Loss of a Great Man

Just after my last blog in November 2011, a dear and much loved man died of multiple melanomas on the 18th November.  I didn't know it till recently when the news came along the grapevine.  This man was Dr Roger Woolger, a warm, humorous and healing person with a depth of knowledge and understanding that made us all respect and love him.  Roger was a Jungian therapist but his speciality was what he called Deep Memory Process, a technique he developed which helped many people get in touch with buried memories, often of past lives.  Bringing these memories to consciousness was a tremendously liberating process and a healing one as I can vouch from personal experience of his workshops. 


My son originally brought his work to my attention when he gave me Roger's groundbreaking book, Other Lives Other Selves, as a birthday gift.  I got in touch with Roger and attended one of his workshops in Malvern in 1991.  As soon as the Malvern Hills came into sight through the train window I began to choke with tears.  I immediately felt this place was my spiritual home and have always felt so and in 1999 moved from London to Malvern with my husband who loves the hills as much as I do.  I also made some other friends from this period who will always be special to me.  Thus on life's journey, we meet some particular faces once again, people who feel so familiar. . . .this is how it seems to me. Friends who will be with one perhaps through many incarnations. 

Roger became a close friend for a while but over the years we lost touch though I often heard of his brilliant work and punishing schedule as he toured the world teaching his process to others.  The workshop experience was a life turning point for me in many ways.  At these workshops, Roger would play us music, read poetry and he put me in touch with the sublime mystic poetry of the Sufis, especially Jellaladin Rumi.  I shall never forget the regression experiences in which I had an amazing sense of coming close to the Divine, an uplift of the soul that cannot be expressed.  It freed me and healed me in many ways. 
Thank you, Roger, for all you gave to us at the cost of your own health.

Here is a poem from his web site http://www.deepmemoryprocess.com/ which expresses so much of the mystical view of life and death.

DEEPENING THE WONDER

Death is a favour to us,
But our scales have lost their balance.
The impermanence of the body
Should give us great clarity,
Deepening the wonder in our senses and eyes
Of this mysterious existence we share
And are surely just travelling through.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
Hafiz would call for drinks
And as the Master poured, I would be reminded
That all I know of life and myself is that
We are just a midair flight of golden wine
Between His Pitcher and His Cup.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
I would buy freely for everyone in this world
Because our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
Of time and space cannot endure very long.
Death is a favour to us,
But our minds have lost their balance.

The miraculous existence and impermanence of
Form
Always makes the illumined ones
Laugh and sing.

~Hafiz


From: "The Subject Tonight Is Love" (60 Wild & Sweet Poems of Hafiz translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Are we becoming a giant brain?

According to an article by Jane Thynne which I recently read in the April 2011 Oldie (I always read these articles ages afterwards!) we are running out of cyberspace on the internet, no more room for any more IP addresses left.   We tend to assume there is no limit to cyberspace and there isn't as far as we know, though the concept of eternity and never-endingness seems too much for our finite minds to bear.   There is, of course, a limit to the Galaxy we inhabit and even a limit to the Universe. But as far as we know - and we don't really know much - there are billions and billions more universes out there that stretch on an on.  Mystics would say each universe is but a cell in the body of Adam Kadmon, the Atman, and that must mean that there is even a limit to this or what sort of 'body' can we talking about?  Are there billions of Adam Kadmons also stretching on and on into infinity, that are also just cells in the body of the Absolute?

I agree - it's all too mind-boggling.

Apparently a new system called IPv6 has been devised to make extra space on the Web and this, we are assured, is likely to last well up to the time the Sun decides it's a dying star.  The web sites created with this will not be accessible to old computer systems.   Not much of a loss as there's enough already, if you ask me.  However, what interested me most was the fact that there is an enormous  'dark web' lurking beneath what we ignorant and ordinary people are so far able to access with the usual search engines. This is another world altogether, a place full of 'terrorist guides, pornography, pirated books, political samizdat and secretive networks' to use Thynne's description.  This secret and hidden area needs special passwords and codes to enter and can be used without leaving any traces of the users.   Lisbeth Salander springs to mind; she would surely know the codes and belong to this secret world of ideas and plottings and inventiveness, beyond the ken of most of us.

