<![CDATA[Conductive Reasoning - Conductive Reasoning Blog]]>Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:52:04 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[On Invoking an Archetype]]>Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:25:18 -0800http://johnrbrusseau.com/1/post/2012/02/on-invoking-an-archetype.html

I don’t know how much of the following is my own, and how much is Carl Jung’s view on archetypes, but I will endeavor to ransom this idea (archetypes) from its esoteric Jungian terminology. 

Archetypes are, simply put, arch-examples of things. Human consciousness needs to be constructed within a framework of hierarchical ideas, in order for it to grow. Archetypes are this framework. Archetypes are the building blocks of consciousness. 

Something significant is happening when we consciously interact with an archetype. Of course, the majority of an archetype, of an arch-example, arch-association, remains unconscious, but the part of it that does emerge into consciousness serves to compare our subjective understanding of things wth the objective templates of reality that are archetypes, thus rendering us more sane, more clearly grasping what is. 

So many subjective factors (emotions, intuitions, desires, and the past experiences we have had with those factors) skew our perception of reality, until we are living in the wounded past, and not really living in (interacting with) the moment before us. 

Invoking an archetype, is simply reminding our self to refer back to the objectivity inherent in that archetype, objectivity that is significant to some part of life we are presently dealing with. Invoking is the conscious grasping of, and the emotional embrace of, some objective idea. When we invoke, we are doing so because we are aware of the limitations of our subjective human consciousness, and are trying to re-experience some of the objectivity (real sense of the context of things), as represented in those arche-associations/types. 

When viewed in this way, the preoccupation humankind has always had with ritual and religious worship, begins to make sense to us. Rituals are such an attempt to recall the insight inherent in archetypes. Some rituals are more resonant with the archetypes than others, and some people make fuller use of ritual than others.

]]><![CDATA[The Definition of Truth and Love]]>Tue, 29 Nov 2011 06:32:05 -0800http://johnrbrusseau.com/1/post/2011/11/the-definition-of-truth-and-love.htmlIt has been stated many times, that we cannot hope to define love, or truth.
Here is my definition of both.

Truth is the context of things.
Love is the embrace of the context of things.

]]><![CDATA[Legitimacy or Love]]>Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:05:48 -0800http://johnrbrusseau.com/1/post/2011/11/legitimacy-or-love.htmlWe confuse, and even lose, our spiritual path to wholeness and integration, when we equate the need for our own legitimacy with our need for love.

Legitimacy has its founding in law, in ethics, in moral codes. Love has its founding in our universal context.

To the extent we insist on receiving a sort of legitimacy from others, to that extent we are incapable of receiving love. We must choose whether we will embrace love for our soul, or legitimacy.

None of us are legitimate. We all are so far from a state of wholeness that any notion of us being lawful, that is, moral, or legitimate, must be completely thrown out, in favor of the reality that we all are significantly damaged goods. Our humanity is broken. Our functionality as human beings is ruined.

Let’s be done with our protests to the contrary, which can only result in the sabotaging of our spiritual journey toward wholeness and integration.

What we really need is to be loved with our flaws and dysfunctions, really loved, thoroughly loved, and that implies absolute forgiveness. If we turn up our nose at the suggestion of forgiveness, it is because we are still invested in a search for legitimacy.

If you still are not inclined to leave your quest for legitimacy, for the better quest for love, then perhaps the following observation will help. A quest for legitimacy will never be realized, in fact it cannot possibly be realized (even accepting as real the insane premise that you actually are legal in all things, or in anything, completely), in as much as this quest is, and always will be, directed at the people who have failed to accept your legitimacy up to this point, and no two of these, or any, people will ever agree on what the law, on what moral integrity, is.

Your quest for legitimacy is screwed from the outset. It is a thirsty soul’s maddening pursuit of a mirage.

So much of what passes for psychology, or social progress, today is a pandering to this reactionary impulse in mankind to seek legitimacy. We should not be fooled. Legitimacy is not what we want; love is. And all of the skillfully tailored psychological or political gimmicks, complete with slick, intellectual, or political, or spiritual-sounding, jargon will not change this human equation.

So what if someone does not think your sexual orientation, or your culture, or your religion, or your ideas or beliefs, etc. are moral or natural or correct, and you do? Changing their mind, changing everyone’s mind, will not get you what you want, what you really deeply need; that is, to be loved.

I have a suggestion for a practical course of action. The next time someone gives you a hard time with your particular legitimacy issue, agree with them about whatever they are suggesting is unlawful, or unnatural, or wrong, and then ask them if they will forgive you.

You won’t lose the use of those functional parts of you, just because you act this little pageant out, and if you truly are legitimate in whatever aspect of you that is being wrongfully judged, you will still be free to be you. The thing that will change is that you will begin to travel down the road that is the quest for love. Traveling down this road is what transforms us, from the wounded, dysfunctional, souls, who are busy earnestly licking our own wounds, into people would can love themselves and thus can turn their attention outward in love for those around them.

What do you have to lose? You have been trying the other path your whole life, and what has it gotten you? Look for love, and live, really live.

You may protest that if people truly do love you they will embrace the legitimacy of your significant issue. That is true, of course (assuming you are in fact whole), but love from other people is not the love I am suggesting you go in search of. Look for love from the spiritual force underlying your human existence. If you get love from this factor, you will be able to love your self, and that is all you need in order thrive, to fully, proactively, live out your life as a human being.

Of course, everything I have been trying to sell you on here depends on one thing; that the spiritual force underlying the unfolding material universe does, in fact, love you. I can tell you from my own actual, enormously illegitimate, human experience, that it does.

Whether you see the point I am making here, or not, I want to love you perfectly, so I will be continuing to quest for love, and reject my impulse to seek legitimacy. I hope I see you on this Road. 

]]><![CDATA[The Restoration of our Species]]>Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:40:42 -0800http://johnrbrusseau.com/1/post/2011/11/the-restoration-of-our-species.htmlThe restoration of the species is dependent upon the same thing that the restoration of the individual is; the spiritual force underlying our existence. And just because this is so, no amount of damage done by an individual or a nation, will ever adversely effect the individuation of the individual, or the collective restoration of our species.

Those elements that opt for ego-fear-driven-control will simply cancel themselves out of the universal equation at some point. The universe/God, will move on without them

When God judges humanity, his judgement is to give us what we have chosen for ourselves. If we have chosen prideful disharmony with our own underlying spiritual force, we are effectively cutting ourselves off from the factor that is responsible for our continued existence.

God will judge mankind, just as the prophets have been telling us for thousands of years. It is an inevitable outcome of the process begun by the force that expresses itself in human free-will, and that underlies our existence.

The existence of choice, implies, and logically requires, a corresponding outcome, in order for the choice to be viable. If our choices don't result in a choice-based outcome, then our choice is merely a con. 

And it must be understood that the system responsible for us having the power to choose, will logically be the factor giving us the outcome of our choices. I view human society as being moved toward a collective psychological state in which our ego's problem with fear is being brought to a head, in much the same manner that our individual emotional issues come to the surface. Things will get very much worse for our species, and then God/the universe/insight/judgment will come and deliver us from the prison of our own collective and individual, fear-driven psyche.

It is a natural process, and thus it is a divine process, just as our coming into existence was. And this divine process will resolve into a state of universal harmony, with those of us choice-making creatures who have chosen to pursue restoration of harmony between us and the spiritual force underlying our existence, being given that very harmony. 

