Guided by aliveness

  Mysterium Conjunctionis  is the last great work of Carl Jung, which he finished in his eightieth year. The book gives a final account of his research into alchemy, and is in many ways a summing up of his thought world. The subtitle shows the point of the book: An inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. Examples of such opposites in the book are the king and the queen, Adam and Eve, the sun and the moon. Other universal opposites are thought and emotion, mind and body, culture and nature. The process of synthesis of the opposites in alchemy may be symbolically understood as the process of psychic integration, ie. connecting with the parts of the psyche which has been split apart because of social adjustment, trauma or other experiences. Integration includes according to Jung both the individual and collective unconscious, and implies connecting with our wholeness, becoming whole. To Jung, alchemy is a tradition which originated in Egypt, and has i

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum  writes in her wonderful book   The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy  about  how to understand a central dilemma in the human condition: "the intermingling of what is ours and what belongs to the world, of ambition and vulnerability, of making and being made".  Her view on this dilemma is a critique of a traditional emphasis in ethics on human beings as rational, autonomous and free, and a pointing to the beauty and importance of other aspects of human life. We are more than rational agents, we are deeply dependent vulnerable embodied beings: “a lot about us is messy, needy, uncontrolled, rooted in the dirt and standing helplessly in the rain”. Human beings are nature, a part of nature and not something entirely different. This is constituent of our beauty: "Part of the peculiar beauty of human excellence is its vulnerability. (...) Human excellence is something whose very nature it is to be in need,