The Tao of Psychology

October 17, 2016

Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self. Harper Row, 1979/1982.

Jean Bolen has been a favourite writer since I first encountered her Goddesses In Everywoman a quarter century ago. This little book, The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self, links the ideas of Logos, Tao, and Jung's Collective Unconscious/Self. She defines "synchronicity" as "meaningful coincidence, a subjective experience in which the person gives meaning to the coincidence." [p.15] Which is why, I suspect, she and Jung seem to appeal to writers. Because what they are describing seems to me to be connected to how metaphor functions. How we tend to try to define the unknown in terms of the known & familiar. How do we explain "mystery"?

We are part of a larger whole -- Jung's collective unconscious. "When we feel synchronicity, we feel ourselves as part of a cosmic matrix, as participants in the Tao. It gives us a glimpse into the reality that there is indeed a link between us all, between us and all living things, between us and the universe." This is why synchronicity, she says, breaks through our modern isolation and loneliness and we feel we have had a numinous, religious, spiritual experience. [p.103]

In the Land of Pain

October 7, 2016
Alphonse Daudet. In the Land of Pain. Edited and Translated by Julian Barnes. 

Toward the End Of Time

John Updike's Toward the End Of Time. Knopf, 1997.

Ben Turnbull is 66 years old, living near Boston, beside the sea, in 2020, after the destruction of the Sino-American War. Government has disappeared. Entrepreneurs are moving in to offer services, and are in turn being encroached upon by corporations. The chaos in society is parallelled in the chaos of Ben's golf game.

Ben is mostly retired from a financial planning job, unhappily married to his second wife, remembering countless flings and mistresses. He has adult children, step-children, and grandchildren, a fact which seems to be related to his neurotic anxiety about the distant future and distant galaxies. He struggles to recover from a prostate operation. The only good thing in his life seems to be a heightened awareness of the miracles of nature which surround him. Like the black holes in space, there appear to be a few holes in the cheese of his brain, leading him to recall his time with St Paul and, later, as an inhabitant in an Irish monastery during a Viking invasion. The "End of Time" alluded to in the title is personal, cultural, planetary, cosmic. While the journal entries which compose this novel are his attempt to comprehend and control, time and time warps evade his pen.

Personally, I got that his mind is a bit discombobulated and I did not really need all these words and descriptions. I also got that he seems to be a man led, driven, solely by lust and his own physical sensations and gratifications. His abstract scientific mental meanderings are an unconvincing attempt to know the unknowable. Although the dystopic vision of a post-apocalyptic planet does somehow ring true. And in the final identification with nature still dominated by human Old-Think, the narrator offers the reader a glimmer of hope that he may have seen some light.

Man

Kim Thuy's Man.Random House, 2014. Translated by Sheila Fischman.

This gentle novel is post-Vietnam, when abandoned female children have been adopted, married, emigrated. It's about the love of words and the love of food, and about love in general. About cultural vestiges, cultural differences, cultural taboos. Set in Montreal and Paris with flashbacks to the old country. A must read for all lovers of poetry and language. Foodies who love Montreal. A fusion for lovers of ideas - of individualism and identity - and of ideals - of parenting, friendship, marriage, and obsession. 

The Circle Game

Margaret Atwood's The Circle Game. Anansi, 1966.

Poet, writer of short stories, novels, non-fiction. Political activist. Canadian celebrity.
I really miss how George Strombo . . . used to get so flustered in her presence. 

Zen Telegrams

Paul Reps. Zen Telegrams: 79 Picture Poems. Charles e.Tuttle, 1959.

Two great finds on a hunting and gathering adventure to Value Village in Chilliwack and Baker's Books in Hope. 

One Hundred Flowers

Georgia O'Keeffe. One Hundred Flowers. Knopf, 1990.