"I of my own knowledge…"

I included this exchange in my forthcoming  Hemingway on Hemingway.

Legitimate Suffering and Mental Illness

Sunday, August 8, 2010, 5 AM. Just spent most of an hour posting [on my website] a couple of conversations from May…. It was interesting to read the pieces from May 24 and 25. I had forgotten that it was from Carl Jung that I first got the concept that Hemingway represented a complete man, that his great attractiveness to people stemmed from his wholeness. Obviously that didn’t prevent him from experiencing and ultimately succumbing to serious personality problems, but it does change the picture. All right, so here we go. Dr. Jung, I have been using a quotation of yours as a part of my signature in e-mails for some time, but only yesterday — at your prompting? — did it occur to me that I didn’t quite understand it. It rings true intuitively but it could do with some explanation. “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” What is “legitimate suffering,” and for that matter what is mental illness, and how are they thus so intimately connected?

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I feel like saying, “here I am again, back from the dead!” More to the point, I’m back from last revisions (I hope!) to Hemingway on Hemingway: Afterlife Conversations on His Life, His Work and the Myth, my seventh book, which is to be published later this year by Rainbow Ridge Books, the imprint owned by Bob Friedman, my old partner at Hampton Roads.

I  suppose the easiest way to explain what I’m doing is just to append the Introduction.

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By way of Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC), this discussion with Carl Jung earlier this week. Sometimes you play with an idea for some time, thinking you understand it, and suddenly realize (with a little help from your friends) that it’s bigger and more important than you had thought it.

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A. I. Allenby visited Carl Jung soon after World War II. This excerpt from his description of his visit is from the book C. G. Jung Speaking, page 158.

Another time Jung reverted to the problem of self-doubt, using a further example by way of illustration. “Our needs and desires are always active,” he said. “Trouble occurs only if they are active in the unconscious, if we do not take them consciously in hand so as to give them a definite form and direction. If we refuse to do this we are dragged along by them to become their victim. Then they are like a sledge rushing downhill snow, with no one at the steering-ropes. You must place yourself firmly at the steering-ropes, not hang on at the back or, worse, be unwilling to take the ride at all — that only lands you in panic. Our unconscious energies give momentum to our journey through life and, if we direct our course, our actions will have strength; we may even sense that God is behind us.”

Thursday, May 5, 2011

8 AM. Well, guys, it occurs to me that what you are giving me applies to interpersonal relationships in the body, no less. We all deal with a certain combination of factors that we elicit, and someone else dealing with that person elicits a slightly different combination – or even a radically different combination. If I and a woman are in love, I may never experience the sharp side of her tongue that others experience all too often – until suddenly I do, and the honeymoon is over.

The analogy is close enough to be instructive, provided that you realize that she herself is not dealing with an unchanging unit. People in bodies, especially – but out of bodies, too – tend to think themselves exceptions to rules that govern everyone else. Or rather, they don’t think of the rules when thinking of themselves. It isn’t that they consciously decide “I’m different.” Rather, they never put themselves into a context in which “they” themselves disappear and reappear, according to mood and circumstance, like illusions on celluloid.

Good to see that we don’t become any more perfect on the other side. That’s a tendency I had, and many others still have – to think, once out of the body, perfection.

No, but it’s more like, once out of the body, what you are is a hell of a lot harder to change than when in the body.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

5 AM. All right, Papa, I am ready if you are. Michael thanks you for your reading on things. I take it you had more to say about sex, as opposed to the relations between the sexes.

Huge subject. If I were trying to write my autobiography from this perspective — which I am not — I’d have a lot I’d need to say about sex and my lifetime, for of course it was an important thing for me, but — as you might ask yourself about yourself, or ask anybody about themselves — why?

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So You Think Your Life Was Wasted – Part Three (7)

[I had been discussing Reconstruction with Claude Bowers, author of The Tragic Era, whose take on things differed considerably from mine. And I had been sending out the transcriptions day by day to a list of friends. Then one day I got a massive shock: There I was talking to Carl Jung.]

Thursday March 9, 2006

9 a.m. All right, Mr. Bowers.  Hard to really get going this morning. All right, shoot.

You can see from your emails [received] that the material is meeting response. This ought to suggest to you that a significant part of your national story is going untold. That is, if any one point of view is systematically suppressed for whatever reason, tensions build up – for the unconscious knows and the conscious does not, and it is a great drain of energy to maintain a state of not-knowing if you once invest in so doing. This is a major source of much of the craziness in your politics and public life. It is particularly disruptive when not one stream but many are being suppressed, for this means that different rivers of consciousness – call it that for the moment – suppress different parts while others elevate precisely those parts (suppressing others that they themselves do not wish to see). Hence your rivers of consciousness – that is, your factions, your ideologies – do not describe the same world, and meaningful exchange and compromise become ever less possible.

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This completes the second section, “Shaping Ourselves,” of my projected book to be called So You Think Your Life Was Wasted. Next week we’ll start on Part Three, “Society and the Individual.”

Life and Achievement

Friday, August 10, 2007

5:45 a.m. somehow frittered away three quarters of an hour doing — what?? Story of my life, that.

Joyce, where do I go from here? If psychic powers and abilities aren’t an end in themselves — and clearly they aren’t, any more than anything else is — and if no form of external achievement is my focus –

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“If you missed some chances, so what?”

At the cost of some slight embarrassment, I offer this for those whose life situation it may echo, who may take encouragement from it.

August 9, 2007

Joseph, my friend, long time no see, but I just got the sense that I ought to contact you.

You will notice that you are listening repeatedly to the Paul Potts album and finding tears in your eyes when he sings “Time to say goodbye.” I don’t think it’s because that’s the only line in English, do you?

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It is precisely my objection to politics and ideology, that they encourage people to look outside themselves for the source of life’s problems. But, as Jung in his wisdom told this reporter, each of us has within us Mr. Hyde. Our job is to learn what we are

From an interview with the English journalist Frederick Sands in 1955.

“It seems to me we have reached the limit of our evolution — the point from which we can advance no further. Man started from an unconscious state and has ever striven for greater consciousness. The development of consciousness is the burden, the suffering, and the blessing of mankind. Each new discovery leads to greater consciousness, and the path along which we are going is merely an extension of it. This inevitably calls for greater responsibility and enforces a great change in ourselves. We must draw conclusions from what we know and discover, and not take everything for granted.

“Man has come to be man’s worst enemy. It is a clash between man and God, in which man’s Luciferan genius has produced in the H-bomb the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient God could. We must begin to learn about man until every Jekyll can see his Hyde.”