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I’m reading Good magazine’s issue on water (which is, despite what OPEC would have you believe, our most valuable resource). This morning, I came across this Brazilian public service ad outlining a way to save many thousands of litres of water a year.
A couple years ago there was a campaign in Australia called Save Water, Shower with a Friend. Just think how much water we could save worldwide if we join all this thinking up!
Lovely find of the day…
Solitude from robin risser on Vimeo.
I’m reading Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle from Volume 8 of his collected works (Pantheon, 1960). In it, he makes this astounding claim:
bq. Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogeneous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche. The same applies to the temporal determination of the psyche and the psychic relativity of time. I do not need to emphasize that the verification of these findings must have far-reaching consequences. (Paragraph 996)
Indeed. That statement is just sort of hidden at the end of the essay’s appendix; but has huge implications for the discussion of spirituality and human nature (and our connexion with…everything else).
Must read more. I’ve the house to myself at the moment; sitting here with a cup of tea; rainstorm outside; perfect conditions.
I’ve read H. Ryder Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines this week (mainly because She keeps appearing in Jung). She is apparently a best-selling but somewhat forgotten book. This is a shame as it’s an imaginative and well presented tragedy. A quote from Chapter XVI The Tombs of Kôr:
bq. Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history of fact. But it came so home to me—I saw it all so clear in a moment, as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past, present, or to come, may lie in the imagination? What is imagination? Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the soul’s thought.
In an instant the whole thing had passed through my brain, and She was addressing me.
“Behold the lot of man,” said the veiled Ayesha, as she drew the winding sheets back over the dead lovers, speaking in a solemn, thrilling voice, which accorded well with the dream that I had dreamed: “to the tomb, and to the forgetfulness that hides the tomb, must we all come at last! Ay, even I who live so long. Even for me, oh Holly, thousands upon thousands of years hence; thousands of years after you hast gone through the gate and been lost in the mists, a day will dawn whereon I shall die, and be even as thou art and these are. And then what will it avail that I have lived a little longer, holding off death by the knowledge that I have wrung from Nature, since at last I too must die? What is a span of ten thousand years, or ten times ten thousand years, in the history of time? It is as naught—it is as the mists that roll up in the sunlight; it fleeth away like an hour of sleep or a breath of the Eternal Spirit. Behold the lot of man! Certainly it shall overtake us, and we shall sleep. Certainly, too, we shall awake and live again, and again shall sleep, and so on and on, through periods, spaces, and times, from aeon unto aeon, till the world is dead, and the worlds beyond the world are dead, and naught liveth but the Spirit that is Life. But for us twain and for these dead ones shall the end of ends be Life, or shall it be Death? As yet Death is but Life’s Night, but out of the night is the Morrow born again, and doth again beget the Night. Only when Day and Night, and Life and Death, are ended and swallowed up in that from which they came, what shall be our fate, oh Holly? Who can see so far? Not even I!”
Today is my birthday—which I would otherwise not note—however, it seems exceptional this year in that I am not dead from the accident just over one month ago.
I see that I share a birthday with Marcel Proust; I’m sort of understanding that ‘living with one’s parents and having no job’ thing he went through…but earnestly hoping I don’t live here till after both my parents die then waste away in my bedroom whist writing a giant novel.
More interesting (or synchronistic?) is that I was born 100 years after C.G. Jung (don’t worry, I’m not going to develop some kind of complex that I’m the reincarnation of Jung—it’s just neat to note).
And, to top it off, today is Nikola Tesla’s birthday; how shocking.
6 September 2009 Update: My mother just noted that I was born a few weeks early; I was due to be born on 26 July 1975…which is 100 years to the day after Jung.
SilenceThen—
A heartbeat
In the womb;
Suspended.
The first sound
We share—but
Unique;
A mother’s monologue.
Birth
And life follow
Days and sound
Collide.
The pulse our own
But, often, stifled.
As discord
Too much
Resonates.
Whispers
We each hold close
Our
Single shared unknown.
I listen, calmly
For this note to
Call me on.
I must attend
To Death’s deep undertone
That Sound
Is mine
—It’s mine
Alone.
