## Metadata - Author: [[David Tacey]] - Full Title: Edge of the Sacred - Jung, Psyche, Earth - Category: #books ## Highlights - The so-called ‘environmental crisis’ is wrongly termed, in my view, for it is a crisis of human consciousness, a failure to view the physical world and its elements as sacred. ([Location 130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=130)) - I think there is a part of us that comes alive when we return to the mythic personifications that scientifically-based education has dispensed with. Emotional knowing is as important, and sometimes more important, than conceptual knowing, especially if we need to summon psychic energy to meet the ecological crisis that we currently face. ([Location 153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=153)) - It is not so much the ‘unconscious man within us’ who is changing, but rather the interior woman. It is ‘she’ who has had enough of patriarchal oppression, and is bursting out with impact and force. The interior man stands amazed and confused, as his feminine counterpart takes on a new life and demands her right to expression and influence. Call this, if you will, feminism at the deep archetypal level, a psychic or mythic equivalent to what we have seen in the social and political sphere over the last fifty years. ([Location 180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=180)) - The greatest favor we can do to ourselves and the planet is relax the anxiety of the patriarchal tradition toward the body and earth, and experience the feminine mysteries in a positive light. ([Location 193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=193)) - Nietzsche said we had murdered God, and we were hardly aware of our terrible act. We had to become more aware, and we had to replace the old and dying God with a new image of the sacred, which Nietzsche felt could be found in Dionysus, the sacred god of the feminine mysteries of earth, fecundity and procreation (Nietzsche 1872). ([Location 199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=199)) - A correction needs to be made in favor of the feminine, but it would represent a regression to extinguish the advances that have been made under the aegis of the patriarchal regime. It is time to bring Father and Mother, Spirit and Matter, Heaven and Earth, together into a new totality of human enterprise and endeavor. ([Location 204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=204)) - The challenge today is not to destroy the former truth, but to put it to one side so we can listen to the new truth that demands to be heard, from nature and the feminine. We need to listen to its sacred voice, to hear its plea to be respected as we have respected the ‘law of the fathers’ in the past. ([Location 224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=224)) - Although the term ‘romanticism’ can be trivialized and reduced to an aesthetic affectation or erotic swoon, it was, and continues to be, a major archetypal expression of the sanctity of nature, the sacredness of creation, and the holiness of desire, embodiment, sexuality and libido. Romanticism is not just a stuffy, high-cultural movement confined to love-struck poets and philosophers, but a serious renaissance of the feminine and matriarchal dominants that have always existed in the Western psyche but which have been driven underground. ([Location 232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=232)) - Based on Jungian thought, and on Hillman’s archetypal psychology, a new discourse has emerged which calls itself ecopsychology. Jung’s work was constantly attempting to re-establish the unitary reality of what he called ‘archaic man’, whose relationship with nature was binding and emotional. ([Location 240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=240)) - Through scientific understanding our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man’s life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still harbors a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants and animals. He no longer has a bush-soul identifying him with a wild animal. His immediate communication with nature is gone forever, and the emotional energy it generated has sunk into the unconscious. ([Location 244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=244)) - I doubt the capacity of secular governments and well-meaning agencies to resolve the ‘environmental crisis’. To put this another way, one cannot resolve this crisis with the same mental approach that created it in the first place. Something further is needed, and that something is a movement of the soul into the world, an act of vision which allows the so-called ‘outside’ world to reveal its interiority and its intense inward fire. If we continue to treat the world as ‘outside’ the soul, we continue to perpetuate the problem, rather than solve it. ([Location 259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=259)) - What is lost to our awareness falls into the unconscious, from where it has to be recovered, by hard labor, effort and creative endeavor. The emotional, psychic and spiritual connection with nature can still be brought into consciousness, so long as we have the courage to sacrifice some of our rationality and egotism, which keeps it at bay and prevents it from making its necessary return. For clearly, we cannot make way for the spiritual communication with nature unless we are able to make room for it in the psyche, and prepare a place for it in the hierarchy of our knowledge, wisdom and education. ([Location 266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=266)) - Jung struggled to bring up the light of nature, the lumen naturae, into consciousness and culture. But one has to risk entering the darkness of the unconscious before this strange light, this numinosity or sanctity of nature, can be brought back to life. One needs to make a descent into the unconscious, and I think the idea of descent is at the heart of the experience of Australia, which has long been referred to as ‘down under’ and on the other (wrong) side of the world. ([Location 271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=271)) - To walk again in a sacralized universe, we need to feel that we are walking through the soul of the world, and soul is not merely human, but is an aspect of creation. Soul is thus ‘returned’ to the world; not that it ever left the world, but in our error and misperception, we imagined soul was confined to the human. ([Location 279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=279)) - The notion that the earth has spirit could be a mistaken formulation, or an error of perception. Perhaps we could put it the other way around: spirit ‘has’ earth, and earth is insinuated in and surrounded by a much larger reality of spirit. This is what the ancient Greeks meant by panentheism, all things in God. Matter might be seen as the finite dimension of the infinite spirit. If this is true, then Western thinking about the world, based as it is on a dualism of earth versus spirit, is rendered false at the outset. ([Location 293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=293)) - Summarizing Jung’s position on spirit and matter, Meredith Sabini said: ‘Matter is the tangible exterior of things and spirit the invisible interior’ ([Location 302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=302)) - Jung arrived at his nondualist position by way of his intuitive investigations into the structure and dynamics of the psyche. At first he began with the Freudian assumption that the ego has an unconscious, and the unconscious contains elements rejected by the ego and suppressed by conventional morality. Then, on further reflection, he realized that the unconscious was not a product of the ego, but it had a collective dimension and did not ‘belong’ to individual persons. He then began to postulate that things worked the other way around: the ego is a creation of the unconscious, and it emerges from it like an island thrust up out of an expansive sea. Jung adopted the view that something infinite, and ‘as yet unknown’, creates and guides the finite realm, and consciousness is a product of the unconscious. He reversed the chain of causality that had governed psychodynamic thinking. ([Location 307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=307)) - The vastness of the psyche suggested to Jung that it was not ultimately human at all. Rather, what we call the ‘human psyche’ is our portion, our experiential segment, of a world psyche that embraces and envelops the whole of creation. Jung quotes the alchemists: ‘The largest part of the soul is outside the body’. ([Location 315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=315)) - The New Age is an inevitable social movement