brings you close to the mystery, allowing the soul to be initiated by your strong emotions and even your confusion. You are brought to a new level of loving where it is possible to work out the paradox of being a person and being a partner. In Hillman's version, the pain of love is the discomfort of psychic pregnancy. Love's impossibility forces you to become a different person. You are forced to think and consider what love is all about. You believe you have to make hard choices, but, more important, in your deliberations you are educating yourself. You can't love deeply until you are a deep person in the first place, and the torture of difficult love is the very ordeal that makes you a person capable of strong love. Your love for another, especially when it is difficult or impossible, works on you and prepares you for a different way of loving. By psychotherapist, Thomas Moore from his book, 'Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals'.

More from Thomas Moore on love triangles:

In his extraordinary book on the soul and love, The Myth of Analysis, James Hillman writes that impossible love tortures the soul into a new level of awakening. "Before connection is possible, psyche goes through the dark night of the soul, that mortification in which it feels the paradoxical agony of a pregnant potential within itself and a sense of guilty, cut-off separateness". I have seen this explosive confrontation of desire and guilt in many people suffering the confusion of an impossible love. They shift back and forth, from one halting decision to another, from one loyalty to the other. The very instability of their thinking and feeling is a sign of the dark night and the failure to achieve the attitude necessary for resolution. The love triangle forces you out of the fusion, as Hillman calls it, to recover your individuality, whether or not you want it. By psychotherapist, Thomas Moore from his book, 'Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals'.

Thomas Moore on love triangles:

In a famous and often repeated lab test called the Iowa Gambling Task, subjects are asked to turn over cards from four packs, two red and two blue. Depending on the card, they will either win or lose money, and their goal is to maximise winnings. Effectively the red cards are disastrous—you can win well, but you can also make heavy losses; and the best strategy is to stick to the blue cards which give you regular, modest winnings. Although it takes subjects usually about 80 cards to be able to articulate what is going on, they are able to verbalise a preference for the blue cards after about 50. However, in one study, the subjects were hitched up to a polygraph (a 'lie-detector'), that measured how sweaty their palms were. 1/2

What this revealed, astonishingly, was that after only 10 cards, long before the subjects were conscious that there was a difference, the polygraph registered that they were more anxious when their hands hovered over the red cards: and that already at this point, though again the subjects were not aware of it, they had actually started to change their behaviour to accommodate the new information. Long before the conscious mind reached its conclusions the body had perceived what was happening and was already responding to it. It should not surprise us to learn that lack of awareness of emotions negatively affects intuitive decision-making. — Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World 2/2

Fascinating passage, from Iain McGilchrist, on the intuitive wisdom of the body.

Suffering and conflict are a part of life; they must not be regarded as 'ailments'; they are the natural attributes of all human existence, the normal counterpole, so to speak of happiness. Only when from weakness, cowardice, or lack of understanding the individual tries to evade them do ailments and complexes arise. For this reason we must distinguish sharply between repression and suppression. "Suppression", says Jung, "amounts to a conscious moral choice, but repression is a rather immoral 'penchant' for getting rid of disagreeable decisions. Suppression may cause worry, conflict, and suffering, but it never causes a neurosis. Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering". Fundamentally it is an 'inauthentic' suffering which we feel to be meaningless and hostile to life, while suffering from an 'authentic' cause always bears with it an intimation of future fulfilment and spiritual enrichment. In this light, conscious realisation may be interpreted as the transformation of an inauthentic into an authentic suffering. — Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung

The widely prevailing view that psychic development leads ultimately to a state in which there is no more suffering is of course utterly false.

In times of suffering, when you feel abandoned, perhaps even annihilated, there is occurring—at levels deeper than your pain—the entry of the sacred, the possibility of redemption. Wounding opens the doors of our sensibility to a larger reality, which is blocked to our habituated and conditioned point of view. Consciousness that had been previously well-robotised and trained to the consensual perspective of our particular culture is excruciatingly sensitised and has a vastly extended sensorium. Pathos gives us eyes and ears to see and hear what our normal eyes and ears cannot. — Jean Houston, The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Mythology and Sacred Psychology

Jean Houston on how our wounding may contain the seeds of healing and transformation.

The older I get, the more uncertain I am about the formulations of truth and morals I received in my youth. There was a time when I thought I knew everything and had the right slant on every issue. Now life is so subtle and complex that I stew in my reflections as people around me take sides. By Thomas Moore from his book, 'The Soul's Religion'.

