Apple Farm Community Blog

Irony and Innocence

2009-12-21T13:06:00.017-05:00

By Don Raiche, Apple Farm Community, Christmas 2009

The Christian story begins with an innocent child in a wooden manger and culminates in that same child, as an adult, disgracefully murdered on a wooden cross, the innocent victim of trumped up charges. Carl Jung suggests that the Western psyche is profoundly Christian. The archetype of the innocent child provides endless possibility for transformation. The innocent one is the source of life and full of possibilities for metanoia. Through the ages this haunts and threatens the representatives of collective power.

2 And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, 3 And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. -Matthew 18

Christ’s words suggest that innocence is as possible in the old as in the young. We find in the child image many paradoxes including the idea that true maturity, one of religious depth and psychological health, depends on maintaining a very real link to the image of the child. Allen Chinen speaks of the elderly as being capable of what he calls conscious or “emancipated” innocence. Such innocence connotes vigor and immediacy. The child questions without false modesty or a need to impress; may be timid but rarely full of suspicion. Tears come readily without filters as to propriety or usefulness. The child goes directly to what it wants - a comforting parent, a sweet, or a mud puddle.

At archetypal levels the meaning carries even greater spiritual and psychological weight. “The archetype of the child has to do with the wonder of all beginnings and the wonder of beginning again. We are led by it to imagine being in the world as on the first day of creation, seeing the world for the first time. The child embodies and encourages spontaneity and joy, imagination and celebration.” [1]

Herod and Pilate, steeped in Roman values of collective power, success, wealth and security, are threatened by the innocent one. What is it that is so antagonistic between their worlds and his? Unlike Christ, they each inhabit a fortress mentality -- lives dominated by fear, riddled by suspicion and calling for constant vigilance. The novelist E. M Forster calls this kind of life, the “tragedy of preparedness,” in which we “nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes,” wasting energy by assuming “that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and [we ] are the better for staggering through life fully armed.”[2] No wonder the Christ child worries Harold’s sleep. The values this child articulates are completely antithetical to the very fabric of his world.

Unfortunately Herod persists in the human psyche. How often, in our quite ordinary lives, do we slaughter the innocents of creativity and wonder? We turn our suspicion and hostility against the awkward first steps of the creative child within ourselves and also kill off the possibility of extending trust to others and thus fostering peace on earth and peace within our own psyche. If we bridle at the thought of ourselves as Herod, we might squirm yet harder when we realize that we may be far more like Pilate than Herod. At the other end of Christ’s life stands this figure who rejects the innocent Christ out of expediency and to uphold the public good. Like so many contemporary people, not only politicians, he views spiritual values with irony and skepticism. He is not terrified as is Herod, but despises the folly of the “unworldly” including the folly of the childlike love that “moves the sun and other stars.”(Dante)

Matisse writes, “in order to look at things with an undistorted view, you have to have the courage of a child. If you lose that faculty you cannot express yourself in an original way which is your own personal way.” With such courage and trust we find that we have nothing to lose and no real need to protect ourselves as we become truly ourselves – free human beings breathing free air. Childlike forgetfulness of self in the wonder of play and the wonder of “the other” are captured in an Eastern Orthodox story. “A saint said to a child, ‘Look here, if you were able to play with the Lord, it would be the greatest thing anyone could ever do. All the world takes him so seriously that it has become horribly boring. Play with God, my child. He is the best playmate.’”God, my child. He is the best playmate.’”

The values constellated by the child archetype mean costly changes in the fundamental ways we view things. It’s as if the molecules that constitute our spiritual and mental makeup are transformed. The socalled practical worlds of Herod and Pilate emphasize usefulness, demand rational planning, cost benefit analyses, and clear objectives for the activities they value. The world of emancipated innocence sees freedom from convention, abandonment to the dance, cultivated inefficiency, and idle rumination as essential components of the spiritual life. All the spiritual masters, including Jung, are insistent that our best time and energy (not our spare time and energy) be allotted to contemplation rather than ratiocination.Contemplation is sometimes described as “simple gazing” with radical openness to transcendent realities; so that suspending our logical and linear thought processes are often necessary.

The 17th century poet Thomas Traherne never lost a sense of the innocence of childhood and wrote many poems and epigrams expressing the exhilarating world of that perspective.

Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born, are the best unto this day wherein I can see the universe. By the gift of God they attended me into the world, and by his special favour I remember them till now. Verily they seem the greatest gifts his wisdom could bestow, for without them, al1 other gifts had been dead and vain. Certainly Adam in paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I when I was a child. [3]

Thus we see the world again from the inside of the regained vision that belongs to conscious innocence. It is, of course, not enough for us to simply decide for the childhood world with an act of the will. We have to go through a long process of putting aside childish things such as resentment at parents, wanting to be at the center of other person’s lives, as well as wanting the more obvious Roman glories of success, wealth and security. We may also have to deal realistically with persistent neuroses and obsessions.

It can be a long journey from the naïve, natural childlike innocence of chronological childhood to the mature, realized emancipated innocence but the way to that which is our true home takes work and time, until as T. S. Eliot says:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

[1] Christine Downing, An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism, (Boston, 1991), p. 232
[2] E. M. Forster, Howards End, (New York, 1987) p. 106-7

[3] Traherne, Thomas, “The Primal Vision” in Landscapes of Glory, (London, 1989), p.6

New Exhibit at the Rubin Museum of Art: The Red Book of C.G. Jung, Creation of a New Cosmology

2009-10-05T11:20:00.003-04:00

The Red Book of C.G. Jung, Creation of a New Cosmology
October 7, 2009 - January 25, 2010

Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011 · 212.620.5000

This unprecedented exhibition marks the first public presentation of the preeminent psychologist C. G. Jung’s (1875-1961) famous Red Book. During the period in which he worked on this book Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation. It is possibly the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. In celebration of the exhibition and the publication of The Red Book facsimile, events related to the Jung and the book will take place at the museum throughout the city.

