Through a Jungian Lens

This is a scene from a few days ago, one that no longer exists.  The snow is gone, absorbed into the ground and the air.  Since the moisture still exists and will always exist somewhere, the scene can be mistaken for a fact when it should be seen as a constantly transforming whole that one attempts to freeze frame into an image.

There is something about this that gives me hope.  Many years ago when I was a student in a mathematics course at a university in Canada, I began to wrestle with the concept of a number.  In plotting a number one a single line, then as a point in a set of coordinates, I found that there is no point that actually exists.  The spaces between the concept of the number one and the next number that may lay beside it continued to grow so that could never actually reach the number one.  Think on it for a moment between one and .99999999999999999999 lies an uncountable number of other possibilities from .999999999999999999990000000001 to .99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 into infinity.  So much for trying to tie down something so simple as the number one.

I know that I am a complex being that is constantly in a state of change.  No sooner do I claim to be one thing than I find that that has already been passed en route to something else.  All the photos of myself or any person can never come close to obtaining a holistic image of my self.  The moment the photo is taken I have already changed.

Yet curiously, beneath all of this there is a one-ness.  In a way I guess it could be called all that is and isn’t, or less confusingly; all that was, all that is and all that will be.  All of this becomes one.  Now this is something I can actually understand.

I have just finished reading The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, a book I didn’t find as good as some of his previous works.  That said, it did have some powerful words including those found in the title of this post.  I know that the original use of these Latin words were in a small poem by Virgil, a poem about making a salad.  I also know that this used to be the motto for the U.S.A. which had been in place from the beginning until 1956 when it was replaced by “In God We Trust.”  But, it is in how this is understood in the novel that best matches my understanding – that the communion of soul constitutes a wholeness (a holiness) that is God.