and something that had to happen, because if our science proves unable to take us to a new stage of thinking then popular mysticism has to assert the existence of what science cannot see or understand. However, the New Age is only a parody of the new science that is to come, since it confuses stage three with stage one, and, lacking the resources of science or philosophy, it often returns us to superstition and magical thinking. ([Location 483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=483)) - All too often, the New Age movement is in fact a return to the esoteric spiritual enchantments of the ancient and premodern past. It is a cultural ‘symptom’ of our time, and a testimony to the fact that if new metaphors cannot be found, old ones will be made to suffice. Although the New Age claims Jung as its mentor and inspiration, Jung would be embarrassed by what it is advocating, which is a return to magical thinking. ([Location 496](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=496)) - First there is spirit, then there is no spirit, then there is: that’s the history of Western civilization. Stage two thinking feels besieged on either side, protecting itself from a past it continues to debunk, and a future it attempts to fend off. ([Location 507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=507)) - The colonizing ego thinks that the ‘New World’ nation is new, that it is virgin territory, which the ego is able to conquer and control. But while the nation is new, the land itself is ancient and powerful. ([Location 546](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=546)) - The psyche of the modern person has a lineage which goes back to the mists of the past, and unknowingly, we carry that lineage even as we walk in the clear light of the secular present. It is as if an invisible realm of forces and energies surrounds us, or bathes the psyche in an otherworldly glow. Or to put it another way: we have a memory of the entire human species, and this memory can be spontaneously activated in certain conditions. ([Location 857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=857)) - While the forms of ancient superstitions are outdated and seem far-fetched, the contents at the heart of such superstitions may well be true today, if only we can find a new kind of understanding. ‘Primitive man has a different theory’, which Jung believes is ‘more sensible than academic science’ – and that is because academic science leaves the depths of the psyche out of the picture of reality because they are not obvious and not apparent to common sight. Hence Jung’s analytical psychology is an attempt to restore to our knowledge what has been rejected as mere superstitions of the past. He translates ancient theories into a modern language about complexes and archetypes which are semi-autonomous and can be activated by environment and suggestion. Jung’s science is an apology for, and a new translation of, ancient ways of knowing. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=881)) - There was no television in the interior, and I never saw TV during my years in the center. The town had no cinema, no university, no senior secondary education, just the basics of life lived in the presence of natural elements: desert, sky, mountain ranges. It forced me to become attuned to nature because, quite literally, there was nothing else. In the absence of culture, high or low, we turn more attentively to nature. ([Location 1034](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1034)) - It is fascinating that a geographical move can be experienced as a psychological and spiritual shift. One is dislodged in one’s settled egohood, only to come home to a different place in the personality. This new place is a forgotten, lost, or never-realized part of the psyche, and although one sees it for the first time there is a sense of remembering something one has always known. One feels a sense of recollection, as if one has been here before. ([Location 1042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1042)) - To think like a blackfella meant to think in vast terms, across eons of time and space. It meant being able to experience the land as alive, as a living subject, instead of the typical Western habit of experiencing the land as a dead object. It was to experience the soul as vast and wide, and not to see the soul merely as a pea-sized organ in the brain. Rather than the soul being inside us, the indigenous view was that we were inside the soul. ([Location 1081](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1081)) - Aboriginal people seek to relate to the unseen spirits of the land. They spend an enormous amount of their time in states of attunement and receptivity. They realize that the greater part of reality is invisible, and that human lives are best spent trying to adjust to invisible forces. ([Location 1096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1096)) - But the only way I can describe the effect of red earth and black people on my life is to say that these had a ‘shamanizing’ effect. I was ‘shamanized’ beyond the realm of the ego and Aboriginalized in my sleep. ([Location 1171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1171)) - I kept most of my teenage experiences quiet and to myself. I did not want others to destroy my state of reverie. I recognized that others might want to destroy my experience if they did not share it themselves. Part of the evil in men’s hearts is a desire to destroy other states of consciousness that are not understood. Aboriginal people had suffered most from this evil capacity in the character of Europeans. ([Location 1181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1181)) - I can only support my father now, too, by offering him a language and the concepts of depth psychology, which act as a bridge between our world and that of indigenous people. We were trapped in a logic that was not allowing us to live properly. ([Location 1216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1216)) - The Self is said by Jung to be the center of the psyche, the archetype that gathers the conflicting opposites of psychic life into a working relationship. ([Location 1229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1229)) - The Self is not an easy place to be, and is not some mythological paradise where all opposition ceases and the lion lies down with the lamb. It is the place where conflict is contained and held by a ‘transcendent function’ which attempts to resolve differences and to keep warring opposites in check. The transcendent function brings thesis and antithesis together and creates a synthesis, usually a symbol of integration and wholeness. ([Location 1233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1233)) - The dreams are far more intelligent than the ego and when the ego becomes too literal about its attachments the dreams will cut across it and spring something new on the ego, to shock it out of literal thinking and toward the metaphorical. The psyche strives to encourage not literal attachments or fixations, but fluid and changing metaphorical awareness. ([Location 1282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1282)) - I have taken this on as a spiritual discipline, to allow myself to experience the invisible forces in nature, to sensitize myself to the hidden reality beneath this one, to experience myself as part of the cosmos and not only as part of society. All of these, if you will, are gifts that Aboriginal people bring to the consciousness and spirit of this place. But the art of receiving these gifts is to allow them to activate ‘equivalent’ capacities and energies in the Western psyche, and not to steal the forms and intellectual properties of Aboriginal cultures. The challenge for Euro-Australians and for all those from other lands is to awaken the soul from its slumber and to release the personality from the tyranny of absolute rationality. ([Location 1323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1323)) - In ‘The Complications of American Psychology’ (1930) Jung argues that colonial societies are forced into new and dangerous encounters with the primordial psyche, since the transplanting of a culture tends to weaken consciousness while the unconscious is stirred to new activity. Colonial societies tend toward democracy and egalitarianism, Jung felt, not because of any high-minded philosophy or spiritual principles, but because the collective layers of the psyche have been strengthened, giving rise to collectivist values. ([Location 1506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1506)) - In a sense, neither true femininity nor masculinity was experienced because what was in the ascendant was an exaggerated masculinity. The