Resonance of Masks

In ancient Greek theatre, masks were used not only to make it easier for the actors to play more than one part and go beyond their real identity, but also they helped to amplify the voice and amplify the character being played - in other words, they served to create resonance.  Just so with the Jungian idea of persona - the mask we put on to present ourselves in a suitable way, to help us be in tune, resonate, with society.   We can have multiple persona to suit each different situation.  The Champernowne Summer Course provides the opportunity to experiment, to 'play' with different parts of ourselves and see where it takes us. With this knowledge we have more resources to tap into, not only for enriching ourselves, but also to use for the masks of persona.

The Resonance of Choirs

This is a photo of choir singing on the Champernowne Trust - C G Jung Club London Summer Course in August 2018.  It happened every day.  Choir singing in unison means we 'vibrate at the same rate' -  one of the definitions of resonance.  To resonate with others is a good feeling.  Singing puts body and mind in tune.  Feel good hormones are released when we perform in a choir.  We will be doing it again on the August 2020 Summer Course.  And in the same beautiful room. 

A Resonant Alliance

One of the definitions for ‘resonance’ in the Collins Dictionary is “The sound produced by an object when it vibrates at the same rate as the sound waves from another object”.   The two ‘objects’ in this case are the Champernowne Trust Summer Course and the C G Jung Club London.  In 2017 the Trust approached the Club asking them to join in creating the 2018 Summer Course.  It was a truly resonant alliance and the 2018 course was a veritable success.  Both organisations have the same profound belief in nurturing the soul by being in contact with Jung’s objective unconscious, achieved through imagination and creativity.  Jung wrote –

How black and white are our attitudes and judgements: this is good, this is bad; its a male dominated world.  But life is more complex.  The Hindu God Shiva reflects this - both destructive and creative, half woman half man, meditative and daemonic.  Tomorrow, Saturday 18th March, there is a workshop at the C G Jung Club London where Shiva will be vividly experienced. 

Meditation
Tomorrow, Thursday 16 March at 7.30pm, Martin Liebscher will talk to the C G Jung Club London about meditation and the role it can play in enabling us to find our true nature - what Jungians call the journey of individuation.  In this fast running world the need to create the space to let in the Jungian collective unconscious, the religious God, is more needed than ever.  All religions pray or meditate, but we don't have to be part of a religion to be in communication with this vital 'other' in our daily life.  It impinges on us anyway, how much better to relate to it. www.fisu.org.meditation/centres www.londonmeditationcentre.com www.kmclondon.org www.lbc.org.uk www.shambala.org.uk www.kmlondon.org www.willwilliamsmeditstion.co.uk www.sahajayogalondon.co.uk/meditation

Club Fellowhip

The speaker for the talk tomorrow evening (Thursday 19 January) has had to cancel.  Luckily - the gods are with us - Jim Fitzgerald has very kindly stepped into the breach and will give a talk on the Grimm fairy tale Hans the Hedgehog.  He is a well known and popular speaker in Jungian circles and embodies the fellowship of the Club in doing this. 

Unblocking the resistance to dealing with the climate crisis

This Thursday, 19th January, Sarah Halford will give a talk to the C G Jung Club London entitled 'Psyche's Seasons: Jungian Psychology and Climate Crisis'.  The evidence is becoming more and more clear that we are in a crisis situation ecologically, yet, for some reason, the motivation is not there en masse to do enough about it.  I would suggest this is to do with our 'dislocated psyches', with so many being out of touch with true nature, both their own personal one and with nature in the world.  In Jungian psychology, everything is connected with everything, so the two aspects go together.  Sarah tackles this by offering useful new perspectives informed by the bridges Jungian psychology and Celtic myths can offer toward a renewed orientation to the planet and to the suffering embedded on each dislocate psyche. 

Does nature have purpose?

In the last episode of a reading from her book 'Stop the Clocks' by Dame Joan Bakewell, Friday 5 February 9.45am BBC Radio 4, she said:
"Does the year have a purpose, does nature, time?  I know the answer to all these is 'no'.  So why are we so purposeful, eager to tend gardens, organise homes, write books, pass laws, run global companies?  What genetic glitch then this frenzy of intent into our DNA?"
This perspective is as though we humans are different from the rest of nature.  Yes we are purposeful, yet nature is not!  But we are part of nature, part of the cosmic world.  Distinctive, yes, but still made from the same principles - Jung's archetypes, atoms.  Jung wrote of synchronicity  being evidence of the unus mundus - everything is connected to everything - and of the archetype of purpose.  It is in our nature and in nature.  What the purpose of nature is we do not know, but not knowing does not mean it does not exist.

