Through a Jungian Lens

A busy late afternoon in the ICU at People's Number 1 Hospital in ChangZhou, Jiangsu, China.

During a tour of the People’s Number 1 Hospital in ChangZhou, while in the Intensive Care Unit, my wife collapsed.  Immediately a team was doing all in their repertoire to deal with the situation and soon had my wife in a bed on monitors.  In the end, nothing serious, just a combination of flu and circumstances.  This occurred on April 6th and has had a lot to do with my three-day silence.  All is now much better and a worry has lifted.  For those who don’t already know, I have been married to this same lady for almost 40 years.  We are very connected though I don’t know if it shows in my posts as I rarely mention her existence.  Why?  For me, trying to plumb the depths of my own psyche, I try to keep it as individual as possible.

The avoidance is more about trying to avoid inadvertently bringing in projections, avoid focusing on other even though that other is a significant part of my interactions with the world.   With all of that said, I intend to continue bringing my self to this blog as I navigate the images that bring some awareness to my own depths and darkness.

The tour was about the administration honouring me and the guests that I had brought to visit the hospital.  I saw that “otherness” was being valued, almost unconditionally.  Though we were just middle class Canadians, we were being treated as VIPs by the staff and administration.  As we toured the hospital’s museum I was shocked to see my photo on the wall of honour because of a lecture delivered there in 2007.  The photo also caught the vice-president by surprise.  At that point I was wishing that I was somewhere else as it stole attention away from the others for whom the tour had been arranged.  And this feeling lies behind the selection of this photo.

What the photo does, is tells me that I am not fully in control, that I must trust the presence and efforts of others, and that one must not succumb to hubris which is easily slain by the shadow.  It reminds me to take nothing for granted, to treasure the small moments which are easily snatched away.

As I took this photo, I didn’t know what the impulse was, I just knew that I took it for presentation here.  So dutifully, I prepared the photo by cropping it and centering the wildflower.  And then, I have let the photo sit on my “desktop” ever since quietly in the background while using the other photos you have been seeing here.  After a dream during the night which had nothing to do with the photo (or so I thought), when I sat down to keyboard and began to check my e-mail and do a bit of browsing such as a weather forecast check, I felt another headache fill my head.  Refusing to reach for a pill, I opened up the blog site and clicked on “new post” and then selected this photo without any inner debate.  Today, it chose to presented.  Some things are too mysterious for me to wrap my head around and try to figure out.  I just accept the mystery and go on from there.

The same thing happened in terms of what text, if any, would I use with this wildflower on a prairie river bank.  For some reason, I bypassed most of my usual books of interest and picked up a book I had barely started reading many months ago, a book by Eugene Monick called Potency: Masculine Aggresion as a Path to the Soul.

Potency, that makes sense.  The flower is definitely a potent source of new life.  And its shape,?  As a representation of phallus, it does suggest a heightened potency.  At the beginning of chapter one, Monick has a series of quotes which I want to present here before going much further.  The actual source (book. page) of each of these quotes is not known, nor do I have the “head” today to go in search of them.

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical.  It is the power of all true art and science.  He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”  - Albert Einstein

And the second quote:

“I think we can say that in and of itself an act of knowledge could never give access to the truth unless it was prepared, accompanied, doubled and completed by a certain transformation of the subject; not of the individual, but of the subject himself in his being as subject.”  - Michel Foucault

Now, allowing for the mystical, allowing for the energy and mystery that showed up in my dream, I sense the mystery of the masculine potential, and curiously the feminine energy which pulls the masculine.  It is all about “potency.”  One talks of a man as being potent in more than in a sexual manner.  A man is potent in being able to make things happen, as a man charges first to a finish line, as a man stands tall as hero against all manner of bad guys and monsters.  And it is this potency that needs to be drawn upon by a man as he dares to approach the feminine.  This potency does not require violence on the feminine, rather, it requires due respect and awe of the “other” which is forever cloaked in mystery as the source and womb of life.

I am reminded of how in how the awe of coniunctio I am both filled and emptied – a paradox and a mystery – and how I feel I have connected with my soul.