In your words I see the image of being made whole by complimentary relationships with others or perhaps one special other. The flip side of this is the conflict and codependency that relationships can involve. If on the spectrum there is engulfment on one end and fragmentation on the other, wholeness can be seen as the center, the mean which balances the two extremes. If we accept that something like that is the case, then I suppose it’s the wisdom to do that that we seek in our spiritual practices.
I agree that relationships can complicate our lives, and they can be problematic, but I can’t see a healthy life being possible without them. In my experience, we have the solitary experience of our own mind, body and soul, and we have the communal experience of partner, family, friends and neighbours, who also act as a mirror to us, perhaps sometimes with an unclear or distorted image, but they are essentially the people who can make us aware of the shadow. I think that they make up an aspect of wholeness that we can’t overlook.
In fact, the feeling of flow, the high we get when we harmonise perfectly, even if it is seldom, is something that people have aspired to with their chanting, singing and music making. Of course, the danger here is that the harmony may be the wrong thing to aspire to with certain people. Those who desire harmony above all are in danger of giving their individual integrity for the sake of it. So there remains a tension, between order and chaos, which depends on individual circumstances. I think you are right that this is where we need the wisdom to do that in a healthy way.
Right. The experience of flow is what we’re after. Is it to be found at the center between order and chaos, between the individual and the social? That’s what the Tao Te Ching teaches. Staying with consciousness with awareness seems to involve staying open to the Yin as well as the Yang of experience though we might be inclined to favor one over the other. That’s what I’m attempting to do today in preparation for a concert I’m giving tonight. It’s a process of expression that involves overcoming much anxiety and self-doubt in the presence of the people who comprise the audience.
I hope the concert went well! That is of course one of the most obvious experiences that shows the need for harmonious interaction. But we find ourselves constantly in the middle of people playing their part and we, insofar as we take part, wait for our que and make our contribution. Because this is a permanent fixture, and in a way, we can’t not take part and express ourselves in some way, just as we can’t not communicate, we are reliant upon a friendly environment, that won’t jump on us for a false note. It is also a question of how receptive we are of people taking the music to new melodies and strains.
Upholding our own personal need in the group is something that we learn (or don’t) in the socialisation process, and too many people fail to find the confidence to interact. That is why they lack balance and awareness and fail to keep the tension of yin and yang alive. People are allergic to chaos in some cases and can’t see the chance therein, which is one reason why women are sometimes annoyed that the ancients regarded the feminine as the side of chaos and creativity. We also have the overconfident people who fail to acknowledge their inter-reliance on the collective and strike a chord that grates the sensibility for interaction.
But this is, for me, the wholeness of experience, whether we are musicians or not. It is also the reason why communal singing or chanting is healthy and it is always a pleasure to hear people play music together, if they can accept their role in the group. There is always a time when we talk or even argue about how we play, what we’ll play and diverse specialities that only musicians can relate, but when the music is playing, it is time for harmonious interaction.
Thank you. It did go well. But not without it’s challenges. My partner and I in the duo haven’t performed together for almost a year and a half due to the pandemic. So I was nervous to the point that my hands were actually shaking (a sympathetic nervous system response.) This made it difficult to the required finger movements accurately.
At some point in between songs, however, I realize that the anxiety and self-consciousness were gone. I had in fact gotten into the flow. When I was actually in the flow I wasn’t conscious of it. Absence of self-consciousness seems to be the essential element of flow. One is simply being and doing.
Now of course this phenomenon was occurring in the context of communal wholeness such as you describe above. And the audience was very responsive and supportive all of which is conducive to high performance. They even participated in call-and-response group singing on one song.
It doesn’t matter how many times Jordan Peterson explains that in traditional symbolism the masculine and the feminine both have negative and positive aspects, some will manage to get offended. Masculine order includes tyranny and feminine chaos includes creativity. Furthermore, men have feminine aspects and women masculine ones as Carl Jung elucidated. Wholeness includes the balance and expression of both sides.
I also appreciate the statement that doubt and insecurity are indispensable in the quotation you cited. Plagued as I am by these phenomena, I have often tried to control them by suppressing or repressing them which I found doesn’t work. So now I’m practicing awareness and acceptance of them which I understand is consistent with the Buddhist practices of mindfulness.
Thank God for the mystics:
"As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother, and he revealed that in everything, and especially in these sweet words where he says: I am he; that is to say: I am he, the power and goodness of fatherhood; I am he, the wisdom and the lovingness of motherhood; I am he, the light and the grace which is all blessed love: I am he, the Trinity; I am he, the unity; I am he, the great supreme goodness of every kind of thing; I am he who makes you to love; I am he who makes you to long; I am he, the endless fulfilling of all true desires.” (chapter 59, Showings, Julian of Norwich)
Julian presents a more balanced view then the orthodox Christian Trinity presents. By doing so he achieves a more holistic vision.