This revelation immediately put me in mind of Jung's concept of the Unconscious mind.  He showed diagrams of the mind as a mountain rising from a sea.  The conscious was a mere tip for the vast majority of humankind, a mere atoll even for the brightest of us,  while below lies all the dark, unknown territories of our inner psyche.  The Personal Unconscious is the more accessible upper regions of this sea, where we can travel and discover our own individual past, buried memories and inferior, savage feelings and confront our Shadow personality.  That's the shameful part we prefer to bury and forget while working carefully on our light, bright outer, conscious image.  Beneath this however, Jung also discovered the concept of the Collective Unconscious which everyone carries in them, stretching way back to pre-history, full of archetypal images, symbols, memories that belong to the whole human race and can arise spontaneously in the dreams of people from Africa to Iceland who know nothing about the other's culture.

The Web is beginning to look more and more like the collective brain of Mankind, synapses with information racing along from one neuron to another; every computer, i-pod and phone a neuroreceptor. . . something interesting is happening to us as a species and this is its product, this enormous brain that we have created which is beginning to rule our lives.  It is no respecter of individuality or humanity but seems to be forcing us all into submission to its enormous power.  It's hardly suprising that this Mind has a dark, unconscious side.  And interestingly, like the unconscious mind of every one of us, this may be the place from which great creativity will pour out and redeem Mankind - or the beginning of a huge human psychosis. Just at the moment, the latter seems more in evidence as we gaze around us at a chaotic and unstable world.

New Things for Old?

We went to buy some new mattresses recently at our local bedding shop.  They are cosy memory-foam, so deep and luxurious it meant moving the large pictures on the wall over the bed as now our heads would bump into them.  At the shop was a new range of bedroom furniture and it was exquisite; reproductions of Georgian style antiques, all in walnut and very expensive.  I yearned.

When we got home I paced the bedroom and eyed the ill-assorted types of wood and style of furniture there and thought how lovely it would be to have all the furniture matching, in the same light walnut, the same style for chests of drawers, bedside cabinets and dressing table plus a charming, tall, slender piece of furniture in that range solely for the purpose of guarding ones undies.  I might even treat myself to silk undies to go in such a delightful piece with its little secret drawers (sorry for the pun!).   Then I'd have to get new curtains as well as such elegant furniture would require something far more elegant than the ones I'd hastily run up when we first moved here.  The list was growing at an alarming pace of effort and expenditure.  However, I wasn't rushing into any sort of  decision - but woke every morning and contemplated happily just how splendid the room would look.

Then it gradually dawned on me that I couldn't part with what I already had.  These old, battered pieces of furniture had a memory, a meaning, a moment in my life embedded in them.  The Victorian chest of drawers, the drawers of which always stick and are annoyingly difficult, the washstand with it's quaint green tiled back on which a repeat motif of mauve pansies flourish, were bought in the 1970's when I won a prize of £20 for a play I had written.  The simple, useful bedside tables were amongst my mothers first household items, bought in the late 1940's.  She gave me these when we married and we cut off the cabriolet feet in an effort to  'modernise' them at the time.  They are now so layered with coats of paint through the years to match every bedroom decor we have ever had that the doors scarcely shut any more. The nursing chairs I bought at my first ever auction and I love them. The Victorian dressing table was purchased when I first moved to Malvern.  I felt so happy with it because it's quaint and has useful drawers beneath it.  The old oak chest belonged to my late mother-in-law. I can still picture it standing in her hallway during all the years I knew and loved her. How could I now get rid of all these much-loved items with their history and their personal meaning, give them to strangers? 

It made me understand that a home is an organic place that should grow with one over the years.  It should contain the ancestors in it, contain one's past, present and future too, be a living entity, a part of oneself, the outer shell in which one exists and lives.  This struck me with real force and feeling.  I knew that everything was perfect just as it was.

So I saved our money and now take a renewed pleasure every time I awake to these items which have remind me of so many loved people and moments in my life.

Life's Crazy Mistakes

Time to stop being profound, methinks.  It's too wearing for the brain these days.  So instead I'll reflect a little on the fact that one makes some profoundly foolish mistakes in the course of life.  I often yearn to look back on a mistake free life but it isn't possible.  And what's more it would mean that I'd be so smug as to be unbearable.  Mistakes are humbling and humbling is good for the ego.

