"I have no ready-made philosophy to hand out. When a patient asks me "What do you advise? What shall I do?" I do not know any better than he. I know only one thing; that when to my conscious outlook there is no possible way of going ahead, and I am therefore "stuck", my unconscious will react to the unbearable standstill." C. G. Jung
Openfoot: Born 1952. Location: South-East Wales (UK)
It’s always hard to identify beginnings. It’s not hard to put up arguments that there aren’t any. Every event arises from the one preceding it. All is continuity. It is the apparent discontinuities and changes of state, that we conventionally refer to as beginnings and ends. However you view it, in everyday life we can pick out distinctive moments and events that are at least milestones, proxies for beginnings.
How did Openfoot come to follow this path? When did he consciously recognise that the journey had begun? It’s hard to be sure but two appropriate milestones suggest themselves. These were his reading of “An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology” by Frieda Fordham, probably in late 1970 or early 1971 and the commencement of his dream diaries in April 1972. Openfoot is inclined to believe that if it had not been, “An Introduction” it would have been some other equally appropriate book that would have directed him to his rambles through internal landscapes. However, it seems clear that the particular form that these rambles took, with the emphasis very much being on paying attention to dreams, resulted from his exposure to Jung’s thoughts.
It is also clear that Openfoot had in someway been primed beforehand to be receptive to such a book and to the world view it conveyed. He was open to the novel perspectives and concepts it contained. So were there significant events in Openfoot’s earlier life that cast light on why his mind was receptive to the notion of interior ramblings, to the idea that a spiritual path might exist or that a meaningful quest was possible?
At this point Openfoot has no intention of writing an autobiography nor of examining the wider influences and impacts of the cultural changes taking place in the 1960s and early ‘70s. Although, with the youth counter culture and the hippie revolution more or less at their height, times could hardly have been more favourable to Openfoot’s endeavours.
The points that follow are then just some of the more significant personal factors, as they seem to Openfoot.
As a child growing up in 1950’s South Wales there was every chance that Sunday would involve a trip to Church and or Sunday School. Sunday was certainly that for Openfoot. Some parents still dissuaded their children from playing games outside on a Sunday and the plethora of retail opportunities that Sunday now presents were not available then. Education authorities bought Bibles to present to every child on their entry to secondary school, and continued to do so into the sixties. Openfoot still has his copy somewhere. So there was no evading the influence of Christian thought and practice on Openfoot’s early life. For the most part Openfoot was accepting of this and although prone to ask awkward questions during Confirmation classes he was more or less content to proceed to Confirmation. This key event in a Christian’s life proved to be just that for Openfoot – but not in the way he was anticipating.
For whatever reason Openfoot's expectation was that partaking in Holy Communion, in the Blessed Sacrament, would offer a new experience, a new insight, a step forward, a right of a passage. Call it what you will, when it failed to live up to this, when there was no accompanying new experience, when it became like much else in the Church, an empty ritual, Openfoot's acceptance of the whole thing quietly slipped away.
As a child, perhaps aged ten or eleven(?), one dream made a particular impact on him and he has never forgotten. In it
“Openfoot is running through a desert landscape with his father. A big, fierce golden-orange dragon is pursuing them. They manage to keep ahead and come upon a golden throne. Openfoot and his father run to the throne and sit in it. Here they are safe. They can view the dragon and are protected from it”
Openfoot very much sees this as a dream of emerging identity and individuality. Here the egoic mind is emerging from the power and forces of the unconscious; perceived as the threatening dragon. Duly enthroned the ego is safe to take up its "ruling" role. It could well be argued that having, in this dream, achieved separation from the dragon the overriding theme of all of the dreams related on this site is that of coming to know, to be friends with, the dragon again. Of healing this natural split.
At a similar age or perhaps in his early teens, Openfoot had several episodes of what he now knows to be called sleep paralysis. This is characterised by becoming conscious and awake while you body remains asleep. Waking in your body and being unable to make contact with it, not being able to direct a hand, a leg or to bring about any kind of movement is disturbing to say the least. As feelings of entrapment and panic grew Openfoot would attempt to call for his mother but to no avail. How can you call out when you don't exert any control over your mouth, throat and lungs? Eventually, after repeated attempts to call out, the re-connection with his body would be made, the call issue forth and a comforting mother appear. There were three or four of these episodes, although as far as he can remember only one of the opposite, moving around while being unconscious, or sleepwalking.
