ONE'S PREFERENCES TO BEING REMEMBERED? February 23,2022

That is not an easy question. Some go to great efforts to be remembered as they wish. In the end it seems to me life gives us the memories of others it chooses.

   I'd be pleased to be remembered as an imperfect yet kind and supportive man. Especially to my wife Beverly and my three children. 

   It might be worth remembering that I faced a totally unexpected 'midlife crisis' at age forty. My life had been very stable, organized and predictable. My young family needed that from me. But suddenly one's world can be stood on end with respect to life's work and by threats to some long held values. With me as a sincere minster it was my deeply ingrained and restrictive religious values and attitudes that, without my permission, were to be upset and challenged.

    I found that such a tornado in personal life can't be met with only good reasoning and ordinarily helpful advice. For it includes content from one's inner, at first seemingly irrational and illogical, depths of mind. One hopefully manages to find unexpected new paths and beliefs that better prepare him for the second half of life.

    While I was in this process there were numerous extended family and long time friends who were unable to join my rather irrational hope that new light would come from what only seemed to be darkness. C.G. Jung's writings on these topics were partially the grounds for my 'hope in the darkness.' I was extremely fortunate that my most immediate family kept confidence in me.

    The gracious outcome, after a couple of years, was that new paths for work opened up. Work that was far more in line with my natural abilities and temperament. The work included 19 years as licensed/ordained pastor to  Untied Church of Christ and Presbyterian(USA) churches, 12 years working for private and public institutions as an Illinois Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, 5 years as a science/math teacher for high risk students in our public schools and 13 years as a hospital/Hospice chaplain.

    This natural psychogical/social/spiritual process also unexpectedly worked for me a long retirement (unusual for such a diverse employment record) in which to reflect on the outer and inner aspects of my life experience. And do an amount of informal educational travel which I'd not expected to ever do.

    I am left grateful that I was granted work which fit me, benefited others appreciatively and provided well for my family.

    So I think this remembrance stands as an example of how a threatening midlife intrusion can generate positive life changes which a person would have never imagined from only their conscious ego efforts or plans. I hope such a remembrance might only increase someones' confidence in life and it's purposeful meandering ways.

I suspect there are times when it is best to step out of the way and let life happen.

  There's a deeper, unexpected, and somewhat  embarrassingly presumptuous, aspect to my strong turn at midlife.  It remains in many ways still beyond my comprehension. I became somewhat aware that my life was being a kind of divinely determined experiment.( I suspect this the case of all lives in their uniqueness.) That my life's central purpose, and its at first unconscious goal, was to become increasingly more conscious of love's meaning and power. And, in it's small unnoticed way, to promote somehow becoming more conscious of the importance, essential nature and supreme grandeur of creative love. 

It was a life shaped to surprisingly help drive home the eternal truth that in our lost and desolate times only a rediscovery of love from our depths can bring humans their highest personal joy. And also provide the redeeming path to prevent our destroying ourselves and this planet Earth, our only home. 

A love that pushes one beyond a healthy valuing of one's self and those in one's circle to a more universal love which embraces with equal value all of humanity and the Earth with all it contains.

I can point to my blog as my best, however scattered, effort to explain how I have discovered and experienced being such an unlikely experiment. There most any question that can be asked about me is directly or indirectly addressed.

Below is something I've just written in metaphorical language about love. It attempts to express the redeeming richness and beyond words our word love is pointing Western cultures toward in our present time:

"Even Carl Jung has credited Freud that the Western mind has still not significantly stated the importance of sex, of godlike Eros.

I doubt many couples or would-be lovers have yet to pay proper tribute to Sex or the Spirit. Have yet to know the cost they are asked to pay if they even get the chance.  

And Spirit and Eros are determinedly aiming at couples as their target, where consciousness born in humble delicate childlike mutuality and beyond reasoned words can still happen, not at the alone

 individual level.

Westerners are too sophisticated for Eros and too brutish for the Spirit.  We are not yet ready to play in life's mud to retrieve its golden most expensive hidden treasure. And maybe not ready to support it happening to someone else for the good of all.

Eros and Spirit determine to be united in the couple's sincere shared spiritual ecstacy where no words matter except, 'O my dear Holy God.' We indeed are religious at our core. 

Such a union results in the nameless that is beyond our definitions of either Eros or Spirit. It must happen when the swirling  undefined  and gathered 'All and Nothing' of the Great Mother finds, to it's own shock, it's most important and secret meaning and expression of love within two. The primordial eternal Yin and Yang.

Of love which truly is, after all else is gone, in all and every way the greatest of what is, can be or has ever been.  

Ironically and sadly I confess it is out of my life's part of not living in personal sexual/spiritual love that any insight into the grand meaning and extreme importance of love has come to my conscuous attention and deliberation.  Perhaps only a broken heart is able to sing of 'joy unspeakable and full of glory.' Maybe this has been the only way the experiment could proceed? 

I'm always very grateful of such love if I sense it in others' faces, words and actions. I must be some proof we cannot egotistically will such love including its Eros  and Spirit aspects into being. It will always be the highest gift and grace bestowed on a human by the Divine will and Its own need for a more expanded consciousness of love through love's suffering in both God and the Human Creature.

I'm very appreciative of 'youthful Jim(Jimmy)' and believe his path has been much as it had to be.

