Through a Jungian Lens

I had a difficult time choosing today’s photo, and it isn’t about there not being enough interesting photos to choose from.  As I went through the recent photos this photo kept coming to my attention and I continually rejected it because it was a poor photo in my opinion as there is a lack of focus in the flowers.  Yet, in spite of my opinion, the photo kept reappearing.  And so, I listened.  So here it is.  I did a bit of “fixing” in an attempt to make it a better photo using photo-editing software.  The process only frustrated me as I tried to “rescue” the photo.  It then dawned on me, that the photo didn’t need rescuing.  It was at that moment that I realised that the task became to highlight the “weakness” and so this is the result.

Sometimes this is what life does look like.  It isn’t always an experience in “LivingTechnicolor” as one would expect.  There is a lot of fuzziness that is experienced, at least by me.  Sometimes I want “clear” choices when presented with a dizzying array of possibilities where those possibilities are hinted at rather than presented as certainties.  Hmmmn?  There is something critically important in this, a need to hold to tension to allow ambiguity to play its role.

I think that this is the key bit of direction that I get from reading Jung’s words.  He doesn’t come forward with answers, he simply allows his words to inform, to create a tapestry of threads that detail his journey – not my journey.  I can see that it would be so easy to become an orthodox Jungian as thought Jungianism was a religion with the analysts as the priests and the Collected Works as the printed “Word.”  But in doing this, I would miss my journey, my resonances and my truths.

As I sit back and let these words and accompanying thoughts swirl around within me, I begin to realise why I never did follow up on the notion to go to Zurich and study with the intention of being a Jungian analyst.  I just didn’t have the “faith.”  I am too much an individual to follow lock-step any thread.  Everything needs to “accord” with my centre.  Jung’s words constantly remind me to do just this.  His words don’t ask me to “believe.”  I must carve out my own understanding.  And that is what it is all about, this journey of individuation.

With mirror images such as this scene from a bay of Lake Athabasca, the eye and the mind are often drawn into the fuzzier version of the image, one that because of its fuzziness or numinosity hints at something more.  One learns that life is not always what it appears to be on the surface.  The concrete realities presented through the senses of sight, touch, taste, feel and hearing often deceive more than they illuminate truths.  Perhaps it is because of our experiences of being deceived that we either retreat into money, numbers or words as the ultimate truth; or we begin to search for a fuller truth by looking at the fuzzy edges, one that is more satisfying to the soul.