At the time Openfoot was happy to receive his mother’s assurance that these phenomena were a form of “growing pain” but he feels sure that these powerful experiences helped to lay questions about personal identity, the relationship of mind and body and the nature of consciousness, at deep levels in his mind.
At school Openfoot was no high-flier. Firmly middle of the road in his ability, achievements and grades things carried on like that until he entered the Sixth Form (from 16 to 18 years of age) and began “A” levels. Being able to concentrate on subjects he was attracted to namely geology, geography and biology, made school a better place to be and grades and performance improved. These subjects are all great at stimulating you to think deeply about change, impermanence, interdependence and dependent origination. About systems and processes rather than objects and things. About evolution and development, about transformation and the dynamic interplay of natural forces. It is of course possible to think about all of these things purely from an external standpoint. To leave them as externalities. However, Openfoot’s nature is that of a strongly expressed introvert and so there was little chance that he was not going to apply these ideas to thinking about his own nature and about mind and awareness. Openfoot went on to study Geology at university, so throughout the first few years of the seventies he was immersed on the one hand in the study of the outer natural world and on the other increasingly obsessed by the nature of the internal natural world, which he explored primarily via his nightly rambles through interior landscapes.
Openfoot’s major recreational activity in his mid-teens was stillwater fly-fishing. Many hours were spent, many long days enjoyed, lazily casting the fly over sparkling, rippling waters with his mind alternately in a state of focussed attention on the line, in anticipation of a bite, or in contemplation of the shimmering water; while at others he was lost in some strand of thought or daydream. This was as good a form of meditation as many others he assumes and a great teacher about the nature of persistence, habit, and gain and loss; all taking place while immersed (up to his thighs on many occasions) and in intimate contact with the natural environment.
So all of these experiences and others contributed to Openfoot’s response to “An Introduction” and of course Openfoot was not immune to adolescent angst. Few escape. There were perhaps two main sources of confusion contributing to Openfoot's angst apart from the usual and obvious teenage problems - What to do about women and sex? What to do about money? What will I ever do to earn a living? How can I overcome my social ineptitude? I’ve never sorted the later!
But the two fundamental angst inducing conundrums were:
What sort of a person am I?
How do I get to the bottom of this mystery, this life, this existence, that I’ve been thrust into?
Openfoot variously felt very intelligent or very stupid, very wise or very foolish, young but also very old, very dextrous or very clumsy, very spiritual or very material, alternately wishing to be a recluse and a monk or a lothario and Casanova. Perhaps its not surprising then that Jung’s concept of the archetypes immediately had resonance, enabling these conflicting feelings and desires to be seen in some sense as other than him ,or at least different parts of him, and at the same time offering a way out, a solution, to their constant conflict and warring; through the process of individuation, of developing an integrated self. Here was someone taking about inner experiences in a way that Openfoot could feel an affinity with. In a way that stuck a chord, that made intuitive sense. At the same time it offered a way of systematising and ordering thoughts about the inner world. It provided a framework for understanding, claimed to be, and provided evidence to support, a universal theory of mind. Openfoot liked big ideas and was very familiar with them in the life and earth sciences; he had a passing knowledge of them in astronomy and physics. And now, in Jung, here was someone who was providing a similar unifying big idea for the human psyche! And at the heart of it all, dreams. Working with dreams as a means of achieving insight, of working with the natural inner reality and with the inner dynamics of the psyche to follow a process, to forge a path, to the desired goal.
It was all truly revelatory and life changing.
It is of course impossible to read Jung without coming to appreciate the very great influence of Eastern thought on the development of his ideas. References to the Tao, the Buddha, and Yin and Yang in “An Introduction” resulted in a rapid visit to the university library, not only to draw up a reading list of Jung’s own works but to find out more about these eastern works which were clearly of such importance to him. Soon afterwards, on the look out for eastern texts affordable on a students budget, Openfoot found Paul Reps “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones” which together with “An Introduction” became Openfoot's constant companions for many years. Openfoot still loves the depiction of “The Ten Bulls” in “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones” and at the time they provided further confirmation of the existence of a path.