I’m beginning a new category here entitled ‘Synchronicity’ as it’s becoming an ongoing theme.
For the past week or so, I’ve engrossed myself in C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity by Robert Aziz (it’s not exactly beach reading). I’m going to make an extensive quote here as it’s directly pertinent to recent life experience. I should note that, though I’ve read Jung for the past year and kept my eye open for anything on Synchronicity theory, I did not specifically seek out this book. I came across it in the library whilst looking for something else—which is how Synchronicity works anyway (though that is arguably the sister concept of Serendipity).
For those of you not familiar with the theory, here is a brief definition (though there are many more layers as, at its heart, it delves into how everything is related to everything else—from oneself to the cosmos). The Wikipedia definition (which is as good as any) follows: Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. In order to count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance. There is a larger related question regarding the timing of the events that I’ll not go into here (as simultaneous Synchronous events might not actually occur at the same moment because we have a limited understanding of time in the relative sense. We are talking about the underlying order of the universe and, basically, though the universe is coherent, it doesn’t necessarily meter out time from one moment to the next. Something can happen in my grandfather’s childhood and my old age at the same moment ...but that’s for another posting).
Jung speaks of synchronous events as if they are a way for the Universe to ‘course correct’ an anomaly in the stream of things; there is a natural imperative to bring a ‘compensatory effect’ into play. These occur, in an individual’s life, to aid in the process of individuation (the becoming of a whole person—or development of a harmonious connexion with the order of things). However, the key thing is to become aware of the presence and meaning of Synchronicity. It’s important to foster a keen sense of recognition:
The ability, for example. to recognise at the earliest possible point when one has drifted, either consciously or unconsciously,from the more comprehensive pattern of one’s individuation is particularly important, because it is not uncommon when one is so floundering for the synchronistic compensatory response of nature to become increasingly aggressive until the situation is satisfactorily corrected. It is, therefore, very much in one’s interests to catch such developments in their beginnings and to take the appropriate action
as quickly as possible. Jung refers to such a situation in a letter to Philip Metman dated March 27. 1954. Metman and his wife, apparently had just narrowly escaped serious injury in a car accident. In writing to Metman, Jung very notably, as we shall see in the following drew Melman’s attention to the possible synchronistic relationship between their narrow escape from injury and some writing Metman was engaged in at that time. Jung’s essential point was that Metman may not have been giving his creative energy sufficient freedom in his writing, and consequently he found himself at odds with the synchronistic flow of outward nature. “I gather with great concern,” Jung writes, “that you have had a hair-breadth escape from a car accident. The accident has affected only the outer shell, but evidently you and your wife were not affected physically by this broad hint. Naturally this may have an inner connection with what you are writing, for experience shows that accidents of this sort are very often connected with creative energy which turns against us because somehow it is not given due heed. This may easily happen; for we always judge by what we already know and very seldom listen to what we don’t yet know. Therefore we can easily take a step in the wrong direction or continue too long on the right path until it becomes the wrong one. Then it may happen that in this rather ungentle way we are forced to change our attitude.”
Much as is the case with dreams, synchronistic experiences, such as the above, tend to repeat themselves, as Bolen explains, “until the inner psychological conflict or the conflicting external situation changes,” that is to say, until the desired compensatory effect is realised. Bolen, interestingly enough, presents a case that is rather similar to the above, only with her example, not one but three car accidents took place before things were put back on course. Bolen relates how a woman with a perfect driving record found herself in the very awkward position of having to make two “it’s me again”—type calls to her claims adjustor. Particularly troubling about these accidents was the fact that in each case the woman herself was blameless. In the first collision, she was hit from behind while stopped at a traffic light by a woman who failed to brake quickly enough on a rain-wetted street. On the second occasion she was hit again by a woman who was changing lanes. The third accident was similar to the first, only more serious still. She was again struck from behind while stopped at a traffic light, but in this instance by a woman whose brakes had failed. This time the impact of the accident was so great that her gasoline tank ruptured. fortunately without igniting, and her vehicle was dangerously pushed forward into the intersection. After this third collision, the analysand, we are told, finally began to give serious thought to a possible synchronistic connection…
... We see from the above examples, therefore, that when one is at odds with the compensatory flow of one’s individuation, it is very much to one’s advantage to discover as quickly as possible how the subjective position is not right, and then to make the needed adjustments immediately, lest the compensatory synchronistic pattern take an even more sinister turn.” (Aziz 161-62)
I sat in an armchair on Thursday evening reading this; for a moment, I put the book aside and considered the import of the words. My mother looked over at me and said, “Did something strike you?” Yes—indeed; I think I’ve been stricken.