]]><![CDATA[Time and Space and Free Will]]>Mon, 14 Nov 2011 06:54:00 -0800http://johnrbrusseau.com/1/post/2011/11/time-and-space-and-free-will.html   If time is a concept relative to space ( a concept of a sequence of events in the material universe), then things of a non-material nature, such as those things that we traditionally identify as spiritual things, and which today we might identify as the underlying ordering factor behind the systematically unfolding material universe, such things are not limited by time and space. Rather, time and space are limited by this underlying ordering factor. 

    And since this underlying ordering factor is not limited to time and space, it would be able to interface with time and space as a whole (in what we time and space-oriented creatures would describe as past/present and future, all together). 

    This type of interfacing, with time and space, absolutely knows the unfolding of time and space, and thus could both express itself in a temporal free will, and in its interaction with our temporal free wills. Such interaction would not invalidate our free will. If we temporal-oriented beings knew the outcome of our choices in the same manner that the underlying ordering factor did, this would effectively invalidate out free will. We don't, so our freedom to choose remains viable. 

    And because we are inherently subjective enough creatures to carry a viable freedom of choice, we are also subjective enough to require consistent moments of spiritually originated objectivity/insight in order for our choices to rise above the ordinary influences of instinct, and emotion, and our value structure (what Freud would have called the super ego). 

    Without this objective input, we would be fated by our physiology and our physical and emotional environment to live out absolutely predictable lives. We don't live out absolutely predictable lives, just because there is this interaction between the underlying ordering factor of the material universe, and us. 

    Jung would call this interaction, the collective unconscious at work in our subconscious mind, and would vaguely and alternately define it as either a product of human evolution, and a product of something much bigger than human evolution. 

    I would call it God, and would say that regardless of the actual extent of human evolution, it is a force that is the context of the systematically unfolding material universe, and as such is expressing itself through every material thing in the universe, and through our human psyche as well (which is capable of interfacing with this spiritual force). 

    To the extent that human free will is an expression of this underlying ordering factor, it implies that the root cause of all human dysfunction is a product of our choice to remain in disharmony from this underlying ordering force, and the reason we choose this path is because we opt for pride instead of love. 

    Pride is our wounded ego's reactionary attempt at solving our problems, and is invariably self-directed. The ordering factor underlying the unfolding material universe is patently loving, and when we respond to it, we are raised up out of the conservative acting, self-directed, destructive impulses of our ego, and freed to see our real options. 

    So, our choices are ultimately about whether we will respond to love (the underlying ordering factor of the universe we are an aspect of), or whether we will opt to react to fear (and its ego supported perceptions of reality). All of our human behavior is a result of this choice, and we are constantly making this choice, whether we are conscious of it or not. 

    Becoming conscious of this ongoing series of decisions is itself, a product of our consciously deciding to seek, to knock, to ask for harmony with this underlying ordering factor of our life. We are all being wooed. Some of us will respond. Most wont.

]]><![CDATA[On Jesus- the Path, Jesus- the Truth, and Jesus- the life we seek]]>Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:30:30 -0800http://johnrbrusseau.com/1/post/2011/11/on-jesus-the-path-jesus-the-truth-and-jesus-the-life-we-seek.html

    You think that if you can somehow learn the most significant truth, that you can become whole, that you will become fully realized. You think that if you can somehow see the greatest spiritual reality you will then be able to overcome and rise above, to transcend your mundane and your damaged soul, and spread your spiritual wings and fly off to a state of perfect oneness with all things.

    The problem with this notion is that you already have seen the greatest spiritual reality, and you have already known the most significant truth (in fact you are constantly seeing it), and you are still the same troubled, stalled, dysfunctional human you have always been. No, chances are you are even worse off now than you were before.

    The greatest spiritual reality and the most significant truth are shouting at you, from the colors and textures and sounds and smells and sensations and patterns, of the universe all around you and in you, and you cannot appreciate any but the smallest measure of it all, because there is something broken inside of your consciousness. You do not work properly, and the attainment of more self-originated experience, however profound, will not change that.

    And yet, you say, people have been spiritually transformed. So, how did they become spiritually transformed? What did they do, or know, or see, that changed them? Again, I say, they did nothing to change themselves. We are the problem, and deploying our problematic human being to bring restoration of our dysfunctional humanity is to guarantee that the same human errors will be repeated in our sad lives, but only dressed now in the camouflage of new and different-looking terminology and ideas.

So how do some people experience spiritual restoration?

    The answer lies in the fact that we have been made by a spiritual force underlying everything in the physical universe. And because we have been made by this force, there is logically only two possibilities as concerns our potential for change and realization. We are either already what we were made to be (in our present condition), or else, because this force also made us with the special ability to opt out of harmony with it, and consequently become damaged goods (and we as a species did, somewhere in our past, opt out of harmony with this originating and maintaining spiritual force), then we will somehow need to have a state of harmony with this originating force restored to us in order for us to become fully realized.

    And here is where we come to understand why most of our previous efforts at becoming whole, and becoming realized souls, have failed miserably. We have become, just because we have become bereft of our natural harmony with this originating spiritual force underlying our physical existence, uncomfortable facing the facts of our present disharmonious state of existence, and equally predisposed to rely upon our damaged psyches for the solutions to our worsening condition.

    In fact, some of us even come to a point of hatching the delusional idea that we are not made by that spiritual force, and that nothing has been made by that spiritual force, and that therefore, we are already all that we can ever be. Denial of the problem is without a doubt a much easier road to travel, than is the scary road of humbly dealing with the reality of our problems, in the hope that the spiritual force that made us will be willing and able to remake us, to restore us.

    So, we have been in denial of our state of disharmony with the spiritual force expressing itself as our human existence, and we have thus turned to ourselves as the source of the resources needed to restore the life that we have lost as a result of our broken harmony with this spiritual source.

    In as much as we are turning to ourselves, out of fear of the truth of our true state of disharmony, we are also afraid to receive any aid we might be offered from the spiritual source we are now in a state of disharmony with.

    It is not fear that keeps us from receiving this harmony-restoring aid from our spiritual source however, it is pride. Love can conquer all fear. It won’t conquer pride, because pride is volitional. It is our choice. We don’t choose to be afraid, but we do choose to rely on pride.

    And our pride is wrapped up in every religious path we think to travel. There are no exceptions to this. It is only our responding to spiritual experiences offered to us by this spiritual force underlying our existence that ever produces restoration of harmony and the wholeness and realization generated by that harmony.

    And we are, each of us, carrying much pride. And some of us choose to turn from pride in order to embrace the aid of this spiritual force underlying our human existence, and most of don’t. There is a direct tradeoff for us: we embrace the aid at the expense of our pride, or we cling to our pride at the expense of the aid we need.

    And, of course, most of us will not agree with this particular breakdown of the human condition, because we are still choosing pride over aid. And until and unless we humbly turn to the spiritual force underlying our human existence and plead for its aid in overcoming the disharmony between it and us, we will always cling to our pride, because we blindly think that is all we have left.

    If we do choose to humbly face our disharmonious condition and ask for aid from the spiritual force underlying our existence, then we will be given all of the aid we need. This is guaranteed in as much as this underlying spiritual force is essentially perfect love.

    And we can know this spiritual force is love, even in our disharmonious state, because we see love’s harmonious order, and love’s design of free will, and love’s systematic patterned production of matter, throughout the universe around us.

    Love made us, and love will remake us, if we turn from pride and seek love’s aid. Love made our ability to opt out of harmony with the spiritual force underlying our human existence, and love made a way for us back into the state of harmony we require in order to become whole, and fully realized human beings.

    And this way produced by love is a way that is completely produced by love, by the spiritual force underlying all things. No aspect of this way has been produced by us humans, or originated in our humanity. This is important in as much as any solution originated by humanity would include the errors generated by humanity’s damaged state of harmony.

