Author Archives: Morgan Mussell

Jung’s Tower: simplicity and the inner life

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Jung's Tower House, Bollingen, Switzerland, by Andrew Taylor, 2009. CC BY-SA-2.0

Jung’s Tower House, Bollingen, Switzerland by Andrew Taylor, 2009. CC BY-SA-2.0

Recent news of technological incursions into consciousness itself (virtual reality and altered memories); almost daily revelations about NSA spying; suggestions that social media “isolates people from reality;” it’s enough to make you want to unplug all the gadgets – at least for a while!

Renowned psychologist, Carl Jung (1875-1961) did just that, for months at a time, in a tower-house complex he started building in 1923 and continued to work on for the rest of his life.  He often spent months each year living as simply as possible, without electricity or running water.  It’s easy to think he lived in a simpler time and couldn’t have imagined modern complexity, but consider these words he wrote in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, published in 1961, the year he died:

“We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness.  We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise.  We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.
………………………
…new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for.  They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole.  Mostly they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before.”

The tower, phase 1, 1923. Creative Commons

The tower, phase 1, 1923. Creative Commons

Ten years before starting the tower, Jung had a painful break with Freud that precipitated a period of disorientation and a huge uprush of the kind of unconscious contents he had witnessed in schizophrenic patients.  Feeling that his experience was purposeful, he chose to submit to the unconscious with writing, art, and the effort to understand.  Out of this phase of turmoil and uncertainty, his unique psychological insights were born.  Paper and ink, he said, did not seem “real” enough to represent his discoveries, so in 1922 he purchased land on Lake Zurich for a “representation in stone” of his “innermost thoughts.”

Phase II, 1927. Creative Commons

Phase II, 1927. Creative Commons

Jung wrote at length of the parallel developments of his inner life and the tower, over more than three decades, saying things like:

“At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself”

“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.”

“I pump the water from the well.  I chop the wood and cook the food.  These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!”

Jung pumping water at Bollingen ca. 1960. Library of Congress

Jung pumping water at Bollingen ca. 1960. Library of Congress

While drawing inspiration from Jung, an obvious question becomes, how do I connect with this kind of depth in the midst of my own too-hectic life?  The good news is, we don’t need a tower to live in for months at a time.  The bad news is we need to unplug every day and tune into activities that nourish the soul; this is often hard arrange.  It takes focus, intention, and experimentation to find those things that center us and we are drawn to.  Any number possibilities come to mind:

  • “Spend an hour a day in a quiet room by yourself reading old stories that you find nourishing.”  That’s what Joseph Campbell said when Bill Moyers asked this question during the “Power of Myth” interviews.
  • Meditation, of almost any kind.  This my own core practice.  Zen teacher, Cheri Huber said, “If you start by watching your breath for as little as five minutes a day, it can change your life.”
  • Sports that allow one to get in “the zone,” especially walking, running, or bicycling.
  • Keeping a dream notebook.
  • Writing, though I suspect most bloggers will have the same difficulty I have in putting words at the service of psyche – how do I turn off the writing sophistication I’ve worked so hard to gain?  Can I ever truly use words in a “purposeless” manner, allowing them to go where the wish, without thinking, “Gee, this would make a good blog post?” For any chance of success, I need a definite strategy, like writing fast with a rollerball pen in cheap notebooks.
  • Visual arts or crafts.  Training or skill is not required for this kind of work, and in fact, can get in the way.  Those with artistic training may find it useful to paint or draw with the non-dominant hand.  Jung had no formal art training, but his private journal, The Red Book, only recently published, gives an idea of what may emerge if one is determined to honor the psyche.
Red Book, p. 131. Courtesy Ox Aham, Creative Commons

Red Book, p. 131. Courtesy Ox Aham, Creative Commons

When I truly examine my own habits, it’s clear that I fritter away enough time with gadgets each day to find the space for this kind of exploration.  It doesn’t need to be with the kinds of activities I outlined above.  I find it’s ok to schedule “time for inner work” the way I schedule time at the gym, but the most powerful new discoveries seem to emerge from those quiet voices at the edge of consciousness, the tiny impulse it is so easy to overlook in our busy lives.

Such an impulse woke me one night at 1:00am one morning.  Instead of going back to sleep, I got up and wrote down a sentence.  That led to a paragraph, and then a page, and then another.  That was the start of the first (and so far only) novel I’ve finished.

Something similar happened to Jung at his tower.  He gave the stonemason at a quarry precise measurements for blocks he needed to build a new wall, but one of the stones arrived in error; it was square, about 20″ on each side.  When Jung saw it, he said, “That is my stone, I must have it!”  Over time, he carved a testament to his life and work on stone which “stands outside the Tower, and is like an explanation of it.  It is a manifestation of the occupant.”

