This happened

This evening will be dedicated to the reading and commenting of Margaret Bullitt-Jonas’ essay, “Climate Change, Addiction, and Spiritual Liberation,” which highlights the urgent need for a transformation of society to preserve a habitable planet for human beings. Drawing on her personal journey of recovery from addiction and decades of climate activism, she explores how understanding addiction and recovery dynamics can inform our efforts to protect the web of life.

This essay has the potential to be a seminal reference for transformation, especially when discussed at McGowan House, a place of transition, spirituality and healing. Let’s explore how this text can help us actualize the potential of this place as a transformative force for our community and beyond.

I will present the Governing Dynamics, Key Activities and Requisite Disciplines of my own Practice. I am a 75-year-old immigrant from Chile. By way of my worldly background, I have been a CPA, Management Consultant, Chief Financial Officer, and full time Stock Market Speculator for my own account.

The most important Spiritual lessons of this incarnation have transpired over the combined ten years of my last fourteen years of life. During said time I had the honor of tending to the body and soul of two dying wives—Mary Ann and Bobbie. Mary Ann was a brilliant Computer Scientist for Hewlett Packard. We were married for twenty-nine years, until March of 2012, when at the age of 58, she succumbed to brain cancer. Bobbie was a wise and spiritual woman. She mastered the earthly challenges of being an unconditionally loving and unconditionally forgiving wife to the likes of me. We had been husband and wife for over ten years, when at the age of 86, she left her body this January of 2023.

In Part 1, we had a reading of portions of The Book of Job. Then we discussed some of aspects of the myth that Jung found to be crucially important for understanding life in our times, as told in his most controversial book, Answer to Job. Tonight, we continue the discussion, moving more deeply into Jung’s text, specifically his engaging the vision of the Sun Woman in the Book of Revelation, and the dogma of the Assumption of Mary as proclaimed in 1950.

In the days when you could, I made a Faustian pact. As the years pass, I may have blown my end and the Accounts Payable date is looming. But what if the magic had actually happened and I pursued it fully? The answer lies with Key to the Highway, a wild, musical hero’s journey through the Australian Outback to Perth, India, Bangkok, Borneo, and Rio. Discovery of a mysterious blues harp/harmonica by a bayside creek, outside Melbourne, takes the main character, Chris Hunter, on a mystical journey to self-discovery, in which his reality morphs with mythological gods, heroes and villains, manifested as bikers, prophets, gun runners, shady businessmen, neo-Nazis and miners. The quest is disrupted when Chris abandons his Orphic gift, as a cynical journalist and is spirited back to the bland suburbia he tried to evade. Redemption comes when he pursues Canberra’s suppressed esoteric secret in a fight against the Alt Right. We can discuss parallels with epic heroes including Odysseus, King Arthur, and Rama or their modern equivalents in Mad Max, Star Wars and The Matrix.

Last November, Paul presented an overview of the thought of René Girard. Tonight, we revisit Girard’s theory of mimesis, mimetic desire, metaphysical desire, and the centrality of violence and scapegoating in human cultures. Taking up these themes, we will engage Jung’s theory of instinct and archetypes along with Jean Gebser’s description of archaic, magic, and mythic modes of consciousness. Each of these thinkers is deeply concerned about the suicidal tendency of human beings, and all three refer to the spiritual, or saving grace, in specifically Christian forms.