via https://www.brainpickings.org/

Of course this genius is known for everyone (mostly!) and I’d gather some money to get this book 😉

Chance doesn’t deal happiness with an even hand — some lives are more weighed down by sorrow than others. It can be easy, and misguided, to romanticize suffering — despite Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s superb admonition against it, we have a long cultural history of perpetuating the “tortured genius” myth, the reality behind which is far more complex. What would it mean, instead, to orient ourselves toward sorrow neither with indulgence nor with self-pity, to regard it not as a malignancy of life but as part of its elemental richness?  

 

 

That is what Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853–July 29, 1890) addressed in a remarkable letter to his brother Theo, found in Ever Yours: The Essential Letters (public library) — the treasure trove that gave us Van Gogh on talking vs. doing and how inspired mistakes move us forward.

 

‘Self-Portrait with Straw Hat’ by Vincent van Gogh

Despite his lifelong poverty, despite his debilitating mental illness, Van Gogh managed to transmute his various hardships into some of the most visionary art humanity has produced. During one particularly harrowing period of struggle, he writes to his brother in a letter from the Hague penned in mid-September 1883:

You write about your walk to Ville-d’Avray that Sunday, at the same time on that same day I was also walking alone, and I want to tell you something about that walk, since then our thoughts probably crossed again in some degree.

Van Gogh had set out on this particular walk in order to clear his head and his heart after finally splitting up with Sien — the alcoholic prostitute with whom he had fallen in love a year and a half earlier, just after recovering from the heartbreak that taught him how to turn unrequited love into fuel for art. It was a deeply ambivalent breakup — Van Gogh recognized that they couldn’t make each other happy in the long run, but he was deeply attached to Sien and her children, as was she to him.

Seeking to quiet his mind, Van Gogh headed out “to talk to nature for a while.” From this turbulent inner state, he witnessed a violent storm which, paradoxically, reconciled him to his sorrow and helped him rediscover in it the elemental beauty of life.

Vincent van Gogh: Pine Trees against an Evening Sky, 1889. (Van Gogh Museum)

He recounts this transcendent encounter with nature to his brother:

You know the landscape there, superb trees full of majesty and serenity beside green, dreadful, toy-box summer-houses, and every absurdity the lumbering imagination of Hollanders with private incomes can come up with in the way of flower-beds, arbours, verandas. Most of the houses very ugly, but some old and elegant. Well, at that moment, high above the meadows as endless as the desert, came one driven mass of cloud after the other, and the wind first struck the row of country houses with their trees on the opposite side of the waterway, where the black cinder road runs. Those trees, they were superb, there was a drama in each figure I’m tempted to say, but I mean in each tree.

Then, the whole was almost finer than those windblown trees seen on their own, because the moment was such that even those absurd summer houses took on a singular character, rain-soaked and dishevelled. In it I saw an image of how even a person of absurd forms and conventions, or another full of eccentricity and caprice, can become a dramatic figure of special character if he’s gripped by true sorrow, moved by a calamity. It made me think for a moment of society today, how as it founders it now often appears like a large, sombre silhouette viewed against the light of reform.

Writing half a century before before Rilke contemplated how great sadnesses bring us closer to ourselves, Van Gogh adds:

Yes, for me the drama of a storm in nature, the drama of sorrow in life, is the best… Oh, there must be a little bit of air, a little bit of happiness, but chiefly to let the form be felt, to make the lines of the silhouette speak. But let the whole be sombre.

Vincent Van Gogh: Landscape in Stormy Weather, 1885. (Van Gogh Museum)

 Seven years later, the drama of sorrow disfigured the silhouette of Van Gogh’s life.

Complement this fragment of Van Gogh’s deeply alive Essential Letters with French philosopher Simone Weil — one of the most luminous and underappreciated minds of the twentieth century — on how to make use of our suffering and Tchaikovsky on depression and finding beauty amid the wreckage of the soul, then revisit Nicole Krauss’s beautiful letter to Van Gogh across space and time about fear, courage, and how to break our destructive patterns.

Things belonging to the past of mankind and presumably to its future also.

The fascinating world of dreams and also fascinating how Dr Carl Gustav Jung kept searching in this unknown.

here is one of his letter in answering one of his friends and colleague Dr Barrett with a few words but a lot meaning. 🙂 ❤

via https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/

Date: September 1, 2018  Author: lewislafontaine 

To H. J. Barrett

Dear Mr. Barrett, 27 December 1956

Thank you for your interesting letter. It is indeed an important question, the question of sleep and dream.

As far as my knowledge goes we are aware in dreams of our other life that consists in the first place of all the things we have not yet lived or experienced in the flesh.

Beyond that material we are also aware of things we never can realize in the flesh and not in this life.