Bollingen stone, main face, CC-BY-SA-3.0

Bollingen stone, main face, CC-BY-SA-3.0

In a seminar in 1939, Jung said:

“We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul – the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill – this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are “nothing but.”

The Bollingen Tower became a vital way for Jung to live the symbolic life, but he would have been the first to insist that we don’t need to carve stone or build houses to find it for ourselves.  All we need is the hunger.  And the will to begin.

What’s coming to TheFirstGates in 2014?

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Courtesy Emma Paperclip, Creative Commons

Courtesy Emma Paperclip, Creative Commons

Thanks to everyone who visited this year, old friends and new.  Here are a few year end musings on where this blog may be going in 2014.   These are not resolutions.  Remembering Yoda’s words to Luke, “Do or do not, there is no try,” I don’t make resolutions.  These are sort-of-predictions, aka guesses, based on a line from a Grateful Dead song, “I can tell your future / just look what’s in your hand.”

In the case of theFirstGates, it should probably read, “look at what books are piled up on the table beside you.”  Looking at the titles in the stack, I predict more of the same, only new and (hopefully) better.

I’m currently reading a book I got for Christmas, Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales.  The key word is complete – I haven’t read all the tales before.  The other great feature is the Arthur Rackham illustrations.  No one has ever painted Faerie like Rackham, and it’s a place I never tire of visiting.

Another new title is Trickster Makes this World by Lewis Hyde.  Not only is Trickster an ongoing object of fascination, but he pervades blogging just like the rest of life.  I’m reminded of this every time I hit Publish while meaning to click on Save.

And perhaps most important for TheFirstGates, I’m rereading The Dream and the Underworld, one of James Hillman’s important early works.  Here he turns the tables on psychology’s habit of translating the night world of dreams into the language of daylight; serving the ego, in other words.

Dream and the Underworld

Instead of asking what a dream means, Hillman asks what it wants.  This shift is fundamental to all of Hillman’s thought – psychology, the science of the psyche, in service to soul and soul-in-the-world.

Of great interest to me as a blogger is Hillman’s effort to see through literal events to the fantasies, the mythical layers that underly the stories we tell ourselves and the ones we see on the evening news.  The reality in our fantasies and the fantasy in all our realities.

The coming year is unique in one respect: 2014 marks the centennial of the start of that worldwide disaster misnamed “The Great War.”  The first world war has haunted me for years with its end-of-an-age immensity and sadness.  There are millions of stories to tell, and I’ll try to post a few here, from the bumbling youths who sparked the conflict to a young lieutenant named Tolkien who was sent to Mordor in 1916, though the generals called it The Somme.

And finally, as always I will continue to be on the lookout for those stranger-than-fiction events that leave us shaking our heads, wanting to laugh or cry or both at the strangeness of it all.

I wish you all a joyous New Year, and I hope we will all continue to share the emerging wonders of this online experience!

Another great story rediscovered: Bamboo Charlie

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Here is another inspiring tale that I bookmarked some time ago and then forgot.  Coincidentally, like the previous post, its subject is a uniquely creative folk artist.  I read about Bamboo Charlie in a memorial published in the L.A. Times in September, 2012.

Bamboo Charlie and his whimsical paradise

Bamboo Charlie and his whimsical paradise

Twenty years ago, a homeless Texan named Charles Ray Walker noticed a bamboo grove along a narrow stretch of land by the Los Angeles River in Boyle Heights.  The property owner told Charlie he could stay there if he kept the place clean.

On the strip of land, about 40′ x 200′, squeezed between a parking lot and a warehouse, Walker grew fruits and vegetables.  He carved stairs into the bare slopes and decorated them with hundreds of discarded toys and signs.  He built a shack under a tree, with a TV, bed,and sofa, and then he invited guests to visit: graffiti artists, children and their parents, musicians, police officers, and homeless friends.  He assembled a library out of salvaged books, including best sellers and one called The Semi-Complete Guide to Sort of Being a Gentleman.  Bamboo Charlie was featured on the front page of the L.A. Times in 2010.

"Bamboo Charlie"

During the 20 years he spent on the parcel, he collected cans for money, sometimes working late into the night. Duruing occasional trips back to Texas to visit his family, he operated a crane at a steel company. “I’m not going to ask another grown man for money. I never have, and I never will,” he said. “People expect that from a homeless man.”  

That pride may have contributed to an early death.  He suffered greatly from ulcers during his final years, but insisted he was fine when friends suggested he see a doctor. On Aug. 26, 2012, a young friend named Teyuca found him dead in his shack, of what the coroner determined was heart disease.  He was 61.

