Suffering chooses us; the trick is to learn to accept it positively.
One of the greatest books of this century; a true masterwork.
I wrote something about suffering a couple of days ago, and synchronistically, the next day I came across an old post of mine that talked about the suffering of life. It had an excerpt from the book The Problem of the Puer Aeternus by Marie-Louise von Franz in it. If I thought it would work I’d beg everyone to read this book. Please read this book!
It should be mandatory reading. People shouldn’t be allowed to vote until they’ve read this masterwork. It is an extremely accurate view of why this culture is the way it is.
This book also saved my life. It has saved quite a few of my Brother’s lives as well. It’s truly a life changing book.
There are, of course, many other views we could take on this culture, that would be accurate, but this book is one of the best. It is arguably one of the most important books ever written in this century. It’s in my top ten books of all time, and that is no small acknowledgement.
This book is about life, anyone’s life, just as much as it is about the phenomenon of the archetype of the Divine Child. We are all in a real pickle because the pleb farming tyrants have thoroughly made our lives unnatural. Boys are no longer brought up by Men.
I seriously do not know anyone that this book does not apply to. Not one person. I own two copies of this book, because I loan it out to people who come my way. Every male I’ve ever known is to one degree or another a Puer.
I think it’s important to go over some terms in case someone is new to my way of saying things. In my syntax the Self, the Unconscious, and God are synonymous. They are the same thing. Something I will be explaining better in other posts. The Self, God, the Unconscious; dreams the conscious state.
The Unconscious is the sea in which our conscious state is but a wave.
Most people I know who are new to my terms, have this the other way around. All they see, or know, is a single wave, and they tend to mistake this for the ocean itself. Most people think it is the conscious state which is in control. We often call this ego. It just depends on the angle in which we look, which label we use. From over here it looks like the Self, from other there God, and from here it appears as the Unconscious.
The reason there seems to be a Creator, out there, is because our conscious state is being created by the Self, the Unconscious, God. This unconsciously gets projected outwardly. It makes most of us think God is out there somewhere, or as many claim that it is all God.
No! God is within. The Self is our total being. It is mostly all Unconscious! It takes a tremendous amount of inner work to flip the script.
Since most do not consciously see that our conscious state is being created by our unconscious, they do not see that the universe itself is being created by their unconscious. It’s a classic projection. As Alan Watts would say, we cannot see our own eyes without a mirror. We are only seeing our own reflection. This organizing force is inside of us, so we can only see it as being out there.
Our lives are but dreams. The Castaneda way of saying it would be that it is our double dreaming us.
Another way to go about this is to ask this question. A question I bring up all the time. It’s the most important question there is to ask: Who is deciding which thoughts get through, and which do not? All it takes is to go sit and stare at the wall for thirty minutes to figure out we barely have any control of this at all.
Most people I’ve ever known can’t even manage to just sit and stare for thirty minutes. Their own thoughts, which they can’t control, drive them nuts! Most cannot silence their internal dialogue at all, so naturally all kinds of thoughts are going through their conscious state while attempting to just simply stare at the wall. It gets so uncomfortable they flee the scene, and find some distracting thing or other to do. Drugs are bad mmmkay! TV is even worse!
So here we have proof that we are not in control of which thoughts are coming into our consciousness. If we can’t even control our own thoughts, why would we ever believe we have control of anything else?
If we are not in control, and this exercise proves we are not; Well, then, who or what is? What is running the show? It’s obviously not our ego. Our ego is mostly only that voice we speak with internally. That would be like saying our talking voice is running the body. Raise your hand up, and close it repeatedly; doesn’t take any talking inner voice to make that happen! I doubt anyone reading this without looking it up could even tell us which muscles they use to stand up. Who is controlling their heartbeat? Something else is obviously in control.
Our inner speech has some control over our body, (I’ll be writing about this too), just like our ego has some control over our body; but it is not running the show. A little bit of control, isn’t actually control. It’s like riding on a train. Our “control” over the situation basically amounts to which way we look out the window.
Most call this organizing force God. The issue here is that even an atheist has to account for this controlling force. We can call it the Self, that works too. I prefer to mostly use the term Unconscious, because this works for an atheist, as well as a theist. No one who studies the psyche can discount that we have an unconscious force. That term is all encompassing. It takes the woo woo out of it because it’s seen as a more scientific term in this scientific culture. All high end spiritual jargon revolves around this fact.
I cannot answer this question for anyone: Who is deciding which thoughts get through? My saying the Self, or God, or the unconscious does, doesn’t actually answer the question, because so few even know what those things are. Here, now, they are just words on a screen.
