Individuality

"The Jungian, as psychotherapist, approaches each new patient with interest, curiosity and wonder....Each person speaks a different language....Each one's way of being, ways of being, ways of thinking, and feeling and perceiving and knowing are distinctly that person's....No one has ever been exactly like this person who sits with me - I must regard this person well, for there will never be another who is quite the same."

June Singer
Boundaries of the Soul

A Christian Perspective on Dreams

"Psychologically, we view dreamwork as a holistic process leading toward personality transformation....

"Spiritually, we view dreamwork as an arena of relationship between you and God, and as a helpful resource on the journey towards holiness as well as wholeness....

"While many people look to a dream to find an answer to their problems, we have discovered that a dream is more helpful when viewed as a question....

"While many have viewed dreams as a piece of information to be conceptually grasped, we have found, in contrast, that a dream is more helpfully viewed as an invitation to relationship.

Savary, Berne, and Williams
Dreams and Spiritual Growth

Accomplishment and the Long Haul

"Thus too much vigour in the beginning of an undertaking, often intercepts and prevents the steadiness and perseverance always necessary in the conduct of a complicated scheme, where many interests are to be connected, many movements to be adjusted, and the joint effort of distinct and independent powers to be directed to a single point. In all important events which have been suddenly brought to pass, chance has been the agent rather than reason; and, therefore, however those who seemed to preside in the transaction, may have been celebrated by such as loved or feared them, succeeding times have commonly considered them as fortunate rather than prudent. Every design in which the connexion is regularly traced from the first motion to the last, must be formed and executed by calm intrepidity, and requires not only courage which danger cannot turn aside, but constancy which fatigues cannot weary, and contrivance which impediments cannot exhaust."

Samuel Johnson,
The Rambler, 43

Opposition

A Tooth upon our Peace
The Peace cannot deface -
Then Wherefore be the Tooth?
To vitalize the grace -

The Heaven hath a Hell -
Itself to signalize -
And every sign before the Place -
Is Gilt with Sacrifice -


Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 694

Predispositions

This passage reminded me of James Hillman's The Soul's Code.  Even Hillman admitted he was using extreme cases to indicate the reality of far more common (and subtle) patterns.  Johnson's doubt lines up with Hillman's recognition of a spectrum.

"Some that imagine themselves to have looked with more than common penetration into human nature, have endeavoured to persuade us that each man is born with a mind formed peculiarly for certain purposes, and with desires unalterably determined to particular objects, from which the attention cannot be long diverted, and which alone, as they are well or ill pursued, must produce the praise or blame, the happiness or misery of his future life.

This position has not, indeed, been hitherto proved with strength proportionate to the assurance with which it has been advanced, and perhaps will never gain much prevalence by a close examination.
If the doctrine of innate ideas be itself disputable, there seems to be little hope of establishing an opinion, which supposes that even complications of ideas have been given us at our birth, and that we are made by nature ambitious, or covetous, before we know the meaning of either power or money."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 43

The Power of Knowing How Much is Enough

Here is a concept I first found in Joe Dominguez's Your Money or Your Life.  He argued that it is not true that money can't buy happiness.  When a basic need is met, you can indeed become happier.  But money and happiness often have a relationship expressed by a bell curve.  As long as you are meeting real needs, happiness can increase with wealth, but as soon as your real needs are met, the odd thing is that happiness begins to decline with increased material possessions and wealth.  As human beings, however, we are seldom wise enough to stop our feverish acquisition at what Samuel Johnson would call "a moderate fortune."



"Of all those things that make us superior to others, there is none so much within the reach of our endeavours as riches, nor any thing more eagerly or constantly desired. Poverty is an evil always in our view, an evil complicated with so many circumstances of uneasiness and vexation, that every man is studious to avoid it. Some degree of riches is therefore required, that we may be exempt from the gripe of necessity; when this purpose is once attained, we naturally wish for more, that the evil which is regarded with so much horrour, may be yet at a greater distance from us; as he that has once felt or dreaded the paw of a savage, will not be at rest till they are parted by some barrier, which may take away all possibility of a second attack.

....But it almost always happens, that the man who grows rich, changes his notions of poverty, states his wants by some new measure, and from flying the enemy that pursued him, bends his endeavours to overtake those whom he sees before him. The power of gratifying his appetites increases their demands; a thousand wishes crowd in upon him, importunate to be satisfied, and vanity and ambition open prospects to desire, which still grow wider, as they are more contemplated.

Thus in time want is enlarged without bounds; an eagerness for increase of possessions deluges the soul, and we sink into the gulphs of insatiability, only because we do not sufficiently consider, that all real need is very soon supplied, and all real danger of its invasion easily precluded; that the claims of vanity, being without limits, must be denied at last; and that the pain of repressing them is less pungent before they have been long accustomed to compliance."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 39

Inflation

One of the real dangers of spiritual manifestations is what Jungian psychologists call Inflation:  The encounter with the divine, instead of producing a healthy humility, puffs up the ego and produces a self-centered response to the divine instead of a God centered response.

Jean and Wallace Clift describe it in Jungian terms this way:

“In fact, a major danger at the times of encounters with the Self is that the ego may become inflated by identifying itself with the Self, instead of realizing the Other to be the ‘heavier body’ in the relationship.”
 

The opposite of inflation is described in much more powerful words by a believer, Thomas R. Kelley, an American Quaker-

“The sense of Presence is as if two beings were joined in one single configuration, and the center of gravity is not in us but in that Other.  As two bodies, closely attached together and whirling in the air, are predominantly determined by the heavier body, so does the sense of Presence carry within it a sense of our lives being in large part guided, dynamically moved from beyond our usual selves.  Instead of being the active, hurrying church worker and the anxious, careful planner of shrewd moves toward the good life, we become pliant creatures, less brittle, less obstinately rational.  The energizing, dynamic center is not in us but in the Divine Presence in which we share.”