March 25, 2000
Desire
age: 30
gender: female
Thank you for this free service.
Okay, my query: Do you also find yourself wanting some things so badly, imploring the universe, begging God, doing ritualistic things with candles and incense in the hopes of having a desire fulfilled, only to discover, a year later, as said desire is being fulfilled that you have long gone onto the next batch of desires and requests?
This time last year, I wrote letters to God, spoke to my friends about how I wanted 1) to have an agent 2) a cool part time job where I use the gifts God gave me and helped young people at the same time 3) to only work said job two or three days a week. 4) to write for a tv show loosely based on my life and get paid to do it 5) a hairdo where my hair was more manageable but still unique 6) calf muscles 7) go out all the time on auditions 8) Expand my social network.
All of these wishes have been granted. And right now, I feel tired, overworked, objectified by the business, overly scrutinizing of my looks, and very impatient about landing the kind of work I want. Irritated with my volunteer commitments, and clueless as to when or if I will ever land a recurring role on a TV pilot. I pray for serenity, which seems to get me closer to having a material desire fulfilled, and, when I smell success, then I am back on my ambitious materialistic route. Is there anyone out there who simply enjoys being alive? I cannot bear the thought of being a big star in a nice house with my lovely spouse wanting more, more, more.
Yours truly,
A rat on the treadmill of desire.
This sure sounds like an ad for that caveat about asking for things, as you're liable to get them. Your question has a kind of Alladin's Lamp feel to it. It also reminds me of a darker story by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Bottle Imp.
Jung always maintained that his psychology was never meant for those who hadn't reached middle age. The ordinary scenario for centuries in Europe was for a man to legitimately build up his ego and personal power until middle age when decline would set in and the question of life's meaning and mortality would then naturally take precedence. The second half of the 20th century seems to have changed all that, and the likely reason is the splitting of the atom. Here was something urgently wished for by all of the best scientific minds...and at the last moment...the consequences as envisioned by Oppenheimer ushered in a completely new age for the Psyche and psychology of man. What was once a content of the unconscious exploded out of it and created a monumental change that seems to me to have created the necessity of answering mid-life questions at an ever earlier time in the life of an individual.
There is absolutely nothing inherently wrong in the things you've indicated as desires...but there it is...the question of what needs to change is not in those material desires. My reading focuses in on the spaces in-between. The Time and Space in between those activities and desires when you are alone with yourself needs attention. My guess is that you're rarely ALONE...and when you are you probably want to run away from what desperately wants to surface.
It's pretty difficult to enjoy life without engaging, creative and fulfilling Work. But it's impossible to do so in this peculiar post-post-modern age without looking at what's going on within. If you turn your rituals and prayers towards asking for an answer to what lies within, everything is going to change.
I was specifically drawn to this question because of a dream I had the night before it was submitted. In the dream I saw a beautiful grassy field with wonderful blue flowers. (In Italian this would be Il Campo de' Fiori). There were also nice pepper bushes, each with a single green pepper, one of which was mostly eaten. Beneath each bush was a tiny deer, no taller than 8-12 inches. Then I noticed a gray rabbit beneath each bush and what I took to be a mouse associated with each rabbit. The rabbits would try to bite or kill the mice by biting at their hind quarters. It became apparent, as I watched one pair, that the mouse was actually a rat, and quite capable of defending itself. In fact it began to bite very fiercely at the rabbit's nose. They began circling around biting at each other, the rabbit seeming to get a little more the worst of it as the rat would take away some fur and skin from the rabbit's snout. The dream went on further...but as I awoke it suddenly occurred to me that this was the uroboros...the snake biting its own tail. Jung's study of alchemy revealed that there were many symbolic synonyms for this image, including the winged and wingless dragon. It didn't take much to realize that these nocturnal rodents (the rabbit is especially associated with Easter and the Moon) were the Light and Dark side of a particular pair of opposites in my Psyche. They are in a literal vicious circle...but they are also symbolic of a kind of living mandala of the self and of the Tao. Seeing both sides of an issue involves separating out the opposites, which tend to be a blurred unity in the unconscious.
Seeing yourself as a rat on a treadmill is to miss not only the rabbit, but all of the useful qualities of the rat...or Shadow of the rabbit. When you look into those spaces in Psyche...the ones that gape open when you're not busy on the treadmill...you're going to find those Easter eggs. But you really have to look...otherwise you wind up with nothing but a new treadmill.
kristo
*** (3/26/00) I can't help adding something I just came across today...It comes from Psalm 106,13-15
"But soon they forgot his works; they waited not for his counsel. They gave way to craving in the desert and tempted God in the wilderness. He gave them what they asked but sent a wasting disease against them."
In my view, this isn't moralizing...it's simply a reminder to wait for the counsel that comes through your dreams.
kristo