Defying Gravity – The Shining Nigredo 

What do I do 

when my whole world is turned upside-down, 

when a core value, a precious meaning that gave life vitality 

is swung in surprise impossibly opposite, 

when a cherished dream that for so long I believed had come true, 

abruptly reverses as not true, is left shattered in a single painful shift, 

shocking the psyche with a saddening jolt to the heart, 

an emotional body blow knocking balance itself off its axis, 

when grief and loss, spinning through chaos, are now the only wellspring 

life has to offer, my future lying desiccated and hollowed out, 

abandoned by lost passion and emptied of heartfelt drive, 

when potential itself no longer holds promise for my broken spirit?

What do I do

when a useless suicide is the wrong question

and a senseless life is the wrong answer,

when a melancholy pall hangs over the colorless sameness of passing days

and everywhere reminders of what was lost compound and re-injure me,

when enjoying the moment cannot exist as each moment expands

into remembering the past while reminding me what is not present,

when ageless time and searing memory

collide with tattered dreams and entrenched ideals,

all mixing with unholy circumstance

and thwarting my every attempt to let go and find a way through?

Everything tumbles to a catastrophic point of no return,

living the hell of no solution while holding firm

to the heaven of what is still valued, no matter if it’s gone.

And yet, despite it all, I awake once more to a darkening new day.

I arrive at a point of too much to bear, at a tumultuous point

of pathological sanity where I exist in both worlds while a convulsive state 

eggs me to accept a sublime surrender to my redemptive pain.

Standing firm in my duality fuses blood raw soul and transcending ego,

a trauma bond that announces itself like a carnival barker

declaring this gnarled mass as the path of transformation.

Facts twist mythical and I sense from a nowhere elsewhere 

a heralded noble calling beyond myself, a calling that shouts 

there’s nothing else to do when my world is turned upside-down

but to defy gravity, to assert impossible alchemy and defiant magic

for no other reason than to hold firm the suspicion

that for as long as I decide to stay here I have no other choice.

At the still point of the turning wheel of the defining dilemma

lies a shrinking void of paradox and into that void must go all of me,

the light of my triumphant suffering and the shadow of my delusional love.

Some may claim that defying gravity is inflation, is bare white-knuckling it.

But what’s their point? And what does it matter?

Do they not recognize the squirming white snakes peeling back my flesh?

Can they not see the spiraling, razor-sharp tesseract sanctifying my trauma?

It must be so for all in the know announce it as simply the way.

It is the devil in the details as the beatific vision unfolds.

It is the nature of the erect beast in the presence of the moist beauty.

It is the nature of what I must do now,

now that all is upside-down, now that all is different,

now that all that once mattered is gone.

It is the path ascendant, the way through, the unholy sacredness,

the culminating answer without a blessed solution.

It is the final terminal lucidity awaiting me

on the other side of the death-rattle of despair.

It is life fully engaged - in all of its profane glory.

It is the filth that falls from heaven

and nourishes the unconscious faithful.

It is the descending grace of depraved excuses

that tempts one again to unreasonable hope.

It is the masturbatory salvation act of a tortured soul

destined to feel the lustful karma of a callous world.

It is the unused eggs of the Virgin crying out for their fulfillment.

It is the nocturnal seed of the sleeping holy man spurting into the dirt.

It is the forceful bloody consummation

in the violent marriage between me and my soul.

It always was, always will be a soul most pure, most open and trusting, 

so connected to a place where foolish ideals are real as being as such.

But now its most intimate secrets will be fully known

in conscious exploitation.

Its divine body of truth will be eagerly possessed

in great groping excess.

Its tender attentions will be hugely used without mercy,

all in the name of climaxing upon wholeness.

And while the piercing act of full appreciation is being so enjoyed, 

one question repeatedly thrusts forward

as my overwhelmed soul yelps and sighs in pain and joy –

Whom does gravity serve?!

Whom does gravity serve?!

Whom does gravity serve?!

 

I DON'T NEED TO BELIEVE 

In 1959 the BBC program Face to Face interviewed Carl Jung at age 84, two years before he died.

Interviewer: “Do you believe in God?”

Jung: “Now? Difficult to answer.”  After a pause Jung continued with a grin, “I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.”

Later in the interview, the interviewer asked, “You said that death is psychologically just as important as birth, like it is an integral part of life but surely it can’t be like birth if it’s an end, can it?”

