INTERESTING TIMES

It's been decades since I read Siddhartha but it had a strong effect on me.  In my youth I was a philosophy major and a seeker, trying on different religious and spiritual approaches.  Eventually I arrived at myself, at the now, at the goals of non-attachment, awareness, compassion, adaptability.  I adopted bits and pieces of many philosophies, most notably Buddhism and Hinduism, without becoming a believer in reincarnation, heaven and hell, or any of the other dogmas.  New age religion in the US is very much a groovified hand-me-down from the culture behind these religions, and reincarnation is the most common belief system I encounter among people who pretend that they are enlightened.  More appealing to me is the stark realism of the German philosophers.  "To exist is to be in the way".

In Demian Herman Hesse suggests that the truth is not any of these religious structures, the truth is something far simpler, but harder to live.  It is not easy to go through this world stripped of comforting beliefs.  Hesse says we create gods and then we fight with them.  Many of his ideas are reminiscent of Nieztsche, for whom I've always had a soft spot.  He is the German philosopher who said "God is dead" and pissed off generations of religious people.

The protagonist of Demian is a young man named Sinclair, and his story begins when he is only 10 years old.  He is early at becoming aware.  Demian is a character who helps him, initially simply to avoid a predatorial character, and later to begin to think critically and to trust in himself.  When they are schoolmates Demian suggests alternate interpretations of Bible stories, especially the one about Cain and Able, and the mark of Cain.  By the end of the book I was thinking that I too must bear that mark, because I have never been a joiner, never been willing or able to submit to authority or dogma.

This book would make excellent reading for a teen who is beginning to sort out a path through all the competing authorities.  It does not provide a blueprint, but it does say that you must find your own path, and that it won't be easy or comfortable.  When Hesse first released this small book in 1919 it was in pieces in a magazine, and anonymously.  Why didn't he want his name attached?  Why didn't someone recognize his voice and thoughts, when they are so distinctly his?  Perhaps it is because Demian is also a commentary on the sadness of war, on the fruitlessness of giving lives for some shared ideal which might be bunk.  Some of the things he writes harken to the Jungian concept of collective consciousness, for example the shared premonitions of the onset of world war one.  Do we really share a consciousness, or do we simply share some of the same inputs, and arrive at some of the same intuitive conclusions?  Jung and Hesse did.

The most fruitful thing a person can do is to become themselves, I agree with Hesse on this point.  To be with people who are also themselves, this is a very satisfying thing.

Jung thought that "civilized man...is in danger of losing all contact with the world of instinct" and this loss "is largely responsible for the pathological condition of contemporary culture".

No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honour, it has no word to keep.
--Carl Gustav Jung during an interview with H. R. Knickerbocker in 1939

I recommend this book.
By Dorothy Bryant
For everyone.

In the history of psychology, Freud wished to squeeze everyone into his Oedipus myth theory wherein the child falls in love with the parent of the opposite sex and, out of jealousy, wishes to eliminate the parent of the same sex. Jung responded that this was Freud's own personal psychology, which he projected onto all of humanity. In Greco-Roman and other mythologies, there are dozens of other archetypal myths describing child-parent relationships that have no connection whatsoever with the mythic pattern of Oedipus. Have these other myths no descriptive and diagnostic value? If so, why not? Freud also believed religion was a pathological illusion and, with typical disdain, he treated it as such. More than likely he was in revolt against his own past personal delusions of a religious nature.

-Eugene Pascal, Ph.L., from "Jung to Live By".

Freud is just an old Santa Clause.
-Margaret Mead

"'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through each kid
Not an Ego was stirring, not even an Id.
The hang ups were hung by the chimney with care
In the hopes that St. Sigmung Freud soon would be there.
The children in scream class had knocked off their screams,
Letting Jungian archetypes dance through their dreams,
And Mama with her bra off and I on her lap
Had just settled down when a vast thunderclap
Boomed and from my unconscious rose such a chatter
As Baptist John's teeth made on Solomon's platter.
Away from my darling I flew with a flash,
Tore strait to the bathroom and threw up, and - smash!
Through the windowpane hurtled and bounced on the floor
A big brick - holy smoke, it was hard to ignore.
As I heard further thunderclaps- lo and behold-
Came a little psychiatrist eighty years old.
He drove a wheeled couch pulled by five fat psychoses
And the gleam in his eye might induce hypnosis.
Like subliminal meanings his coursers they came
And consulting his notebook, he called them by name:
"Now Schizo, now Fetish, now Fear of Castration!
On Paranoia! on Penis-Fixation!
Ach, yes, that big brick through your glass I should mention:
Just a simple device to compel your attention.
You need, boy, to be in an analyst's power:
You talk, I take notes - fifty shillings an hour."
A bag full of symbols he'd slung on his back;
He looked smug as a junk-peddler laden with smack
Or a shrewd politician soliciting votes
And his chinbeard was stiff as a starched billygoat's
Then laying one finger aside of his nose,
He chortled, "What means this? Mein Gott, I suppose
There's a meaning in fingers, in candles und wicks,
In mouseholes und doughnut holes, steeples und sticks.
You see, it's the imminent prospect of sex
That makes all us humans run round till we're wrecks,
Und each innocent infant since people began
Wants to bed with his mama und kill his old man;
So never you fear that you're sick as a swine-
Your hangups are every sane person's und mine.
Even hamlet was hot for his mom - there's the rub;
Even Oedipus Clubfoot was one of the club.
Hmmm, that's humor unconscious." He gave me rib-pokes
And for almost two hours explained phallic jokes.
Then he sprang to his couch, to his crew gave a nod,
And away they all flew like the concept of God.
In the worst of my dreams I can hear him shout still,
"Merry Christmas to all! In the mail comes my bill."
-X. J. Kennedy