Writing toward Wholeness: Lessons Inspired by C.G. Jung by Tiberghien Susan M

Author:Tiberghien, Susan M [Tiberghien, Susan M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chiron Publications
Published: 2018-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

A writing suggestion:

Take a moment to write a journal entry about an experience of beauty. Close your eyes and remember a walk, some tree on a hillside, a sunset, a single star. An encounter with beauty. Describe what you saw, what you felt.

2. Beauty Seen by CG Jung

How does Jung relate to the call of beauty? Let’s turn first to Memories, Dreams, Reflections . Jung remembers as a young child feeling deep happiness when he was close to a body of water. Once when his mother took him to visit friends who had a castle on Lake Constance, he remembers an unimaginable pleasure.

I could not be dragged away from the water. The waves from the steamer washed up on the shore, the sun glistened on the water, and the sand under the water had been curled into little ridges by the waves. The lake stretched away and away in the distance. This expanse of water was an inconceivable pleasure to me, an incomparable splendor. At that time the idea became fixed in my mind that I must live near a lake; without water, I thought, nobody could live at all. (MDR, 22)

And indeed Jung would build his tower at Bollingen on the shores of the lake of Zurich. As we will read in Chapter Eight, it was here where Jung felt he was in the midst of his true life. “Where I am most deeply myself.” (idem, 252)

Much later, as an adult visiting Kenya and Uganda, Jung wrote glowingly about the beauty of the sunrise. Each morning he would take his camp stool and sit under an umbrella acacia just before dawn to watch the sun rise out of darkness. Before him, at the bottom of the little valley, lay a dark strip of jungle. The horizon would become radiantly white.

Gradually the swelling light seemed to penetrate into the very structure of the objects which became illuminated from within until at last they shone translucently like bits of colored glass. Everything turned to flaming crystal…. At such moments I felt as if I were inside a temple. It was the most sacred hour of the day. I drank in this glory with insatiable delight, or rather in a timeless ecstasy. (idem, 298)

The beauty of the sunrise transported Jung into a moment of timeless bliss. It was the gateway to an experience of transcendence.

It is also in his letters to Emma, his wife, that we discover Jung’s attention to the beauty of his surroundings, along with his desire to share it. When we read the letter he wrote to Emma from the Steamer Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse on his way home from America, his description of the sea takes us back to the attraction of water on Jung as a child, and we appreciate its deep-rooted appeal. It compels Jung to silence.

September 22, 1909

One looks out silently, surrendering all self-importance…. The sea is like music; it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over. The beauty

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