Reproduced by permission of GreenSpirit and the author from GreenSpirit Journal, Vol 10.1, 2008, pp 23-25

“At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself . ... At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world’s and the psyche’s hinterland.” C G Jung[1].

“If God needs us as regulators of his incarnation and his coming into consciousness, it is because in his boundlessness he exceeds all the bounds that are necessary for becoming conscious. Becoming conscious means continual renunciation because it is an ever deepening concentration.” C G Jung[2].

I wonder if I may ask you, the reader, not to continue any further now but, instead, read the two statements above again, pausing between them, and notice, if you have not already done so, what happens in your body when you read the first and then when you read the second. Of course, something may not happen in your body; you may see a new image in your mind’s eye, or hear a sound and be unsure whether it is within or without, or you may receive both statements in stillness, or ...? Whatever is happening for you, I invite you to repeat this process once or twice before reading on.

I am wondering now if you encounter anything similar to me, even if in different forms: When I read the first, my breathing expands, my body relaxes and I feel warm, happy and delighted. When I read the second, my chest constricts, I feel prickles up and down my spine and I want to cry. I also struggle to know if I understand it. Then, when I go back and read the first, I don’t understand that. I can no longer connect with the words and no images or feelings come to me, my eyes are almost falling, slipping over the surface of the text as one might skate over ice. I fear I have lost that previous experience and will never access it again. But, with perseverance, I do and gradually relax again, slowly coming back to expansion, warmth, happiness and delight. Perhaps your response has been the exact reverse and it is the second statement which brings you expansion and the first, discomfort?

In many ways, being a guest editor of and writer in this Spring edition of the journal has evoked an experience much like this. Connections...delights...collisions between opposites ... fears ... contractions ... tears ... expansions ... delights ... connections ... I want now to reflect upon what emerged for me out of Jung’s two statements and what they might mean for us at this time.

What a richness of material we received in response to our call in the winter journal for contributions relating to ecopsychology! Chris, Don and I desired deeply to write for this issue too, so it was no surprise and yet a terrible to shock to realise that we had too much for the available space. With the passionate involvement of every author in their creative product so palpable, how could we make the decisions as to what to include, what to leave out and what to cut into? We simply did not know how to address the competition for space between the three longest articles, Tania’s, Isabel’s and the article I had first submitted. With a groan, Chris named it: “What possessed us to volunteer to be both editors of and writers in the same journal?”

There ensued a painful but fruitful journey. I am writing this at its other end and it genuinely arises out of our process. With the support of Don and Chris, I offer it as a meditation on ecopsychology.

The two contributions that became the pivot of this experience could be considered, in simple terms, opposite in character: Isabel’s, addressing the structure and dynamics of the brain and examining Matthew Fox’s Four Ways through an ecopsychology lens, and mine, the longest by far, an evocation of imaginative processes and a consideration of how our dominant culture’s increasing crushing of imagination in favour of cognition fuels our consumerism and violent treatment of the Earth.

For a short, intense period, in a range of ways, there came different proposals that I should edit mine down. Somewhat identified with what I had written, this felt like a live demonstration of what I had described in the article, the collective attack on and devaluing of the imagination. It was extremely painful. I protested: “I will not be the only one to make the sacrifice!” For, if others also cut theirs, I could keep more of mine.

When Don, as senior editor, took me seriously and asked us three to reduce our contributions proportionately, Tania agreed and Isabel withdrew. In the face of Isabel’s withdrawal, I could do neither. I felt utterly furious and imagined I was not alone. Embarking upon the year’s ecopsychology programme ahead of us with this degree of conflict, the stakes were high. In almost every way, the dilemma and conflict that we were in encapsulates the immense difficulties of our time: real and valid competition between different organisms for finite and diminishing resources. As the main cause of pressure on the living systems of the Earth, it is the human species that needs to make the sacrifices to ensure the biodiversity of the planet not only survives but returns to good health, if this is possible. As the main source of pressure on the available space within this journal issue, should I have volunteered alone to reduce my contribution?

I still don’t know the answer to this. Sometimes it seems a reasonable expectation and at others I ponder the meaning of biodiversity and how it relates to human beings. It seems to me that there may come a point for each of us when we reach the limit of what we feel able to give up for the greater good. How can we know if we are holding on to something that we need or that we desire? We may genuinely search ourselves and genuinely not discover. Conversely, how can any of us know if what we are prepared to give up is needed by the system as a whole and is manifesting through us because of our particular personality shape, talents, and vulnerabilities as well as strengths? Clearly, a path is to be walked here between humility and grandiosity. Every one of these options presents potential seductions, depending upon who we are, what our life experiences have been and what fierce desires and hungers are consciously and unconsciously operating within us at any given moment. And if we deny ourselves our desires and seductions, we surely are missing the point and generating other problems. It is all complex, fraught and intrinsically unknowable.

Now, when it is becoming more and more vital that we co-operate and share, how inclusive we can be will determine our potential for success. How we respond when we meet something or someone radically different from ourselves is key: if we anticipate them being ‘like us’, we usually feel relaxed and welcoming; if not, we may fear their superiority or believe in our own superiority and, either way, we are likely to experience pressure which is hard to withstand. I think there may have been a taste of this when reading the two quotations at the start; their quality and sense were so completely different from each other as to feel incompatible and individually we may have recognised either one as ‘like me’.

