Through a Jungian Lens

I am bringing another photo from a file I have set up called “anima.”  I took this photo about eight years ago while travelling through the Canadian Rocky Mountains.  For those interested, this particular site overlooks Canmore, Alberta.  As with a few other “anima” photos I have presented here, I am continuing with the use of “blue” in order to evoke the Great Mother, Gaia.

If Gaia was able to take human form, then I would see her as standing on the heights looking down at all that she created with a sense of sadness.  There is little doubt that “man” has run wild in his dominion over her creations.  Consciously we know that every act we perform effects the whole in some manner.  There is no escaping this fact.  Yet we bury our heads in hopes that if we “don’t know” that somehow we won’t be held accountable, that somehow what we do will slip by without affecting the whole, without being noticed.  This is where we get into our biggest troubles – the disconnect with our own soul, our own spirit.

So what do we do?  What can we do?

“All that Jung offers, and it may be as much as can be offered, is the suggestion that the individual stay in conscious dialogue with that inner power which is the source of the world’s religions.  Perhaps the only hope in the end is the inner dialogue carried out on behalf of the emergence of the safer myth.  Jung valued the individual’s contribution to its emergence as the greatest contribution one could make to humanity.  More, Jung implies that fidelity to this inner voice is fidelity to a power whose ultimate intent is personal vitality, the integration of the individual’s multiplicity through the balance of inner opposites, and a progressive empathy for the world beyond.”  (Dourley, A Strategy For a Loss of Faith, pp 136-137)

So this, then, is my task – do the work of journeying towards wholeness, living the journey, and sharing this journey here.  There is more, but for now, it is enough.

Yesterday I flew over the Rocky Mountains that border Alberta and British Columbia here in Canada.  It was one of those flight days when the sky conditions were right for decent photography.  Often the photos are not worth saving, but I continue to take the photos just in case.  As you can see, this time, the effort was rewarded.   The sharp peaks covered in snow appeared as though they were layer after layer of teeth.  The terrain was not “friendly” though it was beautiful.  As I looked down on the mountains my thoughts drifted to my adolescence when I first met Zarathustra.  The image of Zarathustra in the mountains was forever carved into my psyche, an image based not so much on the text of Zarathustra, but on my finding Neitzsche while trying to scale what seemed to be personal mountains, mountains that were higher than anything one could ever face in the Himalayas.

Why Zarathustra as I flew over the mountains?  Well, these mountains are as they appear, almost untouched by the hand of man.  The recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico involving BP oil is in sharp contrast.  I am including a link to an image of another BP oil spill, in Alaska as a contrast to the photo.  Now, for words from Zarathustra on the subject, words written about 125 years ago:

“Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth.” (Neitzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)