News from the Muse: The Muse of Jungian Memoir

[from the Tarot of the Sephiroth]

When inner work is brought out into the world—a poem, a memoir—it’s as though something has been constructed in the soul. The inexpressible finds expression; the unsayable is said. I’ve been reflecting on this experience, which feels magical to me—transformative. It’s not just the writing down of inner experience, the process of tracking dreams or engaging in active imagination. It is how it feels to go public with it, to present it to a live audience, or to see its transformation into print. An imaginal space is opened up and something is created there—a temple deep in the woods, past the swinging bridge, or perhaps an altar by the banks of the river, a chupah for the sacred wedding, a teepee in the meadow. This is a holy place to which one can return. It is both an expansion of inner space and creation of something substantive. Is this what the alchemists mean by the Lapis? The Kabbalists by the “Work of the Chariot?” The Hindus by Shakti? The Jungians by the Subtle Body?

The Sister from Below, my muse, informed me that I was writing Jungian memoir when I was working on her book. She told me that Jungian memoir illuminates the inner world, follows the Jungian tributaries of dreams, conversations with inner figures, synchronicities. It is the grandchild of Jung’s great memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Its ancestors include the alchemists and the saints, whose spiritual autobiographies, like the Confessions of St. Augustine, connect us to the Spirit of the Depths, and to the Wisdom Traditions.

Since the publication of the Red Book it’s become clear how Jung’s direct confrontation with inner figures cracked open the walls of rationality and allowed the uncanny, the unfathomable back into western consciousness. Jungian memoir attends to those strange unfathomable experiences that shape our souls.

I was privileged, last April, to participate in a conference put on by the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, called C.G. Jung and the Jewish Connection. This was the swan song of our beloved Baruch Gould, who had been the creative and innovative Director of Public Programs for ten years, and was preparing to end his service. He’d been incubating the idea for the conference for years.

I was among a group of Jungian analysts and scholars approaching the subject from very different vantage points. There were historical papers, papers on Jung and Jewish mysticism, and papers I would call Jungian memoir, telling personal stories from inner lives. Several spoke as Jews struggling with Jung. I spoke as a Jungian struggling with Judaism. The Jungian memoir I wrote for that event has opened an important space in my soul, a deeper and more open connection to myself as a Jew and to Jewish mysticism—a Chupah for the sacred wedding of Tifereth with Malkuth— male and female energies in the Kabbalistic worldview—which Jung saw in a vision of the “Garden of Pomegranates” and described in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Now, thanks to the Jung Journal, all the papers given at the conference are available in print (Volume VI, Number 1). I hope you’ll take a look at them.


Here are some excerpts from my paper.

The Rabbi, the Goddess, and Jung

You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble over them.

The Zohar

Spiritual Exile

How does a Jew to whom God never spoke in a synagogue, who has wandered the world and the paths of other religions seeking direct experience of the sacred, stumble upon it in her own tradition? How does a spiritual exile, whose life was transformed by the Goddess, get past her issues with the patriarchal God of the Jews.

With Jung’s help…

This is the story of how Jung, or the Jungian worldview, helped me find my meandering way home to Judaism. As is my fashion I will weave in poetry, dreams, a journey and a conversation with a ghost.

I have always longed for myth, for mystery, for those moments when the world cracks open, when something uncanny, wild, awesome, enters. I have glimpsed it in Hindu temples, in Catholic churches, in Pagan rituals, in poetry, everywhere but in the Jewish world I knew as a child…

*******

The Ten Commandments of My Childhood

It was a proud thing to be a Jew in my family of origin; it was also a difficult thing. We Jews had responsibilities. We had suffered as a people. We needed to be eternally vigilant, on the look out for tyranny, oppression, discrimination— whether against us Jews or others. There were unspoken instructions for how to be a good Jew below the surface of dinner table conversations, and in social gatherings in the very Jewish neighborhood in post war Queens, New York, we lived in during the early 1950s. These are the commandments I heard:

