Well, this is my last post before tomorrow’s operation. It isn’t supposed to be anything major, so I am not too worried. I will be in good hands, the hands of a skilled and experienced doctor. At one point in my life, I may have taken these last hours for prayer, trusting in the hands of a god to keep me safe. But, not at this point. It isn’t that I don’t believe in something, some presence greater than “self.” Rather, it is that I don’t have belief in the Christian or any other “ism’s” god. Carl Gustav Jung nailed it pretty well when he said:
“There are no longer any gods whom we can invoke to help us. The great religions of the world suffer from increasing anaemia, because the helpful numina have fled from the woods, rivers, mountains, and animals, and the God-men have disappeared underground into the unconscious.”C.G. Jung. Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, CW 18, para 598.
I often say that I am sort of a Buddhist, but that is not a truthful statement. I have been entered into whatever book that may exist, as a Buddhist once I took refuge in Buddhism, just as I am recorded in another book as a baptised and confirmed Catholic Christian. Yet, neither of those worldviews are mine. I have curiously found myself in a singular world of one, surrounded by billions of others in their singular worlds of one. I wondered about this as it would have been much easier to have “Jesus take the wheel” and be responsible. As I read further, from Jung’s work, I found:
“The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as “distractions” and useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rationalist intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche.”Ibid, paragraph 601
If anything, because Jungian psychology has space for the Christian face of me, the Buddhist face of me, the pagan face of me, and the many other faces of me, I have been better able to rummage around in the terrain of the unconscious to become just slightly more aware of who I really am. And of course, a bit of meditation along the way has been helpful. So now, I invoke those unknown presences within my unconscious to stand over me, both gods and goddesses in their own right.