I would have preferred:
"As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother, and that is revealed in everything, and especially in these sweet words: I am; that is to say: I am the power and goodness of fatherhood; I am the wisdom and the lovingness of motherhood; I am the light and the grace which is all blessed love: I am the Trinity; I am the unity; I am the great supreme goodness of every kind of thing; I am who makes you to love; I am who makes you to long; I am the endless fulfilling of all true desires.”
What I see there is that you redacted the masculine pronouns. For years I tended to use neither masculine or feminine pronouns when referring to God. I wanted to get away from anthropomorphic literalism when she’s very strong among some Evangelical Christians.
If God created the world, then all “text-books of natural science” describe God’s work.
How is claiming that the origin of the cosmos was a miracle “science”?
By the way, Phyllo, welcome back. I haven’t seen you post for a while. I missed you.
It’s a religious statement or a religious assertion and it’s not a “physical impossibility”. So Jung’s claim is false.
Wouldn’t your claim entail knowing that God is a physical entity whereas the Bible claims that God is Spirit? Jung is claiming that spiritual reality is apprehended through the psyche rather than a matter of physics. Do you disagree with that? I don’t see physicists including God in their theories about the origin of the universe.
For that matter, everything supernatural is a physical impossibility by definition. And the character of an event that makes it a miracle is that it is a physical impossibility.
That is to say, that the power and goodness of fatherhood; the wisdom and the lovingness of motherhood; the light and the grace which is all blessed love; the Trinity and the unity; the great supreme goodness of every kind of thing; who makes you to love; who makes you to long; the endless fulfilling of all true desires, is God.
“If you focus too narrowly on a single path to God, all you will ever find is the path.”
Meister Eckhardt
Jung sought a Divine Quaternity. What should we make of a godhead that has a Father and Son but no Mother? Of course the holy Spirit could be thought of as feminine. But then it is said to have impregnated Mary.
Anyway Jung was very happy with the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary by the Roman Catholics in which he saw greater balance and wholeness in the symbol of God.
The Meister Eckhart quote balances the saying of Jesus that the way is narrow by asserting that to make it too narrow misses the mark.
That seems like an artificial division that need not be made. When you make it, you’re claiming to know more about God than you probably do know. So then saying that “religious assertions are physical impossibilities” becomes reasonable because you have removed God and religious statements out of the physical. It’s true based on the definitions that you are using.
That did not used to be the case. Newton thought that God had to adjust the motion of celestial bodies on a regular basis.
And let’s face it, the universe ought not to exist. Physics doesn’t have an explanation for why it does.
It’s simpler to focus on the mechanics of what is observable, which is a small fraction of the whole.
If you shove God and creation into the supernatural category, then sure, “by definition” …
What if God is natural?
Phyllo
I haven’t checked it out, but I have read that Hobbes thought that God was a physical material entity. People that say God is a space alien or something like that seem to think that such God is a physical being as well. Biblical fundamentalists see God as literally walking around as a physical being in the garden of Eden and Jesus living on in heaven as a physical human. And no I don’t claim to know.
But Jung and I didn’t “shove” God into being essentially spirit. The Gospel of John chapter 4 verse 24 states that as well as many other passages of scripture. The preponderance of judeo-christian tradition and the experience of people like CG Jung and the mystics, most religious people and myself supports this.
Jung’s point in the quotation was that God is apprehended psychically and that with the Roman Catholic doctrine of the assumption of Mary they had hit upon a psychic fact that protestantism missed.
I agree with you is that the fact that the universe exists at all is astonishing. From a phenomenological standpoint the picture that the universe has expanded too it’s present unthinkable size from something infinitesimally small is absurd. Why is there anything and not nothing?
Furthermore the mystery is much closer to us than we usually think. Because we don’t have an understanding of the consciousness by which we understand everything. Is it physical? Perhaps we should answer that question conclusively before we move on to the question of the nature of God. I don’t see that answer forthcoming. It is the great mystery that is embedded in the mystery that is our own psyche.
“…There is always a tension and a dialectic-- a shifting back and forth-- between concrete life and mental work on it, between living our loves and understanding them, between the desire for intimacy and the wish for solitude, between the soul of attachment and the spirit of detachment.”
Thomas Moore, Soul Mates, honoring the mysteries of love and relationship.
The above is a phenomenal description so true to my experience. What is at the center of the two poles of our experience? Who throws the switch that transitions us from one pole to another? Jung called it the Self. Hillman the daimon. To the mechanistic thinkers it’s a psychological mechanism. Whatever–it isn’t under our conscious control. Our interests choose us rather than vice versa. Our conscious self interacts with our unconscious self to determine our fate.