Openfoot was also much struck by Jung's observation of the habitual tendency the "Western Mind" to approach the world and phenomena with the scalpel of either/or as a means to dissect, reduce and analyse; While the "Eastern Mind" fell more naturally into a both/and perspective more likely to combine, integrate, meld and transcend.
In following up Jung’s own works Openfoot came across a quotation of one of the passages from the "Tao Te Ching" in “The Integration of Personality”. It struck Openfoot so forcefully as a description of his own condition at the time he reproduces it in full below. Various translations are readily available today. After reading this passage Openfoot made sure to acquire his own copy of the "Tao Te Ching", completing a trinity of “constant companion “ books.
In Openfoot’s Dream Books this passage is copied out and dated 8th June 1972, and comes after Dream 2.
Give up your learnedness
Then you will be free from cares!
Between ”Yes”’ and “Yes Indeed” what difference is there?
Between good and bad what difference is there?
But what all men honour
That one may not with impunity set aside
O wilderness have I not yet reached your centre
The men of the multitude are radiant
As at the celebration of great feasts
As when in spring people climb upon the towers
I alone am undecided, still without a sign to act by
Like a little child that is not yet able to laugh
A weary wanderer, who has no home
The men of the multitude all live in superabundance
I alone am like one abandoned
Truly I have the heart of a fool
Chaos O Chaos!
The men of the world are so clear, so clear
I alone am as if beclouded
The men of the world lust so after knowledge
I alone am downcast, so downcast.
Restless as the sea!
Driven hither and yon, alas, like one who dwells nowhere!
The men of the multitude all have something to do
I alone am as idle as a ne’er do well
I alone am not as other people are
For I value the lavishing mother
*******
The form of the full life
Wholly follows the Tao
The Tao invisible, ungraspable, brings things about
It contains images, ungraspable, invisible!
It contains things invisible, ungraspable!
It contains seed, unfathomable and dark
This seed is the truth
This truth embraces faith
From the very beginning until today
The name Tao has been indispensable
For understanding the origin of things
And how do I know
That the origin of all things is of this nature
Through the Tao
It’s always hard to identify beginnings. It’s not hard to put up arguments that there aren’t any. Every event arises from the one preceding it. All is continuity. It is the apparent discontinuities and changes of state, that we conventionally refer to as beginnings and ends. However you view it, in everyday life we can pick out distinctive moments and events that are at least milestones, proxies for beginnings.
How did Openfoot come to follow this path? When did he consciously recognise that the journey had begun? It’s hard to be sure but two appropriate milestones suggest themselves. These were his reading of “An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology” by Frieda Fordham, probably in late 1970 or early 1971 and the commencement of his dream diaries in April 1972. Openfoot is inclined to believe that if it had not been, “An Introduction” it would have been some other equally appropriate book that would have directed him to his rambles through internal landscapes. However, it seems clear that the particular form that these rambles took, with the emphasis very much being on paying attention to dreams, resulted from his exposure to Jung’s thoughts.
It is also clear that Openfoot had in someway been primed beforehand to be receptive to such a book and to the world view it conveyed. He was open to the novel perspectives and concepts it contained. So were there significant events in Openfoot’s earlier life that cast light on why his mind was receptive to the notion of interior ramblings, to the idea that a spiritual path might exist or that a meaningful quest was possible?
At this point Openfoot has no intention of writing an autobiography nor of examining the wider influences and impacts of the cultural changes taking place in the 1960s and early ‘70s. Although, with the youth counter culture and the hippie revolution more or less at their height, times could hardly have been more favourable to Openfoot’s endeavours.
The points that follow are then just some of the more significant personal factors, as they seem to Openfoot.
As a child growing up in 1950’s South Wales there was every chance that Sunday would involve a trip to Church and or Sunday School. Sunday was certainly that for Openfoot. Some parents still dissuaded their children from playing games outside on a Sunday and the plethora of retail opportunities that Sunday now presents were not available then. Education authorities bought Bibles to present to every child on their entry to secondary school, and continued to do so into the sixties. Openfoot still has his copy somewhere. So there was no evading the influence of Christian thought and practice on Openfoot’s early life. For the most part Openfoot was accepting of this and although prone to ask awkward questions during Confirmation classes he was more or less content to proceed to Confirmation. This key event in a Christian’s life proved to be just that for Openfoot – but not in the way he was anticipating.
