Author: andywhite

A long, long time ago, way before you were born, way before machines, tarmac or income tax, there was a fisherman who used to paddle his wickerwork coracle out onto the lake where he lived at every full moon. On this particular night the moon was low and heavy, there was not a breath of wind and the coracle floated without effort into the night. After a while he set his line and waited, knees drawn up under his chin, wolfskin pulled down over his shoulders to ward off the cold. He waited and waited and waited. The coracle bobbed ever so gently on the still surface. His mind wandered…

All of a sudden the line snapped taught and the coracle tipped forward into the dark water. The fisherman quickly looped the line around one hand and braced his feet against the wicker as the small craft was pulled about. He tried to balance himself, leaning back so as not to have the coracle be swamped by surging motion, his heart now racing to the struggles of his hidden prey.

Just as it seemed the boat would be pulled under, a mighty Salmon burst out of the water towards him, arcing through the dark sky, moonlight glittering across its thousand silver scales as it slammed into his body. He tried to get a hold of it. Just for a moment he managed to grab it by the gills and the tail, just long enough to look into its yellow eye, just long enough to see its yawning mouth, just long enough to hear it whisper sweetly, ‘hello darling man, would you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman dropped the salmon back into the water as though it had bitten him. It slipped away and disappeared in an instant. He shook himself and yelled at the rippling wake by way of trying to assert he was somehow still in charge of events, ‘Are you mad? You are a fish! I am a man! Come back here …!’ But the salmon was gone.

The fisherman did the best he could to gather his wits. He told himself he must have imagined it all, or been bewitched perhaps. He set his line again by way of trying to organise his thoughts and soon recomposed himself. But not for long. Once more, just as the waters’ surface had regained their calm, the huge fish burst skywards, knocking the poor man clean off his feet and into the lake.

Though winded and suddenly freezing in the cold waters, he tried to grab at the fish, getting all tangled up together in the line which now seemed more like endless tresses of silver hair. With one hand he tried to hold her whilst clawing for the edge of the coracle with the other. The salmon wriggled against him, almost teasing him, her mouth gaping close to his ear, ‘hello darling man, would you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman spluttered and choked, struggling for coherence, ‘I, you.. what? No!’ And so the fish took him down, line, rod, and man, down down into the inky waters, until his lungs felt as if they would explode… ‘and what about now my darling? Would you be my sweetheart now?’

He tried to fight her. He tried to swim for the surface. He tried to speak, life bubbling out through his beard and up through the swirling mass of hair and flailing limbs. As consciousness dimmed he felt vaguely aware that she had wrapped arms around him, drawing him down and down, ever deeper into the cool dark depths of the lake.

The moon gradually disappeared from view as they sank, though it was not entirely black as you might imagine. Eventually they reached the silty bottom, landing softly and with exquisite comfort in the soft ancient mud. Being dead didn’t seem so bad after all. She held him gently, caressing his face and nuzzling his neck. He put his hands on her waist and then around her, holding her to him. ‘ And now, darling man? Will you be my sweetheart now?’

He thought about it for a bit. Being dead seemed to make quite a difference to how he felt about everything. It seemed not such a bad idea after all. ‘Okay, I will,’ and with that she gathered him up and swam strongly along the bottom, gradually rising up and up until they reached the surface and the edge of the lake where they found themselves in a sandy sheltered cove. There they rested and made gentle love together till morning.

When the fisherman woke he found she had been busy and built them both a rather lovely cottage with a garden and out buildings. A table had been set in the garden with breakfast things and coffee brewed on a fire. Their first child cooed and burbled in his cot. As the fisherman ate the child grew and then there seemed to be another and then another. For an age they dedicated themselves to the lives of the children. Eventually seven sons all shot up like weeds, grew beards and left home one by one, leaving the old couple with hoar frost heads, bodies bent, and just as they came to their last…. there was a mighty jerk on the line and the fisherman woke with a start, the coracle rocking wildly in the water.

