Aging and drawing closer to the spirit.

I listened to a really interesting programme on Carl Jung and psychic intuition yesterday, it explained how Jung’s earliest interest was in patients with so called ‘schizophrenia’ but it was also on ‘occult’ phenomena. And this focus of his was one of the major reasons he fell out with Freud and his work was not as accepted by the mainstream.

Jung’s mother was very psychically attuned, if you read his autobiography he speaks of some phenomena that occurred in his house while growing up that could only be explained by spirits or psychic energy. And as many of you know when he broke with Freud he underwent want some would call a ‘psychosis’ but in it he had visions of Europe bathed in blood just a few years prior to the outbreak of World War One. Jung also drew close to the spiritual dimension and his inner child in those years, the soulful part of which people like John Bradshaw called the soul child, he explored this part of himself and let himself play and he developed a form of inner intuitive meditation and connection to which he gave the name ‘active imagination’ where in he could enter his mind and dialogue with parts of him self as well as archetypal forces, something that may be considered ‘mad’ to the modern mind. He developed his ideas of the shadow after a dream in which this figure appeared to him and passed on truths.

I was thinking today while waiting for my coffee to be made and while looking at an elderly lady enjoying her coffee silently in what appeared to be an inward reverie how the inner spiritual world calls more upon some of us as we go through midlife. Early death or loss may also open us up to the spiritual world, as do near death experiences or accidents such as the one I had at 17, that said if you look at certain astrological signatures some people have Moon or lunar aspects that tie them to the psychic imaginative realm such as contacts with Neptune or Pluto which is interesting as at present Neptune is stationing direct in the sign of Pisces which rules the collective unconscious as well as the fluid realm of creativity and imagination which is where artists draw their images from.

I had this conversation with my nephew who is an artist the other day about how artists almost pick up on ideas which are not theirs but belong to everyone, I remember an interview with a famous rock star whose name I don’t remember right now in which he said he never accuses another artist of plagiarism as he believes music exists as a collective phenomena.

I know the beginning of my own dark night followed similar transits to Jung’s Sun Neptune square. It involved me retreating from nearly all contact in our family’s house by the ocean and writing every day and dialoguing with all kinds of inner imaginative figures. I felt very close to a breakdown for some years and the head injury I sustained on the first anniversary of my husband leaving me put me into another worldly space as well for a very long time which I have still not completely emerged from. I was interested to read on the Awakened Empath page that many undergoing a spiritual awakening had also sustained head injuries.

Today I make a conscious attempt to draw close to the spiritual, intuitive realms while trying my best not to lose my grounding in reality. Jung had his wife and other patients to ground him, as well as the work the did sculpting and playing with stones, as well as drawing and recording all of his inner encounters into what is known as the Red Book which I heard in the programme yesterday was only just published in 2009.

I have always felt a deep affinity with Jung from the very first time my boyfriend, Simon encouraged me to buy his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections from a bookshop in London in 1986. I find his acceptance of certain states of mind that mainstream psychology tends to pathologise of benefit. Jung also understood the collective crisis confronting us at a time when secularism and materialism seem to rule while technology and mad ideas of cerebral disconnection sever us from our true ground in nature. He respected indigenous peoples for this reason and saw they never cut off from their primal magical and mythological roots as much as modern ego centred man or humans.

I dialogue with my inner figures at times, lately I dialogue with my parents passed as well as angelic beings such as Archangel Michael. People may consider it a form of madness but I get deep answers from this inner spiritual world while at times having experienced myself as having been severed from it too. But I do think as we age the inner life becomes more important to us, and if we disregard our individuation later in life we are more likely to pay for it with some kind of dis-ease. We must respect the ego but know its view can at times be limited by fear and all kinds of neurosis. Only a path of inward investigation helps us to deal with these tendencies while holding close to a path of grounded realism as well. These are my thoughts for today.