The Alpha and Omega of my Jungian Diploma

Preface

I dedicate this diploma portfolio to the two great loves of my life. The first is my son Morgan who is always with me. Though I have been absent from him for too much of his life he has never been absent from mine both psychologically, physically and in my dreams. The second great love is Hayley James who I met when I least expected and had least to offer. She has been with me from Court Room to the collective unconscious and through the one great maze that is existence.

I would like to thank my long suffering tutor Beverly Martin. It is indeed ironic that a sitting UKIP Councillor would turn out to be my mentor on this long journey. I would also like to thank Ludwig Esser for helping me discover and romance my shadow. The course has taken me along the highways and byways of my psyche. It has given great moments of fear, ecstasy and discovery.

It has been to quote John Gower in his “Confessio amantis” (II p 35) a conjunction of opposites of dialectic and of a a Hegalian synthesis. In the process of discovery of self the course has been a “Bellica pax, a vulvus dulce and a suave malum”, literally a a warring peace, a sweet wound and a mild evil. It has been an alchemical process of the soul that I have long both resisted and desired.

(Confessio Amantis is a 33,000-line Middle English poem by John Gower, which uses the confession made by an ageing lover to the chaplain of Venus as a frame story for a collection of shorter narrative poems.)

Long ago Jung called to me. I was not even aware of his name then or indeed what Psychotherapy was. My father read a wide range of myths to me from the age of 6. By the time I was ten I knew the basics of Norse, Greek, Egyptian and Babylonian. By eight I wondered why Christianity was any different to any of these stories and I clearly remember sitting in a high Anglican church thinking to myself if I did a ritual I would do it like this. I am not sure what I meant by ritual at this time.....

But at some level I knew from the smell of Frankincense and the elaborate movements of high communion that something altered as the process of ritual developed. I felt different, saw different things and even then I knew that there was something more to all of this.

As I reached adolescence I saw patterns in Science Fiction, Science fantasy and in the novels I read. The effects of sound and smells gave me an altered state that I had not experienced before. I always saw a powerful link as my sexuality developed and I could not see any reason why sensuality and sexuality should be opposed. I read the Rainbow by DH Lawrence. I read the short story “The Man who died” and I knew that there was more to see, know and experience.

When I was 25 my Father had a near death experience and he told me that he met the Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Greece in a hunting lodge somewhere near Athens. I understood then as he did that these beings are patterns that are important to us and call to us. A few months later I stumbled into a box shop in London called Anglo American books I was drawn to a book called “Memories, Dreams and Reflections”. That was when I first met Jung and he has been with me for the last 35 years.

I longed to train as a Jungian and quite by accident or shall we say synchronicity a colleague from work was sent the details of the SOPH course. My decision was instant to do the course. And I quickly had a dream where a great wind carried me over a range of hills and mountains at great speed. I could see for miles and I was exhilarated. As the course ends I had one final dream where one of my students gave me the keys to a restaurant and said its yours now. As I looked around I saw rows and rows of books stretching upwards and I knew that they were for me to use, teach and explain.

Jung has always been with me, long before I knew his name. I was able to read him so easily, so quickly and remember so much. The course has brought together so many things and has integrated so many other thinkers and philosophers. I have gained so much, seen so much and felt so much during my course of study. Long ago Jung tested me and this was the dream. This guardian has been with me so many times and has never left my side.

Initial dream when first training

I am walking along a road and come to a crossroads. At the crossroads is a being. It has the body of a snake, a human head with a crown and wings. I am afraid but keep walking it allows to me pass but follows me. I know it is my guardian.

A few days later I see a picture of it in a book it is a Naga from Hindu myth and its been with me ever since

Conclusion to Diploma

When I was five my father began to read mythology to me. I found a great tension between the religion I was taught at school and the tales of the Greeks, Romans and ancient Egyptians. I remembered asking at school why the Christian stories we heard at school were true and the mythologies of the ancient world were false. No teacher ever adequately convinced me. The best they did was to tell me I was foolish or indeed odd.

If they want me to believe in their god,
they'll have to sing me better songs....
I could only believe in a god who dances.

Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and
believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks--those who write
new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and
fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the
harvest.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche,
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra",
No polytheist ever imagined that all humankind would come to live in the same way; for polytheists took for granted that humans would worship other deities. Only with Christianity did the belief take root that one way of life could/should be lived by all. If only one belief is true, then every other is wrong.
For polytheists, religion is a matter of practice, not belief, and there are many kinds of practice. For Christians, religion is a matter of true belief, and therefore every way of life which does not accept it must consequently be an error.
While many polytheists may vigorously defend their deities, they never perceive themselves as missionaries. It is certain that without monotheism humans would still be violent unstable beings; yet history would have spared us from the wars of religion. If the world had been spared monotheism we would not have developed communism or indeed global democratic capitalism. It is possible to dream of a world free from militant faiths religious or political.
Yet it is also true that unbelief is a move in a game set by believers. To deny the existence of a God is to accept the categories of monotheism. As these categories fall into disuse, unbelief becomes uninteresting, and soon is meaningless. Many humanists say they want a secular world, but a world defined by the absence of the Christian God is still a Christian world. Secularism like chastity, a condition defined by what it denies. If atheism has a future, it can only be in a Christian revival; and it is true that both Christianity and atheism are declining together.
Atheism is a late bloom of a Christian passion for the truth. No Pagan is ready to sacrifice the pleasure of life for the sake of mere truth. It is an artful illusion, not unadorned reality that they prize. Among the Greeks, the goal of philosophy was happiness or salvation, not truth. The worship of Truth is effectively a Christian cult.
The old Pagans were right to shudder at the uncouth earnestness of the early Christians. None of the Mystery religions of the late Roman Empire would have claimed what the Christians claimed - that all other faiths were in error. For that reason none of their followers could ever become an atheist. When Christianity alone claimed they possessed the truth they condemned the rich and lush profusion of the pagan world with damning finality.
In a world of many gods, unbelief can never be total It can only be a rejection of one practice and gods and acceptance of others or else as Epicurus and his followers claimed the conviction that gods do not matter since they have long ceased to bother about human affairs.
Christianity struck at the root of pagan tolerance of constructed interpretation. In claiming that there is only one truth faith, it gives truth a supreme value that it had not had before. It also made unbelief in the divine possible for the first time. The long delayed consequence of Christian faith was an idolatry of truth that found its most complete expression in atheism. If we live in a world without gods, we have Christianity to thank for it. Iamblichus of Chalcis commented
"You Christians have driven the Gods from the world and made it a lonely place".
Algernon Charles Swinburne writing in the late 19th century felt the same. In his poem Hymn to Proserpin he bold states

"You have conquered O Pale Galilean, the world has grown grey from thy breath".......
In D H Lawrence`s story “The man who died” Jesus comes back from the dead only to give up the idea of saving mankind. He views the world with wonder and asks himself; “From what ? and to what , could this infinite world be saved ?”
Humanity considers itself as perfectible beings superior to all other non human animals upon the planet and yet at the same time we never cease to escape from what we consider ourselves to be. Our religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom that we never perhaps have had. In the last two hundred years the utopias/dystopias of right and left have served the same function. Today when politics is bland and unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of humanity's deliverer.
I believe that we need a teaching that stresses that there is nothing from which to seek deliverance, a teaching whose aim is to free humanity from the yoke of salvation.
Nikos Kazanantzakis states my belief clearly “Whoever says salvation exists is a slave, because he keeps weighing each of his words and deeds at every moment. Will I be saved or damned? He tremblingly asks.......salvation means deliverance from all saviours...now you understand who is the perfect saviour…it is the saviour who shall deliver mankind from salvation” or indeed Nietzsche once more claiming,
"Man is a rope, tied between man and superman, a dangerous overgoing.”
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.”
Many people today think that they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith and not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be master of their destinies. Why then should we humans?
Science today has an authority that common experience cannot rival, let let us remember that Darwin tells us that species are assemblies of genes, interacting at random with each other and their shifting environments. Species cannot control their fates. Species do not exist. This applies to us as humans. Yet it is forgotten whenever people talk of the progress of mankind.. We have now put our faith in that which originated in Christian belief and in the last hundred years it has been taken over by scientific rationalism.
I believe that at heart humans and other animals are kin. By contrast, arising from Christianity humans are set beyond all other living beings, and have triggered a bitter argument that rages to this day. In Victorian times this was a conflict between Christians and unbelievers. Today it is fought between secular humanists and those who believe that humans can no more be masters of their destiny than any other animal. This is the hope of rational science today for although human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same; a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive.
Darwin showed us that humans are like other animals, humanists claim they are not. Humanism insists that by using our knowledge we can control our environment and flourish as never before. In affirming this they renew one of Christianities’s most dubious promises -that salvation is open to all. The humanist belief in progress is only a secular version of the Christian faith.
Perhaps it is therefore impossible to describe an adequate definition of real progress. To anyone reared on humanist hopes this ls intolerable. As a result, Darwin's teachings have been stood on their head. Christianity`s cardinal error-that humans are different from animals- has been given by science a new lease of life.
Many Green thinkers like myself realise that humans can never really be masters of the earth. Our spirituality must recognise that we are mere stewards of the biosphere and therefore must except a neo -pagan or pantheist belief for much of our history and all of prehistory humans did not see themselves as being any different from the other animals among which they lived. Hunter gatherers saw their prey as equals, if not superior and animals were worshipped as divinities in many traditional culture.

 “[We conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible