“To find out what is truly individual in ourselves,…”

 “… profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.”

Okay this is going to be a rant.

I am so sick and tired of not knowing who I am and what the hell I am doing here on this thing called earth.  If the Ggods have a clue I wish they would include me in their insights.  I have just taken a day of reflection(not working) and this journey through depression SUCKS!

My friends have to live with pain, psychotic breaks, shame and fear!  I live with all of them except maybe psychotic breaks.  Why?  So I can live this life of what feels like aimless wandering from day to day, reaching and grasping for something that gives my life meaning and purpose.  What the hell is that all about?  What is so crucial for me to know about myself that I have gone into this five years of what seems to me to be, again, aimless wandering, searching for an answer to questions that I don’t even know.

“The best… work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.” I dont know if I am better at this than I was before the depression took over.  You see I live, when I am not conscious of those and what is around me, in my mind.  Not in my brain, which knows life is wonder full and awe full and the place where I dont have to live in fear. I live in a house of mirrors, that at the slightest provocation, can render me helpless and hopeless.

” I am concerned with the woes of the world and their causes, and I at least try to do something about them.”  I feel that I can help those who suffer from what are called “mental illness,” problems in life.  But I dont feel like I am doing enough to help my fellow sufferers.  I know that there are way more who suffer from this dis-ease than are in the mainstream consciousness.  I was told a while ago, by a man who is a student of AA history, that 6 out of the 20 people who wrote stories that were included in the back of the “Big Book,” of A.A. committed suicide.  Thirty percent of the original people who had “recovered from a seemingly hopeless disease,”(1) killed themselves after getting sober.

Now I see why this blog is titled the way it is.  We get sober and then we suffer from the maladies we drank over.  But back on point.  There is a part of me that wants to save every man and woman from going through what I have had to go through. It sucks.  But the dis-ease makes me not share this or step out and really take on the energy that benefits from our malaise.

Well starting tomorrow afternoon, I am off line from the outside world for 10 days.  COMPLETELY!

Hmmm, maybe that is why I wrote this angry blog.  So I would not not have to feel the fear the coming adventure brings.

123 RV, SA, JW, PH, PH, AMA!

All quotes from Carl Jung except (1) which is out of the big book of AA.  I also want to thank the Allman Brothers for playing Mountain Jam, which is what I listened to the whole time I wrote this blog.

“Reason” is, notoriously, not necessarily ethical…”

“… any more than intelligence is.” When I was practicing I called the law “The church of reason.”  I did so because the law believes it is a reasonable person standard that is the norm for behavior.  At least in criminal law it was.  I do however believe that is was all of the law that used the “reasonable person,” standard to predict what “normal” behavior was.  The underlying premise, which was never nor is it ever articulated anywhere in a treatise that everyone follows, is that someone, or a group of people can decide what is the behavior that is going to be determined to be deemed “reasonable.”

Now I dont have a problem with a large majority of what is reasonable, but when it comes to “mental health,” issues, I dont believe that those who have not suffered the debilitation that comes from Treatment Resistant Major Depressive Order(just using my own classification as a benchmark)  can create any “reasonable person” with Treatment Resistant Major Depressive Disorder to be able to articulate any sense of what predictive analysis let alone treatment they can come up with.

I will give an analogy that I think is applicable.  I have an “uncle” who is a professor of psychology at a very prestigious university.  He is a man with a Ph.D and he is renowned in his field.  However, he is not even aware that his suffering, which is not in his conscious reality, is clouding his ability to understand what and how people suffer from those deep seated, sometimes quite often forgotten emotional conflicts.  I tried one time to talk with him and hopefully get him to see that his  shadow was getting in the way of helping others who were as neurotic as he is/was.(He had a nervous facial tic that was so prevalent that he went to a doctor to get medication for it instead of seeing that it was a manifestation of his dis-ease. His weight was another issue he could not see as being related to his inner self.) But he would have nothing of it.  He let me know that he was highly educated and knew more than others did about psychology.  I said nothing because I could see that he needed to be “right,” instead of being helpful.  That is what reason can do for us.

“Clearly the anti-mythological trend is due to the difficulties we have in clinging on to our previous mythological tenets of belief.”  We hold onto reason because we have lost the ability to see that the mythical animals and other heros of worlds long ago have been replaced by one iconic hero whose life was an alegory is now seen as a literal historic event that truly took place in the exact same way that those who were “followers,” of his said  it did.

To the victor goes history.  But the iconic life of the one “true” mythical hero we espouse as being a literal life does not allow for the mythical creatures that our heros of mythological times slayed and befriended to be considered.  This takes away imagination and when it is gone, then the vacuum has to be filled with something and we now have the “reason,” of men from over 2000 years ago telling us what really happened there.  The taking away of the imagination has other effects.  People stop seeing life as a mystery that needs to be lived and see life as a journey that will hopefully get us into a place “better,” than this world.

The power of reason can allow us to strip the earth of the resources in it, since we no longer see the Ggods and Ggoddesses  as being from the earth.  Our only Ggod lives on a cloud high up in a place where we should aspire to go. But using reason, did not the Ggod we think created this thing called earth give it to us for us to glorify in this Ggods name?  Why are we then harming it and  concomitantly ourselves.

