Dear Russ, Paco, and John,
Russ, I am so happy to learn that the crows are seeding our FUTURE with writing, a certain kind of writing, that is — the kind that tells what needs telling!
Does the writer of GAME OF THRONES tell us what needs telling when he "reveals a crow who overcomes the arrow of time”?
And, if so, does that mean the crow has overcome the power of the left brain? After all, linear time is a construct of the left brain. If a massive stroke incapacitates our left hemisphere we lose all sense of past, present, and future. In the right brain we experience an eternal NOW that sees the WHOLE. The left brain is designed to ‘stand apart’ from direct experience in order to master it (while the right brain is IN it). The left brain is made to separate, divide, & fragment wholes into parts in order to manipulate & control them. It also forms "categories” in which to put the fragmented parts, again for easy handling.
The boy in GAME OF THRONES has to be crippled before he can shape-shift into an all-seeing crow (who sees with the eyes of the right brain). And it’s his future warrior (the one his culture expects him to become) that is crippled. Crow and Warrior are incompatible. Is that the choice awaiting us? Or is there a way for the crow to inform the warrior? If we all (males & females) house both worlds inside our heads is a third path opening to us?
Paco, is it possible that the “Unprecedented” offers us a chance for the two sides of our brain to work in harmony? To form a new integration — one we never dreamed of — before? Or are the two worlds forever opposed? I find your idea of wearing a comedy-mask to avoid brain-shutdown intriguing. It corresponds with the whimsy of Russ’ detective as a way to put the fragmented pieces back together — or John Woodward’s love. I’ve had my own bout with brain-shutdown as a result of staggering questions about the overwhelming disasters out there. I feel they must at least be faced, if not solved. I never thought of this as a “nameless, new syndrome”, but, oh, my, god, it is, isn’t it!
The thought of our facing a time of SOLUTIO or LIQUIDIFACTION reminds me of a description of “Wisdom" in the book of Sirach, where she says, “I cover the earth as a mist. Alone I encompassed the vault of heaven and traversed the depth of the WATERY ABYSS.” Are we entering the watery abyss all over again? And, if so, will it be our end or a chance to learn a profound new wisdom?
Russ, you use the elements of Wind & Water in your detective method. In order to be drawn to the ANOMALY and allow the connections to take place between anomalies (& I have to say, the image of a left & right hemisphere as two anomalies we think we know, rushed in) — for this to happen you are “blown” (wind/spirit) from one clue to another. Or they “fly” in to you to WARN that everything is melting (once more into a watery abyss?), and we must prepare for a phase of TOTAL MELTING/LIQUIDATION/SOLUTIO.
Russ, I remember you telling me in the 1980s to pay attention to the increasing abstractions of things. How we’ve gone from the barter of physical objects for other physical objects, to the exchange of those objects for more abstract gold, silver, & copper coins, to paper money backed by real gold, to credit cards with holograms, to … ???
Or, as you put it, John, there has been an ever increasing abstraction away from the “essence”, “substance” and “substrate of things". And the “scouring” (what a great word) goes on! Is it too late to re-embody those three words? Is that part of what the “Unprecedented” is coming to bring us? Or is the incarnation phase — with its dense energy allowing us a physical playground to enjoy or destroy ourselves — at an end?
ECOTASTROPHE does have a ring to it. I especially like its sense of “having been torn apart and then stitched back together as if it had gone through a battle".
Such a crazy, upside down world. A crime is something against the law, but whose law … what law? Look at the Supreme Court right now!
Yes, whimsy, a comedy mask, love — the dream spilling over into this life/dream to take a more active part in whatever is "Approaching".
Love to you three for not giving up and holding onto the fun and joy of life in the midst of our forseeable melting. I can just hear the Wicked Witch of the West crying, “I’m melting! I’m melting!”
Merrilee
Hi Merrilee,
Thank you for your fulsome response. That was quite an outpouring of fertile musings and inquiries.
Since a portion of those musings were addressed to me, particularly the left-brain/right-brain issue, I’ll direct my focus to that.
But perhaps I should first preface my reply with this observation: I didn’t start out as a well-adjusted left-brain whiz, burning through math and science classes in college. I was a gifted-but-wounded Romance language major struggling to keep up with my left-brained classmates. Then all those early efforts to conform to this U.S. society, were shattered after my face was smashed up and I lost my right eye in Mexico, in 1963. (I wrote a book about the experience, and how it altered me over the decades: The Paraclete of Caborca. It’s available on Amazon. I was still twenty at the time of the accident.)