The fisherman cursed himself out loud for falling asleep, trying to cast the seemingly stupid dream from his mind as he struggled to regain control of the line. The coracle dipped dangerously in the water and he had to lean back all he could to prevent the craft from being swamped.

As he held on, bracing himself in the wickerwork, the images of his sleep swirled about inside him, insisting themselves, scoring into his memory and imagination. He struggled against them as though against some hated enemy, desperately trying to reassert himself. He needed to keep his small boat afloat, to land his catch and have something to show for his efforts by morning. Mouths depended upon him after all. There would be hunger and recriminations should he fail. So he held on with all his might when suddenly a great fish erupted from the dark waters and careened, flapping wildly, straight into his body. They both fell to the bottom of the boat where he struggled to hold onto his prey which now fixed him with it’s yellow eye as he held her close and whispered, ‘hello darling man, will you be my sweetheart?’

The fisherman is seeking something. He’s not sure what. Something to feed himself, something to keep body and soul together. The concept of seeking is central to many spiritual traditions, though what it actually means is not so obvious. Is it simply a matter of casting out your line and hoping for the best? The contemporary Christian tradition of ‘seek and ye shall find,’ cast in your line and something will surely bite, is rather different from the original version. This was found in the Gnostic book of Thomas, recently discovered at Nag Hammadi, unadulterated by two thousand years of kings and pontiffs with axes to grind and populations to keep in line. In Thomas this line reads, ‘He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be amazed, and he will reign over the All.. (para2)

Why will we be troubled and amazed? Perhaps the answer to this is best expressed by Rumi in the Sufi tradition, ‘ What you seek is seeking you.’ The divine is not just sitting there waiting to be discovered. It is actively engaged with us, trying to draw our attention to a greater reality than that bound by ego consciousness. Sometimes this is by visiting upon us the most difficult and painful situations in order to bring about the new perspective.

On the entrance lintel to the Oracle at Delphi are carved the words, ‘Know thyself’. This had a rather different meaning to the ancients than it does for us in modern times. We tend to think of self knowledge as shadow integration, having a good grasp of the darker corners of the personality. Back in the day ‘mind’ or ‘self’ was equivalent with the entirety of the Psyche and so knowing oneself really implied having a relationship with the inner ‘Other’ which transcends ego awareness. ‘The Spirit of the Depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being.’ (Jung p232 Red Book)

This understanding helps us to grasp the symbolic meaning of what is often referred to in the literature as ‘ego death’. The western tendency to think concretely has stopped more than a few in their quest for spiritual progress because they imagine their egos have to be eradicated in the process. Nothing could be further from the truth. We need healthy egos to withstand the impact of self-realisation since the experience of the self ‘is always a defeat for the ego’ (Jung Mysterium para 778)

When we become aware of the ‘Spirit of the Depths’ it challenges and reconfigures the constructed identity we spend so much time trying to maintain and stabilise. This leads to the humbling and even painful realisation of how superficial and one dimensional life has been thus far. A sacrifice of ego-as-centre-of-the-psyche has to be made. The death is not that of the ego per se but of its primacy in the psyche. The ego is no longer that around which everything revolves but is itself a satellite of something more fundamental. ‘The Spirit of the Depths said: “No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction; sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come.(Jung p230 the Red Book)

The ego is then compelled to realise it is not master of its own house, but a servant to a greater power. The ‘death’ is that of the illusion that the psyche is what I know of it. The birth is that of realising that we don’t know the half of it, in the face of which mystery we can only stand in awe and wonder.

‘The Spirit of the Depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child: This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child.’ (ibid p234)

Once the fisherman can renounce wanting the Salmon on his own terms he is introduced to an experience of life’s purpose he could not previously imagine. His life becomes simple and dedicated to the child(ren). Of course, once in a while, he lapses back into what Kierkegaard would call ,’the despair of wanting to be oneself’, the fantasy that he is isolated and separate. Perhaps there is purpose in such despair, to be reminded once more that, ‘even the enlightened person remains what s/he is and is never more than their own limited ego before the One who dwells within, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses on all sides, fathomless as the abyss and vast as the sky.’ (Jung, Answer to Job.)

