From the Third to the Fourth

One of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth-century, psychologist Carl Jung, has the unfortunate reputation among many for being a bit of a quack.  I doubt Jung himself would have minded, not the later life Jung in any case.  This later life Jung emerged after he suffered a heart attack that left him clinically dead for a short while before doctors were able to resuscitate him.  During that near death experience Jung recounts how he floated out into space and saw the earth from that beautiful vantage point.  He then remembered entering a temple of some kind, knowing that soon he would be whole again.  He wrote:

 My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow? I felt sure that I would receive an answer to all the questions as soon as I entered the rock temple. There I would meet the people who knew the answer to my question about what had been before and what would come after.

Before he could enter that temple, though, he realized he had to return to earth and soon found himself back in his hospital bed.  As he was recovering from this experience, he fell into a deep depression about not having completed his journey.  He was furious at the doctor who had resuscitated him but also concerned for him because Jung had seen this doctor on the “other side” and he intuited that this meant that the doctor was not long for this world.  Sure enough, Jung was his last patient as a week later the good doctor took to his bed with a high fever and died of septicemia.

This experience marked a new direction in Jung’s life.  While he had been a radical all of his life, breaking with Freud during his descent into a feverish mid-life crisis that would leave him questioning everything he had learned until then—the near death experience gave him the courage to explore those subjects which were more radical yet.  The period after his heart attack until his death at the age of eighty-five produced some of Jung’s most important work including the polemical and astounding Answer to Job.

Jung’s work has been adapted and cannibalized extensively in the last fifty years, serving as the foundation to many a popular self-help book where talk of the shadow and the collective unconscious abounds.   His insights into the human condition are many and they are profound but one of the most important is that we are not only material beings but meaning-seeking beings who need to find a greater purpose in our lives.  It is the individual search for meaning that makes us whole and it was this search that Jung’s own life was dedicated to.

The search does not end until the moment of our death and this is a good thing as it stresses that life is a process and not a goal.  If there is a destination, it is our death, no matter how much we deny it and try to keep it at bay.  It is in fact our very denial and fear of death that keeps us from fully living and our culture strongly supports this by grounding us in the material things of the world—from computer gadgetry to mind-numbing reality shows.

The near death experience has been endlessly written about and vigorously denied by the rationalists among us who put electrodes on people’s heads and try to explain it away using the new research being done in neuroscience. Whether the near death experience is scientifically verifiable is not my concern.  I am much more taken with how the experience often leads to a radical change in the person’s attitude and life.

One person who came close to death and decided he could no longer live with himself was the Hollywood director, Tom Shadyac, director of movies like Ace Ventura and The Nutty Professor.  After a bicycling accident left him with a concussion that would not go away, Shadyac took a look at his life and decided he didn’t like what he had become.  A multi-millionaire with enormous houses and a private jet, he downsized to a 1,000 square feet mobile home in a move to simplify his life.  He also decided to make a movie about something that really mattered to him.  The result, a documentary called “I Am”, details his journey and includes interviews with luminaries like David Suzuki, Noam Chomsky and the wonderful poet and translator of Rumi, Coleman Barks. 

 I am linking the trailer to this movie here in hopes that it arrives soon in my city and yours.

 http://iamthedoc.com/

 Watching this trailer, I was reminded of something Jung believed—that we were moving from a trinitarian world to a world where quaternity predominates (from a three to a four.)  He felt that what was needed was to incorporate the feminine principle that has been devalued for so long.  The feminine is relational, horizontal, content just to be.  Every time I hear Eckhart Tolle talk about the “now”, I am reminded of the feminine at its most centered best.  It is being present to each moment as it is, without resistance or fear.

 Those well versed in Eastern mythology, speak about the same thing albeit in a slightly different way.  Anodea Judith, an expert on the chakras—the energy centers in the body described by ancient eastern mystics—speaks of how we are evolving as a species from the third chakra to the fourth.  The third chakra is centered in the solar plexus and is seen as the seat of personal power. It rules our power, will and autonomy.  It is associated with adolescence and if we apply this to where we find ourselves as a species, it easy to understand not only our compulsive materialism, but why we choose to entertain ourselves with the nonsense that appears on our television screens.

 The fourth chakra is the seat of the heart. It is related to love and is the integrator of opposites in the psyche: mind and body, male and female, persona and shadow, ego and unity.  The colour associated with this chakra is green.    

 While all this may be considered just pretty mythology by some, I am a metaphorical thinker and always appreciate what Joseph Campbell had to say about these things.  Mythology, he wrote, is something that never was but always is.

 Returning to the colour green—the colour of spring, of renewal and of its opposite, death—I  leave you with the first lines of a beautiful poem by the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca—Romance Sonámbulo:

 Green, how I want you green.

Green wind. Green branches.

The ship out on the sea

and the horse on the mountain.

With the shade around her waist

she dreams on her balcony,

green flesh, her hair green,

with eyes of cold silver.

Green, how I want you green.

Under the gypsy moon,

all things are watching her

but she cannot look back at them.

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