Stop Seeking, Start Remembering
One of my many favourite bits in C. G. Jung’s memoirs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections is his account of his visit with the Pueblo – the Indigenous people of New Mexico.
This was back in the 1920s. For the Swiss Jung, his travels revealed to him how he “was still caught up and imprisoned in the cultural consciousness of the white man.”
In northern New Mexico, Jung met with the Pueblo chief at the time, Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake). Jung writes that it was the first time he “had the good fortune to talk with a non-European, that is, to a non-white…I was able to talk with him as I have rarely been able to talk with a European.”
Ochwiay Biano by Maynard Dixon, 1931, oil on canvas
This is some of Jung’s recollection of his remarkable conversation with the Pueblo chief:
“ ‘See’, Ochwiay Biano said, ‘how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think they are mad.’
I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad.
‘They say that they think with their heads,’ he replied.
‘Why of course. What do you think with?’ I asked him in surprise.
‘We think here,’ he said, indicating his heart.
I fell into a long meditation. For the first time in my life, so it seemed to me, someone had drawn me a picture of the real white man…This Indian had our vulnerable spot, unveiled a truth to which we are blind.”
This blind spot - an endless seeking by a mind forced to believe that it’s separate from its own native Divinity, its sovereignty and capacity for wholeness, accessed through the wisdom of the heart – is the legacy of the colonization of the Roman Catholic Church on the psychic terrain of the Indigenous European.
The mantle of power was then taken over by Newton + Descartes and their enduring legacy of scientific materialism during the Renaissance, and by Darwin later on, where the separation of matter + spirit and the belief in a soulless, hostile universe became calcified dogma in the European psyche, and a precursor to the imperialism of the military + medical industrial complexes.
Although seemingly at loggerheads, the Church and Scientific Materialism have more in common than they’d care to admit.
Namely, that the human being cannot be trusted with their own innate, endlessly regenerating Source of Self-regulating power, so they’d better hand this over to an external authority which will tell them what’s best for them.
This is the psychic poison that’s at the root of European colonization – and of the systems of government that we still live under, regardless of left or right. Both “sides” run the same authoritarian, imperialist energy – it’s just the flavours that differ.
The madness of always seeking something “out there” to fill this existential void is also what drives the literal colonization of lands + peoples, of the degradation of the Earth, of animals and of human beings.
Meanwhile, the existential void can only be filled by re-membering our deep reservoirs of wholehearted mystery-wisdom, to root our being in this essential place, and allow our doing to flow from there.
Myth is a fertile portal into remembering that we are already whole – in our light + shadow.
And a myth that points to the roots of the Indigenous European psyche, a pagan psyche grounded in the natural world, a universal wisdom that Ochwiay Biano was pointing to - before the original cancel culture of burnings and Inquisitions, of colonization by Church then State - is a powerful one to invoke in community at this time.
Remembering the story of the Fisher King, the larger pool of Grail legends that it’s a part of, and the symbol of the Grail itself back to its pre-Church-appropriated roots has the potential to (re)awaken the European/white psyche back to the vaster Earth-human story it belongs to.
It’s not necessarily comfortable work – questioning the Waste Land of the dominant narrative, of turning towards the Mystery of unearthing and embodying the wealth of your soul-body’s indigenous wisdom-power.
You will most certainly lose (false) friends along the way, perhaps even be labeled a Fool and excluded from polite society.
But it’s winter, the trees have shed their leaves to make way for new growth in the spring. And as you’re not separate from Nature, the season supports you in releasing with love all that keeps you from remembering your natural Self.
Subvert the colonial paradigm by remembering the heart’s wisdom and letting it guide the head.
Join us for a new season of Root + Rise. We enter the Fisher King’s realm on Winter Solstice.
Registration ends on 31 December.