The latest mistake got us literally into deep waters.  My husband and myself were holidaying for a few days near Newquay in West Wales.  We'd been there before and I recalled that one could take a boat road round Cardigan Bay for an hour with the hope of seeing seals and dolphins.  This desire stuck with me and I asked John to reconnoitre while he was down by the bay.  He picked up an odd leaflet while there.  Later we went to the bay and, on asking directions, were told to get tickets from the Marine Centre. This we did and then sat in the sun till it was time to go.  We saw a nice little boat arrive and went to clamber on board only to be told that we had booked with a different lot and our 'trip' was to be in an inflatable dinghy!

I was absolutely horrified at this idea as I am not a lover of the sea.  Ponds, rivers, lakes, I love - but the sea is absolutely terrifying and one reason why I am not a fan of cruises. All that water everywhere. No thanks. My strong instinct was to pay up and join the nice, neat boat and forgo the other tickets but my husband was having a mean turn about losing the money already paid (and more expensive!) for the dinghy ride.  Right at the last minute, I had a strong urge to let him get on with it if he felt that adventurous.  I would abandon him and join the boat.  But I felt that wouldn't be fair, so I desisted and watched it sail away with a sinking feeling in my gut. So that was mistake number one.  Being nice to others.

My next mistake, and a totally daft move, was to go and sit in the bow.  We had to wear a lifebelt which says a lot. Off we went into the sea and though the vessel was going slowly it still pitched and rolled and the sea was FAR too close.  However, by looking at the land instead of watching the rolling waves, I was okay and John was whooping happily, enjoying the thrill of it all.  A child on board started wailing in terror and my heart was with the poor kid.  Anyway, I settled into relaxing with the pitch and roll and watched the birds that were seen wheeling and screaming to one another on the amazingly striated cliffs but there wasn't a dolphin in sight.  

If I thought all this was bad enough but bearable, it was when the boat turned back and we were now going against the swell that I really freaked out.  Huge waves rolled up before us, the boat curved to meet them and amazingly didn't capsize.  This was to be half an hour of hell returning to the jetty.  I simply shut my eyes and clung to the boat and to John (his arm has bruises to show for it!) while we surged up and down.  I prayed to be forgiven all the sins of my life just in case this was it. But I had a rude awakening back into this world of a sudden when an extra huge swell poured over us soaking us to the skin.  Now we had to sit and freeze till we at last got out on the jetty and sloshed our way to the car where I stripped some of the clothes off and wrapped myself in a long, dry jumper. Poor John had to drive back to our lodgings in wet trousers.

Really, you'd think by now I'd learnt to follow my instincts.  But no.
And we never even got to see a dolphin.

Entering the Abyss

Love is a funny business . . . falling in love an odd expression. What do we actually fall into?

The ancients often painted and carved a sweet, chubby, innocent little Cupid, a child - yet with those lethal bows and arrows - blindfolded as if to say, 'Love is blind' - as well as a madness, an altered state into which we 'fall'.  All this seems to indicate that when we fall in love with something or someone we are no longer truly conscious anymore.  And yet, at the same time we can feel more alive, more real and the world glows with joy.  But if this love is not returned or those involved awaken from their dream illusion, we enter a twilight realm where we stumble about, bereft of our reasoning powers, searching, yearning for something intangible, often with no idea quite what it is we think we have found in 'the other'.   A part of ourselves, our unexpressed Shadow side, an animus, anima figure? We try to reason it out thus in modern psychological terms but it doesn't help much at the time.  No amount of reasoning can explain our reactions to what is stirred up within us by someone who is often a total stranger. In fact a stranger is a better a hook for our instinctual and archetypal longings. The deeper, more passionate, more compulsive the feeling of love, the darker it all becomes; if we are rebuffed or cast aside, all those caring, tender feelings and that all-embracing acceptance of another gives rise to the noxious fumes of hate, jealousy and revenge.  Stalkers are a horrible example but we all feel those compulsive feelings at some time.  Let's be honest!