experience of complex masculinity and femininity was eclipsed by the need to create barriers of defense and a siege mentality. A pioneer society defends not only against the assault of the elements, famine, flood, heat, drought, fire and natives, but against the unconscious forces that it has unleashed. The defensive habit has much in common with what Adler called ‘the masculine protest’ (1912), an exaggerated attitude of strength adopted by a vulnerable part of the psyche to ensure its survival. Adler noted that, although the masculine protest sometimes served short-term needs, it could not be long sustained before exhaustion and collapse set in. ([Location 1606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1606)) - a post-masculinist consciousness which encourages openness and is suspicious of closure, ([Location 1704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1704)) - in an ego-based Western society ‘descent’ is always resisted. ([Location 1725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1725)) - In Australian experience the landscape is coterminous with the unconscious: it is vast, ancient, mythological and wholly other. We have denied the true spirit of the land, and its indigenous inhabitants, for two hundred years of white settlement, and now the repressed is coming back to haunt us. We are not merely caught up in what is popularly dismissed as white-guilt. The Western ego senses that it is not authentic, and its former pretence at belonging is no longer adequate. White Australians have a black history, and that history is now the urgent and demanding present. ([Location 1739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1739)) - No one likes to be told that depression is good for him or her. But in Australian society a bout of depression is what is required to lower the threshold of consciousness and link it with the unconscious. Only from this depression can the connections be made that will revivify the nation and restore integrity to its citizens. We are slowly dissolving into landscape, but it is a necessary dissolution that ought not be resisted or willed away by resorting to the heroics of the past. We are experiencing what Freud might call a regression for the sake of advancement. ([Location 1743](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1743)) - Lacking an organic connection to the earth beneath it, Australian society can appear shadowy, unreal, lifeless. In 1939 Patrick White noted that society and nature were at odds: ‘The country existed in spite of the town. It was not aware of it. There was no connecting link’. White compared Australian society with ‘an ugly scab on the body of the earth’. ‘It was so ephemeral. Some day it would drop off, leaving a pink, clean place underneath’ (White 1939: 28). This hideous image was used in the same year by A. D. Hope, who wrote, in his poem ‘Australia’: And her five cities, like five teeming sores, Each drains her, a vast parasite robber-state Where second-hand Europeans pullulate Timidly on the edge of alien shores. (Hope 1939: 13) ([Location 1770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1770)) - A common story in fairytales is of a land beset by a sacrifice-demanding monster who lives in the dark woods just beyond the settled areas. The monster has a voracious appetite and demands human and animal sacrifices, lest it destroy the entire known world. The land lives in constant fear and is depleted by the monster’s demands. Jungian psychology would argue that the ruling consciousness, sometimes personified by a king or ruler, has become separated from an instinctual, archetypal source, which has grown ‘monstrous’ through neglect and repression. This neglected element draws psychic energy to itself, threatening the stability and economy of consciousness. In the tales, usually the only way to stop this intolerable situation is by heroic activity (slaying the monster), or creating a dialogue with the monster and finding out how to satisfy its needs. Until wisdom or right action intervenes – often personified by a seer, monk, knight or oracle – the monster continues to consume innocent lives. This is where Australian society is caught in archetypal terms: it is feeding the demonic hunger of the unconscious psyche. It exists prior to true heroic activity or conscious intervention. We pour heroic energy into sport, war and military operations, but we don’t know how to direct our heroism to the inward source. We have not yet graduated to the point where spirit attempts a dialogue with the unconscious. We have not asked the sacrificial compulsion what it wants. ([Location 1843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1843)) - The schoolgirls of Appleyard College are led to their destruction on the face of the rock because their human society is asleep. It is a sacrifice to the monster at the outskirts of the big city. It is a giving way to the voracious appetite of the demonic earth. But it is all performed as if a ‘strange tale’ of folklore or legend, without understanding its psychology, without grasping its meaning for us today. We just do not know how real and actual this ‘strange tale’ is. It is not just art and aesthetics, or good cinema, but it is our lives. We don’t have the symbolic awareness to properly integrate it, because as a secular and humanist society, we do not possess a talent for the sacred. We do not understand the meaning of sacrifice. ([Location 1870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1870)) - Conquerors of new lands are conquered by the land, because internally they are racked by self-doubt, plagued by fears, tortured by inadequacies. The natural world within and without seems to turn against them. Their acts of hubris constellate the same consequences that hubris in ancient classic drama brought: the vengeance of nature and the perishing of the soul. Conquerors of land can find no ultimate solace or fulfillment, no deep satisfaction, if they do not embrace the spirit of place, allowing them to connect spiritually, organically, to the world around them. We cannot live a full life shut up inside the sterile, rational confines of the ego. Sooner or later, we must break out of this cocoon and risk the encounter with nature. ([Location 1930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1930)) - But Wright’s vision goes deeper than a romantic complaint about nature as unmotherly. She understands that, after allowing ourselves to lose our vital connection with nature, we have made nature appear indifferent or even malign. We cannot abuse nature on a grand scale and expect it to nurture and protect us when we turn toward it. In ‘Eroded Hills’, she argues that we have not only injured our spiritual pact with nature, but our biological link with the fruits of the earth has been disrupted: ([Location 1938](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1938)) - Wright is showing the spiritual legacy of a conquering society, which can achieve a great deal in external terms, but which has no sustaining internal link to the bio-psychical life of nature. Because of this disjunction, Australians remain anxious, restless, unsure. The widespread search for identity in Australia is not merely an intellectual one that ends when we arrive at comforting national images or consensual conventions about who the real Australians are. Identity cannot be achieved in this programmatic way but must arise from within. When society and nature, conscious and unconscious, are organically related there is no more talk about the problem of identity. The emotional depths of existence are filled and a sense of character or personality is assured. ‘Alienation and rootlessness’, writes Jung, ‘are the dangers that lie in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands’ (1927/31: 103). ([Location 1957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=1957)) - When all is said and done, even money is not much good where there is no genuine culture. Money is a means to rising to a higher, subtler, fuller state of consciousness, or nothing. ([Location 2050](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2050)) - As Jung has said of the process of projection: ‘Whenever man encounters something mysterious he projects his own assumptions into it without the slightest self-criticism’ ([Location 2228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2228)) - The other is complex, awesome, subtle, many-sided and must be entered into relationship with. All that is required at the outset, in order to break the cycles of stupor and destructivity, is a healthy respect for the other. With that new respect, the necessary sacrifice of the ego’s dominion has begun and transformation can occur. All-powerful gods, goddesses, archetypes