For whatever reason Openfoot's expectation was that partaking in Holy Communion, in the Blessed Sacrament, would offer a new experience, a new insight, a step forward, a right of a passage. Call it what you will, when it failed to live up to this, when there was no accompanying new experience, when it became like much else in the Church, an empty ritual, Openfoot's acceptance of the whole thing quietly slipped away.
As a child, perhaps aged ten or eleven(?), one dream made a particular impact on him and he has never forgotten. In it
“Openfoot is running through a desert landscape with his father. A big, fierce golden-orange dragon is pursuing them. They manage to keep ahead and come upon a golden throne. Openfoot and his father run to the throne and sit in it. Here they are safe. They can view the dragon and are protected from it”
Openfoot very much sees this as a dream of emerging identity and individuality. Here the egoic mind is emerging from the power and forces of the unconscious; perceived as the threatening dragon. Duly enthroned the ego is safe to take up its "ruling" role. It could well be argued that having, in this dream, achieved separation from the dragon the overriding theme of all of the dreams related on this site is that of coming to know, to be friends with, the dragon again. Of healing this natural split.
At a similar age or perhaps in his early teens, Openfoot had several episodes of what he now knows to be called sleep paralysis. This is characterised by becoming conscious and awake while you body remains asleep. Waking in your body and being unable to make contact with it, not being able to direct a hand, a leg or to bring about any kind of movement is disturbing to say the least. As feelings of entrapment and panic grew Openfoot would attempt to call for his mother but to no avail. How can you call out when you don't exert any control over your mouth, throat and lungs? Eventually, after repeated attempts to call out, the re-connection with his body would be made, the call issue forth and a comforting mother appear. There were three or four of these episodes, although as far as he can remember only one of the opposite, moving around while being unconscious, or sleepwalking.
At the time Openfoot was happy to receive his mother’s assurance that these phenomena were a form of “growing pain” but he feels sure that these powerful experiences helped to lay questions about personal identity, the relationship of mind and body and the nature of consciousness, at deep levels in his mind.
At school Openfoot was no high-flier. Firmly middle of the road in his ability, achievements and grades things carried on like that until he entered the Sixth Form (from 16 to 18 years of age) and began “A” levels. Being able to concentrate on subjects he was attracted to namely geology, geography and biology, made school a better place to be and grades and performance improved. These subjects are all great at stimulating you to think deeply about change, impermanence, interdependence and dependent origination. About systems and processes rather than objects and things. About evolution and development, about transformation and the dynamic interplay of natural forces. It is of course possible to think about all of these things purely from an external standpoint. To leave them as externalities. However, Openfoot’s nature is that of a strongly expressed introvert and so there was little chance that he was not going to apply these ideas to thinking about his own nature and about mind and awareness. Openfoot went on to study Geology at university, so throughout the first few years of the seventies he was immersed on the one hand in the study of the outer natural world and on the other increasingly obsessed by the nature of the internal natural world, which he explored primarily via his nightly rambles through interior landscapes.
Openfoot’s major recreational activity in his mid-teens was stillwater fly-fishing. Many hours were spent, many long days enjoyed, lazily casting the fly over sparkling, rippling waters with his mind alternately in a state of focussed attention on the line, in anticipation of a bite, or in contemplation of the shimmering water; while at others he was lost in some strand of thought or daydream. This was as good a form of meditation as many others he assumes and a great teacher about the nature of persistence, habit, and gain and loss; all taking place while immersed (up to his thighs on many occasions) and in intimate contact with the natural environment.
So all of these experiences and others contributed to Openfoot’s response to “An Introduction” and of course Openfoot was not immune to adolescent angst. Few escape. There were perhaps two main sources of confusion contributing to Openfoot's angst apart from the usual and obvious teenage problems - What to do about women and sex? What to do about money? What will I ever do to earn a living? How can I overcome my social ineptitude? I’ve never sorted the later!