Many ways to experience the divine

Richard Dawkin's book 'The God Delusion' appeals to the increasingly secular world of Western culture.  However, it only negates the existence of the God of religion, not the divine, the spiritual per se.  Our need to be in touch with the divine is evidenced by increasing participation in other spiritual practices.  With the decline of formal religions there has been  an increased interest in various other forms of spiritual practice - keying in the 'spirituality' category on Amazon books and there are 75 pages of them (a few are 'religious' but the vast majority are not).  This need was a view taken by Jung at a time when religions were still more paramount, it being an inherent part of everyone's psyche and he saw that it could be experienced in many ways, according to what suits the individual.
He wrote "Christian education has done all that is humanly possible; but it has not been enough.  Too few people have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls"

Immigrants - working with the positive and imagination

All we hear about the influx of immigrants into Europe is the problems, the negatives.  Renos Papadopoulos, a Jungian analyst, is in the forefront, with decades of UN experience working with displaced people.  His talk to the C G Jung Club London on Thursday evening this week included the Jungian perspectives of working with the balance of good and bad, and the healing-ness of imagination and creativity.  The situation is overwhelming for all concerned.  When a situation is overwhelming, we simplify to cope, creating polarisation.  Instead, to acknowledge, respect and work with the positive side, alongside engaging with the suffering, not as pathological but seeing it as being a part of the pantheon of humanity's existence.  What are they good at, the abilities they retain and can still use, even positive things they have learnt from the experience e.g. a resilience and the value of themselves, just as people on their own without the trappings of their former existence which they relied upon.  He showed a poignant photograph of a little girl totally absorbed playing with a jigsaw, alone beside her family's meagre worldly goods.  To play, to imagine, engenders hope and the jigsaw symbolises the idea of working towards something coherent from the complex and fragmented world they are in.

Continual growth is not healthy

One of the big news stories today is the decline in Chinese economic growth causing a worrying decline in share values and an increasing sense of world economic crisis.  What is it with this need to forever grow?  For good health it is necessary to stop growing at times. This is the case in nature. Plants need to die back in winter, or be pruned, those forced through artificial means are weaker.  Jungian psychology does not look for linear development in people, it is a spiral process, honouring and valuing both the ups and the downs., this is what gives people a greater depth.  What would be the effect if economists and markets saw a downturn as healthy?

Beautifully Unique

Miranda Hart, on Desert Island Discs Radio 4 Extra Sunday 29th November, said it was a long time before she could look in the mirror and say to herself she was "beautifully unique".
The day before, Jean Shinoda Bolen gave a seminar to the C G Jung Club London entitled 'Path with Soul / Path with Heart - The Inner Compass'.  Her theme was that each person is unique in their particular mix of God-given characteristics ('God-given' used here because it is a well-known phrase - but it is not meant to mean the God of any particular religion, but whatever understanding of the Divine each individual has a sense of) and the importance of valuing, seeing as beautiful, whatever we are.  With the exigencies of the culture of the day, all too often our God-given self becomes hidden or distorted from even ourselves.
Jung said that analysts should put to the side everything they have 'learnt', because, if not, stereotyping can set in, which goes against appreciating the uniqueness of the client and helping them to realise they are "beautifully unique".

The Woman's Voice in Today's Culture

Where is the woman's voice in this world?  This is the passion of Jean Shinoda Bolen, author of the book 'Goddesses in Everywoman', to enable and energise what women can bring to the problems of our world today.  She gave a talk to the C G Jung Club London on Friday 27 November about the  indomitable independence of spirit women have, illustrated so well in the myth of the Greek Goddess Artemis,  Where is the woman's voice in the British Parliament today as they discuss whether Britain should bomb Syria?  She posited that it needs  the fighting spirit that all women have in them, somewhere, even if they have not found it, to balk against this warring trend.  It may seem to be a fruitless task, but calling upon Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphic Fields, she said how there is an accumulation of individual voices which then results in a tipping point of it having a major effect.  You may be the 14th voice, but without that, there cannot be the 15th voice an so on, until it is the 100th voice, when the culture changes (from the myth of the 100 monkeys).  It is a symbolic myth, the actual numbers are probably much greater, but the journey is the same.
Jean is a Jungian analyst, as such she believes that men have female characteristics inside them that, to be whole, need to be acknowledged and used,  The route to doing that is often to be exposed to women who they feel for - Zeus dearly loved Artemis. 
She was an inspirational voice.

The Darkness when the Clocks go Back

Jungian psychology respects and values the dark side.  Here is what Brian Draper, Associate Lecturer at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, said in Thought for the Day on Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday 24^th October.  That Saturday night the clocks went back.

“The British Summer Time debate continues as to whether we should keep British Summer Time all year round. Studies suggest that kids are more active for longer when the evenings are light, there are fewer road accidents and we would save on energy bills.  On the other hand, Northern Scotland wouldn’t see sunrise until 10 and early birds from farmers to postal workers would be plunged in darkness for longer.