I. Thou shalt vote Democratic.
II. Thou shalt take a stand against injustice and inhumanity.
III. Thou shalt believe in the innocence of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
IV. Thou shalt support unions and the ACLU.
V. Thou shalt love Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson and the Weavers.
VI. Thou shalt sing folk songs, spirituals, and union songs with gusto.
VII. Thou shalt know all the famous Jews in the culture, and speak of them with pride, from Albert Einstein to Sammy Davis Jr.
VIII. Thou shalt love the state of Israel, but not forgive it its trespasses.
IX. Thou shalt know the stories of the Hebrew Bible, for thy father will tell them to you as “great literature.”
X. Thou shalt never forget “what happened.”


Upside Down Tree

I was given a gift of a dream. I am shown an image. It is an upside down tree—whose branches touch the earth, whose roots are in the sky. The tree is filled with Hebrew letters. I did not recognize what it was, at the time, though the image stayed with me, tugged at me…[It took me some time to realize that I had] been shown the Tree of Life—the symbolic expression of Jewish mysticism. I [had] stumbled into the esoteric aspect of my own tradition, which I had thought lacked a mystical, contemplative side.…

[Upside Down Tree of Life by Robert Fludd]

Black Fire Written on White Fire

It must be She, the Shekina, who is behind what happens next. In September of 2004 I find myself in Girona, Spain. My husband Dan and I have come here because it was a center of Jewish life and Kabbalistic thought before the expulsion of the Jews …

*******

I sit on the tiny balcony of our hotel room, and try to focus…despite the sounds of passing people, cars, motorcycles, water being poured, conversations in Spanish, Catalan, Italian, English, despite the bells of the Cathedral. I imagine the rabbis meditating—making contact with God amidst donkey piss and roosters crowing and children running about and bed pans being emptied.

*******

In my wanderings in the old Jewish section of Girona I happen into the Nahmanides Institute of Jewish Studies. I learn that Moses ben Nahman (nicknamed Ramban by the Jews, called Nahmanides in the Greek fashion of the day) was a leading Kabbalist in the 13th century in Girona. He was of the generation before the Zohar was written down, and one of those who influenced its writer, Moses de Leon.

[from Tarot of the Sephiroth]

*******

I am filled with the presence of this Rabbi. Later, in my readings, I will stumble upon a reference to a Jewish myth in which “the soul of a great sage who has died binds his spirit to one of the living in order…to guide a person through a difficult time of transition.” This spirit is called an ibur, in contrast to the malevolent spirit known as a dybbuk.

I find myself talking to him: Ramban, I walk the Roman walls of your city and your light walks with me. I walk the narrow streets of the Call de Jueu and the light you received from Moses at Sinai walks with me. You speak in my heart. This light, you tell me, is not of memory, not of the history of our people, not the word remembered and written down. This light is now…

*******

I wonder why it is you who have come to guide me, you who are at once a mystic and a learned Rabbi of the tradition. You say it is because I need to learn your teaching, that “Everything that is done in the mundane sphere is magically reflected in the upper region…” You say I listen too much to my fears. I need to open all my senses to the Shekina. You say I need to contemplate the mystery of “black fire written on white fire —the tension between the oral tradition and the radiance, between manifest wisdom and the transcendent. Because you want me to understand that the Goddess is alive in you, that The Sister from Below is your familiar, you tell me a stanza of your mystical hymn about the birth of the soul.

He radiated light to bring her forth,
In hidden well–springs, right and left.
The soul descended the ladder of heaven,
From the primeval pool of Siloam to the garden of the King.

You say our souls stand in eternity, they are forever, we spend our lives finding our way back to them, for we are in exile from our beginnings. You say the light is now, here in this place where we meet.