I have written before in the GreenSpirit Journal[3] of what can happen within our minds when we are under such stress, according to models I draw upon. Using the infinity symbol as an image, I described an unconscious process of splitting into opposites and polarising, which means identifying with one or other of the extremities. Another way of thinking about this is that, under duress, we may collapse into very small, fixed places in our personalities and minds. Strangely, whether we are feeling inferior or superior, the underlying quality of smallness and fixedness is the same, perhaps because what we are craving is certainty and control. The sometimes unattainable art is to expand again, to gain access to the fluid qualities which can help us to listen, reflect and move; in effect, to come back into relationship. Jung’s description of being himself at Bollingen provides a glimpse of what ecopsychology proposes, that experiences of our interconnectedness enable us to know ourselves in our most expansive state and be secure in our wholeness, paradoxically ‘I’ and ‘not I’. Sometimes, it is being out in Nature that will bring reunification which mediates the smallness and fixedness; sometimes, it is working within human processes, alone and with others, which brings us to enough enlargement that we are tipped into reunification with Nature — it suddenly becomes available as if we have reached the edge of our human forms and extended beyond. At times during our ecopscyhology explorations, members of our group have been enfolded in such states, always healing, grounding and restoring.

Yet, our interconnectedness with Gaia, our being expressions of the living Earth herself, brings further complication. Our dominant culture’s loss of our interconnectedness- wisdom, our giving up our conscious relationship with this deepest level of reality, lies at the core of the disintegration of our world. It seems possible to me that our very interconnectedness with her prevents us from attaining reunification quickly enough and on the required scale. For, in touch even unknowingly with her woundedness that we ourselves are causing, an unbearable burden is brought to bear on our minds which have the tendency to split and polarise when under pressure. As the Earth’s systems unravel, it becomes more and more likely that we will polarise into extremities or collapse into fixedness and, therefore, less and less likely that we will behave towards each other and the rest of life on our beautiful and precious home planet expansively and inclusively; rather, we are in great danger of an intensifying vicious circle. This is how I understand the occasional polarisations I have experienced when with ecopsychologists, ecoactivists and ecospiritualists, despite the loving, conscious connections between us.

How to respond?

Deep in meditation, I came to experience Isabel’s withdrawal from the journal as an extinction of the Isabel species from our journal ecosystem. My fury turned to devastation at our collective failure. Though I didn’t know what had caused the failure I had a sudden intimation that it was something to do with the second statement by Jung above.

I reach for this statement often when I am in turmoil. It is odd that I do because I yearn for it, turn to it and then discover that I don’t understand it! Yet, without fail, it helps me. I believe it functions as an archetypal poem that simply enters my body and infuses my being. This time, I found something new. In ways I cannot adequately convey, when I read the last sentence, “Becoming conscious means continual renunciation because it is an ever deepening concentration”, I felt a downward pressure upon and inside me. With more meditation, I associated this with the collapsing I have discussed above and understood that Divinity’s desire for embodiment provides an additional ingredient in our proneness to collapse. There is more than a necessary defence hidden within the collapse; there is inspiration. As I breathed in, there came forgiveness of the whole situation and a flowing of love. I wanted to write a new article, this one as it has turned out. There also came into my mind a photograph I had seen the day before on the internet when I was looking for something else. It is included here.

Soon after, Don and I had a long, loving conversation and, soon after that, another took place between Chris, Don and I, after which Isabel was invited back and we are all delighted that she accepted. Critical in our reunification was the revelation that we had allowed our relationships with each other to drop away from the centre of our task — just as, in wider culture, Western humanity has allowed its relationship with the Earth to drop from its heart.

As I look around me at how modern collective life is being organised in this country, I can easily despair. It is as if there is an intention to create the worst possible conditions for ourselves, which call out our smallness rather than our greatness. I wonder how what I have described can help us to appreciate the power that becomes available from within and without when we take seriously that any instance may be a microcosm of our larger context. When Chris groaned at the impossible task we had given ourselves, I responded that we must achieve it — we must learn how to impact positively on the system we are in — for we have no way of leaving Earth. We can think of that positive impact as maintaining relatedness, however difficult, for it is this which feeds and strengthens our capacity to re-find our relativity to Gaia and each other. Such a mutually nourishing circle may break the other, vicious one. Mustn’t we try? So much is at risk, not least Nature’s longing for our reintegration into the larger scheme of things ...

References

1. Jung, C G Memories, Dreams and Reflections (Fontana Press 1993) p.252 and in Sabini, M The Earth has a Soul, the Nature Writings of C G Jung (North Atlantic Books 2005) p.14

2. Jung, C G C G Jung Letters 1975 Vol. 2 p.120 quoted in Edinger, E The New God Image (Chiron Publications 1996) p.97

3. White, Sandra. Musings from Hartham Common (GreenSpirit Journal), Winter 2006.

Sandra White works as a Jungian counsellor and an ecopsychologist and she is in preparation to become a Jungian analyst. She walks regularly on Hartham Common near her home, honours and celebrates the sacred in all life and is a member of the GreenSpirit Council.