My biggest ideas come to me in the shower. This morning I finished Carl Jung's autobiography. Right after I closed the cover I ran a hot shower, and fell into ruminating on the final couple of chapters where Jung discusses, as a very old man, his life in terms in the major myths of Western Culture, and I was feeling good about the book, and that there was some truth and wisdom in it.
Thinking about Carl Jung's writing frees up the imagination. (Hermann Hesse's books were the product of analysis by Jung.)
I had the thought that the idea that a person is really a relationship between three separate pieces: (persona = Latin for actor's mask)
1. The body
2. The unconscious
3. Awareness
I will try to define these three ideas: The body is the living form in this world. The unconscious is that part of ourselves that we cannot observe, and that sends us thoughts. Awareness is the quality that makes us more than animals, it is the ability to know you are thinking, observing, and being.
Three, of course, has a huge significance to Christianity, and having attended St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic School as a child, I have my fair share of indoctrination in Catholic concepts. Although, with Catholics at least, the number three seems to remain a fundamental and intentional mystery, and the Holy Ghost is the most mysterious of the three entities of the God-Image. That mystery has always made the Holy Ghost seem very important to me, and I always perk up when someone has something to say about this entity. Strange old creature that no one could explain to me.
So, three distinct pieces make up each person, and I was quite surprised to find myself very convinced about this! Being a painter I am always looking to integrate, synthesize, and systematise concepts so that I can use them, so my mind went on its little route with this idea of three pieces to a person, and the more important and practical observation that a person is really the
relationship between them has been a paradigm shift lurking around me for months, although many people emphasize or live mostly in one section or another, a psychologically healthy person honors all three pieces: The body, the unconscious, and the awareness. You can feel it when a person is calm, smart, and in control; that person has a relationship where the three pieces honor each other.
What could the three pieces of a Human Being and the three sections of the Christian God-Image have in common? Our Western story of the explanation of life has been entwined with what we today would call a psychological myth of wholeness. Parables are kind of the comic book version of theological thought, and meant to reach most people, however, when approached with some spiritual/psychological structure parables bear fruit and become interesting again.
Christianity personifies important concepts, and then uses the personifications to teach the concepts. So, for instance, Jesus is a personification of the human body; God is a personification of the unconscious; and the Holy Spirit/Ghost is a personification of Awareness. To me this is the
most important lesson: the structure of the internal relationship in each person, and how you need to build a relationship where the three pieces honor each other. I couldn't deal with the way it was presented in Church or Catholic School as a kid, and have continued to keep my distance as an adult.
One problem I still have with parables is that they are meant to be taught easily, and that easiness doesn't force people to understand through personal experience, and therefore encourages group egoic structures to form in the crowd that superficially "gets" the lessons, and what happens is you get a primitive and hierarchical group structure. I prefer an emphasis on self-knowledge, and think any value that comes from spirituality/religion comes from understanding yourself.
The lessons of Carl Jung or Eckhart Tolle make more sense to me than parables, because while they both teach basically the same lesson as Christianity, they refrain from building a narrative, and instead both men look to their direct experience and first hand documents from great spiritual leaders, and use those two sources to teach concepts.
I made this diagram to illustrate the synonymous relationships between the pieces of each human, and the three sections of the Christian God-Image.
The mystery of Christianity seems to be the obfuscation of Gnosis (or self-knowledge) in favor of group Egoic structure.
Updated on 6/24/2009
Making a watercolor copy of a Vincenzo Campi painting from 1575 of Christ being grabbed by the guy nailing him to the cross, so that he can pound the nail in.
I picked it because, 1. It was an incredible and moving image, and 2. because Campi is really great at setting up a powerfully believable shallow forground and a dramatically framed background. This painting has so much going for it, I just wanted to pick up some "moves."
I mean, it looks like Christ is about to stand up from the surface, crazily well composed image.
