Opening Lecture: Jeffrey Raff: Second Sacrifice and Birth of the Self
Second Half of Life
35-40: Change in relationship to psyche, self
Symbols of Transformation (volume)
Psychic energy could run through a number of channels, including sex but not limited to it (This idea led Jung to break with Freud)
Demand these phases make and consequences.
Self – whole range of psychic phenomenon in a human being
Personality is mostly unconscious
Equals the god image within us
Self guides all the psychic impulses that are occurring
Most people – self is functioning at a weak level, specifically if not looking at dreams, etc.
Latent self – individuation transforms latent self into powerful manifest self
Begin to feel an inner strength that was not there
Ego comes into relationship with the self
Pay attention to the self and its messages
Individuation depends on ego’s relationship-self
Demands attention in second half of life
Meet demands of first half and second half respectively
First half – development of ego
Ego learning to adjust and adapt – leaving family, getting a job
Ego asserts itself, leaves home and deals with the world
Take psychic energy invested in mother and invest it into the world (adolescence)
Or negative, devouring unconscious forms – helpless, dependant
Sacrifice (Nut?) your mother in order to make that transition into the world
Have to kill this image
Energy released progresses into outer world
Second half
Things begin to feel flat – outer endeavors become tiresome
Regresses into the unconscious
Energy flows backward- can go all the way back to collective unconscious
Sacrifice the World (Hindu horse sacrifice)
Sacrifice all the energy (what you have built) you’ve put into the world
-depression
-fairly important dreams
Archetypal – needs to be dealt with
Our culture doesn’t honor this phase
If you don’t go into it – men- motorcycle, younger wife
Women – surgery
Flow with the process – introverted period
Second Sacrifice
Unconscious is active and alive in a way it’s never been
Has a message but the message is unknown
Fantasy images – dreams *active imagination, major tool
Contact and make conscious
Ego needs to turn within
Self is trying to make itself manifest, presenting material you need to make that known to you
Active Imagination – Principle means self manifests
Ancient history
*Experience unconscious in a waking state – Conscious interaction with them, find a way to record them
Dancing, painting, dialogues
Enable the ego to encounter the unconscious in a conscious condition
Transcendent function
2 conflicting ideas are united in a symbol
Logical person stats having feelings but has known logic, meet an inner figure (in active imagination) who teaches you
Hold the tension and move through discomfort, feeling and thinking into a new image
Transcendent function creates a third entity from the two
Union of ego and unconscious = self
Feeling of being guided and strengthened by something greater than one’s self
Active imagination – conscious and direct interaction
Analysis is the process in which you teach analysands active imagination
Second Half
First half= ego growing and strengthening
Second half – has to sacrifice itself
Ego resists self-sacrifice
Ego must sacrifice its dream of all power
Can’t rule the unconscious any more
Can terrify people – crazy, loss of control
Pay attention to what the unconscious is telling you
Profound transformation available
Self sacrifice and re-entry into the mother (archetypal great mother)
Unconscious is now in partnership with you
This growth is endless
Ego will feel surrounded and supported by divine presence
Rootless = failure to meet these challenges
Some people able to simply avoid these challenges
Paying attention – incredibly powerful tool ego has at its disposal
Attention is blood
Incubation heats up unconscious
No alchemist then alchemy doesn’t occur
Inner figures are real entities
Process that needs your help to transform
Take these figures seriously
Not living for ourselves anymore but for everybody – create Tikkun
All the unconscious forces
Second half confronts death, spiritual transformation; connect with the divine in some way
Respond to demands of inner voice – active imagination twice per week (15-20 minutes)
Ego resists
Return to the world in a transformed way.
Pay attention to what’s happening, going on in your body, fantasies
Why now?
Dialoging with figures
Consc suffering – particularly in the world’s pain
Reflective of your own
This is our purpose and gives life meaning
Personal myth – self will tell you something that suits you perfectly
Dialogue A-B until C
Sacrifice ego’s position of total dominance
Meditation is great way to start active imagination
“Empty nest gives you the chance to lay an alchemical egg.”
When sacrifice not done, then life makes it happen
Walking willingly or being dragged by the self
Death of a parent
Coming to birth of self is the most profound mystery you may ever experience.
Talmud: “Dream uninterpreted is like a letter unopened.”
Jung said the best way to age is to live as if you’re immortal
“Purpose of a problem is not to be solved.but to experience it.” – Jung
New perspective of your consciousness – it’s really not a problem any more
(I see this as a facet of how I do psychic readings)
(My thoughts: What this tells me is that there is a divine and perfect order that we often fail to see, but if we utilize every experience as if it were meant to be, our lives will take on a rich, transcendent function.)