This is a story which deserves another look, having already reflected upon it here..https://andywhiteblog.com/?s=fisherman%27s+ It seems like a simple story of a greedy woman who then gets her just desserts. But there’s way more to it than that.

Once upon a time a poor Fisherman pulled in his net to find he had caught the King of the Fishes. He lets him go in return for a wish. The fisherman runs home to tell his wife who promptly settles on wanting a larger house, though no sooner is it granted than she wants a mansion and then a castle and then a palace and then…

The King of the Fishes becomes increasingly peeved with all this wanting more and more. So when she changes her mind for the umpteenth time and wants a galaxy with added neutron stars and a warp speed sleigh carved from a single flawless diamond to get about in…. he returns both husband and wife to their tumbledown cottage by the sea.

It seems like an ordinary moral tale not to want too much. Yet we might wonder at the wife’s eternal dissatisfaction. She seems grasping and yet you can’t help but think she is also fleeing from some unnamed horror. There is something avoidant about her discontent and beneath the bullish exterior one begins to suspect an underlying anxiety of cosmic proportions.

Her eternal wanting the next bigger and better thing has a manic quality to it, as though she were in flight from some dread prospect, manifest as the inability to settle, to engage with, to really take in and enjoy. It seems like she is wanting to avoid the cardinal rule of good things, which is that all good things come to an end. Her project is to be a step ahead of death and decay by making sure she never does more than dip her toe into the temporary arrangements that are the hallmark of life.

Victor Frankl calls this a ‘no-ogenic neurosis’, refusing the loan of life because of the debt of death. Something has impacted the Fisherman’s wife so severely as to make the prospect of ordinary life quite unbearable. She cannot sit still. She has to rush from one situation to another. She is the person you know who is always on the go, has a million things to do, whose diary overflows, who is forever having to love and leave you. She longs for peace and quiet but somehow cannot give it to herself for more than a moment. For all the business and excitement there is no real joy. She looks strained and exhausted all the time.

In our story the heroine hops from one situation to another, trying to stay ahead of the ravages of time, wanting to be the author of endings rather than being at the mercy of them. It looks like mania but actually its phobia. She is not greedy, she is conducting an anxious rearguard action against catastrophic loss. Anais Nin once said, ‘the secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow.’ This euphemistic ‘as if’ pays only lip service to the harsh yet deeper truth that the secret of a full life is to live and relate to others knowing full well that they will not be there tomorrow.

It’s often puzzling to the casual observer that people stay in relationships which clearly do not work, or that they trade a poor relationship for another just as bad, or that a match which seems compatible is not allowed to last. You can’t help wondering whether the reason behind these vexing quandaries might be the same. The ill matched pair, whilst full of frustrated dissatisfaction, manage most effectively to avoid the heart ache of a truer love lost to the open grave and its handful of dirt. The gratuitous affair, or otherwise inexplicable devaluation of the beloved in a far better match, serves a similar purpose. A moment’s pain is traded against the horror of irreplaceable loss and grief further down the line.

Analyst HG Baynes gets to some of the underlying factors of our heroine’s attitude, her ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ mentality with its narcissistic preoccupation for all things bigger, better, brighter. Baynes describes such restlessness as ‘the provisional life.’ It is inculcated by early experiences of a mother who fills her child with apprehension. ‘Every attempt made to launch her [own] individual life [is] undermined by fear suggested to her by her mother.’ Such a pattern of mothering intrudes so vigorously into her daughter’s private life that she cannot enjoy or settle down with what she has since it is being eternally usurped, compared or spoiled. Mother is ‘a passionately interested eavesdropper in the erotic intimacies of her daughter.’ Nothing is allowed to be hers. Nothing is sacred. There is no privacy. So, of course she feels entitled to compensation kept safe from maternal intrusion by having it be firmly embedded in the safety of tomorrow, all too reminiscent of Dorothy’s longing in the Wizard of Oz.

‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow, its only a moment away…’

To invest in what she already has, her man and her little cottage by the sea, is to place her destiny in the service of the Self rather than in the service of the spell casting witch mother.

‘This means to be shaped and transformed by an unknown power’. This is the core of the neurotic fear of life, ‘that she might be seized, carried away and delivered over irrevocably to an unknown fate.’

The utter dread of such an eventuality must be defended against at all costs, just as strongly as the toxic domination of a possessive mother complex. Caught between Scylla and Charybdis she retreats into fantasy and magical thinking. If only this were a rarity. Sadly her wishes are those of everyone of us preoccupied with winning the lottery, having the ideal wo/man, the next house, the next car, the next gadget, the next ‘must have’ beauty product. It seems like rampant materialism, but is in the fact thinly veiled terror of being here, now.

On the role of symbiotic omnipotence in the narcissistic character.

Once upon a time there was once a poor starving Mule. She was kept in a barren paddock where not a single blade of grass grew. There she stayed in a miserable state, day after day.

Nearby there was a jungle in which lived a ferocious Lion, though she could no longer hunt because of wounds sustained in battle. So the Lion called to the Fox saying, ‘go and find me a Mule, charm her with your spells and specious talk, beguile her and bring her here for me to eat.

The Fox, having been habituated to its subservience replied, ‘I will serve you obediently, oh Lion. I will rob the Mule of her wits with my cunning and enchantment for it is my business to beguile and lead astray’. He followed the Lion’s instructions and went in search of the emaciated Mule.

Soon the Fox came upon the Mule and began to seduce her. He flattered her saying how such a beautiful creature deserved so much better than her barren field and painted for her a grand picture of fields he knew, with grass so high a Camel could get lost in them. But the Mule would not budge and so the Fox had to raise his game, praising the Mule’s beauty, persuading her of his noble intentions and of the delicious meadow which awaited them.

The Mule, in her modesty, was eventually convinced that she lacked the power and perception of the Fox’s true belief. Weakened with hunger and bedazzled with cunning patter she let herself be lured into the jungle where the Lion lay in wait.

However, the Lion was so famished that when she saw the Mule being led forward she rushed her charge, springing too early. So the Mule escaped with no more than a few scratches… and the realisation she’d been duped.

The Lion was furious and sent the Fox back to try and lure the Mule once more, persuading him to use all his guile to muffle the Mule’s reason, making her vulnerable to persuasion. The Fox found the Mule alert and suspicious but began to undermine her directly, ‘you ignoble creature! What did I do to you that you bought me in the presence of a dragon? How could you do such a thing? Why have you reacted so harshly?

‘It was a Lion,’ replied the Mule.

‘No, you fantasised it. You’ve really missed the point, and after all I have done for you. Why won’t you believe me? You’re being over sensitive and clearly have trust issues. Perhaps you have unresolved traumas from your past to be reacting like this. I only wanted you to be happy and this is how you repay me. Don’t be so silly you foolish Mule, you saw no Lion, it’s all in your imagination.’

The Mule was outraged at the Fox’s audacity, at the treatment of her as if she was a fool but the Fox would not be put off and berated her for daring to be so offended. He gradually wore down the Mule’s faith in her own perspective and ultimately persuaded her back into the jungle where the Lion tore her to pieces.

Part of what makes addressing the Fox’s entitlement and refusal to be accountable so difficult, is that the Mule fails to hold onto her suspicion there is a Lion lurking in the wings. It is the Lion from which the narcissistic Fox derives all his confidence and bravado. The reason the Fox is so unrelatable, so absorbed in his agenda, is that his commitment and fidelity are already spoken for. Analyst Masud Khan calls this toxic bond ‘symbiotic omnipotence’, the Fox is identified with and enthralled to a hidden third, the devouring Lion mother.