Truth.

You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things. Why not go into the forest for a time, literally? Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books…

— Carl G. Jung, Letters, Vol. 1

[T]o study soul, we must go deep, and when we go deep, soul becomes involved. The logos of the soul, 𝘱𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺, implies the act of travelling the soul's labyrinth in which 𝘸𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘨𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩.

— James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld

Whereas the average individual has no soul of his own, because the group and its canon of values tell him what he may or may not be psychically, the hero is one who can call his soul his own because he has fought for it and won it.

— Erich Neumann

A common way to avoid the burden of consciousness is to relinquish it to the group or Great Leader. We have seen entire nations relinquish their individual consciousness and moral values, following charismatic leaders on holy rampages. From Jonestown to evangelical fundamentalism to the blandishments of commercials, the lure of group-think is all too evident. Every ideology is based on some kind of idea, perhaps even a good one. But any idea that is universalised to apply to all, that suffers no doubt or internal criticism, that polarises people, becomes demonic. Any ideology—religious, political, even psychological—that would simplify the world's complexities in order to make the individual more comfortable is demonic. Those who offer easy answers do not understand the questions. Staying within an ideology, rather than growing through the necessary suffering of life, is another version of regression. By Jungian, James Hollis from his book, 'Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life'.

Jungian, James Hollis on how ideological dependency encourages regression.

More often than not, we have picked up the habits of thinking of those around us. These thought-habits are not yours; they can damage the way you see the world and make you doubt your own instinct and sense of life. When you become aware that your thinking has a life of its own, you will never make a prison of your own perception. Your vision is your home. A closed vision always wants to make a small room out of whatever it sees. Thinking that limits you denies you life. In order to de-construct the inner prison the first step is learning to see that it is a prison. You can move in the direction of this discovery by reflecting on the places where your life feels limited and tight. To recognise the crippling feeling of being limited is to already have begun moving beyond it. As Heidegger said: "To recognise a frontier is already to have gone beyond it.' Life continues to remain faithful to us. If we move even the smallest step out of our limitations, life comes to embrace us and lead us out into the pastures of possibility. By poet and philosopher, John O'Donohue from his book, 'Eternal Echoes: Exploring our Hunger to Belong'.

John O'Donohue with a beautiful passage on how 'your vision is your home'.

The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalised into harmlessness.

— Carl G. Jung, Collected Works 9i

[Fritz] Perls felt that most psychotherapy, and particularly psychoanalysis, was too intellectual, ignoring the physical sensations of the individual. One of his sayings was that we must 'lose our heads to come to our senses'.

— Deldon Anne McNeely, Touching: Body Therapy and Depth Psychology

No one can claim to be immune to the spirit of his own epoch or to possess anything like a complete knowledge of it. Regardless of our conscious convictions, we are all without exception, in so far as we are particles in the mass, gnawed at and undermined by the spirit that runs through the masses. Our freedom extends only as far as our consciousness reaches. By Carl G. Jung, 'Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon' from his, Collected Works 13.

Spot on from Jung.

For example, I've been asked why I was drawn to Tantra. Because I wanted to spiritualise sexuality, bring a sacred dimension to something our culture seems hell bent on degrading and reducing to little more than a profane act.

The union of body, spirit, and soul.

The newly emerging spirituality emphasises a wholeness of body, psyche and spirit. In the previous age, spirit appeared to seek an upward movement toward the sublime, the holy. It wanted to shrug off nature, instinct, body and sexuality, and being 'spiritual' meant striving for perfection. The 'spiritual' person was pious to the point of being rigidly moralistic by today's standards. In our world, spirit appears to be headed in a different direction. It has acquired a new familiarity with darkness and will not be able to shake it off. Spirit will no longer allow itself to be experienced as light without darkness, perfection without blemish, mind without flesh, heaven without genitalia. We are urged to seek a new way of connecting with the divine, a way to the unification of body, psyche, spirit. By Jungian David Tacey from his book, 'The Darkening Spirit: Jung, Spirituality, Religion'.

Love this from Jungian, David Tacey on the newly emerging spirituality.

If the human and material aspects of divinity—certain elements of an archetype—fade away from the conscious field of attention, we must expect them to reappear in the form of obsessions. When something essential disappears from conscious life, it will appear somewhere else more strongly. One sees this later in the persecution of the witches, upon whom the shadow of the vanished Great Mother was projected. By Jungian, Marie-Louise von Franz, 'The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man'.