or complexes cannot make this happen. It has to happen from the human side, and that is why this relationship is called sacrifice, because the ego is made to feel that it is giving up part of its life in order to gain a greater life through the sacred. ([Location 2248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2248)) - Artists are by definition ahead of their time. They are prophets of a psychological condition still to be realized in the community, which strives to protect itself from change and dull the impact of the new. But what we see in contemporary art, literature, music and in progressive social attitudes is an increased sense of openness to the other. ([Location 2260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2260)) - My view is that symbolism is always important, no matter how secular a society might be. After all, it is only the top layer of human reality that is secular, and underneath, the psyche often presents us with a different story. Although we are too ‘modern’ to fall for symbolism, the unconscious still responds to symbols and can be changed by them. ([Location 2387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2387)) - Symbolic processes can work just as well for atheists, secularists and ‘disbelievers’, as they can for those who have an ‘interest’ in symbolic matters. The gist of my contribution to radio discussions was to tell my interviewers that they should not underestimate the power of words and symbolic process. We must not allow our sophisticated education to get in the way of an organic process of the psyche. ([Location 2393](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2393)) - But in true Jungian fashion, the potent symbol of reconciliation is able to generate the psychic energy that allows the nation to move toward healing and change. ([Location 2398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2398)) - The art of being a nation appears to consist in balancing the opposing forces of change and stability. A nation needs to discover some kind of equilibrium between left and right wing forces, between the desire to be open and the desire to be closed. If, under progressive governments, we are hit with too much otherness, too much that is foreign to the ego, integration will not take place, and there will be a massive social reaction which could prove damaging to the culture. The social progressives must realize that openness cannot be perpetual, and the longing for stability must come into play at some stage in the political process. We can only hope that fear of new and open spaces will not keep driving us back to a past which needs to be outgrown. In order to tolerate otherness, we need a certain respect for uncertainty and difference. Australia requires a social ego which respects and admits the other, yet which recognizes the claims of the past, tradition and order. ([Location 2403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2403)) - Michael Leunig: ‘In a moment of embarrassment there’s a truth present.... The embarrassing moments are when control is imperfect, when other people see that there’s some big force’. ([Location 2434](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2434)) - The psychological revolution will make spiritual lone rangers and mavericks of many of us, since the new psychic energies cannot be poured into the old moulds. The church will close its doors to the new revelations of the spirit, because its primary task is to defend orthodoxy, rather than chart the course of the wayward spirit. For the church, religious truth is timeless, absolute and unchanging, whereas for the spirit truth is subject to change and must be discovered anew. ([Location 2469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2469)) - The spirit is not concerned with theology, belief or dogma, but is more concerned with experience and transformation. Already congregations are warming to priests who emphasize the experience of spirit rather than belief in the statements of scripture. The hunger for experience is the hunger of the spirit, and priests and ministers can maintain their flocks by meeting this hunger, by entering the psychological era and granting people inward access to the mysteries of religion. ([Location 2474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2474)) - Initially, it may be easier for us as a nation to approach the task of resacralizing through environmental and social ecology (further explored in Chapters 9 and 10). After all, ecology almost looks like a pragmatic and secular activity, and devotion to the needs of the environment may not cause the same embarrassment that devotion to the spirit would generate. Through ecology we attend to the most urgent practical issues in the world, and yet, within the practice of ecology there is the romantic and mythopoetic impulse, eros itself, engaged in its vital task of binding, weaving and connecting us to the other. Through ecology we strive to heal the world and ourselves, to transcend the contemporary condition and link our souls vitally to the soul of the world. ([Location 2495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2495)) - We need to be alert to the fact that the more positive recent image comes not as a result of a genuine change of heart about indigenous people, but from a response to our own need to befriend the more primal or ‘aboriginal’ layer in our psychic structure. This spiritual layer in ourselves is now being projected upon Aboriginal people, and this gives rise to several important cultural problems. ([Location 2520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2520)) - In his poem ‘The Inverse Transports’, Les Murray addresses several of these concerns. In particular, he explores the dangers in recent white attitudes: but fairytale is a reserve, for those rich only in that and fifty thousand years here. The incomers will acquire those fifty thousand years too, though. Thousands of anything draw them. They discovered thousands, even these. Which they offer now, for settlement. (1990: 20-21) The popular mind has made Aboriginals the curators of imaginal reality: the mythopoetic world has become a ‘fairytale reserve’ enjoyed only by those who are poor but rich. No money, but they have thousands of years. The very concept of thousands of years, as Murray says, is a white man’s construct. We offer these thousands for settlement. When I was young, the period of Aboriginal occupancy of the land was said to be ten thousand years. Then it jumped to twenty thousand, and then forty, where it remained for some time. Now it is fifty thousand. The period of time offered increases in proportion to white-man’s guilt, and his need to invest spiritual value in the other. But so long as Euro-Australians project their soul on Aboriginal people we will want it back again. ‘The incomers will acquire those fifty thousand / years too, though. Thousands of anything / draw them’. This is the ‘catch’ to the idealization of Aboriginal people. If the sacred has become embodied in indigenous people, the consumerist mentality will want to consume Aboriginality. We see this around us: in the thriving business spawned by the Aboriginal art and souvenir shops in our cities, in the leafy suburbs and airport lounges. We buy up the works of art and the reproduced symbols and designs, hoping to enrich our souls with Aboriginal experiences of the sacred. It could be said that we have made Aboriginality more ‘positive’ to make a more delectable meal out of it. By an elaborate process of projective identification, we prettify and adorn what we are about to consume. The consuming of Aboriginal cosmology is the most recent expression of the imperialist appropriation of the indigenous other. We have not only stolen Aboriginal land, destroyed the tribal culture, raped the women and the environment, but we now ask for their spirituality as well. ([Location 2541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2541)) - Euro-Australians cannot simply graft onto their souls a fifty thousand-year-old Dreaming stolen from another tradition. Such stolen property would not take root in the white soul, and may inhibit or block a developmental process already taking place. We know we are spiritually bereft, but the way ahead may not be by means of a return to animism and ancestor spirits. For the Western psyche, this may be a regression to a worldview which predates modernity and which would engender enormous tension between the soul and intellect. Our need is to develop spiritual kinship with the land, but the Aboriginal cosmology may best serve as an inspiration to create our own cosmology, rather than as a template upon which to build our own. We need to regard Aboriginal mysteries metaphorically rather than