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"Everything to come was already in images: to find their soul, the ancients went into the desert. This is an image. The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them. Thus they went into the solitude of the desert to teach us that the place of the soul is a lonely desert."

C. G. Jung | The Red Book

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The Pain and the God Within You: Carl Jung on the Relationship Between Psychological Suffering and Creativity – The Marginalian

"I asked an elder poet friend why she thought chatGPT rang hollow where Whitman could compact infinities of feeling in a single image, could unseat the soul in a word."

She paused, then said: “Because AI hasn’t suffered.”

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Unexpected angels (l/e)

To befriend the unknown source

Old souls new bottles

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“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”

~ Plato, “The Allegory of the Cave”, The Republic.

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Rabbit Hole.

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The Sacred in Unlikely Places, Spiritual renewal from below

“Great Innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth.”

— C. G. Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man

“Jung was aware that any new experience of the sacred would not be regarded as sacred by tradition. The rising spirit would be in tension with tradition since the spirit would compensate, but perhaps also complement, the existing canon. It is a creative spirit, reminding us that revelations of the sacred are not absolute, are conditioned by time and place, and in need of renewal. Every revelation of the sacred needs to be modified by a new spirit that speaks from a different position. The modern person who is open to the spirit has to hold fast against the attacks of conservatives and remain true to the new vision. In the same way that it was felt that no good could come from Nazareth, so authorities in our time find fault with new spiritual developments and debunk them. Jung felt that this was one of the recurring, and therefore archetypal, themes of civilization.”

— David Tacey, The Darkening Spirit

“The savior is either the insignificant thing itself or else

arises out of it. Over and over again in the ‘metamorphosis of the gods’

he rises up as the prophet or first-born of a new generation and appears

unexpectedly in the unlikeliest of places and

in ambiguous form.”

— C. G. Jung, Collected Works, 9

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The Summer Day, Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean —

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

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Passage from a Letter, Phillip K. Dick to Claudia Bush, July 16, 1974

“Something else shines forth at last. I see the cat watching at night, for hours. He has seen it all his life; it is the only language he knows.

I think a lot about my early childhood and remember events in it vividly, which I guess is a sure sign of senility. Also events that took place within the past ten years seem dim and not really a part of me. Their sadness is gone: used up. I encounter new fresh sadnesses in my remote past, like stars that burst into life when I notice them. When I pass on, they again are forgotten. Usually, however, senility is a gradual process; mine came on abruptly when I noticed the cat trying to discern what was causing me pain (I had stomach flu) and then what he could do to help me. He finally got up on my abdomen transversally and purred. It helped, but then when he jumped down the pain returned, whereupon the cat got up again. He lay on me for hours, purring, and finally the disturbed rhythm of my stomach began to match the pace of his purrs, which made me feel much better. Also, the sight of his jowly face gazing down at me with concern, his keen interest in me his friend—that changed me, to suddenly open my eyes (I had been lying for an hour on the couch) and see his concerned large furry face, his attention silently fixed on me. It was not an illusion. Or, put another way, his field of energy, his strength, was at that moment greater than mine, small as he was, since mine had dimmed from the flu and his was as always. Perhaps his soul was at that unusual moment, that critical moment, stronger than mine. It is not usual for a small animal’s soul to be larger than a man’s. He warmed me and I recovered, and he went his way. But I changed. It is an odd senility, to be comforted and healed by a small animal who then goes on as always, leaving you different. I think of senility as a loss of contact, a drop in perception, of the actual reality around one. But this was true and in the present. Not a memory.

The Constitutional guarantees of our country have been suspended for some time now, and an assault has begun on the checks and balances structure of the government. The Republic is in peril; the Republic has been in peril for several years and is now cut away almost to a shadow of itself, barely functioning. I think they are carving it up in their minds, deciding who sits where forever and ever, now. In the face of this no one notices that virtually everything we believed in is dead. This is because the people who would have pointed this out are dead: mysteriously killed. It’s best not to talk about this. I’ve tried to list the safe things to talk about, but so far I can’t find any. I’m trying to learn what the Lie is or what the Lies are, but I can’t discern that anymore. Perhaps I sense the Lie is gone from the world because evil is so strong now that it can step forth as it is without deception. The masks are off.”

Source: The Exegesis of Phillip K. Dick, 2011

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Image: 'The Court Jester' by John Watson Nicol

* * * *

“[Jung] is saying that to have one’s soul and be in the world at the same time, one needs to be a little crazy. The idea of an interior self is a ‘crazy idea’ to a world that seeks only material security and social adjustment. An element of craziness or eccentricity keeps us sane by dislodging us from an egocentric position, enabling us to maintain a relationship with the whole personality. A great deal of psychiatry advocates social adjustment at all costs, and Jung was opposed to any conditioning that leads to a betrayal of soul. He recommended that the values of society should be critiqued rather than replicated, and that we cultivate a little madness and some secret space, so that the soul can flourish.”

~ David Tacey, 'How To Read Jung'

(Thanks Ian Sanders)

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Beyond the Cycle by Micah Ulrich.

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Allen Todd Yeager, Pan’s moonlight dance with Bats (Ink and Charcoal)

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You are needed. Head up high!

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Energy is in the strike

Matter is in the iron

What is transcendent and numinous is purposeful in wisdom, in the discretion of wisdom, coded in the shared inheritance of language, that there is a right time, not too cool, not too hot, but the correct temperature of the substance and the correct force of the strike, a right time, so that what is forged is the intentioned tool for the intentioned purpose, and not a misshapen substance or miscalculated energy.

And what is condensed into symbol is: Strike when the iron is hot.

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The full force of a star.

Life Finds A Way

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I thought of you when I read this quote from "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky, especially and particularly the last sentence --

"The Messenger has preached the coming of a terrible catastrophe. These days, Bianca’s peers believe that this is little more than a crude attempt to motivate them into throwing further resources at an impossible errand. Again, Bianca is not so sure.

She has a gift for seeing problems from unusual angles, and imagining radical possibilities."