********

I wrote a poem for Ramban, who became a beloved familiar in the writing of this paper. Here is the last section:

God’s Singing Tree
In Two Voices

Ramban
you are old magic with goddess eyes
you are warm fire in the dark of the cave
you gather me back to the breath of that mother
in the long long line of my great grandmothers
who picked up her baby her sack of food
and walked out of Catalonia in 1492

the vessels shattered there was contraction
there was exile you tell me
this is the nature of creation

they who listen will hear
they who open their eyes will see
there is a tree it grows from the feet
of Abraham and Sara its leaves catch the light
on this balcony where I sit with you

remember my daughter
wherever you are the poem is
black fire written on white fire
God’s singing tree

Frontpiece from the 1516 Latin translation of Gikatilla's Gates of Light 

News from the Muse: The Day of the Dead Muse

Truchas, New Mexico

At dawn of the Day of the Dead I saw the sun rise over the Truchas Peaks. It blazed in the branches of the aspen, whose leaves were yellow and glittering in the thin air.

We don’t sleep well here. Is it the altitude—8,000 ft.? Is it the thinning of the veils between the worlds at this time of year? Is it the spirits in motion, touching us, awakening us to other worlds?

Dan and I are here with our friends Patricia and Donald, in a state of arousal and amazement. The mountains are touched with snow; the aspen and the cottonwoods are glowing with gold; there is a holiness here that holds us and guides us—we walk in beauty.

On the Day of the Dead I was touched, as I often am, by the spirit of Don Sandner. He loved this land and knew it well. He had studied the Navajo and their rituals and learned from them the deep ways of an ancient people. He brought that knowledge to the community I joined in the ‘80s, when I became a candidate at the San Francisco Jung Institute.

I wanted to become a Jungian analyst because Jungians were the only folk I knew who were open to the fluidity I experience between kinds of consciousness. Mostly they were open-minded when I spoke of worlds beyond the everyday, meanings beyond those understood by the “Spirit of the Times.”

But Don Sandner was more than tolerant, more than interested in the mystic and the weird. He cultivated it; he lived it. He led a drumming ritual for the candidates, at Jessica’s barn in Petaluma. Before we entered that sacred space, Don smudged us with sage, and used an eagle feather—whoosh!—to cleanse our energies. Then we lay ourselves down among sweet smelling bales of hay while Don began to drum. He drummed and he drummed. And the visions and the visitations began. When the White Wolf appeared to me, he knew who she was.

He left us for the other world, very suddenly, one Easter almost 15 years ago. I had had a dream about him—one I told him—that he was walking down a river to the sea. A white baby alligator had his hand in its mouth and was guiding him. I did not know then, that the baby alligator was a psychopomp—a guide to the underworld. I wonder if Don did.

I do know that he lives in me, visits often in my meditations, is glad that Patricia and I are here, in this wild and sacred country, editing a book of essays about the living experience of other realities.

Don’s passage left a big hole in our community. I wrote about this in a poem.

SINCE HE LEFT HIS BODY
for Don Sandner

He knew what to do with an eagle feather
how to sweep clean the air around us
clear our heads of angry noise
as we entered the barn
We lay on sweet smelling grasses
we who’d been smudged, who’d been purified
and he beat and he beat and he beat on that drum—
we thought it was forever—the White Wolf appeared…
Those who know the animals
who know feather sweep, drum beat
corn dance—how the people shift
from one foot to the other—
know there is a place for each one
coyote, snake, rock, child—
So the White Wolf sings to the hills
So she sings to the fire—
The truth is
we’ve never been the same
since he left his body so suddenly—
teeth of the alligator
scissors of mind—rocks severed
from gods—
trees cut down
cut down—
Are we lost?
Nobody beats the drum
Nobody sweeps clear the air
Nobody remembers the dance
Nobody is a dark cave
where the White Wolf
still lives
See?
She lifts her head to the mountain
She pricks up her ears…

This poem was first published in the Jung Journal

“The Word Made Flesh: The Living Symbol - San Francisco Jung Institute

Oct. 10th, “The Word Made Flesh” a presentation at the San Francisco Jung Institute Conference on The Living Symbol.

