Archive for the ‘Marion Woodman’ tag
Soul Making – Individuation as a Sacrament
On Isla Tortuga, a place that is not too distant from the villa, a trip that takes about an hour by car and boat, was the site where I took this photo of a Black Vulture. This particular bird was watching the antics of a number of other birds as well as a wild pig on the ground below. It was obvious that he was patient, waiting for life to present him with his next meal. Life is meaning enough for this bird and all the other life forms with the exception of us humans – or so I think.
Meaning – that is what drives me to search continually within and without. I hear others talk about “this is all there is” in a world that is fully a world with only the dimension of things that are identifiable by the senses of sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste. Anything else is fantasy, a figment and a lie. In the end, all we are doing is putting in time, just like this Black Vulture.
But, I don’t accept this belief system. And so, I continue the work of soul-making. For me, the work is more important that much of what otherwise fills most lives, the busyness of doing. The soul becomes my temple and the honouring of soul through self-discovery becomes a holy sacrament.
Psychological work is soul work. . . . By soul, I mean the eternal part of us that lives in this body for a few years, the timeless part of ourselves that wants to create timeless objects like art, painting and architecture. Whenever the ego surrenders to the archetypal images of the unconscious, time meets the timeless. Insofar as those moments are conscious, they are psychological – they belong to the sould. . . . For me, soul-maiking is allowing the eternal essence to enter and experience the outer world through all the orifices of the body . . . so that the soul grows during its time on Earth. It grows like an embryo in the womb. Soul-making is constantly confronting the paradox that an eternal being is dwelling in a temporal body. That’s why it suffers, and learns by heart. (Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity: Interviews with Marion Woodman, pp 134-135; cited in Sharp, Jung Uncorked: Book Two, 2008, p. 37-38)
For those who base the depth of the world only on their senses, I would like to gift them with a hope for a meaningful life, one in which there is an urge to creativity, to reflection, to consciousness, a religious urge that has at its centre, the soul. I don’t mean religion in the form of a church, but a dimension of being, one that points beyond the smallness of ego to encompass purposeful meaning within a universe which has purposeful meaning.