Aphrodite, the great Goddess of Greek myth had a strange beginning according to one myth. When Ouranos the Sky God was castrated by his own son, the god Kronos (Saturn), his genitals fell into the sea and produced a mighty frothing and from the unity of sperm and sea arose the glorious form of Aphrodite (her name is translated as 'foam-born)' This falling into the sea or the unconscious seems to have been the first falling in love.
Plato in his Symposium speaks of Aphrodite or Venus as having a 'superior' and 'inferior' form, or Sacred and Profane love.  He also states that Eros, her son, has this dark and light side too. He describes the two myths about their parentage. The Heavenly Aphrodite is the daughter of Ouranos and has no mother, like Athena, the daughter of Zeus, This form of Aphrodite seems linked with the Libran Venus, rational, just, calm, intellectual, beauty loving but in some ways remote. The “common” Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and Dione and comes from a “normal” mating of male and female energies. This equates with Taurean Venus for Taurus enjoys the simple pleasures of mating and sensual joys, loves Beauty in tangible forms such as sculpture, music, painting.  Yet has a darker side which feels the depths of rage, jealousy and possessiveness when thwarted. Eros too has the most ancient heavenly parentage born from the World Egg of Nix (Night, nothingness) and the Wind but in later myth we see his more ordinary manifestation as a son of Aphrodite and Hermes (or Zeus or Ares!)

Sacred and Profane Love.  Why should one type of love be inferior to the other, we now ask? Isn’t it this sort of talk that created the division, later to be taken up by the Mediaeval Church, a split in consciousness into Beauty and the Beast, God and the Devil, the problem that Mankind has always battled with?  Shouldn't we try to marry the two, balance the opposites within us?

We have to recall that Eros was a great God, only later denigrated to a rather sulky little boy playing about his powerful and often cruel and vengeful mother, Aphrodite; the ideal of Love in all its sheer grandeur and awfulness reduced in power to mere Hollywood sentimentality.  Heroic effort is needed to grow up and learn to understand just what Love is really all about. It isn’t about 'happy ever after' or romantic idylls or constant sweetness and light. To expect that a relationship will last forever with no ups and downs is a modern dangerous fantasy and foolishness. It means that young people today prefer to remain single, lonely at heart and isolated rather than risk the dark abyss.  It means couples who fly apart at the least hint of unpleasantness, betrayal or trouble. No more the ability to forgive, to understand anothers transgressions as reflecting our own - but the childlike and selfish insistence on 'my happiness, my pleasure' 

Apuleius says of Eros in his version of “Cupid and Psyche, ' that he is no sweet little cherub but an evil Daimon, rash enough and hardy, who by his evil manners contemning all public justice and law, armed with fire and arrows, running up and down in the nights from house to house and corrupting the lawful marriages of every person, doth nothing but that which is evil'.  Love was well conceived then as a power beyond mortal man, dangerous, painful, destructive, even evil at times but at its best, stirring men and women from the comfort of their “mother-father “marriages and unions and through this adulterous havoc helping them to mature in feeling.

It seems that in order to really experience Love, we have to fall into the heart's abyss even if it means betrayal, pain and suffering and try to climb out again as best we can when we awake from our sweet delusions. But having climbed out of the place where a passionate encounter can and still does take us, we can return clutching a piece of treasure. That treasure is a new awareness of ourselves and a new understanding of our own feelings. The pain of love can have a melting, softening effect upon the hardness of our hearts though sadly, it too often, simply hardens the heart, making us cynical and unfeeling out of fear of further pain.

quote from “Cupid and Psyche” by Apuleius trans. from Latin by William Adlington Routledge and Sons. 1906

Still determined, but maybe not so daft after all.

Mrs Bertha Blackbird (as we have christened her) managed to lay her eggs.  We couldn't see them as she's on quite a high ledge but my daughter climbed a ladder and putting her hand in the nest while Bertha was out foraging, felt the three eggs there.  We were quite thrilled about it.  I was still nervous, mind you, that they'd never all fit in this nest.  However, time proved me wrong and soon we could see the little necks straining up, beaks wide open, piping to Mrs B to come and give them their grubs.  She worked tirelessly and didn't seem to mind our coming and going, just flew over out heads.  She chose this place so she had to get used to it.

You can just see the beady eye of one of the larger babes in this picture.  One morning, I forgot to shut the kitchen door when I went into the garden.  On my return there was Bertha standing in the kitchen, mouth full of worms, looking very disorientated.  I had to chase her out.  After a while as I went to get something in a corner of the kitchen and up flew a baby bird!  It gave me quite a shock.  I realised then why Bertha had come indoors like that.  The babe had left the nest, flown in through the open door and its piteous yells brought her in search of her offspring.

