Through a Jungian Lens

This, Easter Sunday, is the last morning at the beach in Costa Rica.  Tomorrow morning we take a bus to San José where we will spend the day before flying out on Tuesday morning.  Knowing that I will have little time or access to the Internet, I am scheduling posts so that this site continues to publish blog posts until I am settled back in my home in Canada.  Once settled in I will once again return here and share my thoughts and my photos.  I invite you to come here each day and read, post comments and be patient with me for responses.  Now, on with today’s post.

I took this photo a few weeks ago capturing a private moment between a mother and her child.  The scene is along the banks of a dried out river bed in a squatters’ community.  I have met a few of the squatters as they scrounged through garbage bins in search of recyclables as a way to help eke out a living.   The government has allowed power to be diverted into this collection of homes made out of scrap tin and other found materials.

As I think of this mother and her child, I got a sense that there is a belief in life being better for her child.  Life is viewed with optimism.  I know that many of the women of this mini community are hookers by night and parents by day.  What I would have taken as a desperate life style is understood differently by these women.  Their work is about providing for these children.  This isn’t an issue of morality, it is an issue of food, clothing and opportunities for schooling for their children.

When I then turn to my own journey, I wonder about my spiritual quest.  I know that my focus is based on privilege of a sort of wealth in comparison to those who have no guarantees for food, shelter and other basic needs.  That said, my journey is valid and doesn’t need an apology.

“To me the crux of the spiritual problem today is to be found in the fascination which the psyche holds for modern man.  If we are pessimists, we shall call it a sign of decadence; if we are optimistically inclined, we shall see it in the promise of a far-reaching spiritual change in the Western world.  At all events, it is a significant phenomenon.  It is all the more noteworthy because it is rooted in the deeper social strata, and the more important because it touches those irrational and – as history shows – incalculable psychic forces which transform the life of peoples and civilizations in ways that are unforeseen and unforseeable.  These are the forces, still invisible to many persons today, which are at the bottom of the present “psychological” interest.  The fascination of the psyche is not by any means a morbid perversity; it is an attraction so strong that it does not shrink even from what it finds repellent.” (Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, Modern Man in Search of Soul, 1933)

My journey is rooted.  I am connected to a long line of searchers.  I know that somehow I will also transform the life of this world, even if only microscopically.  And as I change myself and the ripples of that change my immediate environment, the whole of civilization shifts.  There is no separation, no wasted humans.  All is connected going forward, or perhaps going towards extinction.