    This gift from the spiritual force underlying our existence is completely contained in, and fully expressed in the person of Jesus, the full expression of God (another word for the spiritual force underlying all things). That such a solution would have taken form in a particular part of the globe, and within a particular society, should not cause us to reject it unless we are, out of pride, upset that it did not take form in our own part of the globe, and in our own particular culture.

    Jesus is what he is, and there is no reason to reject him other than pride. There is nothing in Jesus (or the biblical account of him) that expresses anything other than love. There is nothing but love’s forgiveness being offered us in Jesus, and only pride would induce us to turn down forgiveness. Only pride would protest that we don’t need it.

    Whether it is intellectual pride (and its many reasons for believing that Jesus could not truly have existed (or truly be what he claimed to be), or cultural pride (and its silly excuses for spurning something wonderful that takes form outside of our own culture), or pride in our own moral condition, or pride in humanity, all pride will only seal our human dysfunction, and our spiritual demise.

    What can you possibly lose by turning and kissing the Son, by embracing Jesus and his sacrifice’s provision of forgiveness of all of your sins? What will you have to give up, except the pride that has left you buried in your own private emotional and spiritual crypt?

    Receiving this aid from the spiritual force underlying your human existence will produce a foundation under you of harmony between you and this spiritual force. And you need this foundation of harmony (this spiritual rebirth) to begin to grow more and more in harmony with this spiritual force.

    When it comes down to it, it is just you and this spiritual force facing each other, waiting to see what direction you will choose for your self. No one else is there, no culture surrounds you, no society, no ideology under girds you, your friends and your family are not present, it is just you and this spiritual force.



    I should also mention that receiving Jesus (whom the Bible refers to rightly as the Way, the Truth, and the Life) does not imply that you do not already have a spiritual path/way, or spiritual truth, or spiritual life. Nor does it mean that your culture, or society does not have these things. You and they do. All humans have spiritual life, and thus every culture’s religion contains much spiritual truth and a spiritual path, and spiritual life, and yet there remains something singular about Jesus.

    The writer of the biblical text known as Hebrews, expresses a concept that applies to every religion. I will quote the entire passage here, so that you may see it in its context, and then I will summarize it for you.

Heb 8:3  For every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices: wherefore it is necessary that this high priest also have somewhat to offer.

Heb 8:4  Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, seeing there are those who offer the gifts according to the law;

Heb 8:5  who serve that which is a copy and shadow of the heavenly things, even as Moses is warned of God when he is about to make the tabernacle: for, See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern that was showed thee in the mount.

Heb 8:6  But now hath he obtained a ministry the more excellent, by so much as he is also the mediator of a better covenant, which hath been enacted upon better promises.

Heb 8:7  For if that first covenant had been faultless, then would no place have been sought for a second.

Heb 8:8  For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, That I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah;

Heb 8:9  Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers In the day that I took them by the hand to lead them forth out of the land of Egypt; For they continued not in my covenant, And I regarded them not, saith the Lord.

Heb 8:10  For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel After those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, And on their heart also will I write them: And I will be to them a God, And they shall be to me a people:

Heb 8:11  And they shall not teach every man his fellow-citizen, And every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: For all shall know me, From the least to the greatest of them.

Heb 8:12  For I will be merciful to their iniquities, And their sins will I remember no more.

Heb 8:13  In that he saith, A new covenant he hath made the first old. But that which is becoming old and waxeth aged is nigh unto vanishing away.

    The gist of this rather radical idea is that our religions were a type, a shadow of the restoration that was to come in the gesture of restorative forgiveness by this spiritual force underlying our human existence, known to us as Jesus the messiah. I see in every religion that I have looked into just such symbolic truths, which point to the need for, and the promise of, a spiritual gift of restoration, made by the spiritual force underlying our existence, not by us (Islam is an exception to this, in as much as it developed after the coming of Jesus. Islam is essentially Muhammad's externalization of his conscience's prideful reaction against his own soul's rebellion against the spiritual force underlying his existence. In as much as this is so, Islam has become an institutionalized mockery of Jesus and all he represents. Islam's renowned mistreetment of females is a testament to the distrust of, and disharmony with, and prideful reaction against, the soul, which is the feminine counterpart to the spirit).

    This text goes on to say that each of our religions is incomplete, and that we need a second phase of revelation/insight (or a second covenant), in order to complete what the first spiritual phase/covenant began in us.

    Lastly this text states that receiving forgiveness will promote a highly individuated state of existence in mankind. The text expresses this in terms of; no one will teach his neighbor truths any more, because God will put his truths in their heart by fully restoring their harmony with Him via full forgiveness of their sins.

    Jesus is what every human religion is pointing to. The Muslims have this thing about authority and submission to it, and authority and submission to authority are two very valuable ideas/truths for social creatures such as humans. And Jesus is the way back to harmony with the very source of all good authority, and the source of all healthy trust in good authority (which manifests as sincere submission).

    The Hindus have this thing about the Oneness of all things. And Jesus is the means that the spiritual force underlying all things has provided for us to feel a firm harmonious connection with this Oneness, this underlying spiritual force (and not merely a recognition of this Oneness).

    The Buddhists of course have a thing for the need for the balancing of things.  And things have come to a state of imbalance in mankind because of the disharmony between humans and the spiritual force underlying their existence. And Jesus is the means of restoration of the lost harmony between mankind and this spiritual force.

    The Tao Te Ching has this thing for quiescence being the way to life. Jesus (and the forgiveness we have because of him) is described as being the full embodiment of the rest that God brings us into.

    The Europeans were once a hybrid of shamanistic practices and Greek and Roman Pantheism. Yet they found that Jesus fit there needs wonderfully. Then, they replaced Jesus (as the mediator between them and God) with the Clergy (followed by a resulting dependence upon a collectively agreed upon notion of orthodoxy), so that Jesus was moved out of the picture. When they did this, the European Christians came to have very little to do with Jesus, and correspondingly came to embrace their old hatred of other people’s religious ideas.

    It has thus come to past that much of the rest of the human race now considers Jesus to be associated with the outright rejection of their individual spirituality, and their culture’s spirituality, yet it is in fact merely European Christianity’s rejection, not Jesus’.

    If the European Christians (and their descendants) had held onto Jesus, instead of turning to the clergy, as the mediatory factor in their relationship with God, then they would have been able to love people of other cultures around them, and would have seen the spiritual life present in their respective religions.

    Therefore, it must be said, Christians must come to embrace Jesus as the mediator between them and the spiritual force underlying their human existence just as the rest of the human species must.

    The human species is headed into the dark night of our collective human soul, in which there will be those who attempt to fix our collective human problems with human originated solutions. Among these solutions will be an effort to rid the world of humanities inability to love and respect each others religious and ideological differences by forcing us to accept a homogenized blend of our respective religions. Our religions are unique because we are unique, and our cultures are likewise unique. Uniformity is a bad version of unity. It replaces harmony with conformity, which effectively kills individuation and wholeness.

    Jesus is the antidote for this coming spiritual calamity. Jesus empowers the individual, in as much as they who receive him are directly connected to the spiritual force underlying their own existence. They need no human go-betweens. They need no membership in any social group in order to thrive. They just need Jesus.

    And now I have preached this spiritual truth to you as best as I could.  If you have read through this document to this point you have what you need to make an insightful choice. And yet, in order for you to choose to embrace Jesus and the forgiveness and harmony you get via his sacrifice, you will still need to trade off your pride for love’s aid.

I will leave you now to your choice.

