“Our darkness is contributive in the same way that manure is essential to the rose.”

~ Carl Gustav Jung ~

Urunga Roses that need manure!

 Carl Gustav Yung understood that an integrated person was not someone who has eliminated the sense of guilt or the sense of anxiety from his life, who is fearless and wooden or a kind of  sage of stone, he is  a person who  feels all of this but has no recrimination for feeling this.  This is a profound kind of humor

All humor is fundamentally malice..  The high kind of Humor at oneself, malice towards oneself, the recognition that behind the social role you assume and all your pretensions either a fine citizen, great scientist, behind this facade there is a certain element of the unreconstructed bum.  Not as something to whinge about but to see how this contributes to the person as does manure to a beautiful perfume of the rose.  Yung saw this and Yung accepted this.

A passage from a great  lecture From Yung to a group of clergy in Switzerland :

People forget that even doctors have moral scruples and that certain patients confessions are  hard even for a doctor to swallow.  Yet the patient does not feel himself accepted unless the very worst in him is accepted to.

No one can bring this about by mere words, it comes only through reflection and through the doctors attitude towards himself and his own dark side.  If the doctor wants to guide another or even accompany a step of the way  he  must feel with that person's psyche he never feels it when he passes judgement. Whether he puts his judgements into words or keeps them to himself makes not the slightest difference.

To take the opposite position and agree with the patient off hand is also of no use but estrange
him as much as condemnation.  Feeling comes only through unprejudiced objectivity.  This sounds almost like a scientific precept and it could be confused with a purely intellectual abstract attitude of mind, but what i mean is something quite different it is a human quality a kind of deep respect for the  facts for the man who has suffers  from them and for the riddle of such a mans life.

A truly religious person has this attitude and knows that God has brought all sorts of strange and inconceivable things to pass and seeks in the most curious ways to enter a mans heart.  He therefore senses in everything the unseen presence of the divine will.  This is what I mean unprejudiced objectivity, it is a moral achievement on the part of the doctor, who ought not to let himself be repelled by sickness and corruption. 

We cannot change anything unless we accept it.  Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses!  I am the oppressor of the person I condemn not his friend and fellow sufferer.   I do not in the least need to say that we must never pass judgement when we desire to help and improve but, if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is and he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is. 

Perhaps this sounds very simple but the simple is always the hardest in actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple.  And so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of ones whole outlook on life. 

That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ, all of these are undoubtedly great virtues, what I do unto the least of my brethren that I do unto Christ.  But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself, that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the arms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved what then?

Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed.   There is then no more talk of love and long suffering and we say to the brother within us  Raca and condemn and rage against ourselves we hide him from the world we deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed.

Raca, or Raka, in the Aramaic and Hebrew of the Talmud means empty one, fool, empty head.
In Aramaic, it could be ריקא or ריקה.

Birds in the Blue at Urunga

Matthew 5:22

But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother [without a cause] shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

 ......ooOoo.....

This is the most important thing in Jung, that he was able to point out, is that to the degree you condemn others and find evil in others, you are to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself, or at least of the potentiality of it. 

There can be Eichmann's and Hitler's and Himmler's just because there are people who are unconscious of their own dark sides, and they project that darkness outward into say, Jews or communists or whatever the enemy may be, and say there is the darkness, it is not in me, and therefore because the darkness is not in me i am justified, in annihilating the enemy weather it be with atom bombs or gas chambers or what not.

But to the degree that a person becomes conscious that the evil is as much in himself as in the other, to this same degree he is not likely to project it on to some scapegoat, and commit the most criminal acts of violence upon other people. 

Now this is to my mind the primary thing that Jung saw, that in order to admit and really accept and understand the evil in oneself, one had to be able to do it without being an enemy to it. As he put it, you had to accept your own dark side, and he had this preeminently in his own character.

I had a long talk with him back in 1958 and I was enormously impressed, with a man who was obviously very great but at the same time, which whom everybody could be completely at ease. There are so many great people, great in knowledge or great in what is called holiness with whom the ordinary individual feels rather embarrassed. He feels inclined to sit on the edge of his chair, and to feel immediately judged by this persons wisdom or sanctity. 

Jung managed to have wisdom and I think also sanctity in such a way that when other people came into it’s presence they didn’t feel judged, they felt enhanced, encouraged and invited to share in a common life. And there was a sort of twinkle in Jung’s eye that gave me the impression that he knew himself to be just as much a villain as everybody else. 

There’s a nice German word ‘hintergedanke’ which means a thought in the very far far back of your mind. Jung had a hintergedanke in the back of his mind which showed, it showed in the twinkle in his eyes, it showed that he knew and recognized what i have sometimes called ‘the element of irreducible rascality’ in himself, and he knew it so strongly and so clearly, and in a way so lovingly that he would not condemn the same thing in others, and therefore would not be lead into those thoughts feeling and acts of violence towards others, which are always characteristic of the people who project the devil in themselves upon the outside, upon somebody else, upon the scapegoat.

~ Alan Watts ~ 

Images @ Eminpee Fotography