Great minds think alike...Fools seldom differ?

Something in me of late feels that it has touched the depths, the sea bottom, reading-wise. I’ve explored the dark caves, confronted some monstrous beings, found a casket or two of sunken treasure. But it’s time to swim up again and break the surface into the light, take a few gulps of fresh air.

I’m a firm believer in synchronicity which is the interesting phenomena that occurs when the personal unconscious tunes in with the collective unconscious. Events, images, coincidences occur that mirror one’s personal feelings and dilemmas at a given time. Things can be dormant for a long time and then something stirs in the unconscious, as it did for me of late. Then fascinating things begin to occur. Jung saw this as being particularily associated with the creative force in oneself and the universe. 

Something led me to find a little scribbled note of mine from years back. It was the title of a book by Barbara Hannah, a close friend and pupil of the great psychologist, Carl Jung. I felt an urge to order this book ‘Striving for Wholeness’ but couldn’t find a copy in the usual sites at the time so ordered her Biographical-Memoir of Jung instead. It was so uplifting to read an intimate, feminine viewpoint of the life of this truly amazing man, a man of such humility, wisdom and love of humanity.   i feel I have lived with him, seen his humanity and his genius.  A Great Soul or Mahatma, the Indians would have called him. This gulp of fresh air totally revived me creatively and spiritually.

For most of my life I read either classics or non-fiction books and psychology was a special study. My father suffered greatly from mental illness and I wanted to try and understand what it was that troubled his spirit so much. My own spirit was also deeply troubled at this period of life and at fourteen I suffered from an anxiety complex, a lengthy panic attack that lasted about six months.  This was partly brought about by trying to read such dense, heavy material as psychology at too young an age.  I simply didn't have the centredness and maturity to contain it.  So I suffered a form of psychic indigestion!  However, I came back to this subject again in my twenties and it isn’t being foolish to say that reading Jung’s ideas and writings saved my sanity. Particularily his great work on alchemy ‘Mysterium Coniunctionis.’

Those of us who live close to the unconscious world who are primarily right brained types find the scientific, left brained, ‘rational’ approach to life harsh, unfeeling, dogmatic and out of tune with a quite different reality. This approach has arisen since the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ when it was necessary to dispel the darkness of a preceding age full of terrors and superstitions. Now, however, rationality has aquired a darkness, ignorance and blindness of its own just as impenetrable and hard to dispel.

The best story to portray this modern attitude is Hans Andersen’s 'Little Mermaid.' She is an anima figure who emerges half human, half fish from the deeps and longs to walk in the land of humans. But her feet are full of pain, as if sharp knives were sticking into them as she walks and she finds herself unable to speak the language of the conscious, solar world. This is very much the fate of the Piscean type (Sun Moon or Rising sign in Pisces) A Piscean myself, not only are my feet always in pain but I am quite often struck dumb when with very left brain people who appear to have all the answers, backed by masses of 'facts and education.'   It's almost impossible to explain my own beliefs or to move through the brick wall of their limited comprehensions. They seem to be so rational that they can bring doubt to those who are not so firmly centred. But my heart knows things they do not know and has had experiences they cannot begin to have.


It’s hard to understand this atttiude coming from intelligent people who profess to be detached and scientific. They seem terrified of all that appears to be irrational.  Let’s face it, we can be sure of nothing and science and medicine are always contradicting themselves, disproving their own theories, realising more and more that we merely skirt the edges of real knowledge. So why not open the mind to the possibility, at least, that there is more in Heaven and Earth than the eye can see.

Develop perhaps an Inner Eye that gazes on profunditiy?