Nature and the Ego with C. G. Jung and Psalm 115

Thank you for joining me on Loving the Imperfect!
Lately, I've been reading The Earth Has a Soul which is a collection of work from C. G. Jung (pronounced Yoo-ng). It's changing the way I think about our society, so I thought I would share a couple of points Jung made more than half a century ago about America specifically, our culture, our false notion of progress, and our speedy technological advances.  He begs us to get back to our instincts, back to our roots, and leave technology behind arguing that it has never saved us the time we thought we needed. It seems everyone is busier than ever nowadays!

Join me as we read Psalm 115 which points to idol worship. Is technology modern society's idol, taking precedence over every precious thing in our natural and spiritual lives?

Blessings,
Brianne Turczynski

Books Mentioned in this Episode:
The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life compiled and edited by Meredith Sabini

For more information about me and my work, please visit www.brianneturczynski.com or www.lovingtheimperfect.com

Transcript

 Welcome to Loving the Imperfect Podcast, a show for seekers of deeper contemplation. I'm Brianne Turczynski. For 10 years, I've been studying offerings from holy teachers and holy texts. I'm a journalist who has listened to the stories of many people throughout the years, and so I thought it was my turn to share a thing or two about my journey and my thoughts on scripture and holy work from different faith traditions and practices, mostly from Sufi teachers, Buddhists, and Christian mystics. So, join me as we imperfectly and clumsily make our way through each day, mustering up compassion and some words of love for the hours ahead. 

Hello and welcome to Loving the Imperfect. Today's psalm is 115. It is by an anonymous psalmist, and it is 18 verses. So here we go. Psalm 115 taken from the New International Version:
 1 Not to us, Lord, not to us
     but to your name be the glory,
     because of your love and faithfulness.

2 Why do the nations say,
     “Where is their God?”
 3 Our God is in heaven;
     he does whatever pleases him.
 4 But their idols are silver and gold,
     made by human hands.
 5 They have mouths, but cannot speak,
     eyes, but cannot see.
 6 They have ears, but cannot hear,
     noses, but cannot smell.
 7 They have hands, but cannot feel,
     feet, but cannot walk,
     nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
 8 Those who make them will be like them,
     and so will all who trust in them.

9 All you Israelites, trust in the Lord—
     he is their help and shield.
 10 House of Aaron, trust in the Lord—
     he is their help and shield.
 11 You who fear him, trust in the Lord—
     he is their help and shield.

12 The Lord remembers us and will bless us:
     He will bless his people Israel,
     he will bless the house of Aaron,
 13 he will bless those who fear the Lord—
     small and great alike.

14 May the Lord cause you to flourish,
     both you and your children.
 15 May you be blessed by the Lord,
     the Maker of heaven and earth.

16 The highest heavens belong to the Lord,
     but the earth he has given to mankind.
 17 It is not the dead who praise the Lord,
     those who go down to the place of silence;
 18 it is we who extol the Lord,
     both now and forevermore.

Praise the Lord

 Okay, Lately, I've been reading The Earth Has a Soul by Carl Gustav Jung (pronounced Yoo-ng), who was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist, and it is so good. It is a collection, compiled and edited by Meredith Sabini, and although it has numerous reflections, letters, and essays from Jung, the collections carry one common message: man needs to come back to nature.

I've mentioned before in a couple of episodes, that we have free will as humans because this is something I've always felt was the moral of the story, at least one of the morals of the story of the Garden of Eden. And well, as I'm reading this book, Young speaks of this. He encounters this question of free will with the indigenous tribes of America. In his reflections, he says that man may have too much free will.

He says we need to listen to instinct rather than our will. He talks about roots says,
  
 “loss of roots is a disaster. Not only for primitive tribes but for civilized man as well.” And then he says, 
 
 “For it is the body, the feeling, the instincts which connect us with the soil. If you give up the past, you naturally detach from the past. You lose your roots in the soil, your connection with the totem ancestors that dwell in your soil. You turn outward and drift away, and try to conquer other lands because you are exiled from your soil. It is inevitable. The feet will walk away, and the head cannot retain them, because it is also looking out for something. That is the will, always wandering over the surface of the earth. Always seeking something. It is exactly what Mountain Lake, the Pueblo chief, said to me. The Americans are crazy, he said. They are always seeking. We don't know what they are looking for. Well, there is too much head, and so there is too much will. Too much walking about, and nothing rooted.” 
 