On how suppressed aspects of archetypes—such as the Great Mother—can reappear in obsessions.

There often comes a moment in life, usually around midlife as it did in Jung's case, when many things that once had a sense of meaning now seem like nonsense, outgrown, and lacking in the meaning they once had. This is not exactly the same as burnout, which can often be resolved with some rest and time out. It can instead be an ongoing crisis that needs considerable time and inner work to become resolved. One is not approaching the problem as soluble on the same level. It implies a new starting point on the level of archetype, not of ego. This takes time to emerge from the collective unconscious. In the meantime, there is liminality, a period of waiting and watching what appears in dreams and other irrationally motivated and directed experiences. In this situation, Jung chose to listen to 'the spirit of the depths' and not 'the spirit of this time'. In other words, he looked inward and began his journey through the unconscious by way of active imagination. — Murray Stein, The Mystery of Transformation

Murray Stein on how Jung chose to listen to 'the spirit of the depths' rather than the 'spirit of the time' — something we could all perhaps learn from.

The woundings of our lives can cause the withdrawal of our substance, the leaching of our spirits. Or we can choose to see them as the slings and arrows that fortune provides to gouge us sufficiently full of holes that we may yet become holy. 'Wisdom through suffering', Sophocles said, and millions have assented to this cold if accurate comfort. For it is in the trials of wounding that all our immature or shadowed parts rise to meet us, never to leave us until we are either flat-out defeated and ready to begin the path of wisdom or willing to take steps to redress our lesser selves. By Jean Houston from, 'A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story'.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

If you see yourself as no one worth looking at; if you believe you are not worth listening to; if your parents didn't find you worth looking at, worth listening to; if they told you, That's not what you saw, not what you heard, not what you think, you cannot trust yourself, you are lost. Don't look to others to find you, to love and take care of you now. You'll suck them dry. No one out there is responsible. Go back and find your soul. Be mother and father to yourself, Until the divine parents arrive. — Marion Woodman, Dreams: Language of the Soul

Jungian, Marion Woodman with powerful words to live by.

Same here, Angela. It is, as they say, a process.

A copy of Jungian, Kathie Carlson's book, 'In Her Image: The Unhealed Daughter's Search for Her Mother' stood next to a white milk jug vase filled with pale pink wild roses.

A book I found of great help early on in my psychospiritual journey.

#BookSky #MyBookShelf

Another level of yearning for the lost mother that is prominent in the psychology of adult women is yearning for the mother we never had: a revalued, powerful, strong, positive woman to be connected to and to have come from. At bottom, we yearn for our own and our mothers' wholeness and the wholeness of the dismembered Feminine in our culture—which has indeed been 'lost' but . . . can be pieced together and recreated. This is a soul task for women today, which both includes and transcends the connection with the personal mother. — Kathie Carlson, In Her Image: The Unhealed Daughter's Search for Her Mother

Jungian, Kathie Carlson from her book, 'In Her Image: The Unhealed Daughter's Search for Her Mother'.

All of us, to some extent, borrow from others, from the culture around us. Ideas are in the air, and we may appropriate, often without realising, the phrases and language of the times. We borrow language itself; we did not invent it. We found it, we grew up into it, though we may use it, interpret it, in very individual ways. What is at issue is not the fact of 'borrowing' or 'imitating', of being 'derivative', being 'influenced', but what one does with what is borrowed or imitated or derived; how deeply one assimilates it, takes it into oneself, compounds it with one's own experiences and thoughts and feelings, places it in relation to oneself, and expresses it in a new way, one's own. By Oliver Sacks from, 'The River of Consciousness'.

The wonderful Oliver Sacks.

Life cannot be made to conform to a system, it cannot be forced into a framework, however nobly conceived; and a mind that has merely been trained in factual knowledge is incapable of meeting life with its variety, its subtlety, its depths and great heights.

— Krishnamurti

Once again, for those familiar with his work, you can hear McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis shining forth.

The utterances of the heart—unlike those of the discriminating intellect—always relate to the whole. The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only under the gentle breath of a mood, an intuition, which does not drown the song but listens. What the heart hears are the great, all-embracing things of life, the experiences which we do not arrange ourselves but which happen to us. By Carl G. Jung, Collected Works 18

Beautiful from Jung.

You're welcome, GG! 🙌🏼

I found this passage particularly apt, as today's Pisces Full Moon Lunar Eclipse falls in my 8th house.