The Jungian analyst June Singer describes her first spiritual experience when aged about 7 or 8 she watched a large black ant slowly walk across the back porch and then climb vertically up the door. It looked as though the ant was aiming for the doorknob.

‘The ascent would be long and arduous, and eventually, when the ant arrived at that destination, it would have no possible way to open the door and enter the house. …But I, the girl thought, can easily get up … turn the knob, open the door and walk in. The ant would have no idea how I managed this marvellous feat, because an ant could never do such a thing, much less figure out how I did it … it would surely wonder at my marvellous powers. From the ant’s point of view, I would be accomplishing a miracle.’

The child then makes a connection with the way that the ant is in relation to her, so she is in relation to God. Just as her acts are great mysteries to the ant, even so are God’s acts great mysteries to her. In the same way that the ant doesn’t have the ability to understand how she could open the door so she doesn’t have the ability to understand what God does, much less why.

Singer writes that the incident with the ant was a spiritual experience:

‘Although I had heard about God from my parents and my religious school, and had been taught to pray, I was always troubled by a healthy scepticism about anything that I could not see for myself. That moment on the back porch was the first time I realized that what was a mystery to me was mysterious only because of my own limitations. There might be more beyond the familiar world than I had thought, only I could not see it. This idea tantalized and challenged me. I must have been determined then and there to try and expand my ability to see – not that I expected to see as God sees, but I wanted with all my heart to penetrate as far as I could into the interstellar spaces of the invisible world.’

Easter. The grave clothes of winter
are still here, but the sepulchre
is empty. A messenger
from the tomb tells us
how a stone has been rolled
from the mind, and a tree lightens
the darkness with its blossom.
There are travellers upon the road
who have heard music blown
from a bare bough, and a child
tells us how the accident
of last year, a machine stranded
beside the way for lack
of petrol, is crowned with flowers.

R. S. Thomas “Resurrection”

Easter Sunday and the “unconscious” wood. Peace and beauty of Easter morning: sunrise, deep green grass, soft winds, the woods turning green on the hills across the valley (and here too). I got up and said the old office of Lauds, and there was a wood thrush singing fourth-tone mysteries in the deep ringing pine wood (the “unconscious” wood) behind the hermitage. (The “unconscious wood has a long moment of perfect clarity at dawn, and from being dark and confused, lit from the east it is all clarity, all distinct, seen to be a place of silence and peace with its own order in disorder- the fallen trees don’t matter, they are all part of it!).

Thomas Merton April 18 1964

It’s sunny here now, but it was a long, wet winter here in the UK, and so time for some writings to do with the hope and inspiration that nature can give us. This is from Thomas Merton’s account on February 10^th 1950, the celebration of St Scholastica. He is meditating in the attic of the garden house in the Abbey grounds.

‘Today it was wonderful.  Clouds, sky overcast, but tall streamers of sunlight coming down in a fan over the bare hills.

Suddenly I became aware of great excitement. The pasture was full of birds – starlings. There was an eagle flying over the woods. The crows were all frightened, and were soaring, very high, keeping out of the way. Even more distant still were the buzzards, flying and circling, observing everything from a distance. And the starlings filled every large and small tree, and shone in the light and sang. The eagle attacked a tree full of starlings but before he was near them the whole cloud of them left the tree and avoided him and he came nowhere near them. Then he went away and they all alighted on the ground. They were there moving about and singing for about five minutes. Then, like lightning, it happened. I saw a scare go into the cloud of birds, and they opened their wings and began to rise off the ground and, in that split second, from behind the house and from over my roof a hawk came down like a bullet, and shot straight into the middle of the starlings just as they were getting off the ground. They rose into the air and there was a slight scuffle on the ground as the hawk got his talons into the one bird he had nailed. “In Him all things are made and in Him all exist.”

It was a terrible and yet beautiful thing, that lightning, straight as an arrow, that killed the slowest starling.

Then every tree, every field was cleared. I do not know where all the starlings went. Florida, maybe. The crows were still in sight, but over their wood. Their guttural cursing had nothing more to do with this affair. The vultures, lovers of dead things, circled over the bottoms where perhaps there was something dead. The hawk, all alone, in the pasture, possessed his prey. He did not fly away with it like a thief. He stayed in the field like a king with the killed bird, and nothing else came near him. He took his time.