]]><![CDATA[Regulating the Ego And the empowerment of the psyche ]]>Tue, 06 Sep 2011 06:15:28 -0800http://johnrbrusseau.com/1/post/2011/09/regulating-the-ego-and-the-empowerment-of-the-psyche.html    I should point out that the essence of this essay is an attempt to articulate in psychological terms the Adam and Eve myth about the loss of inner harmony in the human psyche and the means of restoration of that harmony. 

    This is an issue very much at the core of Jungian psychology, and many eastern religions as well. 

The premise of most of these philosophies is that if we could somehow become integrated, that is experience inner harmony, our psyche would then become empowered to do all it is capable of doing. 

The Adam and Eve myth involves the idea of forgiveness in the issues relating to restoration of harmony, and does so in a psychologically significant way.   

There is encoded within the Hebrew/Christian myth of Adam and Eve a rather precise psychological model of mankind’s fall from a state of inner harmony (between his will and his ego, and consequently between his conscious and unconscious mind, and between himself and others). This story contains a significant amount of detail, as it relates to the cause and affects of this inner disharmony. It shows how we have turned from the creative force at work within us, to the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, and that this turn of events has resulted in a disharmony between our will and our ego, and disharmony between our intuition and emotions, and our instincts and reason, and ultimately between us and everything in the universe around us.

    This myth also, interestingly enough, articulates a psychologically viable model of restoration of this lost harmony. One may read this story and determine for themselves whether there is an accurate description of the human equation encoded within. To the extent this scenario resonates with one’s experience of life, it will also serve as a good model for looking at our life, and the state of inner disharmony that we each are dealing with. Read through this psychologically interpreted myth and see if it resonates with your experience of life. 

    Like most of the things I write, the following essay will likely be too concise to be easily readable, but the elements of the myth are all addressed here. 

 

First of all let us take note of the players in this pageant.

 

God = the creative force at work in the subconscious mind (love).

Satan = the destructive force at work in the subconscious mind (fear).

Adam = the will, the instinctual drive within us to become conscious of what we want/need.

Eve = the heart/ego/conscience, the instinctual drive within us to become conscious of the value of things.

 

    The first event in this story is the episode wherein our Will and Conscience aspects of consciousness (Adam and Eve) are in a state of harmony with the creative force of the universe they are a part of. They do as they are directed by this creative force within them. To use a biblical expression for this, they are being led by the spirit of God. 

    In this harmonious state of existence, the creative force at work within us directs us to not feed upon the information (lingering within our consciousness) about good and bad (that is, formulated conscious concepts of morality). We made choices for our life by accessing insight from the creative force at work within us. When we were confronted by new circumstances, we simply turned to this creative force at work within us for the insight relevant to those new circumstances. We did not rely upon our reasoning mind to figure out what was the thing to do. And thus we had no use for moral laws (The fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) 

    The only outcome of deploying this moral information would be to enable our Will to abdicate its responsibility to our Conscience/Ego in the decisions it makes, instead of harmoniously submitting to the creative force at work within us. In its initial harmonious state, our Will submitted its choices about what we need/want by taking the input from our evaluative conscience (Eve) into consideration, and then accessing insight from the creative force within us in order to process that input, as well as the input from our desires, intuition, and our reason, and determine what we want/need. 

    We never needed to access our knowledge of good and evil in order to decide what we wanted/needed. In this way, our decisions were completely natural decisions.

    Our Conscience/Ego did not suppress those foolish choices by our Will to desire things that eventually might hurt us terribly, or to control those beliefs /ideas/thoughts generated by our Will that might endanger our sense of wellbeing. We were hot or cold; we were never luke warm.

    Our Will did not need to react to a fear of a tyrannous Ego/Conscience by choosing to be devoured by our compulsions. We simply naturally chose to do what our father in heaven, the creative force within us, wanted us to do. 

    Our Will felt deeply within it the natural empowerment (because of its undamaged relationship with the source of insight) to govern our desires, and to develop its consciousness of our place in the universe (That is, Adam subdued the earth).

    Eve, our Heart/Ego/Conscience felt deeply within it the safety required to do its work of supporting our Will’s decisions by feeding it a constant stream of evaluative observations in connection with the choices of our Will.

    Adam, our Will, produced consciousness of our place in the universe (that is, gardened) effortlessly (with no resistance, no distraction).

    Eve gave birth to consciousness of the value of things effortlessly (she suffered no labor pains in childbirth).

    And both of these forces within our psyche were in perfect, trusting, harmony with each other. 

    Our will trusted our conscience completely and thus did not feel the need to ignore it or brutalize it.

    Our conscience completely trusted our Will and thus felt no need to passive-aggressively manipulate our will into making choices that were in line with its sense of the value of things. 

    Now, into this harmonious and paradisiacal human conscious circumstance comes fear (Satan), the destructive force at work within us (especially within our subconscious mind).  Fear asks us to second-guess the effectiveness of the creative force at work within us. And fear does this in such a subtle way that our Conscience/Ego (Eve) is not able to detect it. First, fear appeals to our Ego/Conscience, saying; truly, does your inner creative force want you to not feed upon the knowledge of good and evil (to formulate conscious concepts of morality), and make choices based upon these formulations of morality? 

    Fear/Satan continues, and then goes into insinuation mode, implying that the insightful creative force within us is simply trying to keep us from being as consciously developed as we could be (God does not want you to become as empowered as he is). Fear tells our Ego/Conscience that if we had these moral precepts, we would not need the creative force within us to give us the insight we need in order to generate choices. Instead, we could rationally generate the insight we need to make good choices. 

    The creative force at work within us had already previously given us some insightful sense that if our Will and our Ego/Conscience fed upon moral principals as a means to supply us with what we needed to make choices and know the value of things, those two instinctual drives to be conscious (Adam and Eve, Will and Ego) would cease to function normally (they would surely die). Fear/Satan tells our Ego/conscience; no, you won’t die, you will just be able to resolve all of your issues rationally (without need of insight from the creative force at work within us). 

    Now, because fear is motivating our Ego/Conscience, and our Ego/Conscience has had no previous experience dealing with fear, it is tricked into reasoning with fear, which is always a losing proposition. Rather than reasoning with fear, our Ego/Conscience should have asked our Will to choose to turn to the creative force within us to give us insight about the issues raised by fear. Our Ego/Conscience doesn’t do this because she is not used to dealing with fear, and has no experience that would tell her that responding to fear leads to destruction. So, she now has fear issues, and this makes her act more conservatively (pull inward) than she normally would have. She does not ask our Will to get insight about these fear issues; she tries to reason with fear alone. She is lost, of course, the moment she turns inward. 

    She soon sees the truth of what fear has been saying to her, and so decides to turn to her own rational grasp of moral principal/laws to determine the value of things, rather than to wait for insight from the creative force at work within us. Immediately, she knows that she is now exposed and vulnerable (naked). She had always been exposed before, but she never felt it as vulnerability because she had been covered by her natural relationship with the creative force within her. 

    Now, she is on her own, and she hates it, so our Ego/Conscience then wants our Will to also operate without harmony with the creative force within us, so that she does not have to feel alone in her shocking, traumatic, new alienation from the creative force at work within us. Our Ego moves to undermine our Will’s natural tendency to turn to the creative force at work within us. Our ego conscience becomes an enemy of this creative force at work within us as a result of the trauma of her seduction by fear, and attempts to convince us that enmity with this creative force at work within us is what we want (Will). Our Ego/Conscience implies that our choice to replace the creative force at work within us (by responding to the seduction of fear) is not the destructive thing our intuitive insight had indicated it would be. 