In this dynamic the early bond between the Fox and the Lion is typified by a split reality in which the needs of the Fox are entirely marginalised (you can have the crumbs from my table) but then compensated for by indulging his entitlement and magical thinking (‘beguile the Mule with your spells’) making it legitimate to treat the Mule as an object to be used and abused.

The Fox’s real needs, to have his own hunger validated, are supplanted and compensated for by the borrowed might of the Lion. This is why the narcissist can so rarely face themselves, take responsibility for what they say or how they behave, because to do so would be to renounce the support and power of the Lion. This leaves him alone and unprotected from devouring maternal wrath.

In place of relatedness, the Fox is given the opportunity to treat the Mule as the Lion has been treating him. The Fox is then able 1) to deny the devouring nature of the Lion, 2) split off his feelings of subjugation onto the Mule and then 3) get her to identify with and embody all of the subsequent confusion and disorientation which finally culminates in her evisceration.

Moreover, we all know what will happen to the Fox if he returns empty handed. He will wind up on the menu instead of the Mule. The Lion is not only Mother, but a terrifying image of the dangerous aspect of the Unconscious itself and so the prospect of being gobbled up is something the Fox is going to guard against as though his life depended on it….

By way of a postscript to this sorry tale we might well wonder about the psychology of the foolish Mule. You can’t help feeling sorry for her but it’s not as though she didn’t know what was happening. She absolutely failed to learn from her earlier narrow escape. How did she allow herself to be wrestled away from her own experience? Her gullibility is staggering. Even the most rank stupidity is not enough to erase the instinct for self preservation. So how does she permit herself to be led away so readily? Her betrayal by the Fox is certainly preceded by betrayal of herself.

Fairbairn’s moral defence, in which a child holds itself responsible for its own abandonment and abuse, might help here. Learned helplessness and the idea that negative attention is better than nothing doesn’t seem enough to explain the Mule’s seeming masochism. Paradoxically, she tells herself she must be party to her desertion and neglect in the barren field. She must have deserved it somehow. This conviction reinstates her as a significant player in a dismal scenario where she is in fact unbearably helpless. So, agency is restored but then so too is she guilty and guilt, after all, must be punished…

Hans had completed seven long years of work for his Master who rewarded him with a great lump of gold. The gold was very heavy and Hans was soon utterly worn out from carrying it. A man passed on his horse and asked what the trouble was, kindly offering to swop his horse for the gold so Hans could ride along. Hans was well pleased though when he mounted up the horse bolted and threw him down. A lady with a cow passed and helped him up, generously relieving Hans of the troublesome horse for the amazing cow which would supply him with milk and cheese for all eternity, though when he tried to milk her she kicked him in the head.

A most benevolent man gave his pig for the horrible cow and now he had more bacon than he could imagine, though more fear too since it seemed that the pig was stolen and so he quietly swopped it with a very helpful man for his plump goose. Having said that, all these fortunate events gave him no coin in his pocket and so he swopped the goose with a knife grinder for a grinding stone that was only a little damaged. It would be a great living but it was pretty heavy and so when it accidentally fell in the well when he went there to drink it seemed he was now entirely free and so he went happily on his way.

A cynical view of Hans might be that he is the classic ‘puer aeternus’ who doesn’t understand how the world works and yet each one of his exchanges are right for him at the time. His luck seems to be that he accepts misfortune when it happens and refrains from having to dress it up or blame himself. Fair trade depends on your perspective as well as market forces. Because he can hold onto this, let himself feel burdened, bucked, kicked, accused and penniless, all manner of what looks like misfortune becomes something else.

I was on my way to an exciting and long awaited meeting. The sun was out, my new motorbike rumbled effortlessly down the highway. Everything was perfect. Suddenly, the bike begins to splutter, intermittent cutting out, then loss of power and an emergency search for a safe spot to pull over. I let the bike cool down before trying again. Nothing. I wrack my brains trying to figure it out. I’d changed the battery the day before, was there a loose terminal? A hairy bloke on a Silver Wing stops and waggles the cables, ‘yeah, look, a loose terminal’ He regaled me with stories of his own roadside mishaps while we waited for the RAC. I felt better. I was going to make it even if I had been the author of my own bad luck.

One offer of help comes after another. An old boy on a massive BMW stops and prefers a tiny clasp knife to see if that might help. I dig at the terminals with the one inch blade to honour his gesture. Gimley’s big brother turns up in a van, red beard to his belt, ‘I got cokes if you need.’ A Hell’s Angel on a chopped Harley with nitrous canister out front and skull engraved into the tank pulls up, confirming the consensus of opinion and we tell tales until the RAC show up.

The RAC guy really wants to help, wishes it was just a loose wire but it’s not the battery. It’s the alternator. Very expensive. Also, the bike is dead in the water. The policy I took out that morning didn’t cover having to be towed. That would be extra, a lot extra. Oh, and more time. Another hour, then two and then three. Night fell.

Yet I felt strangely buoyant. It wasn’t my fault. Alternators corrode and burn out especially when you live by the sea. My California Vintage was by definition an old lady and prone to senior moments. Shit happens. Its not your fault and maybe even the other stuff that you think is your fault, is not your fault. What if it had been the battery connection? Replacing the battery on a machine that’s new to you is like a squirrel tackling a nut for the first time. You make mistakes. Maybe it doesn’t work first time. This is how we learn. Without trial and error you cannot move forward. You make mistakes, the same old ones and if you are lucky new ones in glorious technicolour. If error becomes blameworthy fault or responsibility heaped where it does not belong then learning stops, branches droop and the tree withers.

Blame gets inside you easily and threatens quality of life. What very often contributes to trauma is the conviction that you deserve what befell you, rehashing what the East has to teach us about karma back into a more Judeo Christian interpretation. We tend to embrace self blame, as pernicious as it is, because it is in fact a form of paradoxical self defence. Fordham reminds us that self blame makes a person party to events and therefore a significant player, mitigating against feelings of inferiority and helplessness. Kids blame themselves for parental woes, for the abuses suffered as a result, blows of fate you must omnipotently ‘deserve’ to keep from being a mere pawn on the board.

Gaslighting yourself makes the thing that happened and your feelings about it difficult to lay to rest. The problem with this is that happiness and things that happen go together. The two words ‘happiness’ and ‘happen’ have the same etymological root, Old English ‘eadig‘, wealth, riches, luck. When certain happenings aren’t allowed to be what they are, random undeserved blows, then happiness also suffers because now you are not only to blame but also unlucky.

How would it be to think of what is happening around you as having absolutely nothing to do with you? Paradoxically, it allowed me to watch the evening settle, to count my blessings for the hard shoulder I had to get off the highway, the Costa coffee house across the way, street light, folks slowing to see if I was okay, stopping to talk. So when Jung says, ‘what happens to a person has something to do with them’, he suggests that what we think of as ‘happening’ is not simply about events themselves but about how we are conditioned to interpret them; not just what they mean but what they have to mean.

The recovery guy is a young Russian bloke, interspersing chaotic efforts to load up the bike with frantic phone calls from his mate whose own recovery vehicle is stuck in a ditch somewhere with its back wheels in the air. Somehow he begins to talk about luck and whether he believes in such a thing. He didn’t like the idea because it implied forces greater than himself and he wanted to believe he was captain of his own ship. Things happened because of things which went before. He was in control… though he did have anxiety attacks… and it had taken him many a sweaty palmed year to get his licence.

‘Perhaps’, he mused, ‘luck happens when you experience yourself as lucky. Its not so much the shape of the journey but what you do with what life presents you.. though,’ he added reluctantly, ‘the Universe responds to expectation…’ Does fortune not favour the brave? He slowed right down as he realised the conundrum with which this now faced him, the corner into which he had just talked himself. ‘So, if I am to be lucky then I must renounce the desire to be in control and not mind what happens….’

