Whenever I get bewildered or stuck, I like to look through Jung. He once wrote: “Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries which yet are one”. And he spent most of his career assisting those in the second half of life figuring out how to incandesce.
Uh, perfect timing.
“The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality.” Easy for him to say. How does one dig deep, take risks, and still be a responsible member of this species? I understand him to say that’s just it. One has to will a way to be comfortable living in those questions. “What work then, needs to be done?”
Or put another way, Jung defined neurosis as “suffering in search of meaning”. Or “it’s not so much that one has a complex, it’s that the complex has him.” And should one, a parent, not feel like taking up this great challenge he/she “should be conscious of the fact that they themselves are the principal causes of neurosis in their children”.
And it goes way back: “Together the patient and I address ourselves to the 2,000,000-year-old man that is in all of us. In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old man in us? In our dreams.”
Furthermore, I’m obviously interested in all aspects of neuroscience, its explication and promise. But I don’t think that science alone will ever completely demystify the living of a life.
“Scientific materialism has merely introduced a new hypostasis…It has give another name to the supreme principle of reality and has assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed an old thing. Whether you call the principle of existence “God”, “matter”, or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have simply changed s symbol.”
“The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for a terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city dweller. He lacks all contact with the life and breadth of nature.”
I’m going outside. Be right back. Well, maybe Monday…
The Subtle Landscape 
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