 

 

 

WHAT SUSTAINED LOVE REQUIRES...July 21, 2023

This requires a very specific effort to set aside one's conscious ego (our 'me')and its desires, regarding expectations about the beloved, for the benefit of the beloved one.

It is the opposite of 'posessing' the other. This must surely be the ultimate test of enduring Human/Divine love; as well as the source of authentic joy of loving another person over time.

Anything less- however much called love-is the desire, often unconsciously, to have power over the other. To have the other be what one's own ego imagines or desires them to be, not who they actually are. This is the opposite of love.

PERSONAL SYMBOLIC MEANING OF '608'...July 22, 2023

I made this wall hanging yesterday. It is the native lumber board with the home address '608' tacked to it. It was part of a sixty-year-old fence I tore down two years ago. The number '608' took on strong symbolic meaning to me some thirty years ago. It now feels foundational to my life experience.

For three decades my forty-seven-year '608' E. Lincoln St. address has been symbolic of my personal development, or in Jung's term, of my on-going individuation process.

'Six' to me is a number indicating change. I relate it to my first adult need/readiness for complex changes in outlook of myself, others and of the world. Rather early on I found by 'accident' some writings of C.G. Jung applicable to my needs and the IChing, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, based on symbolic common archetypal configurations of the number six.

Reflecting, I consider myself at thirty-eight years old(1982) as having been, still mostly unconscious, a very ripe 'six' in this developmental process. It's as if I'd been psychologically/spiritually prepared for significant personality/values changes by experiencing my personal limits of some highest and lowest realities from the common-to-all Collective Unconscious.

'Zero' I take as the time of initial, and reocurring, experience of  humbling. Initially some archetypal energies of the Collective Unconscious all but overwhelmed my ego, my 'I' or 'me'. The building-up of experienced outer/inner life tensions threatened me with the potential loss of mind and of a sound ego awareness. I experienced my greatest battle.

I was compelled in time to know that my ego awareness, as important and essential as it is, is so very small compared to the powers and contents of the Unconscious. The Collective Unconscious might be thought of as, 'All that is, has been or ever can be'. In practical terms the Unconscious introduced my ego to inner images of the 'other', the Divine/Sacred, often called God throughout the ages.

In the 'zero' state I learned that the Unconscious makes itself known to the smaller but eager ego consciousness, in Jungian terms, as the Self. The Self is the only all-encompassing mind factor that I conscientiously can and morally must, to keep claiming my full humanity, bow to and give my highest allegiance.(I learned also that the Self does not ask for blind obedience but invites one to an encounter where human honesty, trust, doubt, courage, questioning and dialogue are some highest values.)

'Eight' being 'two times four' is a strong psychological/spiritual symbol of the embedded human aspiration to consciously reach for the 'wholeness, completeness and uniqueness' of adult personhood. This I believe is a primary goal for which our souls break into this earthly/bodily human life.

This kind of life journey and development toward unique completion is never for any kind of moral or religious perfection which often actually interferes with it. This kind of quest is, in my view, the highest and lowest reaches life places before each of us. It is a value we can take as our own and choose doing what we can to support others in their Self-finding journey to wholeness.

In ways beyond my capacity to articulate or well grasp intellectually, the 'eight' state of mind teaches that the most important experiences one can have are effectively being loved by another and of effectively, creatively and uniquely loving another. 

Love is not yet humanly well-defined or described except as it is experienced directly through one's whole being: mind, body and soul.

For three decades it has been helpful to me to adapt three ancient Greek words for love, taken together, as a baseline for the present-day ego and heart to work with. These are:

1. Agape- An unconditional, unrelenting high regard for the other person.

2. Phileo- The experience of honest/trusting, relaxed and heart-warming friendship.

And of far higher value than the Western world has consistently given it, but instead has generally denigrated its spiritual/psychological importance to our human evolutionary path is:

3. Eros- The spiritual/psychological experience that makes a human feel most alive and joyfully ecstatic. It can be felt toward various realities including devotion to strongly felt personal vocations(soul callings) of many kinds.

Of a most importance, in my best judgment, never should the fulness of Eros respectfully attracting prepared intimate human partners be underestimated.  It can be, in my opinion, a primary channel for the highest development of persons. And capable even of generating compassionate cultures never yet created and being always central to the world's survival and thriving. 

What the Unconscious helps happen in state 'eight' is Eros is shown to be elevated to a union of Spirit and Matter, of Venus and Apollo, of masculine and feminine, of reason and irrationality. Sexuality and spirituality, of psychological necessity for our evolving times, seek to become one.

Eros, supported by the other love expressions, must surely be a redeeming "Divine/Human power" (A Paul Tillich quote)still in and among us.

We can rightfully aspire to be open to a full measure of unfathomable love. And no conscientious person need be discouraged or embarrassed if such love has not yet become very consciously experienced. Love has its own autonomous timing. Our ego is not its master. No matter our personal present state of love, every human can be grateful that such love lives in couples across the Earth and to trust that the numbers now grow. All mature loves benefit all persons and the creation.

Many persons have historically insisted that their transforming experiences of love have been clearly best described as personal gifts received, as Divine grace unexpectedly extended.

Note: 

These three 'states' of development- 6,0 and 8, are only generally sequential in me. They overlap and none of them ceases to operate. Nothing is left behind. All is returned to in reflection to better secure the expanding foundation the Self has added to a humbled ego consciousness. 

There is, in each individuation process, what Jung called a 'circumambulating' or encircling movement of themes around some central image which the Self gradually makes more clear.