literally, to experience them as cultural dreams which stir our souls to activity, rather than as metaphysical systems to believe in. ([Location 2570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2570)) - What is needed is a spiritual revolution in Australian consciousness. We cannot tack on Aboriginal spirituality to our rational consciousness, but must change our consciousness from within by burrowing down into our feared and walled-in unconscious to find an answering image to Aboriginal spirituality. The direction we need to take is downward, into the depths, to see what could be happening there, rather than appropriate another culture’s dreaming. Jung wrote that ‘People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls’ (1944: 126). It is easier, he said, to take on the spirituality of a foreign culture, to wrap our nakedness in the trappings of an exotic cosmology, than to face the poverty of our souls… ([Location 2577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2577)) - Western intellectual tradition has a host of terms and concepts which explain away any attempt to animate the land. We use the term projection in psychology, personification in literary and cultural studies, anthropomorphism in anthropology, and pathetic fallacy in the history of art. Each of these terms assumes there is no objective psychic life in nature, and any attempt to attribute life ‘out there’ is the result of our overactive and fanciful minds. ([Location 2608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2608)) - We are faced with completely different and competing stories about the earth. In the one, objectivity reigns supreme, in the other, subjectivity is all. In the old story, individuals are relatively powerless in the face of archaic spiritual energies which co-ordinate and control reality. In the new story, the individual is invested with god-like powers in the sense that the subject creates the world in the act of apprehending it. As Judith Wright makes clear, the imported Western story has subsumed, engulfed and discredited the indigenous one: The song is gone ... ... and the tribal story lost in an alien tale. ([Location 2615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2615)) - I have doubts about the effectiveness of progressive governments and ecology groups telling people to care more about the environment. In the ecological crisis, moral demands and appeals to collective guilt about what we have done to the land may serve short-term goals. We may have to be frightened into some kind of new bond with nature. But for the long-term we will not only have to stir our conscience, but transform our consciousness. The ecological crisis is at bottom a psychological and spiritual crisis. ([Location 2643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2643)) - Aboriginal people have long been an ecologically committed people, not because they labored, like us today, under moral constraints about what they must do or feel about the environment, but because they spontaneously felt the environment to be part of themselves and intrinsically related to their reality. This is the missing dimension in today’s discourse about the necessity to be green. The secular and moral approach to the problem will not work, because the issues are deeper than activist programs will allow. The rationalist mindset is part of the problem and cannot be expected to come up with the cure. ([Location 2650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2650)) - Our love moves toward that with which it can identify, that which it sees as part of itself. Affective bonds unite us with family, home and personal connections. There needs to be a fundamental shift in the locus of identity, so that what we care about, and what we regard as belonging to ourselves, is broadened to accommodate a greater span of reality. Put cynically, if humans care only about themselves, then the notion of what constitutes ‘ourselves’ has to be broadened in the direction of the world. The ecological task is not only to repair our damage in the outer world, but to repair the splits on the inside, to work toward inclusive rather than exclusive concepts of selfhood and identity. ([Location 2655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2655)) - D. H. Lawrence put it best when he said that we need to make a ‘detour’ back to the primal state to revitalize and invigorate civilization: We must make a great swerve in our onward-going life-course now, to gather up again the savage mysteries. (1923b: 144) ([Location 2668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2668)) - The idea that we need to make a ‘great swerve’ toward the primal condition makes sense to me. This may look like regression from a rationalistic perspective, but the idea of a swerve suggests a spiralic course rather than a straight regression. At the turn of the cultural spiral we will seem to be throwing away the hard-won benefits of consciousness and civilization, but it will be apparent that this return is for the sake of a more integrated consciousness. We will not have to renounce intellect and stifle development, but place less emphasis on these elements as we revisit and embrace the primal side of human nature. Not for ordinary ego development do we make this journey, but for spiritual development. For soul resides in the deeper levels of psyche, those same levels that we believe we have left behind. ([Location 2674](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2674)) - Hillman argues that ‘Man exists in the midst of psyche; it is not the other way around. Therefore, soul is not confined by man, and there is much of psyche that extends beyond the nature of man’ (1975: 173). He claims that all things in the world have a mythopoetic dimension. Although soul is associated with innerness, it is wrong to focus this innerness in human persons: ‘interiority is a metaphor for the soul’s nonvisible and nonliteral inherence’ (1975: 173). This interiority is found everywhere, in animate and inanimate things. Hillman extraverts our sense of interiority, so that it becomes a property of the world, just as he extraverts the notion of anima (in Jungian terms, the soul in man), so that it becomes anima mundi. Hillman’s work has been influential, and has given rise to a school of discourse on the anima mundi, a discourse based in philosophy, phenomenology and philosophical psychology (Adams 1997). ([Location 2725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2725)) - If we arrive at the view that we and the universe are enwrapped in a world-soul, a view which approximates to that of theoretical physics (Bohm 1980), the flow and movement of emotional content between ourselves and the world is a consequence of being alive and in the world. ([Location 2740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2740)) - Note: Thermodynamics of Emotion - In Renaissance cosmology, the soul or psyche was the middle or third term between spirit and matter. Psyche is not heavy and inert like the concept of matter, nor transcendental and remote like spirit. Rather, psyche inhabits a middle area known as the metaxy, and is represented as subtle, elusive and metaphorical. The soul and its imaginal world may be our way out of the crippling national dilemma between a Western materialism we are tired of and an Aboriginal metaphysics we cannot readily embrace. ([Location 2759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2759)) - Australia becomes an ideal place for the birth of a new dreaming, a dreaming which could be an important cultural experiment for the world. The thesis of white rationality is being eroded by the antithesis of Aboriginal Dreaming, but the synthesis will combine and transcend both terms in this encounter. ([Location 2766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2766)) - If we take the mystical element from animism and the intellectual element from rationality, we end with a discerning or watchful mysticism, a mysticism on the alert for implausible claims and a capacity to detect nonsense, yet always open to wonder and revelation. ([Location 2773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2773)) - Note: Metamodernism - Imaginal vision is the stuff of poetry. It is the act by which things take on meaning and become symbols and metaphors. Poetry is the major cultural carrier of the mythopoetic mode of perception in secular times. ([Location 2798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2798)) - In our greatest poems, the habitual dualism between self and other is undermined and the condition of alienation is subverted. When dualism has been fully subverted, the condition of poetry has been achieved. Great poetry is the achievement of mythopoesis. ([Location 