Claire Dunne: Carl Jung, Wounded Healer of the Soul
The psyche is, by nature, religious according to Jung
Personality 1 – By nature
Personality 2 – Created to fit in
“Why be a second class Jung when I can be a first class me?”
“I’m glad I’m Jung and not a Jungian.” Jung
Authenticity. We need to become our complete selves.
Perfection is a masculine concept
Completion: feminine wholeness
Death of a Woman by Jane Wheelwright (look up?)
“Doubt and insecurities are indispensable components of a complete life.” Jung (letters)
Deep in the psyche you must meet the spiritual
Self can appear as images, such as wise old man, priestess.
“People, even theologians, are embarrassed to talk about God. It is more polite to talk about sex.” – Jung
John O’ Donohue: The Art of Balance
Gift of the mind is the greatest gift
“In time of peace the warlike person attacks himself.” Nietzsche
Quality of presence of mind
Grey-blue light, pools of silver – epiphany and brightness were eventing themselves
Balance and middle way only make sense as constructs
Balance that is truly formed, not frightened paralysis
Experience is structured with loyalty to duality
Where the dualities meet- at a threshold – vigorous place
Each of us is a force field, which makes us more interesting than chairs, doors, windows, intensity of isness
What are you leaving out in yourself that’s dying to talk to you?
Sophia Institute in California
A soul is a bloody dangerous thing to have.
Disturbing yet imagination loves duality
We are imagined by ourselves
Your knowing of yourself is an act of imagination
Introduce yourself as anyone you want
Imagination loyal to wholeness and wholeness – opposition inevitably invited
Hospitality to miracle of thereness,
As if identity were equivalent to biography
“It’s easy to choreograph a fairly flat life but it’s such a waste.”
We can get so lost behind the facades of respectability that it completely masks that we are totally lost.”
Substantial magnetic ordering in us
Subtle form of who you are will begin to love? Live? After itself
Poem will start misbehaving and define itself
Let the complexity of yourself emerge – natural coherence of rhythm
Great respect for the unknown within us
If we brought the same hospitality to the things we don’t like about ourselves
(Tempkin Museum in San Diego)
“It is on no map; no true place ever is.”
Always a shape of presence latent in the chaos
Finding the myth in the myss
Emergence of form to the imagination that welcomes it and can receive it
Balance is a living thing. It has passion – requires loyalty to the opposing force (art of balance)
Balance is a grace
Adventure of being doesn’t offer you security; anything can happen to you
Need to go down beneath turbulent waters to the still place
Unseen force
Priestliness of the human heart
“There’s something about being in the rhythm of a thing; it looks after you.”
John O’Donohue: Midlife – Invitation to a New Sensuousness
Takes us longest to reach what is nearest
Come home to being a body and like it
Vows to themselves – a wedding to one’s own body
Awakening simultaneously act of distance and act of nearing
Broken, exiled relationships to one’s own body and yet rare to see someone
Who didn’t belong to the body they were in
What declarations are visible in me?
Irony is that we’ve never seen our own faces.
Mirror exercises: what I glimpsed in myself that I never suspected
We are a threshold between visible and invisible
Without the visible we’re boring
Last secret is secret of privacy
Geography of psyche revealed through rhythm of the body
Incredible that we’re not totally invisible
Death scraped tracings on the invisible
Visibility sister of vision
Visibility maturing to invisibility
Invisibility claiming space
Belief in invisible – you should have no fear
“If we let our bodies alone they would have an incredible belonging with nature.”
Rilke: In difficult times you should always endeavor to stay close to one thing in nature.
Liturgy that starts with the toes
Psyche and spirit – when you attend to both rhythm words incredible logic of darkness in eros of the body
Don Patterson, Scottish poet: all of the body almost speaks
Daniel & Siegal: Developing Mind – Brain is learning, self-activating organ
What enzymes are up to in their private time
Orchestra of the body speaking to the little broken string
Yes there will be music again
Sophistication of senses in us
Everything pivots on individual integrity allied to some kind of natural belonging to our body – Home
Mindfulness that unfolds in your senses
Bring a consciousness to your body – Under a mindful gaze, the world deepens
Ask yourself – what did I really see?
Listening. Being visible is like having a day off
Which of you senses do I not give fair pleasure? Take an afternoon and take that one out.
