Friends of ours took their family to a resort over the Thanksgiving holidays and let everyone know how much fun they intended to have (and have been having since arriving) by emailing and posting photos of every part of the trip. I find there is nothing like a play-by-play account of the wanton spending of money to inspire envy in even the most enlightened individual, and so it was that I fell from the pious pinnacle of my stupa and became just human enough to adhere pejoratives such as “wanton” and “wasteful” to people whose integrity and good-heartedness I have heretofore had no reason to doubt.

I have never been to a resort over a holiday, you see; nor to Disneyworld or Disneyland or on a cruise or to a foreign country other than to adopt a child that we would then spend over $350,000 to raise, according to U.S. government statistics, while our friends all have the requisite 1.86 perfect children, none of whom came from countries that lack adequate resort facilities, much less require any sort of remedial help, orthodontia, or medical or psychological interventions.

My Facebook status that day stated that being jealous reminded me that I was human, and friends joked about how I needed to be reminded of my humanity. What I meant, though, was that I’m not much given to jealousy or covetousness, for I myself am regularly the object of other people’s projections of failure or success (as the case may be) and know that the reality of what it took to get here and what it takes to live here every day is not enviable or, on the other hand, regrettable because it’s my life: My life that I have chosen a million times and have built for myself over countless moments and which could not have been lived by anyone else.

What this means, of course, is that I chose to live this life. I’m not a victim of my own life, meaning that nobody put a gun to my head or isolated me in a cell or stretched me out for torture until I succumbed and agreed to marry my righteous but pig-headed husband, or have umpteen children, most of whom had already received life’s cruelest psychological, spiritual, and emotional wound in the first hours, weeks, months or years of life, or compelled me to do or be any of the things I regularly regret doing or being because the lives my neighbors live look so much more inviting for their novelty, ease, and ability to inspire envy in me.

It means, too, on a deeper level that when I say I am human, I mean that I’ve caught myself being human: fallen, falling short, less than godly, less than a goddess. I joked in my next Facebook status update that I am usually a goddess, but I wasn’t really joking, for, as St. Paul said, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from ourselves.” People tend to focus on the surpassing power of God part without noticing that Paul wrote that we have this treasure, we have this treasure of the very power of God, the godhead, within us–the same resurrection power that created the universe with a word, impregnated a virgin, and brought Christ out of the grave after three days and three nights. That very power: in me.

Having God ride shotgun in my life means that I was disappointed about the envy I felt, for I’m used to not feeling envious due to a typical lack of attachment to things that had me telling the cleaning ladies a few weeks back not to worry if they broke anything, for it was all destined to perish anyway, and there was nothing in my house that breathes or inspires life into its inhabitants except for the inhabitants themselves, at which they looked at me agape. I had, you see, forgotten that attachment to people is an attachment, too, and projecting my “wish I could’s” onto my friends or children is no less a crime than being attached to the objects in one’s house, for people are not possessions and it is not the job of anyone else to carry my unlived life.

What my jealousy meant, in part, was that I wished I could go to a resort but I couldn’t, because I have Too Many Children and Not Enough Money. But under cross-examination, the witness admits that she could probably afford to go to a resort, go to Paris, buy her 16-year-old a brand new car, or do any manner of things other people do with their money if that were her value or desire. The problem, she further admits, is that she chooses not to value trips to resorts as much as she values the life she has chosen for herself.

The other problem is, of course, that I need someone or something onto whom or which I can project my unlived life so that I’ll continue to have a handy excuse for not living it. Alternatively, I need something to focus on that will keep me from progressing in my career as a goddess who is more attached to the things of the spiritual world than those of this temporal one.

The day I was overcome with jealously, I read this in Jung’s Psychology and the East, and it made me smile with a smile that felt like a death mask because I could see my bias toward the temporal over the eternal:

The externalization of culture may do away with a great many evils whose removal seems most desirable and beneficial, yet this step forward, as experience shows, is all too clearly paid for with a loss of spiritual culture. It is undeniably much more comfortable to live in a well-planned and hygienically equipped house, but this still does not answer the question of who is the dweller in this house and whether his soul rejoices in the same order and cleanliness as the house which ministers to his outer life. The man whose interests are all outside is never satisfied with what is necessary, but is perpetually hankering after something more and better which, true to his bias, he always seeks outside himself. He forgets completely that, for all his outward successes, he himself remains the same inwardly, and he therefore laments his poverty if he possesses only one automobile when the majority have two. Obviously the outward lives of men could do with a lot more bettering and beautifying, but these things lose their meaning when the inner man does not keep pace with them. To be satiated with “necessities” is no doubt an inestimable source of happiness, yet the inner man continues to raise his claim, and this can be satisfied by no outward possessions. And the less this voice is heard in the chase after the brilliant things of this world, the more the inner man becomes the source of inexplicable misfortune and uncomprehended unhappiness in the midst of living conditions whose outcome was expected to be entirely different. The externalization of life turns to incurable suffering, because no one can understand why he should suffer from himself. No one wonders at his insatiability, but regards it as his lawful right, never thinking that the one-sidedness of this psychic diet leads in the end to the gravest disturbances of equilibrium. That is the sickness of Western man, and he will not rest until he has infected the whole world with his own greedy restlessness (para. 962).