    Our Will is not seduced. It knows that replacing love’s insight with fear’s control is not what we really want, but it goes along with our Ego/Conscience so that our Ego/Conscience will be able to be redeemed eventually. And when it does, it too is then overwhelmed with a traumatic sense of alienation from the creative force at work within us. The trauma of this new alienation from the creative force at work within us is no minor difficulty. It renders us in a state of disharmony with our own humanity, and with our Will and our Ego/Conscience, and ultimately with the universe around us. We are cast out of the Garden of Eden. 

    The shock of this turn of events is too much to process. It is overwhelming, and so we repress our memories of the circumstances of our fall from our natural human existence. And having repressed our memory of the circumstances of our spiritual demise, we are doomed to act out the subconsciously originated compulsive behaviors, the rituals, the fixations, the ideologies, that symbolically restate those very facts of our spiritual demise that we are repressing. 

    Insight no longer comes easily to us. Increasingly we rationalize away our need for it, so that eventually, we no longer think it is an option for us. We are now in the hands of fear/Satan/pride, rather than love/God/ insight, and move to create a world-view that can replace the one we had when we were in harmony with the creative force within us. This new world-view that we attempt to create is essentially an extension of our choice to replace insight with reason. It is a self-righteous, legalistic, religious approach to human existence, and it is marked by the insanity of fear’s seductive perception of things. 

    Now, the creative force at work within us does not, of course, give up on us. It wrestles with us, by producing a sense within us that it still wants harmony with us (it seeks out Adam and Eve). And when we give in to this creative force’s pursuit of harmony with us, we are then faced with the facts of our alienation from this creative force at work within us (we respond to this creative force by telling it we are afraid of it, implying that we would like to not continue being afraid of it). 

    The thing is we cannot resolve our fear of the creative force at work within us. Our attempts to do this are the fig leaves of self-righteous, legalistic, rationalism, and they don’t do anything but perpetuate the fear we have of the creative force within us. If we persist in responding to that now small voice of the creative force at work within us (which wants restored harmony with us) we will have to face our own ridiculously ineffective attempts at covering our choices, with reason instead of insight, with self-righteous legalism in stead of trust in the creative force. 

    This is the point at which the creative force at work within us offers us forgiveness as an option. Accepting forgiveness from the creative force at work within us, will, at this point, appear to us as accepting forgiveness from an external creative force (god), in as much as our fear of this force has perceptually distanced us from it. Forgiveness requires us to completely face the circumstances of our spiritual destruction and to repudiate fear’s option in favor of trust in the creative force at work within us (now perceived as a completely external god-factor). Because of the insanity that fear (of this creative force within us) has installed within our perception of things, the creative force within us will need to place an archetypal picture of forgiveness within our subconscious, that at the same time paints a picture of what our consciousness will look like if it has been restored by forgiveness. 

    This archetype is a lamb sacrifice. The lamb symbolizes the instinctual drive within mankind to trustingly submit to providence. In as much as it is a gift to us from the creative force at work within us, and is not generated by our reason, and in as much as it is a symbol of our natural instinct to trust, when we slaughter the lamb gift we are revisiting our own slaughtering of our capacity to trust the creative force within us. We thus sense that the creative force within us is forgiving us completely for that choice, and all of the destruction that has followed, as well. 

    Accepting forgiveness then is the practical means of trusting that creative force that we have come to fear. We cannot any longer trust it to govern the choices we make, via its outpouring of insight into our life, but we can trust it to forgive us. And this choice to accept forgiveness will be just the beginning of our psyche’s slow restoration of harmony with the creative force within us. This slow process will meet with resistance from our Ego/Conscience, because of its prior embrace of self-righteous, legalism, or hyper-rationality. 

    Thus, the new world-view we construct is itself a wrestling between the creative force at work within us for us to pay attention to the very circumstances of our spiritual demise and accept restoration of harmony via trusting forgiveness, and the destructive force of fear’s hyper-rationalistic embrace of self-righteous legalism.  Our world-view is not one that is largely built upon insight’s pure sense of reality, but upon fear’s impure, caustic, destructive need for rational control via self-righteous legalism. And thus there is a major conflict unfolding within mankind, individually and collectively, between the will to continue holding on to the Ego/Conscience’s rationalistic control of our life, and the will to trust the creative, spiritual, god-force within us by trusting in forgiveness. This is why there is so much resistance within each of us to embracing the idea of forgiveness. It is humbling, and this humility comes at the cost of our Ego/Conscience’s fear-driven rationalistic, legalistic, control of our lives. 

    This is the great conflict facing each of us, and it is our choice relative to this conflict that will decide the fate of each of us. It is a conflict that is both within us and within the human community around us. Not only will we suffer great internal resistance, but we will likewise suffer great external resistance, and the only thing that will make this a viable option for us is that the creative force within us is eminently capable of making it emotionally and spiritually worth our while. If the creative force at work within us did not make the extremely unpleasant, often miserable, process of restoration of harmony worth it to us, none of us would ever have traveled this road. That many of us have (and typically at great cost), is a comforting indication of the ability of the creative force at work within us to more than fully compensate us for the suffering we experience on the way. 

    There is within every religion of man a representation of this conflict. There is a fear-driven self-righteous, legalistic, hyper-rational approach to life, and a forgiveness-based, trusting, approach to life (Cain and Able conflict, in the biblical myth). In as much as the creative force at work within us is the same creative force at work within the unfolding material universe around us, the generation of a lamb-archetype by the creative force within our subconscious mind, makes it a certainty that this archetype will have a material, literal, manifestation as well. The Hebrew/Christian myth, has from the beginning, suffered the same conflict that the rest of the human religious myths have. 

    There have always been factions within both the Hebrew and the Christian communities (just as there have been in every other religious community) that have chosen between fear’s rationalistic, legalistic, control, and love’s trust in forgiveness. The difference is that the Hebrew/Christian myth was formulated in conjunction with the literal, historical, geographic, unfolding of the lamb archetype, and the others were not. The other religious myths around the world (those aspects of religious myths that encouraged trust in the creative force at work within us), were also a production of the creative force at work within mankind. They were that creative force’s practical preparation in the widespread human community for the physical spreading of news of the literal manifestation of the lamb archetype in the Palestine region of the earth. 

    There is a practicality in this creative force within us.  It is that which orders the systems that unfold as matter, and the material universe. It is very practical.

    It is very effective, and it is love. Psychologically we needed an archetype, and psychologically we also need this archetype ultimately to be physically manifested.

    It has been, and we are here to pass on the news of this event to our fellow humans. Jesus is this archetype. He is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

]]><![CDATA[Pursuing Dialog with an Enemy]]>Fri, 05 Aug 2011 05:15:13 -0800http://johnrbrusseau.com/1/post/2011/08/pursuing-dialog-with-an-enemy.html

When picturing someone we fear, we;

 

  1. Form a stereotype of them that encapsulates what we most fear from them. They are no longer a human, or community of people, they are the monsters of our worst fears. They are vessels of injustice, and terror, and tyranny.

We begin to slowly, semi-consciously, become aware of the injustice our stereotypes heap on those we fear, and thus begin to defend our conscious mind from this growing sense of our own fading virtue by creating a stereotyped view of our own beneficence. We thus soon become, in our own mind, naught but a sacred vessel of a pure mentality of love, and a society of glorious virtue and generous grace. 

  1. Next we begin to view all interaction initiated by our opponent as a threat to our wellbeing, while simultaneously viewing interaction initiated by us as solely a model of ethical beauty, and integrity.

     The fact that this is a human tendency, and not the tendency of one culture, or religion, or nation, or another, means that both sides of every highly developed conflict will be practicing this sort of defensive insanity. And it must be mentioned that denial of the existence of this kind of defensiveness within our own heart, is typical. I deny. You deny. We all have moments of denial of the defensiveness we, all too commonly, feel.