Carl Jung’s Secret Book on NPR'S, "On Point"

2009-09-30T11:08:00.005-04:00

Carl Jung was a giant in the dawn of the age of psychoanalysis. A student of Freud who broke with Freud. Champion of the individual spiritual quest as doorway to the universal. In midlife, he looked for his own soul and found nothing. Dug deeper, for years, late at night, recording wild visions: gods and demons, winged snakes and crocodiles. Found his soul’s footing, but feared he’d be called insane. Jung said his “red book,” in which he recorded his visions, was the base of everything else he did. But it was locked away for years in a Swiss vault. Now it’s out. We have it. Listen to the program, On Point: Carl Jung’s red book with Tom Ashbrook.

Jung's Unpublished Red Book Now Available

2009-09-29T13:06:00.003-04:00

The most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. When Carl Jung embarked on an extended self-exploration he called his “confrontation with the unconscious,” the heart of it was The Red Book , a large, illuminated volume he created between 1914 and 1930. Here he developed his principle theories—of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—that transformed psychotherapy from a practice concerned with treatment of the sick into a means for higher development of the personality.While Jung considered The Red Book to be his most important work, only a handful of people have ever seen it. Now, in a complete facsimile and translation, it is available to scholars and the general public. It is an astonishing example of calligraphy and art on a par with The Book of Kells and the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake. This publication of The Red Book is a watershed that will cast new light on the making of modern psychology.

Sense of the Sacred Now on DVD

2009-09-29T12:24:00.005-04:00

A Sense of the Sacred is a portrait of one of our foremost writers on the subject of story as it relates to our inner life, our masculine and feminine natures, and the natures of the human journey towards wholeness. Hosted by Thomas Moore, this DVD features illuminating and inspiring interviews with Luke (filmed a few years before her death at the age of 90 in 1995) as well as friends, colleagues and admirers such as Dr. Robert Johnson, Peter Brook, and Sir Laurens van der Post. To order this DVD mail check or money order for $30 to: Apple Farm Community Inc., 12291 Hoffman Road, Three Rivers, Michigan 49093 U.S.A.

Calfornia Meditations

2009-01-24T22:09:00.007-05:00

THE CALIFORNIA MEDITATIONS-THE ASSUMPTION

By Helen M. Luke

Only in Christianity (and in Zen, real Zen, not Western misconception of it) is matter given its whole validity, and the Christian definition of this is the doctrine of the Assumption.

It is often held against Christianity that the woman is given a status lower than that of the Trinity. Mary, it is said, should be a Goddess fully equal to the other Three, and the primitives knew better with their moon goddesses, etc.

This criticism is based on a misconception. The doctrine of the Assumption makes it clear that humanity redeemed exists eternally in union with God. But woman does not create — she receives and brings forth — as in time, so in eternity.

The symbol of Mary bodily assumed, but precisely not a Goddess is surely a deeper thing than any other. She is Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, but she is not God. She remains completely human. Somehow it is a greater image than that of any mere Goddess.

The primitive had to deify the feminine principle, because he did not know humanity redeemed, matter taken up into Heaven but remaining forever itself — “This is my Body” — but it is still a fragment of bread. The Trinity of the Godhead does not simply enter into the material elements, join itself to the bread and wine, as God did not simply operate through man in Christ. It actually becomes the bread and wine — Christ actually was God and Man in one Person. Earth and Heaven, time and eternity, are not two but one reality. So potentially with every detail of life on earth, once it is offered in its wholeness to the Divine. The life of the Mother of God was the perfect offering, so complete that God was born of her flesh. “Figlia del tuo Figlio.” But to say that she was actually God is immediately to be landed in a kind of pantheism. Every mystic has said in effect that in the state of union man becomes God by participation. But as long as the Reality is expressed by image or concept at all it remains false to say that he is the same essentially as God, i.e. uncreated. — Christ alone is begotten, His Mother, she who gives Him birth, is created and taken up again into her Creator through union with this her Son. “Figlia del tuo Figlio.”

Jung has accused Christianity of ignoring the “fourth”, and it is true that this knowledge, implicit in the Christian Revelation from the beginning, has only now in this age been allowed officially as Dogma — that is to say recognized as absolute Truth. The ignorant imagine a new Dogma to be something thought up by the Pope and his advisers and imposed on the faithful. — On the contrary, as Jung has pointed out, it is something made explicit which before has been implicit, lying in the unconscious and consciously known by a few through the ages, but now rising with great power to the surface and demanding definition. The Pope, “moved by the Holy Spirits” (as Jung again says) merely responds.

Courtesy of The Apple Farm Community ° 12291 Hoffman Road ° Three Rivers ° Michigan ° 49093 ° U.S.A. ° 269-244-5993

The Garden of the Psyche-A Collection of Quotes on Nature and the Individual

2009-01-18T12:57:00.002-05:00

We want happiness and do not want suffering. Animals and insects also want happiness and do not want suffering, but they have no special ability to consider how to achieve deeper happiness or overcome suffering. As human beings, endowed with this power of thought, we have this potential, and we must use it.- How to Pratice: The Way to a Meaningful Life, His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Helen Luke Quotes

2009-01-04T13:14:00.001-05:00

ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY

To do the ordinary thing in an ordinary way is easy. To do the extraordinary thing in an extraordinary way is easy -- both these kinds of activity are very common indeed. But to do the ordinary thing in an extraordinary way and the extraordinary thing in an ordinary way is quite staggeringly difficult and very rare indeed. It is the way of the saints.