As Proverbs 27:20 says, “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied; nor are the eyes of man ever satisfied.” We’re made with the quality of Never Satisfied because Never Satisfied is in our deepest beings as a sign and emblem of the depths of symbolic spiritual experience to which we can go if we will only dare. Most don’t dare, but remain stuck on a sensual, temporal level that belies a commensurately cavernous spiritual emptiness, the likes of which I recognized in myself with surprise, dread, and awe the day I envied my neighbor’s good fortune.

References

Jung, C. G. (1978). Psychology and the East. (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vols. 10, 11, 13, and 18. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

An airport is a vacuum, a place of an unwelcome sort of timelessness where one can introvert and come to three hours later like someone who has been knocked unconscious.

I’ve been knocked unconscious.

Lately it has been impossible to get the sort of time alone I need. I wonder from time to time this year just how much time alone I’d need to feel repaired and rested, restored to a place where an abundance flowed out again (if it ever did). My feet planted in the earth up to mid-calf, I might stay from one winter solstice to the next before it was enough. It has taken this long for me to reach full height and breadth; now all that’s left is to go deep.

I feel the cold dirt between my toes and it’s very good.

When I go out of town every month to my Jungian studies program, I feel giddy with joy by the time I’m ready to leave. Every moment I spend by myself is a resurrection, even when spent in the airport, in the limousine, in the hotel room with its muted lighting and mocha-colored walls. Every single bit is like life was when time stood still. Building villages of pebbles, stones, and sticks behind the hydrangea bushes. Lying full length along a branch of my favorite tree, mesmerized by the swirls and eddies of the creek below, glinting green, brown. In bed with my husband, newlyweds, my arm thrown across his chest on a Saturday morning, the smell of the magnolias coming through the screens. Nursing my first child in the middle of the night, lashes dark and lush against skin made silvery by the moonlight.

As if it would never end.

That I can feel such a magical sense of time in these places full of travelers, weariness, dirt, conglomerations, noise, hustle, churning, banging, squeaks, dongs, crackling speakers, wheels that go whop-whop-whep-whop, crying children, a cacophony of languages shows just how long it has been since I have been able to sit at my own hearth and stir the ashes.

At the end of their long estrangement as brothers, Jacob and Esau met again. Genesis 33 tells us that Jacob saw Esau approaching from the distance with 400 men and, afraid that Esau would order his men to attack, arranged his household strategically so that those most precious to him would be the most likely to escape. Most Christian translations say that when Esau met Jacob on the way, he ran and “kissed him on the cheek,” but an accurate Hebrew translation is more sinister and surprising, as well as being upheld by rabbinical teachings and Jewish tradition: The rabbis teach that Esau fell upon Jacob’s neck and bit him, vampire style!

I’ve been interested for a while now in the current American preoccupation with vampires, which began roughly around the time that Anne Rice’s Lestat series became best sellers (1976), and has culminated with the Twilight series in print, and True Blood on HBO. Esau’s legendary role as a would-be vampire would be disconcerting had I not done as much reading and mulling over these brothers as I have; but I keep returning to the New Testament admonishment that spiritual folk should not allow themselves to develop a character like Esau’s, or to let an Esau thrive in their midst. “See to it,” Paul wrote, “that there be no immoral or godless person like Esau among you, who sold his own birthright for a bowl of soup.”

What is a vampire, if not a person whose birthright–his experience of being fully human–has been lost? What is a vampire, if not a once living person who succumbs to another blood sucker and must forever after live off the literal lifeblood of others, having no true life of his own? Isn’t this the perfect metaphor for our somnambulent American culture with its reality TV, true crime best sellers, celebrity tabloids and gossip magazines, thinly-disguised Facebook and MySpace voyeurism, and constant inane tweets where meaning must be communicated in 140 characters or less?