2803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2803)) - An education system which is based on secular values can never understand poetry or the spiritual mission of the poet. The radical, threatening, challenging dimension in poetry is lost when poetry is taught without reference to its mythopoetic power. ([Location 2810](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2810)) - Until we learn to respect the reality of soul, and until we can grasp that the world itself has soulful interiority, our poets will be misrepresented as eccentrics supplying adornment or fancy dress to nature. The unexamined assumption is that nature itself is neutral, blank, empty, a premise that poets do not share. ([Location 2815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2815)) - Hillman has argued that it is only when something divine awakens in us that we can respond to the divinity of the world. The mythical interiority of the world will not present itself to our senses until we have awakened our own interiority and attuned our imaginal depths to the those of nature. This will involve not more adult learning but unlearning the ways of rational perception and becoming again like a child, in the sense of being capable of immediate apprehension of the cosmos. ([Location 2874](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=2874)) - In Spirituality and the Secular Quest, Peter Van Ness defines spirituality as ‘the desire to relate oneself as a personal whole to reality as a cosmic whole’ ([Location 3034](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3034)) - As theologian Sandra Schneiders has said: I define spirituality as the experience of conscious involvement in the project of life integration through self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives. It is an effort to bring all of life together in an integrated synthesis of ongoing growth and development. ([Location 3056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3056)) - We need to develop a spirituality of creation, to remind ourselves that creation is sacred, since the secular and humanist awareness has not managed to generate a reverential or loving relationship with the earth, but on the contrary has led to the exploitation and destruction of the environment. ([Location 3130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3130)) - Jacob changed the name of his place from Luz to Bethel, meaning ‘the house of God’, and we have changed the name of our stone from Ayers Rock to Uluru, meaning ‘sacred Dreaming place’. Moreover, in 1985 we gave it back to its traditional caretakers, the Anangu people. This is a crucial act in the process of making sacred: to sacrifice ownership of a place, which was wrongly taken in the beginning, is to restore dignity to land and people. ‘Sacrificium’ literally means in Latin to ‘make sacred’. ([Location 3285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3285)) - Note: Just like my dieta is a sacrifice that gives up ownership of my body and makes it sacred. - Mircea Eliade argues that all societies, even secular ones, develop special sites or places that are invested with special interest, because humanity is homo religiosus and cannot bear a purely profane state, where there is no way to overcome existential uncertainty. Sacred spaces are consecrated, Eliade says, ‘to put an end to the tension and anxiety caused by relativity and disorientation, in short to reveal an absolute point of support’ (1959: 27-8). Importantly, he says that a people without a sense of the sacred is a people afflicted by drabness, dullness and boredom. The human spirit has not been uplifted, there is no verticality or grandeur in life, and everything seems flat, amorphous and indistinct. Life is dull because ‘public space is homogenous and neutral; no break qualitatively differentiates the various parts of its mass’ (1959: 22). To make sacred is to reveal a fixed point at the center of life: ([Location 3298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3298)) - The development of Australian spirituality will show that God is not confined to places designated as ‘holy’, and God’s existence does not require an act of belief in miracles and wonders. The miraculous is already inherent in creation as its mystical core. As Tillich put it in his radical theology, God may no longer be believable as a ‘being’ up in the sky, but a new world opens when we see God as Being itself. ‘The God from whom we cannot flee is the Ground of our Being’ (Tillich 1949: 54). ([Location 3329](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3329)) - For Aboriginal people, everything is potentially sacred, and the vast expanses of rock, sand and desert are ‘cathedrals of stone’ in which the sacred is recognized and worshipped (Charlesworth 1998). Aboriginal spirituality is chiefly a tradition of transparency, in which the numinous shines through the forms of the world. ([Location 3355](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3355)) - The Gods can be denied and rejected, but they can never be extinguished. They merely go into the unconscious, where they become sources of psychological and social disturbance. They are no longer recognized by theologians or churchmen, but only by doctors, alienists, psychotherapists and poets. They puff up and inflate human ambitions and desires, and attach themselves to the ego without its ever knowing. When the soul is lost to the unconscious, without any cultural or religious assistance toward its transcendent goals, it secretly distorts and corrupts human activities, investing them with grandiose expectations that can never be met or realized at the human or sociopolitical level. ([Location 3374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3374)) - today we need to ‘see through’ the messes and mishaps of secular society and look for the buried Gods or archetypes in them. ([Location 3383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3383)) - We seek all manner of substitutes for spiritual satisfaction. Drug addiction and the burgeoning drug epidemic is an unconscious and miscarried expression of the need to find ecstatic release from the prison-house of the ego. Despite our intellectual dedication to rational and egotistical goals, we unconsciously crave an experience of the nonegoic and the transcendent, which is artificially but destructively reproduced in drugs. This is especially the case with Australia’s favorite drug, alcohol. There is an alcoholism epidemic in this country, and the problem is increasingly affecting young people as well as those of mature age (Eckersley 2004). We see the problem focused in particular in Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal people have been adversely affected by the traumatic disappearance of spirit in their lives, and I am referring to spirit as it has been enshrined in rituals, ceremonies, initiation rites and spiritual attitudes. Jung estimates that tribalized Aboriginals spent over half their waking lives in a spiritual state of being, through symbolic action: There is a peculiar value in the symbolic life. It is a fact that the primitive Australians sacrifice to it two-thirds of their available time – of their lifetime in which they are conscious. (1939: 649) To shift from a symbolically saturated conscious reality, to the one in which most of us experience today, namely, a desacralized world in which little or nothing is sacred, was too great a shock for Aboriginal people. It is, actually, a shock for any human community, but more so for a people that had been steeped in sacred consciousness for millennia. European culture had been weaned off the sacred in the course of centuries, at least since the age of reason and the rise of science. But for Aboriginal culture, which was ushered into modernity overnight and forced to live in a desacralized universe, the impact has been devastating. It is true that the impact of colonization has been lethal, but the usual political analyses of the Aboriginal crisis fails to take into account the existential impact of the loss of the sacred. Eliade puts it correctly when he writes: The man of traditional societies … can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence. For him, profane space represents absolute nonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving in chaos, and he finally dies. (1958: 64) ([Location 3402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3402)) - Australian social attitudes tend to be constricted, overly rational, at times cynical and often pessimistic. It is little wonder that alcohol has become such a huge attraction in this country, because alcohol has the effect of loosening our ties to rationality and opening us to dimensions of the psyche that say Yes, instead of