There is a pattern; and we can even take the notion of a triad as described in the example above. Over the past year, there have been three occasions where I’ve been severely stricken off course. First was an issue with my MSc; I was not able to finish the program as I had hoped (for reasons I’ll not go into here as the discussion on this has swirled round in other quarters). Second, was my inability to obtain a UK visa and stay in Europe. Third, of course, was the road accident that could have easily taken my life. All three incidents were, in many ways, ‘beyond my control’; however, in all three, I was in some sense ‘in the driver’s seat’. At the time of each incident I felt that I had control of the situation till it was clearly and suddenly made evident that I was not. Each incident pivoted on the narrowest of margins; a few points, a few Pounds, a few centimetres one way or the other and the outcome would have been different. (As an aside, though I was not listening to music at the time of the accident, I looked at my iPod the next day and the last song I had listened to beforehand was Lose Control by Evanescence.)
I am at the threshold of something significant in my life—it may have already happened and I’ve just not yet come to comprehend all the pieces; but, I know it has begun. And, the mind boggling thing is, as I hinted at above, I think it’s possible that the beginnings of it may have been long before I was born. It’s a continuum of events. Everything happened just as it had to happen. Every decision of mine—and everyone before me—leads on to here.
Or, perhaps, rather than say, ‘I’m at the threshold of something significant’, I should say that I realise there may be more significant than previously comprehended.
I’ve obtained several images from the accident scene itself and updated my gallery; they are—pretty gruesome (especially the last image of the cabin of the car…if one can still call it that). Click here to go to the gallery.
It looks like we probably stopped traffic both ways for a while (obviously whilst the helicopter came in and out). In some of the images I did not post, there are cars lining the highway in both directions. Also, there is a long long line of skid marks where the truck pulled me along underneath (I remember that part as it took some time compared to the initial impact and etc.). I think it’s really ironic that, on the back of the trailer, there is a sign stating We Hire Safe Drivers.
I’ve not written a lot in the last few days; I’m taking some time to meditate on several things and ponder what is next. I began physical therapy this week; strangely, some muscles are more sore and tight now than they were shortly after the accident. However, the therapist assures me we will be able to get everything back in shape. He asked if I have any range of motion difficulties; I said that, normally, I’m able to put both feet behind my head (really) and that I was having some difficulty with this at the moment. He said, as that’s not even a starting point for most of his clients, this would be a challenging goal to work towards.
(not an existential question—just the practical stuff)
Several people have emailed to ask why I am suddenly in the States and no longer in Europe. Was I not supposed to be in France or Scotland or the Czech Republic or something? Well, yes; however, there is this gap between supposed to and the actuality of life.
Several episodes ago, you may remember that my company sent me to our office in France to satisfy a new rule concerning visa applications in the UK. This would have worked if the Home Office would not have changed the rules in mid-stream again. Halfway through my time in France, I went to check the application procedure for UK visas at the embassy in Paris only to find that the requirements had changed again (quite suddenly only a few weeks before that); I was now completely ineligible for a British visa. I had fallen through a bureaucratic black hole.
My company had done everything and more than could be expected and just had to let me go (I could have extended my French visa only for a few months more…and my job was really designed to be in Scotland anyway). So, quite abruptly, I’ve found myself back in the States after three years in Europe. This was—disconcerting; I had planned to live in Scotland for at least the next two years, very much liked my job, and was just generally keen on life in Europe in general.
Of course, these kinds of sudden changes lead one to re-assess life goals and etc. And then, for good measure, let’s add a severe road accident on top of that…