However life began, whether by accident or design, what we can be reasonably certain about, despite epochs of not very much happening at all, is that it was all of a sudden. Life is a binary arrangement, things tend to be alive or not without a great deal of dithering in between. Whatever it was must have happened in the blink of an eye.

The concept of Spontaneous Generation is probably way older than Aristotle who first put the idea on paper, suggesting that life sprang from inert compounds provided ‘pneuma’, breath or spirit, was present such that this sudden thing which happened could both duplicate and maintain itself at the same time. Louis Pasteur felt he could refute this idea by placing some inert matter in a sealed sterile jar and waiting to see what happened, which was nothing. Nor was it ever going to. Not in his life time anyway. Perhaps Aristotle would rejoin that Pasteur’s sample was clearly devoid of ‘pneuma’, which would be rather difficult to disprove since pneuma is, by definition, non-material and starting to sound suspiciously like divine intervention.

Let’s say for a moment that Pasteur was impatient by a factor of several trillion and that ‘pneuma’ does not necessarily imply godly meddling. What are we being asked to imagine? What does the idea of spontaneous generation involve? In order for life to exist it has to have a minimum number of components. Micro biologist Craig Venter discovered that the smallest and simplest life form had to have a minimum of 437 genes to survive. The simplest gene has about 200 DNA bases. One small DNA molecule is comprised of 50 million paired nucleotides each of which has a dozen or so atoms. This means that the most basic form of life has 1.75 billion atomic components. To get a sense of how much this is, imagine each atom was a grain of salt. The number of grains of salt/atoms required to make the simplest form of life would fill two bathtubs.

In the blink of an eye, nearly two billion particles fall into alignment with each other and then simultaneously get jolted into mutual co-operation. As an ‘accident’, this is infinitely less likely than the prospect of just the right kind of tornado hitting just the right kind of auto shop such that the ensuing chaos produces Kitt out of Knight Rider from the swirling maelstrom of mechanical debris. Unscratched.

Nevertheless, things that aren’t supposed to happen do. How creatures came to fly is about as unlikely as how life itself came into being because so many things have to line up for it to happen. You might say that the laws of natural selection themselves mitigate against this unavoidably slow and resource consuming process involved in developing wings that can only be used to advantage once more or less fully formed.

A smattering of feathers won’t do. You have to have a full set for them to carry your weight and constitute an evolutionary advantage. So, why would early birds go on consistently produce feathers if it would be a few million years before they ever got round to using them? Why would natural selection allow the initial emergence of non-functional feathers to persist as a desirable trait? Yet the skies teem with life. It rather suggests that Evolution has an aspirational goal. It seems quite happy to saddle a species with curious and apparently useless appendages so that one day a dream may be realised and some distant descendant benefit from the resources sacrificed by their forebears.

From this we might infer that Evolution involves something other than reactions to circumstantial constraint or the avoidance of ‘un-pleasure’. Life seems to anticipate what’s possible and then heads in that direction regardless of the un-pleasure or how long it takes. The adaptation of flight has its eye set on the future. It is rolled out despite the encumbrance of the initially insufficient proto-feathers to those earliest generations as yet unable to make use of them.

Evolution knows what it is doing. Those first useless feathers are kept as desirable traits and passed on to successive generations because they will be useful one day, a thousand generations hence. Flight wants to happen, which brings us back to our two bathtubs of salt grain/atoms. What if the missing bit of Aristotle is that ‘pneuma’ is always present, awaiting the fortuitous moment? Or, it exists/makes itself felt, where it perceives conditions are sufficient? Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say. Maybe pneuma is matter-wanting-to-happen. One way or another the bathtubs of grains organise themselves, or, are organised; then kickstarted into co-ordinated activity by something which cannot be measured nor said to be in the tubs along with the atom/grains. Even if you exclude god you still seem to have to reckon with some teleological agent.