Jung: “Yes, if it’s an end – and there we are not quite certain about this end. Because you know there are these peculiar faculties of the psyche that it isn’t entirely confined to space and time. You can have dreams or visions of the future, you can see around corners and such things, only ignorance deny these facts. It is quite evident that they do exist and have existed always. Now these facts show that the psyche in part at least is not dependent upon these confinements. And then what? When the psyche is not under that obligation to live in time and space alone, and obviously it doesn’t, then to that extent the psyche is not subjected to those laws and that means a practical continuation of life, of a sort of psychic existence beyond time and space.”

Interviewer: “Do you yourself believe that death is probably the end?”

Jung: “Well, I can’t say. The word ‘belief’ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. If I know a thing, I know it, then I don’t need to believe it. I don’t allow myself to believe a thing just for the sake of believing it. I can’t believe it! But when there are sufficient reasons for a certain hypothesis, I shall accept.”

Interviewer: “Well now, you’ve told us that we should regard death as being a goal and to stray away from it is to evade life and life’s purpose. What advice would you give to people in their later life to enable them to do this when most of them must in fact believe that death is the end of everything?”

Jung: “Well, you see I’ve treated many old people and it’s quite interesting to see what the unconscious is doing with the fact it is apparently threatened with the complete end. It disregards it. Life behaves as if it were going on and so I think it is better for old people to live on, to look forward to the next day as if he had to spend centuries, and then he lives properly. But when he is afraid, when he doesn’t look forward, he looks back, he petrifies, he gets stiff, he dies before his time. But when he’s living on, looking forward to the great adventure that’s ahead, then he lives. And that is what the unconscious is intending to do. Of course, it is obvious that we’re all going to die and this is the sad finale of everything – but nevertheless there is something in us that doesn’t believe it apparently, but this is a psychological fact. It doesn’t mean to me that it proves something. It is simply so.”

Sir Laurens Jan van der Post was many things - Afrikaner author, farmer, war hero, political adviser to British heads of government, close friend of Prince Charles, godfather of Prince William, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer and conservationist. And he was something else, something that led him to write a fascinating book titled Jung and the Story of Our Time.  For the last 16 years of Carl Jung's life, the two men shared a nuanced friendship of respect and depth. Fourteen years after Jung's death, Sir Laurens' book was published. For those interested in not only making the attempt to understand Jung's life work and impact on society but are ever curious about Jung the man and his most personal perspectives near the end of life, Sir Laurens' book gives a glimpse behind the veil. 

For me, certain things jumped off the page, resonating a higher appreciation for what Jung was after and the expanded view he left us of ourselves and our place in all there is. The idea of the feminine soul, the anima, being the way to reconcile the shadow. The idea that God has a Shadow and we are in partnership with God in realizing the transcendental, infinite meaning of that necessity for there to be anything at all. The idea that reconciling opposites means realizing something greater than just the blend of polarized parts. The idea that infinite creation implies meaning itself  is ever being created and never static and done and we play a dynamic part in creating ever more expressive manifestations of that Divine meaning. The idea that God gave us the greatest resource to help us face God's Shadow, and that resource was love, and this love is mediated in us through the feminine soul. The idea that we are the answer to the problem for which life was created, the problem implicit in creation. Through our energy and actions, through our will and creative work to reconcile the light and dark in us, we continue the most wondrous aspect of all - creating new transcendental meaning for ourselves and all there is. The idea that all philosophers have been after the same eternal truths of Being -- purity of heart, honesty of mind, love of God, and a patience of immeasurable love which endures and bares all things to the true end.  For Jung at the end of his life, all of the psychological concepts fell away and in awe he faced one great mystery, a mystery he never grasped the full measure of - that was the mystery of love, the feminine mystery.
  
Here are some excerpts from the book - the highlights are my own:

"For the feminine soul in man is the go-between and guide to reconciliation of man and his shadow ...the conscious will of the masculine in creation was increasingly being joined to serve the love of the feminine and a creation, no longer static but procreatively on the move."

...No one could be real and not throw a shadow. I had learned this as a boy from my own black friends in Africa who, if they wanted to pay a sincere compliment said, "But you do throw a shadow." One would look at his own shadow, quixotically lean and long at sunset, and say of it, "You see that man there? When I die he goes up into the sky to join the sun, but I go down into the earth where he now lies."

...Coming to terms with the shadow, the problem of reconciling the opposites in a whole greater than their parts, was an ultimate of his seeking. As far as the shadow of the All-Highest was concerned, it had bothered Jung all his conscious life. In this paradoxical pattern the image of God was both terrible and lovable. There the fear of God always was the beginning of all wisdom, and the love of God the only protection of the spirit that ventured in his presence. Fear and love were mysteriously joined to enable both man and God to achieve greater meaning. He saw man and God, as it were, in partnership, the traffic between them no longer one-sided but two-way. Man was no longer at an almost intolerable receiving end but also at a giving end; he too now could contribute to the conscious reality of God as God contributed to his power to do so. 