I tried to pray, afterward. But the hawk was eating the bird. And I thought of that flight, coming down like a bullet from the sky behind me and over my roof, the sure aim with which he hit this one bird, as though he had picked it out a mile away. For a moment I envied the lords of the Middle Ages who had their falcons and I thought of the Arabs with their fast horses, hawking on the desert’s edge, and I also understood the terrible fact that some men love war. But in the end, I think that hawk is to be studied by saints and contemplatives; because he knows his business. I wish I knew my business as well as he does his.’

(The Sign of Jonas)

The beatific vision

‘Now that I may say to you, what perhaps I should not dare to say to anyone else: That I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophecy & speak Parables unobserved & at liberty from the doubts of other Mortals. . . Doubts are always pernicious [. . .] I take your advice. I see the face of my Heavenly Father; he lays his Hand upon my head & gives a blessing to all my works. . . through Hell will I sing forth his Praises. . .Excuse my, perhaps, too great Enthusiasm.’

Letter to Thomas Butts, 25 April 1803

William Blake, who wrote the above letter, was famous for his spiritual sightings that included angels, and a vision of Ezekiel. He held Christian beliefs and drew extensively on the the Bible, but rejected organized religion. He experienced the imagination as a means to perceive ‘the invisible world’, the reality beyond the physical world. He viewed the imagination as a prophetic force that could unveil truths hidden from the ordinary senses. His writing was inspired: ‘I write when commanded by the spirits and I see the words fly about the room in all directions’.

In every age there have been people who have seen through the surface of ordinary consciousness and directly communed with the invisible world, and given visions of another world, without boundaries, out of space and out of time.

Andy Griffiths, in ‘The Hope of Seeing God’ writes about the beatific vision—the moment when God’s children are transformed by seeing God face to face: ‘…for we will see him as he is…’ There is a transformation into the divine likeness, at the culmination of all things. But while here on earth is seeing God possible? William Blake and others thought so, and Griffiths suggests through relationship and where God has become visible through Jesus Christ, we can experience God-in-Christ.

He suggests that viewed in the right spirit we can sense, perceive and experience God through contemplation, and be shown that the whole world is no longer merely physical, but imbued as transcendent, where God can be glimpsed. Opening up to our senses and learning to see God in all things our earthly world will become re-enchanted, and we too become changed.

In Thomas Merton’s talk to the novices in August 1965 he ends with this:

‘ … the Lord is present and living in the world … and so the disciples at Emmaus – their vocation is our vocation – came running back to Jerusalem bubbling over with joy and happiness not because they understood the mysteries of another world but because they had seen the Lord. This is what we are all here for. We are all here to see the Lord, and to see with the eyes of faith. But to see that the Lord really lives and that the Lord really is the Lord.’

Griffiths quotes the Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley:

‘We learn to “see the Lord”, …with absolute conviction and certainty. Many think that this doesn’t happen anymore, but let me tell you (as one who was once a hospital chaplain, ministering to the dying) it does…You will also in due course “see” the beloved Christ, as your senses and mind and desire are attuned to his presence: there he is … in those whom you love beyond measure and those whom you hate and spurn; in bread and wine and water and oil and all the glories of the earth; and finally waiting for you as your life ends.’

The visible world is the familiar world, and our perceptions of it are affected by our senses, our thinking, how we feel, and our intuition, but these perceptions are also conditioned by our upbringing, what we may have picked up from others, and by our environment. Inevitably, what appears to be ‘real’ is different for someone with a different perspective from ours, and so our visible world will hold many contradictions: what we see will not always fit with what we have been told, and so on. ‘We have to learn either to close our eyes to dissonance or to coexist with ambiguity and paradox.’

Despite this dissonance, the visible world seems solid, and so we commit ourselves to the world we see, and become possessive about our opinions believing that we know more or less who we are. This gives us our ‘ego’ – the coherent, stable, and enduring part of us which helps us live in the here and now. Yet the ego has its limitations, and its duration is limited by birth and death – it can also become too restrictive.