A teleological view on any subject is the argument that the purpose of something is intrinsically linked to its design. Things are headed towards possibility as well as away from constraint. The difference between these two very different ways of thinking is that teleology implies sentience and intention. Why involve God in the story of creation when Nature already knows perfectly well what She is doing?

All kinds of weird stuff that shouldn’t happen does. Nature has a way of defying the laws of Nature. Bumble bees shouldn’t be able to fly at all but they do. Alaskan wood frogs shouldn’t be able to be frozen for months at a time but they do. Atomic particles shouldn’t blip in and out of existence but they do. They shouldn’t be both particle and wave but they are. You’d think nocturnal seagulls would get de-selected along with vegetarian vultures, yet they thrive. Cheeseburgers in vending machines shouldn’t be a thing but it is. Statistically improbable events seem to occur way more than probability likes to admit.

Our tendency to think of psyche and soma (body/matter) as distinct from one another forces us into the corner of having to explain Creation by either accident or design, by random events or by the hand of god. How would it be to think of spirit and matter as being at the ultraviolet and infra-red ends of the same spectrum? Perhaps Psyche is an expression of Nature and intrinsic to it which is why there are things that shouldn’t happen but do.

In much of Jung’s work you get the sense that he is trying to heal the Cartesian rift between spirit and matter which has made the circumstances of Creation and the generation of our own smaller creative efforts so mysterious. Jung’s ideas on the ‘Psychoid’, matter infused with pneuma, expresses ‘the essentially unknown but experienceable connection between psyche and matter.’ (CW vol 8)

According to `Jung the Psychoid possesses three different aspects. First, it is inaccessible to consciousness. Second, located in the meeting place between the psychological and the physiological, it can manifest in the relationship between a person’s psyche and their body. Thirdly it refers, “to the relationship between a person’s psyche and the physical world beyond that person’s body” (Main, p.26). We could add from Collins that the Psychoid is ‘the innate impetus to perform actions’. Intention does not have to be added to matter. It’s potentially already there. This is the principle behind the phenomena of synchronicity, which not only tend to occur against the odds but are invariably meaningful.

The separation of spirit from matter in western thought leaves those arenas of life where they clearly overlap unintelligible. This hatchet job on Being bequeaths an impoverished sense of soul to modernity. In Gnostic thought soul is like the radius of a circle, joining the circumference which is the body, to the centre which is spirit. If spirit and body are separated, the experience of soul is ravaged, reduced to a mere concept, inhabiting the body like a fugitive. ”The Spirit of the Times (Aristotle’s Pneuma) considers the soul as a living, self existing being and with this contradicts the Spirit of the Times (Descartes’ intellect) for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man ” Jung’s Red Book p232

Nearly two millennium before Descartes, Greek philosopher Plotinus taught that ‘the psyche is not in the body, rather the body is in the psyche.’ This means that psyche is also ‘outside’, in matter as well as in the body. You could call it a projection but the psyche doesn’t care much for ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. The alchemical opus of freeing spirit from matter means recognising just how tangled up it can be in the first place and therefor the meat and drink of psychoanalysis whose very name means ‘soul-disentangling’.

What we think of as objectively happening out there in the world is very often an inner event. Dreams seem like the quintessential inner experience and yet they come from somewhere beyond our ken. Something unknown is doing I don’t know what, seemingly unintelligible because of the narcissistic wound to ego’s pride in having to take seriously the autonomous existence of those layers of the unconscious from whence such things flow, consciousness beyond either body or mind which has the power to make things happen. Pneuma wants form and embodiment. ‘Eternity is in love with the clocks of time.’ to quote poet laureate Elias Cannetti. The Spirit of the Depths longs for the Spirit of the Time. It manifests in every niche available not because it has to but because it wants to and then revels in its infinite variety. Life on Earth began because it could. Life, like love, finds a way, one the mind is unable to imagine.