It must be experienced first hand, and one will have to take up the inner work to figure it out. These words are not the thing; they are only a map of sorts. They are only a way of thinking, and we are not our thinking. That’s the real dilemma in this culture; most everyone fully identifies with that talking voice in their head. That voice simply is not who we actually are.
One will have to take up a spiritual path. Even atheism is a spiritual path. It’s still a path in an effort to figure out what is really going on. I doubt anyone reading this isn’t interested, at least a little, in what’s really going on, or they’d never have made it this far down the page.
Since I’m just a dumb white boy from Missouri, with no degrees, or awards, or fancy titles; let’s take it from someone with all of those things. She too, has a way with the words. It’s real magick! Marie-Louise von Franz was a true genius.
The reason I defined these terms, is because as one reads this, it can easily be seen how we can interchange these three words in this work. Unlike most of these Jungians, my career isn’t on the line for talking about God.
Simply replace the words as you please, and it will still be saying the same exact thing. Maybe a person doesn’t like this idea of Self, but prefers God. Or maybe a person doesn’t like either of those terms; then use the unconscious in their place. Regardless one will get the same exact information.
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From The Problem of the Puer Aeternus by Marie-Louise von Franz:
When the Self and the ego come together and get in touch with each other, who is wounded? As soon as they come together, both are wounded because to get in touch with the ego is a partial damage to the Self, just as it is a partial damage to the ego to be in touch with the Self. The two cannot meet without damaging each other….One way in which it is damaged is that instead of being a potential wholeness, it becomes a partial reality; in part, it becomes real within the individuated person--in the realizing actions and words of the person. That is a restriction for the Self and its possibilities. The ego, however, is wounded because something greater breaks into its life….Which is why Jung says that it means tremendous suffering to get in touch with the process of individuation. It causes a great wound because, put simply, we are robbed of the capacity for arranging our own lives according to our own wishes.
If we take the unconscious and the process of individuation seriously, we can no longer arrange our own lives. For instance, we think we would like to go somewhere and the dream says No, so we have to give up the idea. Sometimes it is all right, but sometimes such decisions are very annoying. To be deprived of an evening out, or a trip, is not so bad, but there are more serious matters where we greatly want something which is suddenly vetoed by the unconscious. We feel broken and crucified, caught in a trap or imprisoned, nailed against the cross. With your whole heart and mind you want to do something, and the unconscious vetoes it.
In such moments there is naturally an experience of intense suffering, which is due to the meeting of the Self. But the Self suffers just as much, because it is suddenly caught in the actuality of an ordinary human life.
That is why, in this connection, Jung refers to the saying of Christ in the Acts of John, in the Apocrypha. Christ stands in the middle of the dancing apostles and says, “It is your human suffering that I want to suffer.” That is the most simple way to put it. If it is not in touch with a human being, the divine figure has no suffering. It longs to experience human suffering--not only longs for human suffering, but causes it. Man would not suffer if he were not connected with something greater… (pg. 113)
Question: Would you say that suffering, if accepted, could become a medium of communication with the Self?
That depends on whether it is accepted in the right way, because if it is accepted with resignation, it does not work. Many people accept their suffering, but with a tinge of resignation. They put up with it, and then it does not help. It must be a positive acceptance, and I would say that you can only get the meaning if you accept. So really it generally works out as an endless struggle and then a moment of grace, where suddenly one can accept it and the meaning dawns upon one. One could not even say which comes first. Sometimes it is the meaning and then the acceptance, or one makes up one’s mind to accept it and then at that moment the meaning becomes clear. But it is strangely interwoven. (Pages 114-115)
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Dear Friends, this book can be purchased at innercitybooks.net
These major corporations, like Amazon already have enough money nowadays. Support the publisher directly. It’s good for the soul!
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The defining point here is there being a difference between one who asks to be what they were born to be, and one who is living life via their ego. Once one makes a conscious connection to the Self, God, the Unconscious; life becomes a different thing. It is no longer their own.
We all suffer regardless.
One of the more painful examples of this in my life is that I always wanted a family. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much effort I put in; it always failed. I put my entire Will into trying to get a family, and I have been denied every time. I just wanted the family that I never had as a child. That is a trademark of a Puer, wanting something lost.
Well, having a family just isn’t in the cards for me. All I was ever doing was adding more suffering to the suffering that already existed in my life trying to get back something that I’d lost. Thinking I could somehow get this family I never had just made my suffering worse.
The real trick is the ego work of positively accepting this about life. We can’t avoid suffering. No simple thing that.