Laurel, a high-achieving academic researcher, seeing June Singer for Jungian analysis dreamt of two aquariums – one small with a defect in it and one large.

‘It is necessary to transfer the fish from the small to the large aquarium, or else they will die because the small aquarium is gradually losing water. The big aquarium is self-sustaining, as it has a system that aerates and filters the water and plants and there are secluded places in it for the fish to breed in.’

In the session Laurel realized the small aquarium was a metaphor for the visible world, a closed system, nothing came in from outside to replenish it and nothing could escape. The large aquarium was an open system letting in fresh air, and that could represent the self-perpetuating, adaptive cosmos, the farthest reaches of which are part of the invisible world.

Opening to the invisible world can happen in many different ways: dreams, visions, meditation, unusual events, extended illness, disaster, and so on. We are led to repeatedly confront this dimension which is all around us, just beyond our line of vision. If we’re not open to it or receptive to the ways that it affects us then the invisible world will find its own ways of intruding and drawing us towards its orbit. Sometime later into her analysis Laurel said:

‘My unconscious is telling me that there is something more important than any task I perform. It is a way of being a form of redemption. I don’t know exactly what I mean by ‘redemption’ or even by ‘a way of being’. We have talked in here about goals. That is my goal. It is not an easy path, and I don’t get any rewards for it in this world. … The reward must be finding the meaning of my existence.’

Beyond the ego state lies the state of wholeness in which the ego serves a larger reality than itself, and where the conscious and the unconscious can communicate in an open way. Jung called the larger reality the Self (with a capital ‘S’), which is unlimited, infinite, oriented towards wisdom, and is the central focus of the totality of the individual. Singer sees this level of awareness as: ‘This …corresponds to the Tree of Life, while the pure ego state is controlled by the Tree of Knowledge, which is also the Tree of Death’.

For, as Jung himself noted, towards the end of his life:

‘The decisive question for [a person] is, are they related to something infinite or not?’ It’s ultimately the only thing that truly matters … In the final analysis we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, then life is wasted.’

In the sea

Explorations in both psychoanalysis and in spirituality quickly reveal that there is much in life that is unknowable through the mechanisms of ordinary human awareness. There is the world we see ‘the visible world’, and then there is the ‘invisible world’ – and they are both real but in different ways. Both worlds are there to be recognized and experienced and make up our experience of being alive. One world is limited and finite and the other infinite and unboundaried. Most of the time our mind is taken up with the visible world and our survival in this world, and this is our consciousness whilst the invisible is largely unconscious.

June Singer, the Jungian analyst, suggests that this idea of the two worlds can be visualized through imagining oneself at the centre of a small spiral on a sheet of paper. As we move outward along the line in a spiral, the spiral rolls out ahead of us taking in an ever expanding area. So, as we move along the spiral defining the visible world the space around the spiral that is alongside it also expands. If we continued with the spiral beyond the paper, out into the room, beyond the house and the town so the boundary between the spiral of the visible world and the infinite expanse of the invisible becomes ever greater.

‘The more you encompass of the visible world with the knowing of the mind, the more aware you may become of the expanse of the unknowable.’

Another way of knowing is the way of the soul – gnosis. This is different from ways of being aware through intellect and reason, thinking, feeling and sensation, rather gnosis seem mobilized primarily in the unconscious – intuition, speculation, imagination and dreaming. The soul or psyche includes aspects of the mind but is not limited by it.

‘The soul bridges the gap between what can be learned through the mind, through the senses, through the intellect, and through the exercise of scientific observation – and the intuitive awareness of a deep, abiding, mysterious space that may be penetrated by consciousness but can never be encompassed by it.’

Perhaps, especially at present, given the state of the world, the belief that there is only the visible world can leave us disheartened almost to the point of despair. This is because it feeds a sense of hopelessness: this is how the world is and there doesn’t seem much one can do about it – so only live for today, and the thought: is this all there is?

Singer describes the dream of someone she was seeing in analysis who had recently left her marriage, was tired and dispirited, had lots of aches and pains with no physiological basis, and was disheartened by the state of the world.

