Wheaties on Wise Old Trails

“Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakens” – C.G. Jung

Hey everyone! I had a healing weekend in Houston, chock full of amazing blues and dive bars, where the Gentleman and I met up with our friend to unite the Trash Trio and send him off to live across the world.  It helped shake and shuffle a lot of things loose in me, and as I wait for that to settle I wanted to try to put some of the posts in bite size form to digest a little easier. It is amazing that y’all are reading this and I want to thank each and every person for reading whatever you choose to read.  However, reading gives you knowledge, and knowledge feeds your mind. It does not feed your soul. So I hope that once you read these you can turn it around and see if it’s a way of thinking that benefits you, and if it’s not that’s fine, as long as you’re feeding that soul and growing.

I also did not discover my love of paradoxes until this blog became a thing, and I again want to proclaim them by shouting from the almost top of this post to list the ones I have scattered about so far.  Life can only be fully understood in the sense that you can’t make sense of it. It’s a big ole goofy world, as John Prine would say.

• The facing of aloneness allows one to engage with another more deeply and meaningfully.
• Flowing is resisting, choosing is denying other choices, opening a door closes another. Not making a choice is a choice.
• The more we grow into ourselves the more we can observe the connection we have with others.
• The deeper you knowingly immerse yourself into the collective that all people share, the more you will discover and be able to define yourself.

I want to talk about paradoxes more, and how most truths, when you get down to it, are going to be paradoxical, as we have ridden rationality about as far as it can take us, past ancient paradoxes (like the yin-yang symbol) straight into a land of paradoxes (quantum physics is completely built on them, as far as we can tell).  With that being said, let’s recap where we’ve ridden so far, starting at the beginning.

Grover:
It is universal, we shouldn’t get too bummed out because anything and anyone conscious has one as “any light must cast a shadow”.

This started the blog! First written in a ten-minute writing exercise with my friend Jackie.  It is about my favorite book as a child, and how Grover gets you and him all worked up over nothing.  How often are we scared of a monster that just isnt there anymore. And it’s also how we are our own monsters, so yeah.  Childhood throwing truths at you.

“Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakens” – C.G. Jung – and this right here is the quote this blog chose for itself, the direction I thought I should take with my writings and the direction I took with myself.  This is the motto I try to adapt to my life everyday.

Elephant Trails:

We are all big dumb elephants sometimes, and sometimes we are really, really smart, and we can be dumb and smart at the same time. We’re just elephants. Staying mindful of that is a helpful way to keep your trail manageable.

This post is about those cycles that we are all caught in, and how I was caught in addiction for more than half my life. So it’s kind of a guideline for how I bested my main squeeze for awhile, alcohol.  The trick I did not learn for many years is how to not just switch one addiction for another, and I did not learn that well enough until last year. It also showcases my recreation and parks degree and trail building skills. *swoon*

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
Carl Jung

Life Spices:
The images and ideas held up by our belief systems are to possess the truth, instead of express it.  Believing wholeheartedly in something that tells you how to live will always fall short. It falls short because it is not made by you.

This one is about how we are accountable for our actions.  This is even with the rough situations we are all in, and all that dumb shit our parents downloaded us with.  It’s still on us. It gets easier realizing it’s on us because we can realize it’s all on everyone else too. Realize that other people’s actions don’t rest on you, just yours.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning  (this book was super important for me, and it came around long before I studied Jung.  I actually have a quote from this book tattooed on my arm, “In order to give light, one must endure burning”).

Roots Underneath:
Love isn’t just for trees, but all life itself.  Love is life’s way of being in the world. Wholly and selflessly.

This one’s a doozy, there’s a lot going on in this post.  It talks about trees as a community, and how we are also a community but we often times are just dicks to everyone.  It’s so easy to forget that the same life force that has the trees grow and strive is an unemotional, unadulterated love. If we can stop for a second and look around, we can see that the same life that has those trees growing and loving other trees, we’d see that the same thing is going on in us, we just try to think it’s not that simple all the time.   

The first joint project from The Gentleman and I.

“If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life…I must be able to say, “I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.”
Erich Fromm

A Salmon’s Current:
So flowing with life isn’t just going with life’s current, it’s going with your current, even if that is against resistance.

This post talks about how most mystical sayings are ridiculous and that the only thing you can do to make yourself happier/better/insert-positive-adjective-here is to not only find the direction you want to go in, but actually swimming that way.

“The doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.”
Herman Hesse

Wise-Old Grandma:
Life is only the present moment, you cannot go back any more than you can go forward, all you have is the now. That’s new age and that’s ancient philosophy and that is stuff we have heard before and that is true.

This post talks about Erik Erikson’s idea of how life development is just different stages, and each stage requires completing a task.  It also goes into how my tasks allows me to act like a grandma and how I am awesome with that.

“To ask the right question is already half the solution to the problem”
Carl Jung

Whole-Grained Raft:
Archetypes are just the preformed parts of us that carry things that people do and are universal.

This post starts into Jung’s ideas of energy, complexes, and archetypes. This energy flows through you all willy-nilly like until it hits a knot or complex, and at that complex’s core (and everything’s core) lies an archetype. That’s crazy that all that is going on inside you, but even more crazy that this stuff is going on everywhere else as well.

“All that is outside, also is inside”
Goethe

Half-Frosted Wheats:
You have to keep in mind though, when your persona is in control you no longer have control, just like when the shadow strikes and the ego is dumbfounded, here your individual wants are pushed down in order to maintain your ego’s sense of belonging.

This post introduces the persona and the ego, the masks we wear and the face we cover, and how we all have them and that is part of us.  It also talks about some of the dumb stuff I’ve done.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
The Gospel of Thomas

Why Hyde:
Being authentic means adapting and adjusting to life inside and outside of you. It is understanding and realizing the whole you inside yourself, and expressing that you in the outer world.

This post analyzes the classic story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and how Jekyll is so consumed with both his shadow and persona that he does not ever realize how little of Jekyll is actually truly him.

“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”
Albert Camus

Two Halves:
Holding these opposites and attempting to work with them is the way human life is meant to be. Jung says it is “a game of hammer and anvil. Between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an ‘individual’.”

This post is about the anima or animus, a personification of the hormones of the other sex that is in you. It is about the importance of integrating these qualities, and how denying them will turn you into just a super obnoxious person.  

“You are a slave to what you need in your soul”
Carl Jung

Uncertain Truths:

I believe that astrology, or religion, or any movement or belief system that can show positive change is not the end of your journey, but the means.

Astrology has some truths in it, and I talk about the things that have been right for me.  I also think that nothing has the whole truth, as nothing is designed to. It can tell you that your in a Pluto transit and things are bad, but making things right you have to figure out on your own.    

“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul”
Hermes Trismegistus