Things belonging to the past of mankind and presumably to its future also.

The latter can be realized only very rarely as future events, because we have no means, or very few, to recognize and identify future events before they have happened, as we also cannot understand thoughts we never had before.

All the things which are not yet realized in our daylight experience are in a peculiar state, namely in the condition of living and autonomous figures, sometimes as if spirits of the dead, sometimes as if former incarnations.

These formulations are probably auxiliary means supplied by our unconscious mind to express forms of psychic existence we do not really understand.

I am sorry my time does not allow me to comment in detail about your experiences.

I hope my general observations will help you to a certain extent.

Sincerely yours,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 341

 

Carl Jung: We are the object of the dream, not its maker.March 15, 2018In “Dream”

Carl Jung and the psyche does not react in a simple way.April 6, 2018In “ETH Lectures”

Carl Jung “ETH Quotations” – AnthologyJanuary 5, 2018In “Anthology”

As I got the experiences about LSD in the early 70th,  being convinced that this could be a very helpful therapy for the psycho. Here is an interesting article there about. hope you enjoy. 🙂

 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-30/underground-psychedelic-psychotherapy-mdma-lsd/10134044

How hard it is to master it 🙂🤟❤

I might repeat myself but as I know not be so famous enough,  mention it again: I am not religious, but I pray when I get in an unwilling or feeling some uneasy situation. But pray to what? a good question; I just pray to a great ghost, the whole, sometimes call my brother, who was all in my life with me…anyway, it seems that Dr, Jung was also in this meaning. an interesting issue  

via http://esotericnow.com/

http://esotericnow.com/carl-jung-about-why-to-pray-works/

As if nothing, in his most controversial book-at least of those published in life-C. G. Jung leaves a footnote:

Prayer, for example, reinforces the potential of the unconscious, thus explaining the sometimes unexpected power of prayer.

The prayer -or prayer or prayer-, Jung tells us, makes us enter into a relationship and dynamic tension with the unconscious. This is very important, but it is necessary to explain it. Jung considers that the unconscious is the source of instincts, images and even not only individual but also collective purposes, it is “the spiritual treasure of humanity”, a great ocean in which the whole history of humanity and possibly the cosmos is recorded. A fund that also seems to have an intention or purpose, which is to unify the psyche, integrate the opposites, make the human being complete, something that is equivalent to what in the Christian tradition is called theosis – the divinization of man – and in the Hinduism is the realization of the Atman. Jung, however, does not affirm that man becomes a god through the manifestation of his unconscious, but that the unconscious in his becoming conscious produces images similar to those that have been generated in the great religions and that this process is accompanied by a numinous effect, or of a sensation of finding meaning in life.

Throughout his, work Jung argues that the unconscious is something like a divine monster, wonderful and terrible that responds to our attention and interest. Praying is a way of paying attention to this fund of mysterious energy and intelligence that is part of us – the biggest part of who we are, “the majority partner” -. The same can happen, for example, when we really make an effort to remember our dreams: something is shaken in the deep and begins to symbolize (the unconscious communicates through symbols or images that communicate something ineffable and transcendent). To pray is in a certain way to pray to ourselves, but in ourselves, there is an unknown and autonomous force, which can impose itself on our will and give meaning to our life. A force at once chthonic, celestial, titanic and demonic. The human being only finds true meaning when he feels part of something bigger than his ego.

In a letter to a patient, Jung wrote: “I have thought a lot about the prayer, it – the prayer – is very necessary, since it makes the transcendent in what we think and conjecture become an immediate reality and places us in the duality of the ego and the dark Other “. The unconscious is, at least while it has not become conscious, the transcendent, a transcendent aspect of existence, at once intimate and elusive. This dialogue opens us to the possibility of experiencing that we are not merely an ego; There is something else, an Other. In the dialogue with the unconscious, which is the dialogue with the transcendent, says Jung, the door is opened to “a whole sphere of knowledge and experience through which all the functions, all the ideas, manage to enter to the side of our ordinary conscience. ” How to open the vault of the treasures of the world of archetypes. Thus, praying can be a way of practising what Jung called the active imagination or the transcendent function, which is a way to open the way to the content that springs from the unconscious and its deep source of archetypes. In a certain way, prayer is to the religious awakening life what dreams are to the psychic life, a space in which the inner life can be revealed, what lies hidden in our psyche and that can produce a numinous experience, a meeting with the radical otherness that Rudolf Otto talks about.

“The unconscious wants to flow towards the consciousness to reach the light,” says Jung in Response to Job; “God wants to become a man, but not at all.” There is a strong tension here, something that hinders the repetition of the eternal myth that, in some way, is always occurring in the background: the incarnation of the Logos, the light that illuminates the darkness, which must finally be understood.