     The solution our fear-generated conflicts then will absolutely require;

  1. humble confession of one’s own sins of defensiveness, as well as those of one’s people,
  2. and a willingness to sacrificially forgive the defensive abusiveness being heaped upon us by our opponents

 

We all do have far more in common, as members of the same human species, than our religious, cultural, and ideological differences will ever come close to equaling. And the only reason we don’t serve this commonality we all share is because of defensiveness, that is, fear. 

     Fear is not a good premise for human interaction. Defensiveness is not a good strategy for pursuing a dialog. And the only way we can get past our fear and defensiveness with each other is if we know that we will be taken care of regardless of what our counterpart(s) do to us. 

     This requires genuine faith, and anything less than genuine faith will manifest in defensiveness. We may possess correct dogma, correct ideology, but without genuine faith, we will never get past our own defensiveness sufficiently enough to be able to sacrificially love our enemies, and thus help them move past their defensiveness. Our instinctual desire for self preservation will override our desire for dialog, and we will find ourselves torpedoing any possibility for harmony.

 

This logically means that ;

  1. there is no, and never will be any, justification for defensiveness on our part, regardless of what our enemy is doing.
  2. and there is no point in rationalizing our defensive position, in as much as holding onto our defensiveness can never produce anything but the furtherance of the conflict.


         We will probably not heed this insight into human relations in the midst of battle (regardless how much we              can see the rightness of it now) so we will need to shore up our foundations of faith in God’s/the universe’s ability to cover us, before we get into a conflict.

    Whatever you are inclined to do toward this end will be your best course of action as a fellow human being. Conflict is everywhere, waiting to reduce us to fear-driven beasts. Faith is the only practical psychological antidote.

    In the mean time, I wish to say to all of you who are viewing me as a threat to your wellbeing, I love you, and want the opportunity to show it. I will likely have to deal with many moments of fear and defensiveness as we interact with one another, but I am committed to trusting my well-being to God.

    Please, let me have the chance to prove my love to you, and please forgive me for my past sins of defensiveness. I know I have hurt you with my actions born out my fear of your actions wounding me. You did not deserve this treatment from me. I want you to know that I am making a commitment to love you, and not fear you, from now on.

]]><![CDATA[Approaching the Interpretation of a Symbol]]>Sun, 31 Jul 2011 11:18:12 -0800http://johnrbrusseau.com/1/post/2011/07/approaching-the-interpretation-of-a-symbol.html
The following is a Dream by Anandh, and my interpretation, which highlights the concept that symbolic meaning is derived from three levels of association.

Anandh K • I want to share a dream I had about six years ago... I would like your comments.... 

THE DREAM 

I am walking along a winding pathway inside the gates of a premises, towards a building. I reach the building and ring the bell. The door opens and an usher smiles and invites me in. That usher is me too. 'Please sit down. He will see you in a few minutes.' he says. It is a large hall. At a corner of the hall is a spiral staircase. He climbs up and gets back within a minute and says. 'You may go to him now. he is waiting for you.' 
I climb up the stairs. As I reach the landing I see two doors. One door is plain. The other one has some poster stuck on it. I can hear the muffled noise of some loud music filtering through the closed door. The usher (me) guides me to the plain door. He softly knocks on the door and tells me, 'You may go in now.' 
I step in. It is a large, bright room. The wall facing the door is a large window. Outside the window is a big tree, with branch quite close to the window. The walls are white the furniture is white, the sofa is white and the person who rises from the sofa is wearing a white kurta and white pyjamas. The floor is covered by an off-white carpet. On the small, low tea table a vase holds fresh flowers. His face is serene, his eyes are deep like pools of silence. And it is me! He ever so gently extends his hands and holds mine. His touch is cool and soft. Silence pervaded the room. He made me sit beside him on the sofa. In a soft, low voice he started talking to me. He spoke very little. Then he pointed to the window. As I turned to the window I saw a kingfisher alight on the branch near the window. I could see the flourescent turqoise feathers under the wings. The branch gently swayed before it settled again. It sang for a short while and then flew away. The branch swayed again and it took longer to settle this time. He smiled at me. I could sense that the meeting was over. He placed his hand on my shoulder and smiled into my eyes. As I opened the door and was about to step out, he said, 'Now that you are here, meet my brother in the next room before you leave.' 
I knock on the other door. 'Hi, come on in,' shouts a voice above the din. As I push open the door the noise of loud music fills my ears with a shock. I enter the room. It ais of the same size as the other one, but the floor is strewn with books, CDs, papers, picture cards and posters of pop stars adorn the walls. It takes a moment for me to find him amongst all that. He too is me! He is waering a pair of faded blue jeans which is frayed at the bottom. He is wearing a tea shirt with loud colours. 'Hi, come, sit,' he shows me to a straight chair without arms. I go and sit down. 'So, you met him, didn't you? Ok, good. All who meet him meet me too. I like you. I want to show you something. Let me find it for you. he dashes here and there and from amidst the jumble of books and cds, he picks a CD. 'I am sure you would like this one,' he says and in a moment, the sound of a different kind of music fills the room; a kind of a folk melody. That somehow suits the atmosphere of the room. He talks to me about the recent trends in art and literature. I feel quite easy with him. After a while I get up and take leave of him. 'I am gald you came. do come again, he says. I think him and come out. As the door is shut there is a sudden silence. 
The usher waits for e at the foot of the spiral staircase. He walks along with me upto the door. ' I am sure both of them are gald that you came. So am I,' he says and close the door softly behind me. 

I woke up with the feeling that the kingfisher is the most important aspect of the dream.

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 9:44 AM, John Brusseau <jn.brusseau@hotmail.com> wrote:
Anandh, please feel free to question me about any of this.THE DREAM 

I am walking along a winding pathway inside the gates of a premises, towards a building.
This is your path in life (whether it is current with the dream, or current with the interpretation isn’t clear.). You are following a winding spiritual path toward an unknown conscious existence (the building).
I reach the building and ring the bell.
You finally become conscious of this new conscious point of view (house) and seek to enter in-ring the bell (familiarize yourself with this new point of view).
The door opens and an usher smiles and invites me in. That usher is me too.
Within this new point of view, you find yourself at home (you usher yourself in).
Please sit down. He will see you in a few minutes.' he says.
You tell yourself to relax, and that you will soon find yourself.
 It is a large hall.
You are now in a place of transition (the hall).
At a corner of the hall is a spiral staircase.
In this place of transition there is spiritual growth spread out before you (the spiral staircase).

He climbs up and gets back within a minute and says. 'You may go to him now. he is waiting for you.' 
You soon come to the moment of asking yourself to experience this spiritual growth in order to find our self (ascend the stairs to meet you).

I climb up the stairs. As I reach the landing I see two doors.
In going on this spiritual quest, you come to see two options set before you.

One door is plain.
One option is simple, unadorned, perhaps not very appealing looking.

The other one has some poster stuck on it. I can hear the muffled noise of some loud music filtering through the closed door. {Is the noisy room the room behind the postered door?}
There is some culturally conceived embellishment recommending this option (the poster). Beyond this option you hear a lot of noise of busyness.

The usher (me) guides me to the plain door.
You guide yourself to the plain option.

He softly knocks on the door and tells me, 'You may go in now.' 
You peacefully ask entrance to this option, and then tell yourself it is okay to take this option now.

I step in. It is a large, bright room.
In taking this plain-looking option you find a frame of mind (room) that is full of enlightenment.

The wall facing the door is a large window.
You encounter a perspective on life (window) that is the source of the enlightenment.

Outside the window is a big tree, with branch quite close to the window.
Through this new perspective on life you can see a significant, big, truth/archetype (large tree), that is closely associated with this new perspective on life.

