Spring cleaning has struck: What is it? Habit, the weather, boredom, a message from the “neat freak” who occasionally berates my “archaeological” (layered) filing system? Whatever – I hit the computer room’s closet – big shelves where I toss books, tablets, shipping materials – surely some of this stuff can hit the street tomorrow for trash pick up? Yes!
Among the throwaway-or-not items was The Portable Jung which I consult about once a year, just to remind myself of “that world” of intuition, introversion, thinking and judgement behind the MBTI: I am INTJ, which can be a confusing personality type: very Asperger-esque in my estimation, including the mysterious “logic” of intuition, which thrives on hidden forces, patterns and unchallenged “knowing” that comes, seemingly, out of nowhere. I believe in at least considering the value of Synchronicity.
One strip of paper remained from a former “look see” into Jung’s thinking; I opened the book to page 116-17:
Nobody of his own free will, can strip the unconscious of its effective power. At best, one can merely deceive oneself on this point. For, as Goethe says:
Unheard by the outward ear
In the heart I whisper fear;
changing shape from hour to hour
I employ my savage power. (Faust part ll, Act V)
Only one thing is effective against the unconscious, and that is hard outer necessity. (Those with rather more knowledge of the unconscious will see behind the outer necessity the same face which one gazed at within.) An inner necessity can change into an outer one, and so long as the outer necessity is real, and not just faked, psychic problems remain more or less ineffective. This is why Mephisto offers Faust, who is “sick of the madness of magic,” the following advice:
Right. There is one way that needs
No money, no physician and no witch.
Pick up your things and get back to the land
And there begin to dig and ditch;
Keep to the narrow round, confine your mind,
And live on fodder of the simplest kind,
A beast among the beasts; and don’t forget
To use your own dung on the crops you set! (Part l, The Witch’s Kitchen)
Well! How appropriate to me – this is exactly what I did in coming to Wyoming, 22 years ago – and stuck with it. I was fed up – “Sick of the madness of magic” – Is that not what the Asperger blog and my entire life have been about?
But the section continues:
It is a well-known fact that the “simple life” cannot be faked, and therefore the unproblematicle existence of a poor man, who really is delivered over to fate, cannot be bought by such cheap imitations. Only the man who lives such a life not as a mere possibility, but is actually driven to it by the necessity of his own nature, will blindly pass over the problem of his soul, since he lacks the capacity to grasp it. But once he has seen the Faustian problem the escape into “the simple life” is closed forever. There is of course nothing to stop him from taking a two-room cottage in the country, or from pottering about in a garden and eating raw turnips.
Hmmm…an uncanny description of my time here…
But his soul laughs at the deception. Only what is really oneself has the power to heal.
Hmmm…a proposition that “a real self” may lurk within, one that is not at all pleased with my chosen course (the existence of a poor man) or is this an affirmation that “inner necessity” has successfully manifested in outer necessity?
This is not something I can think about consciously; my interpretive capacities for literature are non-existent: I am a “non-fiction” reader-writer. I have delivered the content to my unconscious intuitive process which is far smarter than I am. LOL Thankfully, there is the Internet…
I take it that a Faustina is possible…
Asperger: The HypoSocial Human 