From Our Co-Founder...

For anyone new to the Circle let me just say it is over 30 years old, open to any adult, is a modest Charity and has two main functions the combination of which make it possibly unique in the world as a non-training Circle of people run voluntarily by its members with the stated aim of learning about the life and work of C.G. Jung.

We have good records going right back to the start, written by quite a number of members, and I am now collating all this as it provides clear evidence that given this focus the Circle, as we call it, has enriched many lives in so many ways all without claiming any such purpose!

One of the great ideas Jung is known for is ‘Individuation’. This has often been lampooned in the over simplified phrase ‘of discovering yourself’ which is a limited distortion of what Jung himself experienced and what he found out after his own suffering and his years of patient work. He eventually came to offer his patients and students, through analysis a way forward by means of his analytical psychology, while also understanding how life itself are the two ways along the path of Individuation; now it seems the patient Circle provides ‘a third path’ and we can now also see how it has helped many men and women to gain in maturity beside one another through better understanding and mutual experience of Jung’s thinking as well as it’s further evolution.

I well remember the time when In a sudden flash of extreme emotion not caused by anything I could identify I realised there was more, far more, to my make up than I had ever realised. The moment when I began to realise what I had lost when my father was killed in his spitfire over the Channel exploded in me in overwhelming grief and sorrow for myself and in an outpouring of sadness for our family. His loss damaged or destroyed many relationships. I emerged from the memorial chapel shaken but with a slowly dawning notion of sheer amazement that something so massive had been so hidden from my view all my life thus far. Through childhood, schools, national service, university, business and world travel, nothing had ever hinted at that single core of overwhelming absence within my being from the loss of my father when my consciousness was only just waking into being. After that shock I began to find my way through the labyrinth of avoidance, denial, funk and insecurity that had surrounded and pierced my attempts at living thus far but now I had one priceless gift. I now knew undeniably that there was a massive part of me I knew nothing about and it had a name - the ‘unconscious’. In his interview with John Freeman Jung remarks: “it really is un-conscious!” Then my search began. So who would know about this? It was not easy to find in church or state. I have recently invited others to ask themselves and write for us in The Chronicle on ‘Why Jung?’ with some inspiring results.

My own ‘Why Jung?’ began that day with that shock treatment while alone in the little memorial chapel at Biggin Hill from seeing my father’s name in gold above the altar.

At that point I had never heard of Jung though it started the search from the jolt of how little I knew of human inner limits. The next big step was when I found the book with the title: “Boundaries of the Soul” by June Singer, a Jungian analyst in Chicago who told how, after years of work with a woman patient who felt caged, she at last discovered that the back of her prison had no bars. In case you think I am suggesting I have discovered ‘answers’ even after a further 51 years I must say that I have realised the journeying into what is called capital S Self is as wonderful and scary as the shimmering

rainbow and as far as I can tell no one has ever found the pot of gold at its base, and certainly not I. The idea of embarking on a blog is a bit daunting and feels different to anything I have ever done before and may end right here, but I hope not, as it is for me a whole new way of meeting others in their own uniqueness. In any case I’d love to open up a discussion about ‘every day symbols’ like this one I found seen from our

little garden in Scotland. It might be surprising where it leads us!

Several years ago I watched as this little cloud drifted right over the plinth and

there they were in connection together as if they and I had waited since time began for

this moment, like a solar eclipse then to be beamed into a man‘s consciousness and

held till the end of time. A symbol of the opposites, of stasis and movement, of matter fixed and solid and man-made, lined up, connected invisibly, with something made by nature, ‘untouchable spirit’ moving and changing as it drifted into place while I waited. Spirit and matter aligned and held now in this image, thus joined in a man’s mind together: awareness of the opposites in tension of both permanence and fleetingness at once.

Now as I express the sudden flash of meaning from this conjunction the ripples

may now go out around this image of man, cloud and concrete into the wonder of

further minds. A trig point was created here many years ago to triangulate with other trig points and provide the data on which the most precise maps ever made up to then

would be created to help mankind navigate and understand his environment.

A symbol’, says Jung ‘is numinous and the best expression of something unknown at that moment’. Part of the meaning here for me, over the years, has pointed up the sheer mystery of mankind’s relationships both with other people but crucially with the whole of nature, still far from fully understood. Our psycho-material background being rarely mentioned, which was of such interest to both Jung and Pauli the Nobel

prize winning physicist who was also patient, collaborator and friend of Jung.

For me the meaningful coincidence of such (when you realise them) blatant and impressive opposites is immensely energizing.

‘Professor Jung, but for your teaching, such a series of views of something so obvious and everyday as a lump of concrete and a flimsy little cloud would have passed me by completely. Thank you!’

Richard Barwell

Co-Founder

(I have drawn on ‘The Pauli Jung Conjecture and its impact today’ published 2014 by Imprint Academic P.O. Box 200, Exeter, EX5 5YX. ISBN No 97818-45406684 for some of this first blog, with references there to Jung’s Collected Works. It is not an easy read but rewards perseverance).