No. ([Location 3432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3432)) - It was William James who first tracked this thirst for alcohol as a religious problem: The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionable due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. (1902: 387) The fact is that we cannot stand our orderly, rational prison all the time. There are times when we must break out, and ‘Friday night spirituality’ (as I have called it) has become a kind of ceremonial release for many Australians who are caught in rationality most of the week. We are not just searching for alcohol and the poisoning that it inflicts on the body and nervous system. We are searching for altered mental states, and for ‘potential forms of consciousness entirely different from our own’ (James 1902: 388). But in a secular culture, we do not know how to transcend the normal state of consciousness, except through eating, drinking and various kinds of substance abuse. This is where the loss of religious awareness sorely takes its toll, because we stand dumb and mute before the innate human need to transcend our profane state and achieve the condition of homo religiosus. ([Location 3434](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3434)) - Adopting the language of Greek mythology, Jungian writer Robert Johnson claims that our secular culture has a poor relation to Dionysus, the God who teaches us how to transcend the rational. By day and during the week, we carefully erect an Apollonic structure around ourselves that by night and during the weekend we feel compelled to tear down. But we are so far removed from Dionysus, his rituals, strategies, ceremonies and arts, that we do not know how to conduct this transcendence in a positive or transformative way. Instead, we turn to the lesser rituals of the drunken Bacchus, or to what Johnson calls ‘low-grade Dionysus’ (1989: 21), and attempt to drink or consume our way to a breakthrough. The loss of spiritual ecstasy in white and black cultures has been replaced by the spurious, artificial ecstasy that is provided by alcohol and drugs. The word ‘ecstasy’ comes from the Greek… ([Location 3447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3447)) - Dionysus was referred to in ancient times as ‘the loosener’, as one who loosens our ties to ego and rationality, and Aboriginal people lived in this condition in their socially sanctioned symbolic lives. But with the sudden collapse of their Dreaming, and with spirit, soul and meaning shattered by colonization, detribalization and loss… ([Location 3458](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3458)) - Jung was indirectly involved in the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he realized that to combat the negative power of alcohol, one would need to discover or rediscover a spiritual life. Jung wrote to William Wilson, the famous ‘Bill W’ who was co-founder of the New York-based Alcoholics Anonymous: I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by a real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action of grace and isolated in society, cannot resist the power of evil…. You see, alcohol in Latin is spiritus and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum. (1961a: 624-5) Jung means by this cryptic Latin phrase that only an experience of spirit can contradict and cancel the effects of an addiction to the poisonous ‘spirit’ of alcohol. Like cures like, or more precisely, like takes away the symptoms of like, and this is the philosophical basis of homeopathic medicine. One needs to employ a higher or more distilled form of the poison to combat the poison. ([Location 3465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3465)) - Alcohol is a perfect symbol of an ‘alien’ and non-indigenous spirit, since this intoxicant was unknown here until imported by Europeans. It is apparently the case that the Aboriginal metabolism cannot break down or ‘digest’ this substance in the way that other cultural groups can, and hence drunkenness or intolerance to the liquid occurs more readily. In its unintegrated or undigested state, spirit – like its bottled namesake – is a fatal agent of ruin and degradation. When living in Alice Springs I was impressed by the fact that those Aboriginals who had best learnt to overcome alcoholism were those who had made a personal conversion to a religious faith. Although some claim that religion is the ‘opium of the masses’, its capacity to provide a creative channel for the unruly and chaotic spirit cannot be underestimated. ([Location 3479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3479)) - The so-called sex revolution is an unconscious expression of the archetypal desire to connect in ecstatic and releasing ways with an other. In our secular world the other has lost its spiritual aspect and has become an ‘other’ human being, lover, friend, husband or wife. Often, we look for an other man or woman in our lives, since it is the illicit affair that sometimes carries more psychical and archetypal resonance than the partner to whom we are committed. Connection with the other leads to forbidden and taboo sexual liaisons with the secretive other, to that which is not part of our conscious world. We see how easily the unconscious desire for the sacred becomes expressed as promiscuous sexuality or as an erotic and personal parody of the union of self with the divine. ([Location 3488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3488)) - the degraded sacred, even if all of it is carefully manipulated and controlled by our cool-headed entrepreneurial mind. The innate archetypal impulse is for more. The buried soul in us, which has become a blind autonomous impulse, knows there is more to reality than what we already have or know, and so we are compelled from within to seek more and more at the material level. It is not that material things are bad or that sex or money are evil. This is the world-denying position of old-fashioned, pre-psychological and puritanical religion. It is rather that material things, money, drugs, sex, relationships, are often invested with inappropriate spiritual longings and inhuman archetypal expectations. ([Location 3505](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3505)) - We arrive at the paradox that we profane and denigrate the material world when we are unconsciously bound to it by the compulsive projection of the spiritual. We overburden the physical by asking it to perform magical tricks and to produce miraculous satisfactions. Matter is a manifestation of the sacred, but when we cut ourselves off from the divine source matter becomes demonic. ([Location 3511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3511)) - Where have the Gods got to in secular and enlightened times? Jung replies that ‘the Gods have become diseases’ (1929: 54). Having fallen from heaven, the Gods reappear in the unconscious with a vengeance. The transcendent powers thrash around in our psyches and bodies, bringing neuroses, illnesses and forcing us to bizarre literal enactments of symbolic processes. ([Location 3517](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3517)) - Our present mental condition, in which God is felt to be dead and the Gods are seen as mere fantasies, would once have been recognized as hubris. When humanity forgets or willfully denies the Gods, when it thinks it is itself God, able to live and be without the Gods, then it succumbs to hubris and perforce must deal with the punishment and vengeance of the Gods. Hubris was the most feared moral transgression in the ancient world, and much Greek tragedy arose from the need to give it public and aesthetic expression. The tragic hero is one who strives too hard, oversteps human boundaries, outreaches his own and human limits, and so instigates his own downfall as he brings upon himself the terrible punishment of the Gods. What was viewed once as divine vengeance and wrath can be seen today as archetypal possession and psychic upheaval – rather than literal Gods invading or attacking us from without, we can now see that nonhuman agents in the psyche are wreaking devastation and havoc. ([Location 3536](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3536)) - We also have our own rational, secular terms and understandings for the madness that has befallen us: anxiety, stress, neurosis, the tension and pace of modern life. But when the manic forces of the Gods have run their course, they simply dump us into a pit of depression, where we are suddenly made aware of how little personal energy and human resources we actually possess. Even then, we say: oh, that’s just life, the ups and downs. Our greatest spiritual fault is not even guessing that an other might be involved in what we are