This whole one Ggod is poppycock!  Okay I apologize to all my friends who believe in “it.” It is a great myth though!

123 RV, SA, AMA, FB, HF, JW, JEW, PH, PA!

Quotes from Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

I get so much from this blog.  I hope you can too.  http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.com

“I don’t want my thought to be put into a rationalized system.”

There is a big part of me that no longer wants to write my words down.  I think as I am getting back to being in my body more and living from a sense of action and not necessarily thought, I am more able to live in the moment. This helps my depression in that I am not perseverating as much about the mundane things in life.(Which most things are, dont you think?)

So what I am sensing is a change is how I see the “other,” which is really a change in I see me.  I am less willing to put up with the nuances in life that are detrimental to my emotional well being.  I have to say that one of the biggest pet peeves of mine is the absolute lack of humanity that corporations have for the individual.

“When a hundred intelligent heads are united in a group the result is one big fathead.” (1)  I am easily irritated when those who work for the corporate mechanisms treat another human being the way they do.  Their assumptions that they are the ones who are never mistaken and that the individual, in this case me, is the presumed mistake maker is astounding and lacks even the sense of decency interactions “should” have.  How easily the individual who works for the corporate mechanism directs all responsibility  back to the individual person.

“The danger of individual analysis is the neglect of social adaptation.”(1) I am not interested in operating in the social realm that much of what we call life is about any more.  It is not that I want to withdraw from life.  No it is the exact opposite.  I want to live life and what I see going on around me is life less in many ways.  The fear that permeates my friends, and my self in a less limiting way than it used to be, is created in this system where we compete, almost ruthlessly, to “get ahead.”

“The sense of security is increased and the sense of responsibility decreased when one is part of a group.”(1)  I want to share moments with those around me that mean something.  I want to live in loving kindness and it is less and less available when the fear of the world is what dominates.

“Many people who write books, novels or poems, work at night, when the day world is gone.” I am about to set out on an adventure for the next few weeks that will keep me away from all technology.  I am blessed and a bit scared also as I have become a slave to technology more so than I have been since before I went to college.  I will let you know the results of my technology “intervention,” in a couple of weeks.  I believe that I need to write down my story for those who would come behind me in this world called “mental health,” issues.  The work I am doing building lately is a part of the preparation for me to write down my story.  The retreat I am about to go on is also part of the preparation for the writing.

It is time that people see people like me as more the norm than the exception. People who suffer from the deep seated, sometimes quite forgotten, emotional conflicts that persist below the level of consciousness are more in number than the culture wants to acknowledge.  Why, I dont know.  But there and many I know of, and many I dont know of who are suffering to live in this world the way it is.  It is my duty to help them.

I just re-read the whole article.  The first paragraph was written about a week ago.  I have come full circle!

(1)Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 217-221.  Other quotes by James Hillman

123 AMA, HF, RV, SA, PA, PH, JM, EP, JW, JEW!

” It is more trouble for us to speak really simply than to…”

” …speak in a rather complicated and roundabout way.” What is the reason that we use words in such a way as to leave a conversation less satisfied or educated than when we started.  I had a conversation with a friend the other day and in 2 minutes more was said about our lives in a true sense than was said in the previous two hours.  I am not saying that the previous two hours was anything less as far as shared communication about who we are and what we think, but in the end, the clarity that came from those two minutes was priceless for me.  Why?  Because they made it all very clear where we were in our relationship.  Wonder full!

“Only numinous experiences retain their original simplicity or oneness which still gives us intimations of the Unus Mundus.” I am sitting here this morning at 3:41 a.m. and I am struggling with the sense of what this is all about.  When this happens, the
Ggods give me the statement above in my email.  Numinous.  What does it mean.  I looked it up and the definitions included the words spiritual, religious, divine and the word that most describes how I am trying more and more to view their world as; mysterious.

I drove through the fire area again.  I had to go and see if the house of a new friend I had made was still there.   As I drove up the highway from Middletown(where the press focused it’s efforts on) to Cobb (where the conflagration really took off) I saw literally thousands of trees cut and laying off the side of the road.  There were so many that they had started moving down off the mountain and spreading them out in the open fields next to the highway.  I was awestruck by the amount of dead wood sitting by the side of the highway. (It was dawn so it was a little magical almost to see them lined up like pieces of lumber in a lumber yard)

So when I got up to the road where my friend lived, I turned up the hill and starting going up.  When I was by the road there was still houses and they seemed like they were alright.  This gave me hope as I started up the hill.  Then I saw the first burned out house.  Having driven through Middletown, I held out hope that the destruction would be random.  But as I drove further up the road, it became clear that there was no random saving of houses.  I drove by about 50 burned out houses and had to turn around.  I could not stomach to see what was above me on the mountain.  You could see the mountain from about 10 miles and almost all of the trees had been burned down.  Not the leaves burned and the trunks remaining.  No the fire up where my friend’s house used to be burned so hot that it burned the trees up and even burned the earth it was so hot.

