^ Carl Jung and the Conscious Mind
Just when I decide to give up on every school of thought and embrace nihilism and anarchy, along comes a deeper introduction or understanding of a perspective I hadn’t considered yet. Recently, in discussing Carl Jung with a friend, I find he was a fascinating mind with a lot of interesting things to say about the conscious mind and the nature of man. Here’s a new favourite quote by him:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Ah, this chimes all the right bells in my heart and mind. I waste so much of my energy trying to sort out “my fate.” When in reality, some deeper part of me believes there is no fate but what we make. (See my earlier posting on May 3, 2008.) So if there is no fate, if it’s all my own mind driving my perspective, then I don’t have to be so bunged up about who is in my life and why. I don’t have to worry about making the right job choice. There is no “meant to be.” There is just “It is what it is,” and that’s all there is to it. So concepts like god are trumped by sagacity and self-awareness, which is much more self-centric, and that’s just the way I like it.
I am in attack mode on religion of late, because I feel the loss of it as I’ve yanked it out by the roots, and that sense of loss irritates me. I suspect that I am suffering from the same god-hole that plagues man and has from the dawn of time (see St. Augustine’s prayer: “You have created us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”) (http://holycomforter.typepad.com/holycomforter/2006/04/the_godshaped_h.html). I can’t explain why I need certain things, why I miss the sense of comfort that the idea of “something out there” that’s bigger than me should provide. Presuming god is capable of comfort. (God never comforted me, for the record. He stalked me and judged me and harassed and harangued me, but he most certainly never comforted me.) But I by NO means wish for eternal life. What a nauseating concept – to live forever in any guise. The god-hole is presumed to be a longing for eternal life in man, and that when humans center on things that do not last forever (family, career, whatever), they seed themselves with unhappiness. That is a crock of hooha to me. I no more long for eternal life than I do for a life of hedonistic abandon.
I synch more with the pagans in this area, I suppose – I believe there is a cycle to all things, and it is right and proper for things to rise and then pass away, like the Wheel of the Year (http://www.healinghappens.com/wheel.htm). Even the bible speaks to this (Ecclesiastes 3:1), but that gets conveniently swept aside as they christians try to explain why their way is the right way (i.e. “humans long for eternal life so that’s why we have to focus on the only eternal thing, god.”)
Regardless, I am vexed by my silly sense of absence, and so I flog the thing that vexed and vexes me most: religion, or the quest for some sense of spirituality that makes sense in this nutso world.