But the two fundamental angst inducing conundrums were:
What sort of a person am I?
How do I get to the bottom of this mystery, this life, this existence, that I’ve been thrust into?
Openfoot variously felt very intelligent or very stupid, very wise or very foolish, young but also very old, very dextrous or very clumsy, very spiritual or very material, alternately wishing to be a recluse and a monk or a lothario and Casanova. Perhaps its not surprising then that Jung’s concept of the archetypes immediately had resonance, enabling these conflicting feelings and desires to be seen in some sense as other than him ,or at least different parts of him, and at the same time offering a way out, a solution, to their constant conflict and warring; through the process of individuation, of developing an integrated self. Here was someone taking about inner experiences in a way that Openfoot could feel an affinity with. In a way that stuck a chord, that made intuitive sense. At the same time it offered a way of systematising and ordering thoughts about the inner world. It provided a framework for understanding, claimed to be, and provided evidence to support, a universal theory of mind. Openfoot liked big ideas and was very familiar with them in the life and earth sciences; he had a passing knowledge of them in astronomy and physics. And now, in Jung, here was someone who was providing a similar unifying big idea for the human psyche! And at the heart of it all, dreams. Working with dreams as a means of achieving insight, of working with the natural inner reality and with the inner dynamics of the psyche to follow a process, to forge a path, to the desired goal.
It was all truly revelatory and life changing.
It is of course impossible to read Jung without coming to appreciate the very great influence of Eastern thought on the development of his ideas. References to the Tao, the Buddha, and Yin and Yang in “An Introduction” resulted in a rapid visit to the university library, not only to draw up a reading list of Jung’s own works but to find out more about these eastern works which were clearly of such importance to him. Soon afterwards, on the look out for eastern texts affordable on a students budget, Openfoot found Paul Reps “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones” which together with “An Introduction” became Openfoot's constant companions for many years. Openfoot still loves the depiction of “The Ten Bulls” in “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones” and at the time they provided further confirmation of the existence of a path.
Openfoot was also much struck by Jung's observation of the habitual tendency the "Western Mind" to approach the world and phenomena with the scalpel of either/or as a means to dissect, reduce and analyse; While the "Eastern Mind" fell more naturally into a both/and perspective more likely to combine, integrate, meld and transcend.
In following up Jung’s own works Openfoot came across a quotation of one of the passages from the "Tao Te Ching" in “The Integration of Personality”. It struck Openfoot so forcefully as a description of his own condition at the time he reproduces it in full below. Various translations are readily available today. After reading this passage Openfoot made sure to acquire his own copy of the "Tao Te Ching", completing a trinity of “constant companion “ books.
In Openfoot’s Dream Books this passage is copied out and dated 8th June 1972, and comes after Dream 2.
Give up your learnedness
Then you will be free from cares!
Between ”Yes”’ and “Yes Indeed” what difference is there?
Between good and bad what difference is there?
But what all men honour
That one may not with impunity set aside
O wilderness have I not yet reached your centre
The men of the multitude are radiant
As at the celebration of great feasts
As when in spring people climb upon the towers
I alone am undecided, still without a sign to act by
Like a little child that is not yet able to laugh
A weary wanderer, who has no home
The men of the multitude all live in superabundance
I alone am like one abandoned
Truly I have the heart of a fool
Chaos O Chaos!
The men of the world are so clear, so clear
I alone am as if beclouded
The men of the world lust so after knowledge
I alone am downcast, so downcast.
Restless as the sea!
Driven hither and yon, alas, like one who dwells nowhere!
The men of the multitude all have something to do
I alone am as idle as a ne’er do well
I alone am not as other people are
For I value the lavishing mother
*******
The form of the full life
Wholly follows the Tao
The Tao invisible, ungraspable, brings things about
It contains images, ungraspable, invisible!
It contains things invisible, ungraspable!
It contains seed, unfathomable and dark
This seed is the truth
This truth embraces faith
From the very beginning until today
The name Tao has been indispensable
For understanding the origin of things
And how do I know
That the origin of all things is of this nature
Through the Tao
"The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is a better part of him, even though it may be the most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage....." :William James - Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature, 1902