Jungian analyst Russell Lockhart presents notions of the meaning of money as it relates to the imagination, complexes, the Self, and the dark side of life. He presents his reflections on Bernie Madoff and Ponzi schemes, and speculates where "money as god" is leading us.

This essay is now available at http://ralockhart.com/WP/SilverChangeImagination.pdf

Sickness Afoot

Nearly forty years ago, I had dream. In the dream, I was leafing

through Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections. A piece of paper

fell out and on it was written, poem-like

A poem wants a poem

A dream wants a dream

This little dream has become the animating spirit of my work

ever since.

It is always a deep pleasure to me when someone responds to

one of my dreams or poems with a dream or poem of their own.

In response to my recent poem, "How the War on Reality Ended,"

my long-time friend Tony Albino sent me this poem.

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There once was a girl named Alice,

A comely thing who befriended birds

And trees and once, a rabbit without malice.

For she knew what needed to be known,

That plumbing life’s depths was a challenge

To understand, to grasp, to measure one’s soul,

Not in terms of success or failure or even balance

But against the one whose blood was carried in a chalice.

Content with silence, she spoke to none.

A wave and a smile but nothing more.

At a hilltop she’d stare wide-eyed at the sun.

Letting it pour a spreading kindness,

a warmth she hoped would keep her from being shunned

by all those who thought they knew her ways, her thoughts,

but if they really found a way to know her they’d be stunned

to discover how easy their knowledge could be undone.

She spoke water to rivers, wind to trees

and once while whispering to a flower

she gave directions to a troop of passing fleas,

who danced and twirled at being acknowledged

by this girl whose voice floated like a midsummer’s breeze

full of spice and song and hints of saffron

that could make any who were ill at ease and hard to please

smile at nothing and laugh at anything, even their knees.

But deep within was a discontent

that slid as if lying loose on a ship

unbound and unmoored, a shadowy vagrant

whose sudden shift would throw her off course

and into a fog-bank of torment,

her soul close-hauling a buffeting wild sea

whose dark intent threatened to consume and disorient

her every attempt to stay unencumbered and silent.

“Do not follow the path of the hypotenuse”

After more than five decades of working with dreams, I find that more and more dreams are “voice” dreams, that is, without any imagery, only an auditory voice, most often male, but female too. These dreams are often oracular in nature and feeling, with the expression not to be doubted--even if it is not immediately understood. Sometimes, the voice content takes on the character of a simple instruction: “Look for three pennies in the gutter.” I do not ignore voice dreams and make every effort to listen and attend to these instantiations of what feels like wisdom quite beyond any sense of my consciousness. So I look out for the pennies in the gutter. I do not find them in a gutter but in a rain puddle outside the stairs leading into a local drug store. Three bright and shiny pennies. In a future post I’ll comment more on the significance of such synchronicity and why synchronicities are “paths.”

A rather gruff voice announces, “Do not follow the path of the hypotenuse.” When I wrote the dream down, I also drew a right triangle. I looked at the hypotenuse and noted that it is the shortest distance between the two extreme points, or, as is usually said, the longest side of a right triangle. I see two paths: the hypotenuse path and the “angle” path as two ways to reach the “end” point. I spontaneously think of the hypotenuse path as “cutting corners,” as it would be traversing the straight and narrow. Bachelard’s delicious reverie on corners comes to mind, as does my own writing on the goddess of corners: Angerona. She is also the goddess of silence and the suffering of silence. I explored many aspects of Angerona in my essay, “Psyche in Hiding,” which is available in Words As Eggs. Her etymology derives from angles. To “be cornered” gives us a sense of why the path of suffering is rejected in favor of the straight and narrow. But fate always finds a way to corner us, and now, even our whole species is cornered, and faced with the suffering of extinction. Who wants to go there? But for me, if I follow the oracular voice, I must go there, I must not cut corners, must reject the straight and narrow, and seek out some way to “be with” what now seems an inevitability.

Angerona’s statue is hidden away in the Sacellum Volupiae, the Roman Sanctuary of Pleasure. How does one find pleasure in suffering? This seems related to my dream of celebrating the final Raganrök. These could be interpreted as pathological tendencies, but I think something deeper is at work: a true facing of what’s coming. In the next post I’ll take this up more directly.

There was no path to step from

Going forward the only choice

Stepping into a forest of dreams

Each tree a separate dream

Each of different type, size, shape

The forest floor was solid

But crystal clear

Revealing dream roots

All intertwining, all moving, all alive

Connecting with neighbors near and far

It was not a silent forest

But I cannot say what I heard

Except that it pulled me in

For further secrets further on

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From Dreamwork Poems 2017

It begins with cells from the atmosphere taking up residence in the host's blood stream. These cells begin to proliferate and develop tubal extensions that connect aggregates of cells. Feeding off the host's blood is then transmitted through these tubes to develop a networking of these aggregates. They begin to infiltrate the host's muscle and this releases chemicals which infiltrate the host's brain. This causes the host to leave its home colony, to travel up a nearby plant stem and at precisely 25 centimeters, the host stops, takes the plant's main vein into its mandible, clenches tightly so that the plant's juices begin to flow. This grip on the plant vein becomes permanent and the ant host is now unmoving. Inside the ant, the parasite begins to form a kind of spear that goes through the ant's head. A bulbous head develops on this spear and eventually bursts, pouring a large number of cellular spores onto the ant colony and its trails below. This ensures the infection of many more hosts.

This parasite is known as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. The etymology refers to "club headed snake." It is commonly known as the "Zombie" parasite, as it is completely takes over any independent function of the ant. It is a form of parasitic fungus and has been known to completely destroy ant colonies.

In a previous post on parasites (see October 4), I mentioned the use of biological realities as a form of "analogical" research in exploring the psychological and cyberlogical relevance of these biological "models." I will explore this relevance in a subsequent post. In the meantime…think about it.

https://goo.gl/eJr5yn