This is a retrospective of week 4 2024 (2024-01-22–2024-01-28). Here is the retrospective of week 3 2024.
I have been reading Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali by Leanne Whitney this week. Jung believed that God, or the Self, could never be known directly, that comprehension comes about through ‘objects’ of experience. But Whitney writes, “it is continued objectification that leaves us bound to indirect knowledge and unable to embody our wholeness“.1 I would propose that God can only be known directly through personal experience.
What is ‘unknown’ for Jung is ‘pure consciousness’ for Patañjali. Yoga guides practitioners to direct experience “through the total involution of thought forms“.2 Life realizes itself “over and above our knowledge construction and re-presentation“.3 “[W]hen the mind is moving and grasping, we see the world through subject-object distinction, and we psychologically solidify “something” that in essence cannot be solidified ontically.“4 It is, according to Whitney, to confuse the epistemic with the ontic. I also listened to this podcast with Leanne Whitney.
I have also read Dougald Hine latest newsletter this week. He writes:
Anything worth writing – and this is true of other forms of making – starts with a gift, and to receive the gift, you need empty hands.
—Dougald Hine5
If I say that writing a book is hard work, this misses the mark. When it’s working, writing hardly feels like work at all. …if you have to try and summon up the energy for it, then you’re sunk already. There needs to be something alive on the other end of the line, a source of energy that comes from somewhere else, so that your job becomes to wrestle with this and draw it in and find out what exactly it is.
—Dougald Hine6
Notes:
1. Leanne Whitney, Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali.
2. Ibid..
3. Ibid..
4. Ibid..
5. Dougald Hine, The Lesson of Empty Hands, Substack, https://dougald.substack.com/p/the-lesson-of-empty-hands. Accessed: 2024-01-28. Published: 2024-01-26.
6. Ibid..