Mayflow and I both discussed Thomas Merton a bit over at GG. This is one of my favorite sections of Care of the Soul. Thing is, this book is probably one of my first 'spiritual books' I ever got. I think I got a copy of this when I was sixteen. I found out later down the road who Jung really was, and what he was about. Do also have a copy now of Dreams, Memories, Relfections by Jung, and some others.
The Divine Union
by Thomas Merton
"In the midst of everyday struggle we hope for enlightenment and some kind of release. In our prayer and meditation, we hope for a fulfilling ordinary life. Jung always taught that these two, anima and animus, are capable of a mystical wedding, the hieros gamos, a divine union. But it is not an easy marriage to effect. Spirit tends to shoot off on its own in ambition, fanaticism, fundamentalism, and perfectionism. Soul gets stuck in its soupy moods, impossible relationships, and obsessive preoccupations. For the marriage to take place, each has to learn to appreciate the other and to be affected by the other--spirit's lofty aims tempered by the soul's lowly limitations, soul's unconsciousness stirred by ideas and imagination.
The movement toward this union is something to be attempted, worked, and traveled. That is the very idea of soul-making, described by Keats and recommended by Hillman. Soul-making is a journey that takes time, effort, skill, knowledge, intuition, and courage. It is helpful to know that all work with soul is process-- alchemy, pilgrimage, and adventure-- so that we dont expect instant success or even any kind of finality. All goals and all endings are heuristic, important in their being imagined, but never literally fulfilled.
In spiritual literature the path to God or to perfection is often depicted as an ascent. It may be done in stages, but the goal is apparent, the direction fixed, and the way direct. Images of the soul's path, as we have seen, are quite different. It may be a labyrinth, full of dead-ends with a monster at the end, or an odyssey, in which the goal is clear but the way much longer and more twisted than expected. Odysseus is called "polytropos," a man of many turns--a good word for the path of the soul. Demeter must seek her daughter everywhere and finally descend to the otherworld before earth can come back to life. There is also the odd path of Tristan, who travels on the sea without oar or rudder, making his way by playing his harp.
Textures, places, and personalities are important on the soul path, which feels more like an initiation into the multiplicity of life than a single-minded assault upon enlightenment. As the soul makes its unsteady way, delayed by obstacles and distracted by all kinds of charms, aimlessness is not overcome. The wish for progress may have to be set aside. In his poem, "Endymion" Keats describes this soul path exactly:
But this is human life: the war, the deeds,
The disappointment, the anxiety,
Imagination's struggles, far and nigh,
All human; bearing in themselves the good,
That they are still the air, the subtle food,
To make us feel existence.
This is the "goal" of the soul path--to feel existence; not to overcome life's struggles and anxieties, but to know life first hand, to exist fully in context. Spiritual practice is sometimes described as walking in the footsteps of another: Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life; the bodhisattva's life models the way. But on the soul's odyssey, or in its labyrinth, the feeling is that no one has ever gone that way before. People in therapy often ask "Do you know anyone else who's had this experience?" It would be a relief to know that the blind alleys of this soul path are familiar to others. "Do you think I'm on the right track?" someone else will ask.
but the only thing to do is to be where you are at this moment, sometimes looking about in the full light of consciousness, other times standing comfortably in the deep shadows of mystery and the unknown. Odysseus knows he wants to get home, yet he spends years in Circe's bed, developing his soul, on the circular island where all paths go round and round.
it is probably not quite correct to speak of the soul's path. It is more a meandering and a wandering. The soul path is marked by neurotic tendencies as well as high ideals, by ignorance as well as by knowledge, and by daily incarnated life as well as by high levels of consciousness. Therefore, when you call up a friend to talk about the latest mess that has come into your life, you are tending anothe turn into the polytropic path. The soul becomes greater and deeper through the living out of the messes and the gaps, as my cousin's did during her rediscovery of faith in a tragic illness. Ti the soul, this is the "negative way" of the mystics, an opening into divinity only made possible by giving up the pursuit of perfection.
Another description of the soul's path can be found in Jung's concept of individuation. I've heard people acquainted with Jung's writings ask one another "Are you individuated?"-- as though individuation were some pinnacle of therapeutic achievement. But individuation is not a goal or destination, it is a process. As they essence of individuation, I would emphasize the sense of being a unique individual, being actively involved in soul work. All my gifts and gaps and efforts coalesce and coagulate-- to use alchemical language -- into the unique individual I am. Nicholas of Cusa wrote to a man named Giuliano, "All things Giulianize in you." The individual hard at work in the process of soul-making is becoming a microcosm, a "human world." When we allow the great possibilities of life to enter into us, and when we embrace them, then we are most individual. This is the paradox Cusanus described in so many ways. Over a lifetime, however long or short, cosmic humanity and the spiritual ideal are revealed in human flesh, in various degrees and imperfection. Divinity--the body of Christ, the Buddha nature--becomes incarnated in us in all our complexity and in all our foolishness. When the divine shines through ordinary life, it may well appear as madness and we as God's fools.
The best definition of individuation I know is an inspired paragraph in James Hillman's Myth of Analysis:
Transparent man, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing left to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance, his soul is loved, wholly revealed, wholly existential, he is just what he is, freed from paranoid concealment, from the knowledge of his secrets and his secret knowledge; his transparency serves as a prism for the world and the not-world. For it is impossible reflectively to know thyself; only the last reflection of an obituary may tell the truth, and only God knows our real names.
The path of soul is also the path of the fool, the one without pretense of self-knowledge or individuation or certainly perfection. If on this path we have achieved anything, it is the absolute unknowing Cusanus and other mystics write about, or it is the "negative capability" of John Keats--"being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
As we become transparent, revealed for exactly who we are and not who we wish to be, then the mystery of human life as a whole glistens momentarily in a flash of incarnation. Spirituality emanates from the ordinariness of this human life made transparent by lifelong tending to its nature and fate.
The path of the soul will not allow concealment of the shadow without unfortunate consequences. You don't always achieve the goal of the philosopher's stone, the lapis lazuli at the core of your heart, without letting all of human passion into the fray. It takes a lot of material, alchemically, to produce the refinement of the peacock's tail or the treasured gold--other images of the goal. But if you can tolerate the full weight of human possibility as the raw material for an alchemical, soulful life, then at the end of the path you may have a vision within yourself of the lapis and sense the s tone idols of Easter Island standing nobly in your soul and the dolmen of Stonehenge marking eons of time in your own lifespan. Then your soul, cared for in courage, will be so solid, so weathered and mysterious, that divinity will emanate from your very being. You will have the spiritual radiance of the holy fool who has dared to live as it presents itself and to unfold personally with its heavy yet creative dose of imperfection.
Toward the end of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung writes, "the whole man is challenged and enters the fray with his total reality. Only then can be become whole and only then can God be born."
Spiritual life does not truly advance by being separate either from the soul or from its intimacy with life. God, as well as man, is fulfilled when God humbles himself to take on human flesh. The theological doctrine of incarnation suggests that God validates human imperfection as having mysterious validity and value. Our depressions, jealousies, narcissism, and failures are not at odds with the spiritual life. Indeed, they are essential to it. When tended, they prevent the spirit from zooming off into the ozone of perfectionism and spiritual pride. More important, they provide their own seeds of spiritual sensibility, which complement those that fall from the stars. The ultimate marriage of spirit and soul, animus and anima, is the wedding of heaven and earth, our highest ideals and ambitions united with our lowliest symptoms and complaints."