So I turned around and sadly went back down the mountain.  I did not need to see the rubble of my friend’s house and I am glad I didn’t.  I paid an emotional price just trying to go and see his house.  I was telling my friend Willem3655 about the experience and realized how sad the whole thing is.  All you smell when you get into Middletown and all the way up the mountain to Cobb is the smell of death.  Burnt death.  Yes for the people who died, but we lost much more than that.  We lost a place where people called it home.  Cobb will not be the same for decades.  There are places where the fire was so hot, it literally burned everything in it’s wake.

That is so mysterious to me.  Why some houses and not others?  Why level a whole community like the fire did?  It makes no sense to me.  I can hear the argument that it is all random. But if there are truly Ggods out there, why pick my friend’s house and not the people a quarter of a mile away?  I have no answers just trying to make sense of such a mysterious travesty.  People who had lived on that mountain their whole lives lost everything.   A man in his 70’s who I befriended one day no longer lives where he lived for almost 50 years.  It makes no sense to me.

I believe what Campbell said, that Ggod is a metaphor for all that is beyond intellectual, it is that simple.  We dont get to make sense of the mysteries that unfold around us.

Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 508-509

123 JW, PA, PH, RV, SA, JW, JJE

The Healing.

I am not a mechanism; an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds deep to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
And patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
Long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake
Which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

Written by D.H.Lawrence.  This was the first post on this blog and is being revisited for obvious reasons.

123 RV, SA, Jeanette, PA, PH, KH, JW.

“Well I know I don’t know you…”

“… and you’re probably not what you seem,…Aw, but I’d sure like to find out,…So why don’t you climb down off that movie screen!’

Jung says everything we say is projection.  In many instances I  question that but when it comes to women….oh my do I ever agree.  So when I read this lyric, I decided to talk aloud about it here.  I hope this is unifiltered, either that or I will have an agenda and try to influence you!

I have found out with all my relationships that they,(the women) were not who they seemed.  They started out a certain way and then either they could not keep up their persona or they were unwilling to listen to my needs and maybe alter their rage or anger.  But there was still that pull that kept me thinking that they were going to be who they projected themselves to be.
Metaphorically, it was I who put them up on the screen as much as they wanted me to put them on the screen. Because when I am really honest, it is I who is on the movie screen and who wants you to see me in  a certain way.  Because I create these defense mechanisms to compensate for my lack of Self.(Ggod self)  Well not really a lack of Self, but a lack of belief in my self.  A lack of knowing Self.

What I am realizing is that by saying everything I can to “her,”(metaphorically speaking because it is almost every woman I meet who I make into “her” at one level or another) about who I am, my fears, my pain, my weaknesses, my shame and yes my strengths, then the “her,” bubble gets smaller and smaller.  She climbs down off that movie screen.

This journey through depression is giving me skills that I think many already have.  Actually I think everyone else has these skills and that I am the one who has none.  I was just telling my dear friend that I am losing my ability, I should say lost my ability to process information at the level I used to. I dont know if it is really true, but I think it is true, so therefore it is.   I am hoping that I am getting more of those qualities that make for a more peace full life.

“And though I’ll never forget your face sometimes I can’t remember my name”  That is the best way of saying I will look for the answer to my soul’s need for wholeness outward and will forget that all the answers to life, and yes to my relationships with women, are deeply and safely held inside me. ”                                                                                                                        “Hey, I can bleed as well as anyone but I need someone to help me sleep.”  Because that is the rub.  Seeing life through my eyes only leads usually to self consumed ideas that really are just that, ideas.  You see, I need to see someone elses eyes to get to sacred space when I do breath work.Well a life lived alone is not one a sacred one in my book.

So I guess I will have to put another lucky lady up on that “movie screen,” so we can go through the process of deflating the ego, lessening the unconscious power those defense mechanisms carry, and truly living “with,” someone.  I am tired of living in this bubble wrap and bouncing off of those who I engage with in this world. I just want to be alive and let someone truly know me and I want to truly know another person like that.

Quote from Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby by the Counting Crowes

I just re-read the piece and realized that everything I said about the women in my life, I was really saying about me!!

Fanatic’s Masquerade

Welcome to the masquerade ball
Where all are dressed to a tee
Lace and leather
Satin and feather
An invitation to mockery
Grand fall from grace
Faces upon faces sache
Empty emotion locked in place
Bittersweet madness captured
I search and
I search
For a sense of reality
Lost in the maze of duality
Frozen and Contorted smiles
Bright colored sadness
In a fit of desperation
I dash from mask to mask
Begging for guidance
One hand wipes away my tear
One turns a cold shoulder
I falter, scramble
Into the devil himself
Red cape smooth as silk
White gloves of evil
His finger to my lips
My Muffled screams do not echo
The picture perfect persona
Melded to my face
I am left to dance with inner turmoil
Only I can see
Round and round
The room devoid of humanity
An air of confused dignity
Heads held high in reform
It’s a new way of living
Behind the glitter and shine
One step two
Your existence but a matter
Of show
Of fools gold
Shattered pieces of self
Fall away under the fancy guise
Red stiletto heels stomping on real faces
Emotions masked
But not dulled
Pain will reign
There shall the devil be
Ever waiting for your fall