Through a Jungian Lens

Success at last.  After talking with the salesman, it appears as though the lens was sent separately as it wasn’t in the store at the time of the sale.  Two days after receipt of the camera, the lens arrived.  And this is the result of one of the first photos taken with the new lens on the new camera.  This time, it is a dragonfly and not a damselfly – its wings at rest are perpendicular to the body.  This little guy found its way to my pathway for a rest.  Now that all of my camera and assorted equipment has arrived, my mind is also at rest and more able to focus on final tasks as I prepare to close up the house for the next ten months while I teach in Changzhou, China.  Curiously, Changzhou is also known as the Dragon City.

For those interested in the new camera, a Sony Alpha A550, a picture and some information on the camera can be found here.  Information on the new lens, a Sony 18-250 mm, can be found here.  And for the Minolta lens that I took off my older Minolta SLR can be seen here.  Enough of camera talk, it’s time to return to thoughts running around in my head.

The dragonfly is symbolic of transformation.  Something inside changes.  Changes on the outside are most often cosmetic or simply due to the ravages of time.  But the changes within are due to either and enlarging of consciousness or a diminution of consciousness.  For myself, the shift to a more spiritual life has been one that little outward evidence.  I was spiritual as a child within the embrace of a church.  I left the church but I didn’t leave the belief system as I accepted as a truism, “once a Catholic, always a Catholic.”  Now, I have lost this certitude.  So what is left for me as a person with a natural tendency to spirituality?

“Jungian psychology defies manipulation in the interests of the renewal of any religious ideology.  On the contrary, it holds out to the Christian or devotee of any stripe not the possibility of the revitalization of the dead but rather a surpassing compensation which would function with the force of a new revelation or dispensation.  In the final analysis, there are few if any of the ground values of Jungian psychology to be found in the Biblical “good news.”  It is little wonder, then, that Jungian psychology is good news to those who have suffered so long from bad news in their own traditions.” (Dourley, A Strategy For a Loss of Faith, p. 137, 1992)

This Jungian psychology has allowed me to look within for the spiritual and the connection with whatever name we want to ascribe to a deity that embraces all that was, all that is, all that will be, and all that isn’t.  I no longer need to look outward for authority over self.  I must become “self” responsible.  And this is not an easy place to live within.  So, like the dragonfly, I need to take moments of rest and stop to smell the roses, and perhaps take their photo.