‘I drive onto a lonely beach and park my car head down into the ocean. I put my old blanket on the hood of the car and climb up on to it. I slowly slide into the sea and drown. There is no panic. I simply let go.’

The car was an expensive one that the patient’s husband had bought for her when they married, and that she saw as a security blanket. In her work the woman felt weighed down by a secure but joyless job with too much responsibility. Living entirely in the visible world, she dreamed of letting go of her need for security and slipping into the sea – often an excellent metaphor for the unconscious. Her stress-induced symptoms were speaking to her through her body, describing her ‘stuckness’ and demanding that something new had to happen, taking her beyond what she could see and out into something unknown.

‘Something in her knew another place, symbolized by the sea and called her to enter it.’

Part of the deep spirituality experienced by Hesse lay in his love of nature, and an early piece of his writing was on the life of St Francis who listened to nature, and found God immanent in actual things – both in their growth and in their decay. For Hesse, the mystic is also a pantheist – God does not reside in Churches or dogmas – instead is immanent in every living thing. God is the power of transformation. Hesse wrote that even individual letters of the alphabet come alive when the words that they compose take on a reality of their own, as in poetry. So it is with rocks, the sun, the rain, and all plants, and animals – they are all inhabited by something divine, the spark that gives them meaning and lends them a voice. And the new wisdom of each generation is at the same time ancient wisdom:

‘Our actual relationship to nature, even where we only still consider it as an object of exploitation, is precisely that of a child to its mother. Furthermore, no new routes have ever been added to the few ancient paths that are able to lead a person to bliss or wisdom.’

Hesse’s discovery in a journey to Southeast Asia was of the wonder of butterflies – where the reality outstripped any flight of the imagination. Butterflies overcame the chasm between nature and art: ‘heraldic beasts of the soul.’ He found that their beauty was both living and a symbol of transience. Butterflies carried within them both the principle of the moment as well as that of eternity. Hesse described them as: ‘the festive, bridal, at one and the same time fertile and ephemeral form of that creature which was previously a sleeping pupa and before the pupa stage a voracious caterpillar.’

Trees, he felt, carried also a wonderful spirituality:

‘Trees have always been the most powerful evangelists. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And I revere them even more when they stand alone. They are like solitary people. Not like hermits who have absented themselves out of some form of weakness, but like great solitary men like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they strive with all their life-force for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to develop their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is more sacred, nothing more exemplary than a fine, strong tree.’

As a result, Hesse maintains, it wounds the very soul when a tree is felled. The godlessness of a person is shown in his willingness to cut down a tree without feeling any great sorrow in having done so. When a tree has been felled, in the open wound of its severed trunk the growth rings tell of its ongoing struggle over many years with the cold, the wind, the sun, and the rain. They provide evidence that the tree, growing ever upward, attempted to form a link between the earth and the heavens. This was why Hesse called trees “saints”.

“Anyone who knows how to speak to them, anyone who knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts; unconcerned by particulars, they proclaim the ancient law of life.”

And the ancient law of life as spoken by the tree: ‘My task is to shape and reveal the Eternal in my smallest individual detail.” Trees are beautiful and their beauty is not just ephemeral – although what remains precious to us forever is the brief moment in which we realize how magical their presence is:

“They would still be beautiful tomorrow too, but right now they had that magical, ever-to-be-repeated beauty that comes from our own soul and that according to the Greeks, can shine in us only when Eros has cast his gaze upon us.”

The after effects of Hesse’s ascetic childhood, particularly the imprint of his highly critical mother, left him unable to relate easily to women, as shown in his three unsatisfactory marriages, and the lack of realistic women characters in his writing. He also had deep ambivalence towards his three sons and family life. Generally limited by various obsessive behaviours and anxieties, he mostly found other people difficult. Accepting his failings, and deeply present to finding spiritual truths wherever he could, Hesse has God speak to one of his characters:

‘I could not have used you if you had been any other than the way you are, and I needed to give you the spur of homelessness and wandering … your function was to repeatedly instil a little yearning for freedom into people living settled lives.’

