I have just come across this great quote from Carl Jung, the founder of psychoanalytical psychology – someone I am a big fan of. I thought I would share it here as it is very much this issue I am hoping the spiritual mountain days will begin to address in each of us.
“Through scientific understanding our world has become dehumanised. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of god, nor is lightening his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man’s life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom and no mountain still harbours a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants and animals. He no longer has a bush-soul identifying him with a wild animal. His immediate communication with nature is gone forever, and the emotional energy it generated has sunk into the unconscious. This enormous loss is compensated by the symbols of our dreams. They bring up our original nature, its instincts its peculiar thinking. Unfortunately, one would say, they express their contents in the language of nature, which is strange and incomprehensible to us. ” C. J. Jung
We can address this loss to an extent by spending conscious time in nature – time where we can both explore our inner world and become aware of the reflections of ourselves in the outer natural world. We can begin to build on our relationship with nature such that we can heal and understand ourselves more fully.
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Hello,
I like the Jung quote you reflect on in this post. (I, too, am quite a fan of Jung and his works.) Reading it reminded me of a quote I did some reflecting on a few days ago. In an interview, “The Magic of Literacy & the Spell of the Sensuous”, Dr. David Abram, a cultural ecologist and philosopher, states the following:
“We come down in the morning, open the newspaper, focus our eyes on these little bits of ink, and they start speaking to us. And, we enter into this rich, magical field of conversations happening at other times and other places. This is an intensely concentrated form of animism, but it is animism none-the-less. As outrageous as a talking stone, or a talking spider. We do it with our own scratches and scripts. Our ancestors did it with leaves, spider webs, tracks of animals, clouds, twigs, boulders…. [T]his new magic we’re engaged in has effectively eclipsed all the other forms of participation in which the human organism once engaged.”
Abram says that we have developed a culture in which nature no longer speaks to us, but the page does. “The more we pay attention to the world around us… the more our experience is filled with expressive, meaningful stories to be learned from.”
“[I]t’s very obvious to me, for instance… that only when the alphabet comes into a culture, when a phonetic alphabet arrives, only then does that culture get this odd notion that language is an exclusively human property, or possession. And, the rest of the land falls mute.”
Being in nature is vital. I think much of who we are has fallen mute with the rest of the land, and learning to listen again is key to reconnecting. As humans, in general, we need to do some serious work when it comes to our communication skills with nature.
I happened upon your blog through your comment on Weather Thor’s Day. Thank you for linking it, it’s been a pleasure to read.
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Thank you for your kind words. That is an interesting quote – not something I had considered – how the written word has become our symbolic conversation, in the way the natural world used to be for many cultures, we can indeed benefit from recognising the language and ‘news’ the natural world has to share with us. Thank you for sharing this with us here 😀