Then, years later, in 1972-73, just after I had built a bronze foundry and had begun casting bronze sculptures, I also began recording my dreams and studying Jung. Soon, I had read through Psychological Types, cover to cover, among other of Jung’s CW volumes, and it was quite evident that I was an introverted intuitive-feeling type. In the half-century since then, I have never had occasion to deviate from that diagnosis.
The turmoil I went through after the “eye-accident,” resembled how I recently described coining the term “ecotastrophe,” which you commented upon: I too was violently torn apart, then stitched back together afterwards, rather like those old shamanic initiations Eliade wrote about. Right-brain stuff.
As I recall, I first began reading about the left-right hemispheres during the 1970s. But it wasn’t until I got ahold of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind, some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, that it really hit me. I read it twice. If I weren’t so old today, and had more time, I would love to read it again!
At the time, Jaynes’s brilliant intuitions opened up to me one particular series of dreams I had had. It was almost as if Jaynes had written a primer on those dreams for me. And with his profound insights to do the heavy-lifting, those dreams taught me some radical lessons about the relations between life, death, and reality. I could never think about such matters, the same way as I had before.
Another thing that Jaynes and those dreams brought home to me was the realization that I had always—from birth—been singled out by such a strange, introverted intuitive-feeling typology. In other words, I would always be an “outcast” or at least an “oddball,” relatively speaking—one of the 1-1/2% to 2% of Americans with that unusual typology. Would I ever be comfortable with that? Eventually, yes, to a degree; but it took a while.
My typology, combined with the eye-accident, meant that I could never completely identify with the left-brain dominance of patriarchal American culture and society. The “accident” took care of that impulse. And after fifty years of tending to dreams I am more than ever who and what I always was.
Jung’s sub-title for CW6, Psychological Types, is “The Psychology of Individuation,” the idea being that individuation calls for a rotation through the different functions, depending on what is called for. I have not finished that work, by any means, but at least I am constantly aware of it. I learned that typologies require tending and development as much as dreams do.
With that much as background, we arrive at this question of yours:
“Paco, is it possible that the “Unprecedented” offers us a chance for the two sides of our brain to work in harmony?”
Based only on my experience, but bolstered by intuitions and feelings, I would say that the “Unprecedented” not only offers us a chance to use both hemispheres of the brain, but it may just be demanding that we do so. Easier said than done.
Imagine that you are working with a new patient who tests as an extraverted thinking/sensation type, and is well-adapted within a left-brain professional setting. What will it take for that person to become familiar with the Shadow? As you know, such questions cannot be answered across the board. It’s part of the exquisite delicacy of analytical work.
I could go on, but won’t at the moment. My apologies for the length of this reply, but I was having trouble “restraining the horses,” who want to gallop all at once. I know I’ve left lots unsaid.
Thanks again, Merrilee.
Paco
Hi Merrilee, good to hear from you again and read your response here. I am drawn most strongly to this passage you wrote to Paco: “Paco, is it possible that the ‘Unprecedented’ offers us a chance for the two sides of our brain to work in harmony? To form a new integration?”
Several years ago I had a dream which both scared the hell out of me and prompted a lot of writing, but remains no less a mystery to me. The dream shows me “under a tree. I lie there quietly. I see a skull. It is mine but how can that be? As I turn it slowly in my hands I marvel at how at one time my brain was in there. Now the time is close. I feel my breath going and I ask to be taken under the tree to go quietly… (then a following dream …) I decide to kill myself. A bullet in the head, but it does not kill me only knocks out brain functions. So now I am alive but in a very different way.” I took note, Merrilee, of your phrase, “brain-shutdown” too, in this context.
My dream suggests that this being “alive but in a very different way” does not seem to involve the brain and its hemispheres at all! In fact the dream explicitly references death of brain function altogether as a precursor to this very different way of being. This dream counts for me as relevant to “what the Unprecedented is coming to bring us” as you ask. I had the dream in 2011 and my dreams have been occupied with my brain ever since, leading to the surgery you know of in 2019. And that includes the great reality of death. I simply did not know and still don’t but am more willing to be taught by that 2011 dream. I am encouraged by Jung’s understanding (in Zarathustra lectures) about how an era can be bedevilled by reality questions and imagined solutions that remain nonetheless unsolved. Psyche simply moves on and loses interest in the questions (like what happened with Good and Evil—just dropped away as a burning issue and has now become historical).
I am actually discovering that a whole lot of “burning questions” that have driven my writing for so many decades likewise seem to be just dropping away. And so I wait…
Cheers, John