...Jung found man and his unconscious self, man in all four aspects of himself, the man and his feminine self, the woman and her masculine self, joined with God in a task of transcendental meaning. Man was the chosen instrument for enabling life to answer the problem for which it had been invented. Life was a process of living an answer to a problem implicit in its creation. The suffering of man was meaningful because it reflected the suffering of its Creator. In this role, man might look as exposed as Job was to what appeared at times an almost capricious exercise of divine power. But even in his most miserable state, man was not alone, because Jung had clearly demonstrated that where man and God were encountered face to face, a vital, indescribable element of the greatest transforming energies at the disposal of this master pattern was delegated to intercede for man. This was the long-rejected and despised feminine and its highest value of love.

...As a result one finds that at the end of his days, when he is ready to close his own account of what he had laboured to do in life, he leaves the last word not with these great new concepts of his but with a mystery which he confesses he is incapable of articulating, the mystery of love. And that love in the last analysis is a feminine mystery.

...They were seeking to create a new sort of man, a greater awareness of reality and increase of meaning. It was obvious to Jung now that their work was full of living symbolism of the most transformative kind. There was not one of any distinction among them from Hermes Trismegistus to Paracelsus who did not lay down as the first and most important laws of his science those of purity of heart, honesty of mind, love of God, and the patience of that love which endured and bore all things to the true end."

"There is only one way and that is your way; there is only one salvation and that is your salvation. Why are you looking around for help? Do you believe that help will come from outside? What is to come is created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you...But what weakness! What doubt! What fear! You will not bear going your way. You always want to have at least one foot on paths not your own to avoid the great solitude! So that maternal comfort is always with you! So that someone acknowledges you, recognizes you, bestows trust in you, comforts you, encourages you. So that someone pulls you over onto their path, where you stray from yourself, and where it is easier for you to set yourself aside. As if you were not yourself!" - the red book

How did Jung see...The Shadow?

• positive things can be stuffed into the shadow
• inner and outer judgments are operands of the shadow
• expansion of consciousness will automatically open us to more, including more of ourselves, which include more of our shadow (the more light you embrace, the more shadow you need to integrate)
• repression is an active process of the shadow
• the shadow develops over one's whole life, and most is unconscious, and so working with it is complex
• working with the shadow requires becoming conscious of it then pulling out individual threads one at a time from the shadow's inter-meshed tapestry
• shadow work is piecemeal work - to think one experience completes the work is another layer of self-deception
• the shadow becomes a filter for our experience of reality, this often results is self-deception, complicating shadow work even more; in layers one finds "I know myself" is usually wrong
• the shadow creates a distance between you and yourself and others
• the shadow creates a lot of unresolved pressure
• inner judgment always begets outer judgment and outer judgment always begets inner judgment
• actions of the shadow result in us fearing the undermining of our self concept
• in essence, the steps to reintegrate the shadow are - dissolve the ego, invite the shadow back in your conscious mind, then unite the opposites; easier said than done
• the shadow is everything the ego is not
• ego transcendence is having no fear, seeing clearly, with expanded awareness
• shadow integration results in recognizing the projections we do and seeing past the distortions they create
• to guard against the self-deception of the ego split from shadow, watch your thoughts
• expression of traits is not the same as re-integration
• you have no control over your internal state any more than you have control of the state of the outer world around you - both are navigated, not conquered

"You can suck the immensity of the small and the great into yourself, and you will become emptier and emptier, since immense fullness and immense emptiness are one and the same." - the red book

"Honor the darkness as the light, and you will illumine your darkness." --the red book

"Therefore the way redeems you. You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain and valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark. Hell has levels." -- the red book

"Meaning is a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning." - the red book

"Mustn't it be a peculiarly beautiful feeling to hit bottom in reality at least once, where there is no going down any further, but only upward beckons at best? Where for once one stands before the whole height of reality?" - the red book

"Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things." - the red book

"The words uttered at the fire are ambiguous and deep and show life the right way. The blind shall be lamed, so that he will not run into the abyss, and the lamed shall be blind, so that he will not look at things beyond his reach with longing and contempt. Both may be aware of their deep helplessness so that they will respect the holy fire again, as well as the shades sitting at the hearth, and the words that encircle the flames." - the red book

"You are a slave of what you need in your soul." - the red book

Every step closer to my soul...