The walls are white the furniture is white, the sofa is white and the person who rises from the sofa is wearing a white kurta and white pyjamas. {Isn’t a kurta a kind of pajama? What is your cultural association with the kurta?}
Everything is righteous/harmonious (white), the conscious supports for this new point of view (walls), the trust you place in this new point of view (sofa), and the mentality (man) which you encounter there, is clothed in the garments of trust/rest (pajamas), and righteousness/harmony (white).[ I don’t yet understand your association with the kurta.]

The floor is covered by an off-white carpet. {What is your personal, and /or cultural association with this color?}
And the foundation of this new conscious point of view (the floor of the room/house) is also covered in a sense of righteousness/ harmony.

On the small, low tea table a vase holds fresh flowers.
There is a very intimate, personal kind of fellowship, that is humble, that holds pleasant associations for you (the small, low, tea table and the flowers).

His face is serene, his eyes are deep like pools of silence. And it is me!
You are surprised to find that you are able to feel serenity, and have a peaceful vision of life. It is implied that you wonder at yourself for having this wonderful spiritual experience.

He ever so gently extends his hands and holds mine.
This new righteous/harmonious mentality you have discovered within you now begins to extend to, and effect, your actions. (Actions = hands)

His touch is cool and soft.
The effect your new spiritual mentality is having upon your actions is soothing.

Silence pervaded the room.
Whereas the other option presented to you was full of noise, busyness, this spiritual option, where you have found to your pleasant surprise this spiritual mentality, is able to be comfortable with non-activity, with stillness.

He made me sit beside him on the sofa.
This new spiritual mentality prevailed upon you to trust/rest your relationship with him to him (sit beside him on the sofa).

In a soft, low voice he started talking to me. He spoke very little.
Then this spiritual aspect of you began to communicate concepts, and ideas, and thoughts to you in a very intimate/personal (not loud and clear) voice.

Then he pointed to the window.
Then the spiritual aspect of you pointed out the new perspective on life.

As I turned to the window I saw a kingfisher alight on the branch near the window.
As you began to use this new perspective on life, you began to notice an intuition of a time of peace between times of storm (the kingfisher). [according to Ovid and Hyginus, the kingfisher is the origin of the expression, ‘Halcyon days’the period of time in which the kingfisher laid her eggs was a time in which there would be no storms. {Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingfisher}  under the section, Relationship with Humans] 

 I could see the flourescent turqoise feathers under the wings.
You could see the ability of this intuition, to spread spiritual enlightenment.
Kingfishers iridescent colors are not actually iridescent colors (accept in American kingfishers), but are the result of the composition of their wings spreading the blue light in the spectrum. {Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingfisher}

The branch gently swayed before it settled again.
The idea (branch) you were getting from this intuition was gently moving in your mind.

It sang for a short while and then flew away.
This intuition lasted only a short time (as most intrusions do. They flit across our field of vision, and then are gone).

The branch swayed again and it took longer to settle this time.
The idea I got from this intuition resonated in my mind for while, and bit longer than when I first saw it, and then it passed.

He smiled at me. I could sense that the meeting was over.
This spiritual mentality you experienced signaled you that your interaction with it was pleasantly (smiled) at an end, for the time being.

He placed his hand on my shoulder and smiled into my eyes.
This spiritual mentality in you wanted to decisively communicate to you that you were acceptable.

As I opened the door and was about to step out, he said, 'Now that you are here, meet my brother in the next room before you leave.' 
As you were about to conclude your encounter with this spiritual mentality in you, you were directed to see that there is a related mentality waiting behind the other option.

I knock on the other door. 'Hi, come on in,' shouts a voice above the din. As I push open the door the noise of loud music fills my ears with a shock. I enter the room. It ais of the same size as the other one, but the floor is strewn with books, CDs, papers, picture cards and posters of pop stars adorn the walls.
The other option in your life, looks like this room. It is full of knowledge (books), artistic expression (CDs), developing intellectual ideas (papers), personal communications of concepts (postcards), and various concepts of what society celebrates (pop-star posters).

This room is like the room of a college student. I would guess that this symbol is a picture of the aspect of your life as a student of higher learning/higher intellectual pursuits (as in the quest for information related to psychology, sociology, and possibly anthropology.)

 

It takes a moment for me to find him amongst all that. He too is me! He is waering a pair of faded blue jeans which is frayed at the bottom. He is wearing a tea shirt with loud colours. 'Hi, come, sit,' he shows me to a straight chair without arms. I go and sit down. 'So, you met him, didn't you? Ok, good. All who meet him meet me too. I like you. I want to show you something. Let me find it for you. he dashes here and there and from amidst the jumble of books and cds, he picks a CD. 'I am sure you would like this one,' he says and in a moment, the sound of a different kind of music fills the room; a kind of a folk melody. That somehow suits the atmosphere of the room. He talks to me about the recent trends in art and literature. I feel quite easy with him. After a while I get up and take leave of him. 'I am gald you came. do come again, he says. I think him and come out. As the door is shut there is a sudden silence. 
The usher waits for e at the foot of the spiral staircase. He walks along with me upto the door. ' I am sure both of them are gald that you came. So am I,' he says and close the door softly behind me. 

I woke up with the feeling that the kingfisher is the most important aspect of the dream.
This section of your dream seems to be telling you that the part of you that can be still, which is the part of you that can receive intuitions that there will be periods of calm amidst the storms of life, is related to the aspect of you that can get very busy, and that you need both parts of you.

The kingfisher stands out to you, because it is not simply insight about life in general, as the rest of the dream is, but is specifically telling you what is going to happen in your life. There will be some halcyon days, in which you can attend to your own spiritual growth (eggs). And these halcyon days will not last forever, but are for the purpose of preparing you to reengage with your busy life of service to others.

It occurs to me that if you cannot place the circumstances presented in this dream in some specific past time frame, then it may be about to unfold in your life now. Dreams sometimes hold up these sorts of predictive dreams to us, years in advance, in order to highlight the spiritual nature of our life. Spiritual things are not limited to the time/space continuum.



John...In the period that has passed since I had that dream, so many things have come to pass. I was serving as an officer in the Govt of India for nearly thirty five years. I had been contemplating on a change of career for a few years. During the period after the dream I took voluntary retirement from govt service. I am now practicing as a therapist, which is deeply fulfilling and my clients think very highly of me. I started reading Jung when I was nineteen. Now I am sixty. when I decided to take voluntary retirement I did not have clear plans as to what I was going to do. And what I am doing now is the best thing that could have happened to me. 