The motif from the novel ‘Demian’ was ‘become the person you are.’ Hesse saw this ‘be yourself’ as forming the decisive bridge between Eastern and Western thought. He believed that this was a synthesis that could not be institutionalized, and that could be revoked at any moment. His experience showed him that one cannot escape oneself, one cannot with impunity simply transform one’s life into a doctrine. One could overcome life only through living, and you have to travel the route that is assigned to you personally. ‘As I understand it, Nirvana is the return of the individual to the undivided whole … the reversion of the individual soul to the universal soul, to God.’

Despite the childhood damage, Hesse held to belief in God, truth, and beauty, with the knowledge that God always resides in things that are smaller, and more inconsequential, and disregarded. He wrote that one should place no credence in those who teach wisdom, for you can only attain wisdom through your own life and your own sacrifices … about not so much renouncing the Self as finding it.

‘I consider certain maxims from the New Testament, together with some from Lao Tzu and some of Buddha’s sayings, to be the truest, most pithy, and most vital utterances that have ever been said and made known on this earth. Nevertheless, the Christian way to God has been obscured for me by my strict and pious upbringing, by the laughable nature and petty quarrels of theology, by the sheer boredom and yawning barrenness of the established churches, and so on. So I sought God by other routes.’

Two journeys to India and Southern Asia deeply affected him: ‘I have revered the Buddha for many years and have been reading Indian literature since my early childhood. Later on I gained a more intimate knowledge of Lao Tzu and other Chinese writers.’ Hesse’s book ‘Siddhartha’ tries to synthesize Eastern and Western thinking. In the preface to the Japanese edition, he wrote:

‘Nowadays, it is no longer a question of trying to convert the Japanese to Christianity, or Europeans to Buddhism or Taoism. We have no desire, nor should we, to convert or be converted; instead it is incumbent upon us to open ourselves up and expand our minds. We no longer regard Eastern and Western wisdom as mutually hostile forces engaged in a power struggle, but as poles between which a bountiful life oscillates.’

Siddhartha’s concern, like Jesus, was not with doctrinal matters, or dogma, or about one institution sharply demarcating itself from others and declaring all apostates to be heretics, but instead with the atman, the living spirit within all things. This to be treated with reverence:

‘I do not believe in any religious dogmatism or in a god who has created humans and enabled them to develop their expertise in killing one another with a progression of weapons from stone axes to nuclear arms and to be proud of such progress into the bargain.’

Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse

With some academic qualifications, the young Hermann Hesse went to work in a book shop, firstly one near his home, and then moving to Basel. Initially writing reviews and sketches Hesse began to grow in his belief that he could be a writer, and began to succeed. From childhood he took with him the difficult contradiction for the need for closeness with his family, alongside his awareness that he had to get some distance from them. He knew full well that he would be able to start living his own life only after he stopped using his parents as a yardstick for his behaviour. The sense that he was not entirely free after all, and could never leave his origins behind, permeates his early writing. As a child and adult, Hesse suffered constantly from headaches and eye strain, often feeling ‘indisposed’. Unable to sleep, he realised that the night demonstrated how disastrously arrogant it was for the logic of the daytime world to believe that all aspects of life were within the firm grasp of reason.

By 1916, a successful author but with an unhappy marriage plus three children, Hesse’s sense of being deeply ill at ease within himself became unbearable. Seen as a traitor in Germany for his lack of support for nationalism during and after World War 1, and dealing with the death of both his parents, Hesse was near total mental breakdown. When his headaches became unbearably intense, plus panic attacks, dizziness, exhaustion, and lack of sleep Hesse began to meet with a Catholic psychiatrist J. B. Lang. Lang specialised in dream work, and was part of the circle around Carl Jung. The initial 12 consultations in 1916, were followed by another 60 the following autumn, and the relationship continued after that. Lang helped Hesse come out of depression, analyse dream material, and resume writing: leading to Hesse’s book ‘Demian’.