“I really think what he did was folk art, built out of scraps and things found, things that people gave him,” Teyuca said.  “He was a mad genius.  He had such a wild imagination.”

A great story I neglected to post

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I found this during a year-end cleaning of my “Drafts” folder – an unfinished post inspired by a newspaper article in July which details the life’s work of unsung folk artist, Arthur Harold Beal, garbage collector for the town of Cambria, CA.

Just down the road from the Hearst Castle, that world-famous monument to excess, lies Nitt Witt Ridge, the house on the hill that Beal lovingly crafted of driftwood, river stones, beer bottles, abalone shells, toilet seats, and other assorted junk.  Beal started work in the 30’s was still going in 1992, when he died at the age of 96.

Nitt Witt Ridge by megpi, CC BY-NC-SA-2.0

Nitt Witt Ridge by megpi, CC BY-NC-SA-2.0

Michael O’Malley, a plumber in town, bought the Ridge for $42,000 in 1999.  Unfortunately, the sale price did not include water rights, so he and his wife cannot live there, and because it is zoned residential, they can’t open the house for public tours.  Several times a week in the summer, O’Malley gives private tours, in return for donations, to people who contact him directly.  He is something of an expert on stories surrounding the Ridge’s creator.

Beal used to say he salvaged his wood from the ocean, but O’Malley points out the quality of the material, and suggests that Beal might have “salvaged” it from local construction sites late at night.  Beal seems to have been a curmudgeon.  Some people asked to visit the house while he was still living.  If he liked their looks, he’d let them in, if not, he would shake his fist and yell, “Move along, small change.”  O’Malley found a video of Beal on a 1981 TV episode of “Real People.”  At age 81, with a long beard and a walking staff, “he looked like a mix of John Muir and Dennis Hopper.”

Here’s a brief but informative clip of O’Malley giving a tour of the house:

Last summer, when I started this post, I added descriptions of other architectural oddities, like the Watt Towers and the Bottle House of Rhyolite, NV.  The story grew too long and languished until now.

The end of the year is a good time to contemplate things like Nitt Witt Ridge.  While others compile their lists of “The Best of 2013,” here is my contribution to a list of things wacky and weird.

Getting rid of those pesky memories

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In my previous post, I wrote of advances in the field of virtual reality, and posted a video clip that brought to mind the dystopian landscape of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Word (1932).  Huxley imagined life in “The World State” in 2540, where children are born in “hatcheries.”  They are raised in “conditioning centers” and learn to be avid consumers and abhor the thought of solitude.

Happy face thumbs up

One of the World State’s tools for keeping people docile are “the feelies,” multi-sensory movies, most often centered on sex.  The connection to virtual reality should be obvious.  Another conditioning tool was “soma,” a side-effect free hallucinogenic drug that World State citizens used to go on “holidays.”  Soma relates to the subject of this post – a potential advance in the technology of feeling happy, happy.

In “Unwanted Memories Erased in Experiment,” an article in The Wall Street Journal (12/23/13, p. A1), Gautam Naik writes that scientists used electrical currents to erase memories they had implanted earlier.  Someday doctors may be able to zap painful memories and leave the rest in tact.  Assuming the technology becomes (relatively) safe, would this be a wise thing to do?

In a few cases it might be – the 39 patients who volunteered for the experiment were already undergoing electroshock therapy for severe clinical depression after all other treatments had failed.  But the article’s assertion that memory erasing might be useful to remove “associations linked to smoking, drug-taking, or emotional trauma” suggests the kind of social engineering Huxley wrote about.

Last year at a Buddhist teaching, I met an elderly woman who had spent her youth in a Soviet gulag.  As difficult as the hardship was, she had written a memoir for her family to read, “So they’ll know who I really am.”  Her core identity, as well as her later practice of Buddhism were direct results of those years of suffering.

In my late 20’s, I knew a woman who lost her closest male friends over a short period of time; they died of cancers related to Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam.  After surviving a deep depression, my friend enrolled for training to work in a hospice.  Without the pain of loss, she wouldn’t have found her calling.

The poet, Rilke, declined Jung’s offer of therapy work saying, “If you take away my devils, I fear my angels might flee.”  

The disowned parts of ourselves are especially important in scripture.  When Jesus offers living water (Jn 4:10-13), only those who know they are thirsty will hear him.  When Buddha teaches a path beyond suffering, we won’t listen if we’ve deadened ourselves with soma or reality TV.