Beyond these practical arguments however it is perhaps at the visceral level that we feel our descent into the darkness of winter most sharply, accelerated as it is this weekend by the clock change and the often depressing realisation that the darkness has crept up on us again.  This is not helped, I believe, by the way we associate light and dark with good and bad.  We tend to think in terms of binary opposites, because a world of us and them, black and white and so on, is an easier place to grasp.  So when it comes to light and dark, the most primal set of opposites we have, we tend not to like the dark and try to keep it at bay.  Yet if we pause to peer into the beauty of natural darkness – for instance (our eyes do adjust and we are soon reminded of its riches), if the light didn’t fade, how could we appreciate a sunset, or the glimmer of the first evening star.  How could we enjoy a deep and restorative sleep? How could a seed ever germinate?   “At the heart of reality”, says the Quaker writer Parker Palmer “opposites cohere in mysterious unity.”  Religion, if we are not careful, can accentuate the opposition at the expense of the mystery, so we can end up believing that God’s role is just to side with us.  But it doesn’t seem to work that way.  As the poet Henry Vaughan writes “There is in God a deep but dazzling darkness.”   So much of what we have come to associate negatively with being in the dark, such as not knowing or having all the right answers, such as struggle, pain, or loss, is very much part of the mysterious unity of the whole.  Looking back to darker times in our life we can often see that this is spiritually when we have grown the most.  The 16^th century monk Jonathan Cross, from the depths of a prison cell wrote eloquently of his dark night of the soul and accepted it as a gift. 

As the clocks go back, I wonder if we can do the same with our winter darkness as much as with that extra hour in bed.”

Existentialism and Jungian Psychology

'In Our Time' on Thursday 22 October on BBC Radio 4 discussed the Existentialist Simone de Beauvoir.  To quote something said about one of the principles of Existentialism "You can never get off the treadmill of choosing, making choices, you can never stop - - -  You can never go with a quiet conscience, you can never think "Oh well, that's it and I've ticked it and I've done it."

In this respect Jungian psychology resonates with Existentialism.  Jungian psychology is about having a good relationship with the unconscious.  Jung writes

""No mortal can plumb the depths of nature" - nor even the depths of the unconscious.  We do know however that the unconscious never rests.  It seems to be always at work, for even when we sleep we dream.  There are many people who declare that they never dream, but the probability is that they simply do not remember their dreams.  Not a day passes but we make some slip of the tongue, or something slips our memory, which at other times we know perfectly well, or we are seized by a mood whose cause we cannot trace, etc.  These things are all symptoms of some consistent unconscious activity - - "

And so it is that developing our relationship with the unconscious never ends, right up to death.  In Jungian jargon, we are never 'individuate', are never completely and totally all we have the potential to be as our individual unique selves.  All we can do is take the individuation journey right up until we die.

Plant Soul

In the Radio 4 Extra play ‘Family Tree’ (9.15-10.00pm Tuesday 20 October) a boy turns into a plant, his mother tends him until he is 30 years old and gets too big to be indoors and is dying.  Experts tell her the plant is being killed with kindness, needs to be cut back and planted outside.  She plants him in the botalnical gardens.  She has become frail and uses up all her energy doing this.  She lies down beside him to rest, he drop all hi leaves carefully on her.  She would have died without their protection and is found by a gardener.  The chief gardener thinks the boy-plant is dead, but the one who found the mother does not, moves it to his shed, tends it with great care and it grows a shoot.  He leaves his mobile by the plant and the shoot touches it to phone home.  The gardenr sees the number and rings it.  The house is on the market (the mother has been put in a home) and the estate agent answers.  The gardener goes round, sees the damp mark on the carpet where the plant pot stood, the marks on the branches were and realised this was the plant’s home.  The chief gardener burns the plant, which still looks mainly dead.  The gardener rescues seeds from the burnt shoot, one survives, he grows it until it is a small pot plant and gives it to the mother. It is her grandchild.  The voice over in the play is that plant, now old and a large tree, having cast its seeds far and wide.  It comments on people finding looking at trees and feeling a connection, reminds us how we die, are buried, become part of the earth and then part of the plants “We are not as distinct as we think” is the finale. 

This is resonant with Jungian psychology which speaks of the ‘One World’, that everything is connected to everything.   There was a C G Jung Club London – Guild of Pastoral Psychology seminar on 17^th of October with Thomas Moore speaking about ‘Care of the Soul and Spirit in a Secular World’.   He spoke of Thomas Aquinas writing that we have a human soul, an animal soul and a vegetable soul. How we need to be in touch with all of these aspects of soul.  To quote Thomas Moore from the seminar “Why do we have plants in our house? - - Feeling the need to vegetate.  - -  We grow out of this earth, we are not on it, we came out of it. - - That is our partciipation, that is not another species somewhere, but we can participate, we can trust our vegetable instincts.  If we don’t do that  we live only from our mind level of soul, which is extremely valuable but not the whole story. - -  Going down into our roots.”

Radio 4 Extra Familly Tree drama about our vegetable soul resonates with C G Jung Club London seminar 17 October speaker Thomas Moore