The idea of opposing but related figures – the doppelganger principle interested both men –and emerges in much of Hesse’s subsequent writing. Lang – the more radical, emboldened Hesse to abandon everything that inhibited his vocation as a writer – wife and children included. Whilst the analysis helped Hesse, Lang became overly involved, taking on practical tasks to do with Hesse’s divorce; falling in love with a woman who later Hesse married (a second disastrous marriage); asking Hesse to appraise his [Lang’s] dreams in a complete role reversal; and, an increasing involvement with esotericism: it all led to Lang’s self-destruction. Hesse then preferred to seek out Carl Jung himself, and underwent a course of therapy with him, taking on an understanding of the archetypes, and consulting Jung about ideas that Hesse was exploring in ‘Siddhartha’.

In June 1921 Hesse consulted Jung and in his Zurich notebook, Hesse wrote: ‘He [Jung] has sent me away with the maxim: “Desire to do (consciously) what you (instinctively) want to do!’

The following day Hesse noted:

‘My last visit to Jung. We speak about me having virtually no dreams any more. He tells me that I don’t need any … and that patients often ask him how they should “solve” this or that problem. Jung tells them that they shouldn’t be seeking to solve it, but rather just to have a crack at it, to grapple and struggle with it. Problems aren’t there to be “solved”; they are pairs of opposites that between them produce a tension that is called life.’

Years later Hesse wrote in a letter:

‘I have always had respect for Jung, but his works did not make such strong impressions on me as did those of Freud.  … I also had several analytic sessions with him … I got a nice impression of him, though at that time I began to realize that for analysts, a genuine relationship to art is unattainable …’

The seminary at Maulbronn

The ‘punishment’ for running away from the seminary, was that Hesse was placed in an insane asylum run by a pastor where Hesse worked mainly in the gardens, and was given a diagnosis of ‘melancholy’. The family urged the teenage boy to practice moderation as a way of ‘exorcising all the evil demons’, but Hesse saw trusting in God as displayed by his family as a reprimand and a provocation. Begging to return home, he lasted there for 17 days before being re-incarcerated again at the request of his parents for his bad behaviour. He put his experience into this rhyme:

‘Now freedom’s just run out on me,

it always was illusory,

Sent to the “bin” by mum and dad

For all they know, I might be mad!’

Hesse was fighting against those, who with a clear conscience before God, wanted to break him and divest him of his self-will. He wrote to his parents as his ‘jailors’:

‘You deliver all your sermons, urging people to “Turn to God, and to Christ, etcetera, etcetera!” But though you might curse me a hundred times over for saying so, I can see in this God of yours nothing but a delusion, and in this Christ nothing but a man’.

His parents could not understand why Hesse didn’t comply with the basic rules of coexistence – he was either ill or stubborn – obdurate, and the answer to that was further strictness. With illness they just had to wait. Hesse, by the age of 15 began to realise that he was in danger of remaining incarcerated, and somehow found a way of dispassionately explaining himself and asking:

‘Is it right for a young man who, apart from a slight weakness of the nerves, is pretty healthy, to be packed off to a “mental home for the feeble-minded” and forcibly rob him of his belief in love and justice, and hence in God? … You are Christians, and I – I am just a man.’

And: ‘If I was a Pietist rather than a human being, if I could turn all my inclinations into their opposites, then I could get on harmoniously with you. But I cannot …’ His father’s response urged him to acquiesce, but what Herman Hesse was learning was, that, as his biographer, Gunnar Decker puts it:

‘… revolt was not always advisable when faced with a dangerous environment. He would learn what everyone who becomes an outsider quickly learns: namely, to conceal yourself from the world in order to preserve your individuality.’

The hospital inspector felt that Hesse suffered from ‘a moral infirmity’ and needed strict discipline: that he needed to be disabused of the idea that ‘a person could get through life just by playing the fiddle and writing fiction.’ Hesse, knowing he wanted to leave the asylum and become a writer, wrote to his parents that he couldn’t live at home, but did love them deeply, and eventually, and fortunately, he was allowed to move away from the family, and board with a pastor and return to education. His childhood experiences provided both the impetus for his writing and his lifelong spiritual searching – he thought only those who could carry their childhood into adulthood could become a creative writer – where childhood was a dream of a succession of summits between which deep abysses opened up. As in fairy tales good and bad lived side by side there.