A tour of America 80 years ago sparked Huxley’s vision of an economic and political culture at war with soul values.  Now that another “holiday season” has run its course, as the media waits for the next distraction, I am reminded once again of the cautionary words in this wonderful poem that William Stafford published in 1960:

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider–
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Virtual dreams

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A few nights ago I had a 21st century dream in which the key event was losing my cell phone.  In days of yore – say five or ten years ago – losing a wallet was the common dream image for a disruption to one’s persona.  Now my smart phone probably tells me more about my public life than a wallet.  It shows me where I am, where I’m going, when I need to be there, how to find my way, and it gives me multiple ways to connect with people I need to see when I arrive.  In a few years time, I’m sure we’ll all have digital ID’s and credit cards.

Though I still think of dreams in terms of archaic elements, clearly the psyche will use whatever it needs to make a point.  As technology is part of our lives now, it is also part of our dreams.  All of which leads me to the heart of this post:  we ain’t seen nothin’ yet! 

Last Wednesday, I caught an amazing segment on virtual reality on the PBS Newshour.  I didn’t expect to be interested.  Since I don’t play video games or World of Warcraft, VR seems like just one more distraction in an ADHD world.  It may well be, but the Newshour piece demonstrates the power of this technology, beyond anything I’d imagined.  I instantly thought of the “Feelies” – multi-sensory movies in Huxley’s Brave New World.  We aren’t there yet, but it would be foolish to rule out the possibility.  Watch the clip and see what you think.

The power of imagined experience has long been established.  In the early 20th century, Jung developed a technique he called “active imagination” and used it in therapy.  In the 50’s, research proved that imagined practice was as useful as “real” practice for improving basketball free throws.  In reference to meditation, Lama Thubten Yeshe, a prominent 20th century Tibetan teacher, said, “What we have to learn is that the experiences we have through imagination and those we have through our senses are actually the same.”

All of these applications involve self-generated imagery, but if and when VR comes into our living rooms, it will come through the same corporate interests that flood us with adds already.  Do we want them reaching even farther into the deep psyche?

We’ll be clamoring for it!  If you have any doubt, check out Life, the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality by Neal Gabler.  In terms of an obvious metaphor, The Matrix, once we have the ability turn our living rooms into personal holodecks, that blue pill of restless sleep will surge in popularity.

MorpheusWarning

To paint a huge subject in simple terms, over time, our race has transferred successive parts of our brain functions to technology.  Printed books marked the end of bards who could recite epic poems.  We don’t find the griots of Alex Haley’s Roots in literate cultures.  The imaginations of my parents’ generation got a better workout listening to The Lone Ranger on radio than mine did watching the masked man on TV.

I love technology, but I’m wary of it too, and not just the obvious stuff like the NSA.  I’m wary of all the ways we can use it to foster oblivion until, as T.S. Eliot put it, “Human voices wake us and we drown.”

Yule ~ The Beginner’s Guide To The Wheel Of The Year

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Just in time for the solstice, here is another of Lily Wight’s wonderful “Wheel of the Year” posts, with beautiful illustrations and commentary on the Celtic and Nordic stories surrounding this ancient holiday. Enjoy her post and enjoy the return of light!

Lily Wight's avatarLily Wight

Updated 18/12/2014

     There are four Solar Quarter Days (two equinoxes and two solstices) on The Wheel of The Year calendar.  Yule or The Winter Solstice is celebrated during a twelve day period from December into January.

     Yule commemorates the demise and rebirth of the sun’s powers because The Wheel continues to turn and daylight hours begin to lengthen again beyond The Shortest Day.

     The name “Yule” is thought to derive from the Old Norse ” jólnar”  – a collective term for the gods or “Yule Ones”.   Jólfaðr (Yule Father – interchangeable with All-Father) is one of many names attributed to Odin.  In Old Norse poetry names and terms for Odin are frequently synonymous with celebration and feasting.  Odin The Gift-Giver is undoubtedly the origin of our Santa Claus.

     The Midwinter period between the last harvest (Samhain)…

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We were hopeful once, and young

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Bob_Dylan_-_The_Times_They_are_a-Changin

I just came upon a high quality clip of an unbelievably young Bob Dylan at Newport in 1963, singing one of his best early songs.  Watching it, I’m reminded of a line from another early Dylan song, “We never much thought we could get very old.”  I guess no one ever does.

Change a few particulars and the song is as timely today as it was 50 years ago.  What’s missing is the collective hope/dream/prayer of those days that music could change the world.

Maybe it can, in the sense of planting seeds.  Maybe, but if so, those seeds take longer to germinate than anyone who is young can possibly imagine.

Enjoy a great clip of “North Country Blues.”  And maybe water the seed.