On the function of weakness

I do not believe that It is humanly possible to differentiate all four functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition - M.) alike, otherwise we would be perfect like God, and that surely will not happen. There will always be a flaw in the crystal. We can never reach the perfection. Moreover, if we could differentiate the four functions equally we should only make them into consciously disposable functions. Then we would lose the most precious connection with the unconscious through the inferior function, which is invariably the weakest; only through our feebleness and incapacity are we linked up with the unconscious, with the lower world of the instincts, and with our fellow beings. Our virtues only enable us to be independent. There we do not need anybody, there we are kings; but in our inferiority we are linked up with mankind as well as with the world of our instincts. It would not even be an advantage, to have all the functions perfect, because such a condition would amount to complete aloofness. I have no perfection craze. My principle is: for heaven's sake do not be perfect, but by all means try to be complete.

C.G. Jung, Analytical psychology, its theory and practice. Routlege and Keagan, London, 1989, pp. 109-110.

This is the idea we find in many spiritual writers, from St Paul to Calvin and Paul Tillich… I think Jung’s “complete aloofness” is  what Christian tradition calls Pride: a state of total self-sufficiency; and it also could be called “Hell”, because such total autonomy cuts the individual from the community (commun des mortels) and alters and distorts  his or her perception of reality. To be fully human,  we need our weaknesses just as we need our strengths; we ought to value them and be grateful for them too.

Cutting through... perplexity...

Mum's comment (perplexed) : Oh look! Does it mean, a male dog cannot be walked here, but a female one is welcome? 

(That was a sign just in front of our hotel in Vienna. More perplexing signs will follow... :) 

Lady with the iPad

Incredible - the Austrians knew it all before Steve Jobs!

On humility

The word "humility" comes from the Latin word "humus",  which means fertile ground. To me, humility is not what we often make of it: the sheepish way of trying to imagine that we are the worst of all and trying to convince others that our artificial ways of behaving show that we are aware of that. Humility is the situation of the earth. 

The earth is always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour all our refuse, all we don't need. It's there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold out of every seed.  

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, School for Prayer. Daybreak, London, 1989, p 11.

Leaving the results to God

What I aim at is to live within a situation and to be totally engrossed in it, and yet free from involvement. The basic thing is that I never ask myself what the result of any action will be -- that is God's concern. The only question I keep asking myself in life is: what should I do at this particular moment? What should I say? All you can do is to be at every single moment as true as you can with all the power of your being -- and then leave God to use you, even despite yourself.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, School for Prayer. Daybreak, London, 1989, p xvi.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A friend told me a couple of days ago the story of Virginia Woolf's suicide: she was losing her mind; one day she put in her pockets a ballast and walked into the sea, and died drowned. She did it, I was told, because she loved her husband immensely (that was the word my friend used), and wanted to spare him the pain of watching her become insane.

And I thought, arrested by a sudden weariness: good Lord, there is no end to this... Here is, again, someone taking a decision that does not belong to her, here is someone deciding for someone else what is good for him, assuming that she knows, assuming she can control life and death, as if she had the whole picture; here is a perfect self-sufficient pride born of self-loathing enacted...

Later, trying to find sleep, I thought that what Virginia Woolf was dealing with by her suicide was her own inability to bear the thought of another person loving her so unconditionally as to accept her insanity; so fully as to value her life and presence, however disrupted, however incomplete and diminished, more than his own happiness... You cannot bear this if deep down you feel you wouldn't be able to love in the same way -- so you conclude that others cannot either. And this is a logical conclusion if you live with the idea and feeling of alienation, of our existence being only and desperately individual, fragmented, disconnected from the whole and thus ultimately insignificant. But not all of us live with this idea and feeling; or not all the time.

But of course, my understanding is as partial and one-sided as anyone's, and I am as good at projecting my feelings as anyone... so perhaps, Mr Woolf was, after all, relieved to be rid of his crazy wife, and we may be totally mistaken about her real motives, and I may have no clue to what it means, losing your mind. I can see a grandeur in her decision too -- the irresistible impulse to "lay down your life for your friends", to put the well-being of another person, however misunderstood this well-being may be, before your own. I do not know, and she is not there to explain. All I know is that for a short while that night rage and grief of a loving heart left onshore became mine. Nay -- they are mine each time a person assumes he or she knows what is good for me or how I feel about this or that, each time a unilateral decision is taken to spare me something I do not want to be spared. And to the joking question "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?", I find myself answering with Martha, in Edward Albee's play, shivering on a cold morning just as the curtain is about to go down:

- I am, George. I am.