 So when I read that, I’m trying to think of some of the people that I know that may have lost their roots and that's why they seem so imbalanced and overcompensating, and I've seen this in several people that I know, and in myself as well. And I've learned lately that when it comes to making decisions, really important decisions or just stupid, mundane decisions, especially when it involves social media, a job change, or maybe where you want to live. or retirement plans, okay, when making these decisions and exercising our free will to make these decisions, I have learned that we should never take the path of the ego, but the path instead that will be better for our spirituality and our spirit and the spirituality of our family, the growth of the spirituality of our families and our children.

I was always taking the path of more and always wanted to feel like I was successful in what I was accomplishing and always wanted to feel accomplished in my successes. And now I'm sort of stepping back from that and realizing that it's okay to simplify my life and not cram my day with so much and this is The Way. This is The Way. And The Way will not always look like you thought it would. it's not always going to look the way we thought. And this is the beautiful lesson that the Blessed Mother teaches us in her story. And again, we don't know if anything happened the way that it's written in the Bible, but whoever wrote these stories, I think, was a genius, because there's so much truth with a capital T in the message of these stories. So, Mary, the thing that she teaches us is that pregnant Mary goes to Bethlehem. And she and Joseph are trying to find a room, and they're knocking on all these doors, trying to find a place to have Jesus and they're being rejected left and right.

And if I was Mary, and I was pregnant, and an angel had come to me and said that I would have this baby, and I was supposed to name it Jesus, wouldn't you think that God would provide for you a comfortable, safe, and sanitary situation in which to have this baby? But it didn't work out that way. And Mary just went with the flow. She probably didn't complain, she just followed the plan, whatever the plan became at the moment. She was completely present in the moment and just went with the flow.

And she ended up having the baby instead in a manger, or some people have said that she ended up in a cave having the child there. It didn't work out the way she probably thought it might, but it's okay. It ended up being fine in the end, and it was an even better story and lesson for us. 

And there will come a time when you have to drown out all those little voices of the ego that are displeased with you. That said, this isn't how we pictured it, or this isn't what you planned for yourself. You are going to be a great success. You are going to, you know, rise in your company and what are you doing? You're selling yourself short, all that kind of stuff. All these little voices of the ego that shout at us that we're not doing it right.

We need to learn about ourselves more to discern that those are the voices of the ego. And as I'm making my way through Jung's work, it's remarkable what he says about these subjects and what he says of America. In 1912, he says, 
 “You see, America does not see that it is in danger. It does not understand that it is facing its most tragic moment. A moment in which it must choose to master its machines or be devoured by them.”
 
 And so, it is the same with the ego. We have to learn to master our ego and point at it and name it and find it out or be devoured by it driven by our egotistical notions of what we should do next.
 
 We need instead to follow the path of the simple, the instinct, the natural, and the spiritual, instinct in us. The voice of the Holy Spirit that says, no, this is too much. You're doing too much. Settle down. Take a step back. Relax. Sit here and look at a tree. Go take a walk. The voices that tell us to slow down, that is the voice to listen to. The Holy Spirit will speak to us like that because it wants us to heal, and it wants us to stop and notice God in all things. 

And if we're moving too fast we're not going to notice all these beautiful little miracles that we've been missing along the way. God wants us to enjoy life as much as we can. And we can only really enjoy life when we slow down with everything. 

  So, in Psalm 115, we have the psalmist comparing God to the man-made idols some civilizations have worshipped. And like I've done in past episodes, I like to bring the psalms into the relevancy of the present, our egos are driven to continue the worship of idols. We carry our phones around like precious talisman, because we’ve shared too much with these devices, and now our spirits are being devoured by them. We have also, according to Jung, abandoned our primitive and natural instincts, and we have sold our souls away with a false notion of progress the natural instincts are still with us.

But we must retrain our minds to get back in touch with the primitive in us. And according to Jung, that means shutting off the noise of society. I think we could eventually get back to a simpler life if, for every decision we had to make, we asked ourselves, why do I want to do this?

If the ego comes up as the loudest, most boisterous voice you hear, then don't do that thing. So I'm going to challenge myself this week by checking for the ego and figuring out what it needs and what drives it and maybe I'll learn something really valuable about myself. I hope that if you join me in this challenge it will be fruitful for you. 
 
 Thank you so much for joining me this week, again. Next week is Psalm 121. And I hope you join me then. Bye bye.