CONFERENCE:
The Living Symbol In and Out of the Consulting Room - Maria Chiaia, Naomi Lowinsky, Richard Stein, Bryan Wittine, Suzanne Wagner
Saturday and Sunday, October 10 & 11, 2009
9:30 am – 3:30 pm

Reserve for this event at San Francisco Jung Institute"Symbols act as transformers"
- C.G. Jung (CW Vol. 5: 232)
Living symbols are messages from the depths of our being to our conscious "I", messages that reveal mysterious things about ourselves and our lives. Psychotherapists across traditions have found that symbolic images open the way to the creative possibilities of the unconscious. We discover these images through free association, dreams, fantasies, creative productions, and within the relational field between analyst and analysand. They evoke fascination, awe, fear, joy, upset, disorientation, but are inevitably transformative when we approach them with respect and attend to them in a contemplative way.

In this conference five Jungian analysts with different approaches will speak to their experience of living, transforming symbols in their lives and clinical work. What does the living symbol look like in clinical practice and in life? How does the symbol enter our psyche, and what does it do once it becomes known? What are the spiritual implications of symbols? Through lectures that include theory, art, poetry, and clinical material, the speakers will offer their unique perspectives on the ways symbols guide processes of growth in and out of the consulting room.


The Word Made Flesh - Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
It is as if the poet could still sense, beneath the words of contemporary speech and in the images that crowd in upon his imagination, the ghostly presence of bygone spiritual worlds, and possessed the capacity to make them come alive again. As Gerhart Hauptmann says: "Poetry is the art of letting the primordial word resound through the common word." - Jung, (CW 5 p. 303)
Our medium, in analysis, is language: the spoken word. Like poets we seek the "primordial word." We are engaged in the Promethean art of bringing life, fire, libido back to our analysand's word: so the word is made flesh; the symbol comes to life; the God is renewed.

When a person stumbles into analysis, she is typically split off from the surge of her libido, cut off from the meaning of her words, severed from her authenticity and from her Gods. She is incarcerated in taboos and constrictions that block her feeling, steal her breath, smother her fire.
If the analysis goes well she will find her way back, through the circumambulations and meanderings of the analytic conversation, to her own primordial word. She and her analyst will create a private language, a personal Tarot deck of living symbols, born of their shared wanderings in her internal landscape: her Gods and demons, dreams, memories, wounds, and longings. This is the stuff of her soul. Together they come to know what moves her, what excites her, how her words become flesh. Perhaps she will find a creative form in which to manifest the power of her personal symbols.

I propose to tell the story of such an analysis, the one I know best – my own – and to reflect on how language and poetry expresses the living symbol: the word made flesh. A series of poems about my analytic experience will structure the talk.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, PhD, is an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and a widely published poet. Her book on creativity, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way, has just been published by Fisher King Press. She has published a collection of poems about the analytic experience, crimes of the dreamer. She is the poetry editor of Psychological Perspectives, teaches writing classes in many settings, and is in private practice in Berkeley.

San Francisco Jung Institute Monthly Writing Group

Once a month writing group at the SF Jung Institute.

Deep River: Writing as a Spiritual Practice - Naomi Lowinsky
Saturday October 17, 2009 and 7 Subsequent Second Saturdays
1 – 5 pm

I listened to the earth-talk
- Mary Oliver

Poetry of the natural world is a deep river in American literature. From Walt Whitman to Mary Oliver, American poets have heard the spirit of the earth and its creatures, have spoken for forest and mountain lake, gray whale and marsh hawk. threatened habitat and lost wetlands. Theirs is the prophetic function of giving voice to our fear and our grief. Theirs is the shamanic function of re-imagining our place in nature.

This coming year in the Deep River Writing Circle we will track our own relationship to the natural world. We will read Whitman, Oliver, Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, Patiann Rogers and others, and write under their influence.

The Deep River writing circle is a place to find your own voice, to develop your writing practice, to participate in a small community of writers, to study great poems, to make your own connection to the deep river of nature writing. New members welcome, space allowing. Our first meeting will be on Saturday, October 17th from 1-5 in the Institute Library. After that we will meet on second Saturdays, November 2009 through May 2010. Limited to 12 participants.