pleased to call our manic-depressive cycles. We see that we suffer from real ailments, but these are felt to be the logical cost of living in a fast world. ([Location 3547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3547)) - The history of modernity and the last few hundred years is the history of the ego’s struggle for absolute autonomy and freedom. The rise of humanism in the Renaissance, and later in the eighteenth century Enlightenment, is the rise of the ego’s desire to be rid of the past and its superstitions. Humanism, science, and the intellect conspired to create a secular world in which man was the measure of all things, in which matter and the laws of the universe were rationally explicable, and in which humanity was master over creation. ([Location 3572](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3572)) - Humanism has performed many social and political miracles, and we are all better off because of it. But we are not any better because of it. ([Location 3578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3578)) - The great religions have long taught that the ego cannot be its own master and cannot achieve absolute freedom. If it attempts to reach beyond its limits, it degenerates and loses its integrity. As the popular saying has it, the ego makes a good servant but a lousy master. The ego’s task in the psyche, like humanity’s task in creation, is to serve a greater reality (Jung), to attend to the needs of an other (Eliade), to further the incarnation in this world of unmanifest Being (Heidegger). The ego can either choose a life of service or be made to serve in various unconscious, involuntary and destructive ways. ([Location 3588](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3588)) - This is the central paradox of many religions, as it is of Jungian psychology: only by entering into deliberate service can the individual become free. In my commitment to servitude is my happiness; in my acceptance of bondage to the divine is my liberty. The modern individual, paradoxically speaking, only achieves a degree of freedom when he renounces the illusion of complete independence, and accepts, along with ancient and premodern man, that he exists in relationship with an other who must be propitiated, served and recognized. I agree with Camille Paglia when she says that the contemporary emphasis on freedom is misconceived and delusive, and that ‘freedom is the most overrated modern idea’ (1990: 39). Absolute freedom is the construction of a power-oriented ego which believes it can rule alone in the house of personality and in the outside world. ([Location 3594](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3594)) - In archetypal terms, secular humanism is the product of the hubristic ego, whose course is determined in Western society by the patriarchal hero. The hero is an important and much-needed denizen of the psyche and the masculine principle he embodies is crucial in the scheme of things. But he and his masculinity tend to overwhelm other figures and presences in the soul, and the hero has a habit of becoming dictatorial and oppressive. His main project is the promotion of himself and the eradication of opposition. His idea of freedom is what we are all suffering from today, and what now threatens the stability and structure of Western civilization. ([Location 3601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3601)) - Our old style of heroic consciousness is finished but a new style of consciousness is in the process of being born. The new style will be closer to nature and the elemental world, closer to the soul and the feminine, to intuition and feeling, to the values of the earth and the body. ([Location 3622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3622)) - In all of these social and political developments, we may discern a culture which is trying to ‘right’ itself, to restore a sense of balance between conscious and unconscious, society and earth, ego and soul. In order to reach the new point of balance, the first step is to admit that the old one-sidedness has to be overcome. ([Location 3628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3628)) - Initially, this means that the cultural pendulum needs to swing in the opposite direction, and to emphasize the values which have been suppressed. All the elements that have been denied by the patriarchal spirit, including the feminine principle, the soul, earth, nature and the body have to be given room for expression. ([Location 3633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3633)) - Far more influential than the New Age has been the rise of feminism, with its explicit agenda of opposing and defeating the spirit of patriarchy. I have always thought of feminism as one of the most important movements of our time, and it has achieved a great deal in its task of arresting the runaway heroic spirit and forcing it to attend to what has been neglected. ([Location 3641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3641)) - However, I believe the feminist revolution has got stuck in a social and political mode, and it needs to focus on the psychological, emotional and spiritual implications of the feminine. ([Location 3648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3648)) - The new wave of feminism must surely be about the deconstruction of the patriarchal mind and spirit. In too many instances, feminism has capitulated to the patriarchal mind and not challenged its basic values and assumptions. Feminism in the universities, in government and psychological science has not challenged the core assumption of patriarchy: that reason is the basis of intelligence and the key component of mind. Nor has it challenged the myth of the separate, isolated individual that forms the basis of patriarchal modernity and capitalism. There are many extra layers of the ‘feminine’ that need to be unpacked, explored and made available to the community through education and social awareness. It is true that feminism had to toughen up in order to fight patriarchal resistance and arrogance, but now that that battle is largely over, there is a ‘soft’ revolution that must follow. We need to be more feminine in the psychological sense, which means opening our lives to feeling, emotion and intuition. Being feminine in this sense means being receptive, quiet, reflective, and capable of hearing the voice of the other. The early feminist revolution generated a warrior consciousness that was as far removed from certain crucial feminine elements as patriarchy itself. But now the neglected soul and the feminine realm of eros and connectedness call for our attention, and I am not sure whether old-style feminism can do much about this. ([Location 3651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3651)) - In my view, we cannot have ‘spirituality’ without political and social awareness, and in this area the New Age is sentimental and out of touch. The feminine principle has subtleties and complexities that popular movements seem unable to explore. ([Location 3667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3667)) - In the same way that feminism should not stop at politics and external life, but needs to explore the emotional and spiritual underpinnings of the feminine, so too the new concern with Aboriginality must not stop at external interests but needs to go more deeply into the interior life and discover the indigenous person within. ([Location 3671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3671)) - Non-indigenous Australians are urged by prevailing attitudes to give time, money, effort and external service to disadvantaged minorities, but not to tamper with religious or spiritual values. However, non-indigenous Australians will never understand the spiritual dimension of the land or the spiritual dimension of the indigenous people unless they too have spiritual experiences on this soil. We can muster all the good intentions and moral correctness that we can find, but unless we discover some deeper, transformative relationship with place our good intentions will be in vain and we will only be half-hearted about reconciliation and ecological matters. Both Aboriginal reconciliation and ecological awareness require conversions of the heart, not merely moral intentions of the mind. We need to encourage experiences that turn our lives around and make us think differently about our identity and our relation to indigenous people and land. Political and social debate about these issues is often confined to the realm of morality and conscience, but to achieve effective change at these levels we need spiritual change and a renewal of consciousness. ([Location 3687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006XEQFGA&location=3687))