the sacred paradox

I hope I find some other time to blog fully about this; but for the moment, I'm just sharing what for me, has been enlightening to the point of tears:

When the unstoppable bullet hits the impenetrable wall, we find the religious experience. It is precisely here that one will grow. Jung once said, "Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next." The ego is fashioned like the metal between the hammer and the anvil.

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Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put the ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realise that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, "Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out," the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally... the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man's life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.

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To consent to paradox is to consent to suffering that which is greater than the ego. The religious experience lies exactly at that point of insolubility where we feel we can proceed no further. This is an invitation to that which is greater than one's self.

~ Owning Your Own Shadow, Robert Johnson

 ...we must make a shadow, or there would be no culture; then we must restore the wholeness of the personality that was lost in the cultural ideals, or we will live in a state of dividedness that grows more and more painful throughout our evolution. Generally, the first half of life is dedicated to the cultural process -- gaining one's skills, raising a family, disciplining one's self in a hundred different ways; the second half of life is devoted to restoring the wholeness (making holy) of life. One might complain that this is a senseless round trip except that the wholeness at the end is conscious while it was unconscious and childlike at the beginning. This evolution, though it seems gratuitous, is worth all the pain and suffering that it costs. The only disaster would be getting lost halfway through the process and not finding our completion.

~ Owning Your Own Shadow, by Robert Johnson

a vertical reality

 I finally finished a book of my brother's that I have been hogging, and the final quote in the book put me to tears, despite most of the book being really dry and factual:

We allow ourselves to be blown by the winds because we do know what we want: our hearts know it, even if our thoughts are sometimes slow to follow -- but in the end they do catch up with our hearts and then we think we have made a decision.

~ Leopold Weiss, from 'The Road To Mecca', quoted in Apostate, by Joram van Klaveren

...Dr Umar Faruq Abd-Allah (who) spoke of a horizontal universe, a worldview in which matters are explained solely by comparing them to those that appear to be similar to the object of research. In such a reality there is no purpose, there are no absolutes. Everything is subjective and there exists no absolute Truth. Within it, any metaphysical expression is irrelevant, absurd even. This is the worldview of the postmodern West. I call it macro-nihilism. Opposite to that, he places the earlier mentioned vertical universe. Within the framework, one also looks 'upwards' to the philosophical principles and fundamental points of departure. By inserting the vertical aspect, a proverbial tent arises, a building structure with a benchmark and definitive reality. Human perception of reality, by way of previously mentioned 'first principles', points to that one Reality, God.