Recently I’ve been in several different social settings in which I noticed people sitting together eating, at the theater, and even at sporting events while texting or tweeting furiously, or otherwise engaged with their cell phones. This behavior amuses and appalls me at the same time. I wonder if people are conscious to what they’re doing? And what are we doing, if we are not trying to infuse ourselves with life from others when we text message and update our Facebook status in the midst of crowds, at restaurants where we’ve met friends for dinner, while watching a DVD with friends or family? We have this great treasure of human spirit in these temporal bodies, such wondrous possibilities of becoming and being, but so many squander it by living in the shallows. Even in the midst of other people, many will seek to escape life in the moment, with the people who are present.

Anne Rice has said that she wrote her vampire series during a time in her life when she was without God, alone in a universe of fellow dead, and that the anguished cry of her spirit was given voice through her vampire series. That her work resonated with millions of Americans–her books have sold over 100 million copies–does not surprise me. We are a generation of people to whom God is dead, from whose major religions all numinous symbols have been removed, for whom “mental health” simply means being undiagnosable and well-adjusted to a culture that is spiritually and psychologically ill.

I’m reading Volume 9i  of Carl Jung’s Collected Works for my Jungian certification and ran across this today, which relates in part to some of my recent musings about Facebook and other social networking technology:

I put it to the enlightened rationalist: has his rational reduction led to the beneficial control of matter and spirit? He will point proudly to the advances in physics and medicine, to the freeing of the mind from medieval stupidity and–as a well-meaning Christian–to our deliverance from the fear of demons. But we continue to ask: what have all our other cultural achievements led to? The fearful answer is there before our eyes: man has been delivered from no fear, a hideous nightmare lies upon the world. So far reason has failed lamentably, and the very thing that everybody wanted to avoid rolls on in ghastly progression. Man has achieved a wealth of useful gadgets but, to offset that, he has torn open the abyss, and what will become of him now–where can he make a halt?

After the last World War we hoped for reason: we go on hoping. But already we are fascinated by the possibilities of atomic fission and promise ourselves a Golden Age–the surest guarantee that the abomination of desolation will grow to limitless dimensions. And who or what is it that causes all this? It is none other than that harmless (!), ingenious, inventive, and sweetly reasonable human spirit who unfortunately is abysmally unconscious of the demonism that still clings to him. Worse, this spirit does everything to avoid looking himself in the face, and we all help him like mad. Only, heaven preserve us from psychology–that depravity might lead to self-knowledge! [. . .]

It seems to me, frankly, that former ages did not exaggerate, that the spirit has not sloughed off its demonisms, and that mankind, because of its scientific and technological development, has in increasing measure delivered itself over to the danger of possession. True, the archetype of the spirit is capable of working for good as well as for evil, but it depends upon man’s free–i.e., conscious–decision whether the good also will be perverted into something satanic. Man’s worst sin is unconsciousness, but it is indulged in with the greatest piety even by those who should serve mankind as teachers and examples.

When shall we stop taking man for granted in this barbarous manner and in all seriousness seek ways and means to exorcise him, to rescue him from possession and unconsciousness, and make this the most vital task of civilization? Can we not understand that all the outward tinkerings and improvements do not touch man’s inner nature, and that everything ultimately depends upon whether the man who wields the science and the technology is capable of responsibility or not? Christianity has shown us the way, but, as the facts bear witness, it has not penetrated deeply enough below the surface. What depths of despair are still needed to open the eyes of the world’s responsible leaders, so that at least they can refrain from leading themselves into temptation? (para. 454-455)

what are you doing?

In depth psychology, we refer to the Wise Old Man as an archetypal figure who is often encountered by the Hero in folk and fairy tales, symbolizing our wiser, self-reflecting selves that have the key to the way out of the problems we get ourselves into. The Wise Old Man often asks questions, because questions are tools for the self-reflective function of the psyche.

“What are you doing?” and “Why are you doing this?” are two of my favorite questions. In the passage of Jung quoted here, Jung is asking the rational man, the scientific and technological man, “What are you doing? What is the result of all your ‘progress?’” and I think these are wonderful questions. Jung shows here that we either use technology or it uses (i.e., ‘possesses’) us. I doubt there is anyone who hasn’t been lured into a deep dive into unconsciousness by the television, the interwebs, the DVR, and realized only later due to the sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that there were better things we might or should have done with our time.

In this way we are no different from our most primitive ancestors who believed in absolute possession by evil spirits. We who are too sophisticated for the idea of possession can’t understand the lure of Facebook, Twitter, or whatever other technologies we use as treatment programs or substances to dull the anxiety of being alive, the tension of the opposites and conflicts we contain, and our terror of the unknown. By looking down on the primitive impulse to fear possession, we overlook our own proneness to it.

Being human, I understand why we are overcome by inertia through our technological temptations. Being also divine, I look at myself with dismay.