"Breaking the vessels is the return, the turn again to the world, giving back what we have taken from it by storing inside ourselves its soul. By this return we regard the world anew, having regard for it as it shows its regard for us and to us in its face. We pay respect to it simply by looking again, re-specting, that second look with the eye of the heart."
Facebook Post One - My original post. July 23, 2024:
“You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what's broken, but to get what's broken blessed.” - James Hillman
Hillman was brilliant. Still is. And, yes, this is exactly what Jung was about too.
Some Jung quotes are below to nuance or amplify what Hillman was about in his "archetypal psychology" though Hillman does a tremendous job on his own, going his own way with Jung as a foundation to spring from, and at times, against, which is/was his want, as was Jung's with Freud and the scientific materialism and reason of his age, the late 1800's and into the 1900's.
So, the therapeutic goal is not just diagnosis but "gnosis" - Greek for "deeply knowing, acknowledging, apocalyps-ing - apocalypse means "to reveal what is hidden" - of the "gods" (archetypes) in our illnesses seeking to be made conscious and lived consciously. Jung pointed out that the gods live us and we are not aware of it as such. Best, said he, to become conscious of, and Auden said this, our "being lived by forces greater than ourselves."
You just might want to discover what is living you!
At the end of another letter to a correspondent Jung wrote:
"The fear is not of myself, but of the myth in you" aka he fears the myth that was active in the correspondent who was not aware that that myth was living him!
As a young man Jung realized that he did not have a myth. He was born into a myth, the Christian myth of his father and Western culture but did not believe in that myth. He then asked himself,
"What is MY myth?" As an older man he could nuance as he did in the quote at the end of the letter, "What myth was living me?"
Here's Jung:
""God is an ailment man has to cure.
For this purpose God penetrates into man."
And this, the passage below, needs slow rereading, pondering, as itis essential Jung. For context, this is Jung in a letter to a close and trusted colleague, Hans Schmid in 1915. Jung had broken rank with Freud to go his own way, away from Freud's reductive approach to illness, in order to further his intuition and experience that there is more to an illness than the symptoms, they are symbols too which can be approached and in doing so mindfully, creatively, a wholeness is to be gained whether the illness abates or not...there is, in the end, an ongoing/unfolding mystery present and presenting in each individual, so Jung is underscoring the need to be present in THAT in order to expand, amplify, grow a capacity to live in Mystery in the quotidien:
"Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood...One would be instantly deprived of one's personal raison d'etre if one were...Understanding is a fearful binding power, at times a veritable murder of the soul as soon as it flattens out vitally important differences. The core of the individual is a mystery of life which is snuffed out when it is "grasped." That is why symbols want to be mysterious; they are not so merely because what is at the bottom of them cannot be clearly apprehended...All understanding in general, which is a conformity with general points of view, has the diabolical element in it and kills. It is a wrenching of another life out of its own course, forcing it into a strange one in which it cannot live...True understanding seems to me to be one which does not understand, yet lives and works...We should bless our blindness for the mysteries of the other, it shields us from devilish deeds of violence. We should be connivers at our own mysteries but veil our eyes chastely before the mystery of the other, so far as, being unable to understand himself, he does not need the "understanding" of others."