Your knees have had experiences that your elbows know nothing about
(My thought: real way to be a psychic is to be a poet of the moment and the invisible)
This must be from Areyah “He who says something in the name of the person who said it, redeems the world.” Talmud
Christina Mulvey: Images that Heal
“The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life – in them everything essential was decided.” -C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections
“The challenge seems to be staying true to one’s own tune within the orchestra of life.” – Christina Mulvey’s tape
You can understand with your mind but unless you connect with your heart, nothing really changes – Jung
Pay attention; healing images are there all the time
Stand the tension of opposites in our own being and wait and listen,
Pay attention. I’m important enough to take the time and space
(Jung v.16, pg 489)
How do we accept what we are? -Christina
“The sorrow that cuts deep leaves more space for joy.” – Gibran
The self is the one we could rest in and nest in if we would allow ourselves
Mostly it’s the accumulation of work that makes the difference
We’re terrified of what we might do
Do what you can, not what you think you can. – Jung
It’s not about smoothing but honoring and respecting
Persona – outer mask
“All shirts are wrinkled in a different way but all smooth shirts are very similar.” – Christina
“All true things change so only that which changes remains true.” – Jung
“To have someone who just delights in the wonder of you is a wonderful gift.” Senter (from our group)
Christina wanted to stop her work at the Jung Institute in Zurich. Combining thinking and feeling, she questioned why she should do this. In truth, she was afraid to go on.
Very relevant for me at the conference, times I feel blocked and don’t want to go on, do anymore, and in truth, why should I? But what happens if I recognize fear coming up and simply continue?
Claire Dunne: “Mother Ireland”
Granddaughter of Noah led here (to Ireland) 50 women, 3 men
Feminine principle in this country is natural
“To be natural is to be holy.” John O’Donohue
Carl Jung: “The psyche is by nature religious.”
Of the land – pagus
Deer is a sacred animal, like the swan
We come from the earth, not the earth from us, thus she is mother
Jessica Power (writer) “I sometimes think we pass life by.”
Michael Danes (writer) mythic Ireland
Human and divine=living between two worlds
Winter as chaos initiating (gestating?) rebirth
Go into the darkness – form a relationship with it.
“You cannot go through the Rockies and remain small.” Claire
Pilgrim At Tinkers Creek
St Brigid = 3 elements in one
Derry = sacred oak grove
3 patron saints
She’s the third and amalgam of three different layers, elemental fire goddess
Royal daughter of the god “(Daigido?) worshipped by poets
Christian saint – Mary of Gael
“Landscape has a secret and silent memory.” Jung
Myths are stories of psychic process of death and rebirth
Receptivity
Recommended Reading: Symbolic Landscape by Paul Deveraux
Maisey Cavanaugh: when we go out in the bush we don’t talk, we listen to what the land is telling us
A.E. Russell – Shining beings – midworld
Opalescent beings – heaven world
Manisha Roy “Aging as Initiation”
Midlife – last chance for puberty rite that we miss in the west
Natural process of initiation
Initiation is at the core of human experience – cyclical process, can’t control death.
Carol Pearson, Archetypal Stages of Hero’s Journey
Happy child = innocence story
Teenage = seeker story
– innocent and orphan are two sides of inner child
Warrior/caretaker are two sides of inner parent
Midlife Transition: Seeker, Destroyer, Lover, Creator
Return: Living the stories of Ruler, Magician, Safe and Jester
If you haven’t connected with their stories, you may have a hard time moving through them
Psyche type = hardware
More software than we even know how to use
Free upgrade of our archetypes (Johnny Depp movie Don Juan de Marco- sees bigger picture)
What stories have you been living?
What stories still want to be lived?
What stories may you be resistant to living?
www.capt.org
drudge/caretaker- self sacrifice
Innocent – optimism denial
Orphan – realism, wounded child empathy self-destruction
Move into archetype, become less dependent on original imprinting
Caregiver martyr enabler take care of one’s self
Warrior soldier set a goal and go after it winning – work to death for something of great value
Principle set a boundary, akido – deflect violence
Midlife is liminal space
The Hero’s Journey (Carol Pearson)
Hero’s journey is an initiation into the reality of the soul’s journey. It requires us to establish and then let go of control over our lives, to put aside our horror at confronting death, pain and loss.
To experience life’s wholeness we must let go of sentiment, safety and predictability. Even our own concern with physical safety, effectiveness and virtue. We move out of the duality of good and bad, me and you, right and wrong and into a world of paradox.
Different morality from ego’s. Ego wants the world to make sense.
The journey requires us to put all these desires aside and see the soul’s truth that essence of life is mystery.
The soul’s truth does not necessarily make any sense from a rational ego point of view. It is good to be healthy, wealthy and wise but what makes us alive and real is journeying into the central mysteries of life where we learn about death, dissolution, sex, passion, ecstasy, and to see the beauty of it all.
Preparation of the journey is about learning to be strong, moral and healthy but the journey itself is about experiencing the great mysteries of life-death, passion, birth, creation-as mysteries.
There is no punishment for failing to connect with one’s soul except the ever present sense of meaninglessness in one’s life, which is, of course, punishment enough.