After some chasing around the kitchen, I managed to catch the wee thing and stroked its little head to calm it down.  Then left it under a bush nearby for its mother to find and feed. The next day, I had a feeling the rest of the brood had gone also and they had.  So all was well and Bertha's determination paid off.  Later I saw one of the youngsters, now quite large and doing it's own foraging.  If only our own kids grew as fast and were independent so soon!

  I tidied up her nest for her, clipping away some of the tumbling leaves and bits of straw.  My husband was all for taking it away but I knew she would return.  Sure enough she's there again today, sitting on a much tidier nest!... and ready to produce the next brood.  It's wonderful to be so close and able to watch the process happening.  I've never had that marvellous experience before.

A Suspicious Man

A kindly friend bought me a copy of  'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher', a true-life Victorian crime story about the murder of a little boy in a respectable Victorian middle-class home in 1860.  When a child is killed so brutally . . . and this was a truly brutal murder. . . we all feel horror and disgust.  It reminded me of the feelings and hysteria aroused over the murder of little James Bulger in 1993 which still raises its head in some manner even now because the killers were so young.  In much the same manner, the death of little Saville Kent at Road Hill House in Wiltshire, horrifies us once more in this lucid, beautifully written and detailed account.  There is no doubt that Kate Summerscale has impeccably researched this documentary work and written it with all the flair of a fascinating crime novel.

The newspapers of the day seized the story, embroidered it, made it even more sensational to the point where questions were being asked in the House of Commons about why it was taking so long to solve the case. They fed with lurid details a sensation seeking public who gobbled up all the sensation and gore.  The prim, sober Victorians seemed especially ready to be titillated in this manner, a media process that has carried on ever since.  We cannot pretend we aren't equally fascinated by darkness and horror in our own times, though it appears now in the form of televsion documentaries, crime series or books and plays.  A remove from the reality of a situation, dipping into hell from a safe distance. We don't watch public executions any more thank goodness.  My mother was taken to one in Istanbul as a child of four and it upset her so much that she became paralysed on that same day for a year.  She had a morbid fear of hanging and death for the rest of her life. 

It is, however, from this late Victorian period in history that the detective novel, with writers such as Dickens and Wilkie Collins, began to emerge as well as those horror stories of the Edgar Allen Poe variety and Bram Stoker's delicious sexual vampires and transylvanian castles full of dark mysteries. The story of the murder at Road Hill House provided the basis for many of the famous crime and mystery novels produced from then on.  After all, it was great stuff; families full of hidden rage, jealousy, sexuality and evil feelings, all lurking beneath respectable, calm exteriors and nicely conformist public behaviour.

Jack Whicher was a highly celebrated detective sent from the newly formed detective force with the Metropolitan Police in London.  Up to this point his successes had been achieved through instinct, intuition and a very keen memory for detail.  He was a working class man, he understood the ways of all the hustlers and thieves and could pick a man out as if through a kind of strange affinity.  Policeman, criminal . . .  these two are one another's opposites, what Jung would call each other's shadow side.  This is how they recognise each other.  They are one another at some archetypal level.  Whicher was absolutely sure who it was that had murdered Saville Kent, knew full well it was an inmate of the house and a young family member.  Due to all the hoo-ha in the press and in Parliament, he was forced to try and solve the crime quickly as if evidence and answers could be found growing on bushes.  Evidence was not produced and the local police Inspector, who sympathised with the family, did much to obstruct him. Plus, because of his lower class origins and the fact that his accusations were directed against a person of middle class, he was castigated, scorned and laughed out of court. Whicher never really recovered his confidence or his position after this. However, events eventually turned out exactly as he had predicted when a confession was eventually made by the guilty party many years later.

Much can be learnt from this strange, unhappy story.  It's interesting that we all love sensation, darkness and despair somewhere deep in our hearts.  Yet we also long for justice, revenge, exoneration and redemption.  The murderer lived to be a hundred years old, paid back fully her debt to society and went on to nurse lepers and care for other people.  We understand far more nowadays what drove her to the deed.  Her childhood had been a terrible backdrop to the depredations and sins of her own father.  In some ways, she too was a sacrificial victim, a scapegoat for the family who was driven to act out the underlying pains and traumas generatedby his weakness and lustfulness.  Despite the horror of the crime and the manner in which it was undertaken, one couldn't help but feel sympathy for all those involved.