— C.G. Jung's correspondence to Hans Schmid, 1915
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A Theodore Roethke Interlude - he knew whereof he soaked:
Meditation in Hydrotherapy
Six hours a day I lay me down
Within this tub but cannot drown
The ice cap at my rigid neck
Has served to keep me with the quick
This water, heated like my blood
Refits me for the true and good
Within this primal element
The flesh is willing to repent
I do not laugh; I do not cry
I'm sweating out the will to die
My past is sliding down the drain;
I soon will be myself again
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Facebook Post Two - July 23, 2025
The above is a rewrite and riff on this the original here below...the extended Jung quote is worth reading if you read nothing else of the above:Extended quote from which this "nugget" (Hillman's) arrives, is below. Along with James Hillman's statement that many people come to therapy for their wounds to be blessed. Not necessarily "fixed" "repaired", which is certainly what Jung arrived at after his break with Freud who gathered together his "cabal", his name for some of his closest disciples, his secret group, whose sole purpose was to slander and wound Jung who was already suffering from his necessary break with Freud in order to individuate and "follow" said old man Jung, "his own snake, not Freud's, who had to follow his on snake." [NOTE - FOLLOW YOUR OWN SNAKE]
Jung did indeed suffer which led to his "encounter with the unconscious" (title of chapter six in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections), his private inner journeys recorded in black notebooks, his descent into "conscious madness" (better than being "mugged by madness") from which he compiled his Liber Novus, the Red Book, which brought forth Jung's major concepts of which he spent the rest of his life researching and confirming as factual evidence as to the nature of the human psyche, levels of consciousness beyond ego consciousness, and so much more.
Thusly, as with Jung, and with each of us,
in the wound is both bane and boon. So, Attend.
Tend to the whole of it (tho slippery, multi-tentacled, or a morass beyond full ken, yet, try,, hold it, be with, a kind of potential personal Bodhi Tree, and see, feel, intuit what may, and can, and will, emerge at its own speed in its own innate timing - such
understanding/meaning (not reductive) comes
aka image of a not yet awakened Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha's given name, like "Billy Smith"), defeated by and after all his competencies at guru Hindu spiritual gymnastics yet he remained un-woke. He could levitate, bi-locate but so what? Tricks. But NOT enlighenment.
Seven years he was at the Tree, no choice but to stay put, he chose to stay on his buttocks, in a rut as much as his mental and physical capacities routed, refusing to budge (if he could, you can imagine the stiffness of joints, perhaps the calcification of bones and joints (had to be painful), but, a refusal to give up, walk away, unless and until some enlightenment, some grasp arrived as to why there is suffering aka illness, old age, death. And how to transcend if transcendence is possible (and it's not, not literally, but in apprehension, yes. Tis so. AH SO.
Now, I have a little inner movie about the opening lines of Theodore Roethke's marvelous poem "In Evening Air" - in my movie Siddhartha Gautama has already been years long into his refusal to walk away from his honest earnest efforts to "wake up".
One day, a wandering sadhu sees this man sitting at the foot of a tree, the rumors of there being such a man were correct!, and so the sadhu asks the meditating man,
"Why do you sit here so long? why are you doing this?"
And here Roethke's opening lines are, in my movie, Siddhartha's response:
"A dark theme keeps me here,
Though summer blazes in the vireo’s eye. [a vireo is a bird]
Who would be half possessed
By his own nakedness?
Waking’s my care–
I’ll make a broken music, or I’ll die."
Makes absolute sense to me. With or without broken music, either way,
I'll die. May as well try. And in the trying, and in the dying, eventually or, preferred, before dying, be blessed. Or have at least a pocket full of "wakings" to accrue enough accounts that count as
BLESSING. With or without caps.
Something greater, much much greater than ourselves does indeed "possess" us. A curse and a blessing. In sitting and being with both at once, something, some third thing, unexpectedly arises, might or can, that extends, expands and enables one to withstand or even, yes, Praise -
Call it "broken music".
Call it ADAGIO.
Call it "Blase" (Archie Shepp's horn and Jeannie Lee's voice and drums ratta tat tat off beat):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH9To67c5f0&list=RDPH9To67c5f0&start_radio=1
Gradual, usually, such rumored thing, Awakening, arrives but, too, often enough, unexpected,
How can I tell what I’ve seen?
Fall, stand—it’s clear at once.
Wearing my pants backwards, I
Trample the old path. And the new.
—Kakua
80
Fisting, shouting like a petty merchant,
Saying yes, no: quicksand.
Cease pointing, explaining. Keep quiet.
There: now hear the flutist coming home?
—Kakua
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