I will share more as time goes by. 

love

anandh



On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 7:50 PM, John Brusseau <jn.brusseau@hotmail.com> wrote:
Yes, obviously your dream was pointing to a place in which you were going to be reintroduced to yourself, to aspects of you that you needed to become more conscious of. A change in vocation can give us the time to focus on different aspects of ourselves. Your change from working as an officer to working as a counselor definitely would have allowed you to focus upon the aspect of your soul that was a spiritual force (like the man in the plain room). The two doors are a classic symbolic expression of the existence of two options, or a dilemma.The officer, I would guess, is concerned with the management of a group of people. The counselor is concerned about people and their personal issues.  Both sides of you are connected in the dream, and I think that that is because the way our subconscious mind directs the development of our soul is by first giving us a vocation that is a symbolic representation of what we are ultimately going to be doing. So, perhaps the work you did as an officer, somehow developed in you the skills you were going to need as an officer.
So, it does perhaps look like the Kingfisher may have been a spiritual/intuitional sense of the ensuing period of transition (from one vocation to the other).
I have noticed that many of us who have read Jung extensively have tended to take Jung's interpretation of particular symbols as an exact one for one interpretation (my father tended to do this). Symbolic meaning does not lend itself to one for one interpretations however. Symbolic meaning is derived from our associations with things on three distinct levels of experience. Jung had not developed his understanding of symbolism this far, and so he did not know this (as far as I am currently aware).The Kingfisher,or birds in general, could adequately be interpreted to mean a spiritual force, in as much as in a more axiomatic sense it is a force that mediates between the spiritual and the psychical aspects of our human consciousness. What I am trying to say in this point is that a chair could mean different things to us on different levels of association. My personal experience with chairs comes to add a layer to what a chair means to me. My culture's experience with chairs would add a layer of meaning to the chair symbol for me (take for example of the difference in the way a Japanese person would interpret the meaning of chairs, and an Englishman's interpretation of the same symbol), and my universal human association with chairs, a chairs axiomatic definition, would add a foundational layer to what a chair means to me. Thus a Kingfisher could represent one thing to one person, who was required to apply a personal associative layer of meaning to the Kingfisher symbol, and another interpretation to a person who needed to apply a cultural layer of meaning to the symbol.  Universally speaking (or axiomatically) I currently see a bird to be a symbol of an intuition about something. It registers in our minds as a fleeting thought, as a bird flitting across our field of vision. The Kingfisher is a particular kind of bird,and thus it would represent a particular intuition. In this case, I simply looked up the Wikipedia entry on the Kingfisher, and extracted the essential elements of our human associations with this particular bird. Fortunately, the Kingfisher entry had sufficient historical, sociological, information on the bird to allow me to get a distillate of its meaning. [If you had had a personal association with the Kingfisher, this would then be built on top of its more universal, or cultural meaning.]Anandh, would you be comfortable with me posting this last little part of our discussion of your dream on the LI Jungian forum? I think it would add an important discussion to the group, on the interpretation of symbolic meaning. If you'd rather not, of course, feel free to tell me so. I could just as easily introduce this topic in another way that did not involve you.]]><![CDATA[The Christian Idea of restoration of Harmony with God - AS VIEWED WITHIN A PSYCHOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK ]]>Sat, 23 Jul 2011 05:44:06 -0800http://johnrbrusseau.com/1/post/2011/07/the-christian-idea-of-restoration-of-harmony-with-god-as-viewed-within-a-psychological-framework.html    God is perhaps the most significant idea humans have ever pondered. In the God idea we have something that attempts to account for the context of everything. The God idea is the first, and on a symbolic level, the grandest, version of a unified field theory. It is a subconscious attempt to depict for our inherently subjective conscious mind the notion of the ordering factor behind the unfolding material universe.

     As such, the God idea is also a symbol of those sub-categories of the idea of the oneness of everything (the idea that everything belongs to one set), ideas such as love/harmony/order, and context/objectivity/insight. With this in mind, the Christian idea of there being a need for humans to have harmony with God restored, is by extension, the psychological reality that we humans need to have our connection with love and objective insight restored to us.

     We humans need to be reconnected with a mentality that everything in the universe (which, of course, we are a part of) is a manifestation of love. On a practical philosophical level (I know those two words are seldom used together, but work with me here) mater is in existence only because of the presence of order. In fact, it could logically be said that matter IS order.  And if matter exists because order exists, then logically, order predates and prevails over, matter.

     And it could be said that order in the universe necessarily implies the harmony of components, and that harmony is an expression of love. Order implies purpose, in as much as order is the ultimate purpose for things, mapped out.

     The reason the restoration of the God idea is so important to us is that the dual aspects of our instinctual drive to become conscious (the Will and the Heart, or in modern terminology, The Rational mind and the Super ego) have been damaged, have been made less conscious, by our alienation from the god idea.

     The question for humans then is what does harmony with the idea of the context for everything being love’s order, look like, and what happens in a human that damages this idea. It is probably clear to many of you that it is trauma and disorienting pain that is factor that damages our concept of the harmonious ordering of our life, our world, and our universe. Pain, and specifically, fear (Satan/Lucifer) teaches us that there is no order, that there is no love, and that if there were an absolute context for things in the universe, we would not have had to suffer.

     Of course such an idea is merely the subjective reaction of a wounded human consciousness. It is this woundedness that must be repaired in us. Satan/Lucifer is a symbol of this wounded, subtle yet harmful, too intelligent for our own good, emotionally wounded mentality in mankind. In the book of revelations, in fact, we see that it is Satan who comes as a dragon, a symbol of trauma (fear), and who generates the wild, harmful, un-domesticated (that is, compulsive/obsessive) instinctual desires within us (the Beast). Fear usually seems intelligent to us when it is our fear, and yet it is only a subtle delusion that brings destruction and death.

     If we could have every human emotional wound fully healed, what would our consciousness look like? Would it not look like a mentality of absolute peace, serenity, in the face of everything that happens to, and around us? We would understand completely that all that is happening is a part of the grand, perfectly ordered, loving, factor behind the unfolding material universe, and we would feel joy. Every sorrow, and every pleasure, every moment of suffering, and satisfaction would be met with an intense inner peace and joy. We could still feel sorrow and pain, but it would always be wrapped up in peace and joy.

 

    Okay, so where does the Christian notion of a savior enter this psychological equation?

1. The Christian notion of a savior is constructed on the theme that the ordering force that generated the unfolding material universe, needs the presence of free will in some components of this universe in order to be fully actualized, realized, and that,

2. in as much as this free will is given to us humans, and we have chosen a trust in the knowledge of good and evil, in place of our more natural trust in the idea and mentality of love’s ordering force (in guiding our decisions in life), we have disengaged somewhat from our harmony with the order factor of the universe we are a part of.

3. And in as much as this ordering factor generated our existence, and produced such a choosing factor within us, the ordering factor must also produce the means for our restoration (while, at the same time maintaining the viability of our freedom to chose or reject restoration of our lost harmony with the ordering factor unfolding in the material universe.

    The Christ/messiah idea is essentially a carefully constructed, and very detailed, myth that fully develops the idea that there is an ordering factor unfolding in all there is. If there is such a factor, and the universe does unfold as matter (which is essentially order), then even our detour into a misbegotten choice of disharmony with this order, will necessarily have been accounted for by this ordering factor. The messiah myth is about this ordering factor accounting for our choice to opt out of harmony with it, by subjectively being driven by fear to grasp for the control, the ego/conscience control, of our decisions. 

    This universal ordering factor is what we humans have always experienced as spirituality. Our human spirit is our means of becoming conscious of the ordering factor unfolding in as the material universe, of which we are a part.

    Trusting in Jesus, is trusting in the ordering factor, and turning away from mankind’s tendency to trust in the super ego, in our decision making process. If God, the ordering factor, is truly love/harmony/order, and God gave us the ability to make choices, within a naturally subjective (deceivable) consciousness, then God will naturally also produce the means for us to recover from the trauma of our bad decisions. This recovery means is embodied in the idea of forgiveness. The Christ myth is the embodiment of the idea of forgiveness, and it lets us know that forgiveness is totally natural, totally an expression of the universal order.

    Thus trusting Jesus is a psychologically effective path to embracing the idea of forgiveness for our bad choices. We would all like to believe we could be forgiven for our horrible decisions, but until we can see that forgiveness is a natural expression of the universal order, we don’t have the means we require to embrace forgiveness. We can attempt to intellectually convince ourselves that forgiveness is the reasonable and fair thing to embrace, but until we see that it is natural, we just can’t get there. We need a myth to get us there, because only a myth holds the archetypal expressions of the spiritual core, the ordering factor, within the unfolding material universe we are apart of.

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