My brother wrote an excellent article this morning after Trump's win. It can be found at http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3358: "Of silver tongues and silver linings: Trump's Presidency, the Demise of the Major Parties, and the Need for a New Progressive Movement". He and I are very different. He is a fine journalist, whereas I am a poet, Jungian dream worker and shamanic practitioner. Here is what I wrote back to him after reading his article:
Dave:
I of course have a slightly different approach to trying to process what is happening inside and out. This might not make sense to you, but this time, this moment in time, is very, very pregnant. In the old days, ancient and not so ancient times, they would have consulted oracles at a time like this, because the "veil is thin" and they would want to hear from the ancestors. I stayed up last night until I knew that Trump clinched it, than I got 5 hours' sleep. I woke up in a kind of daze, trying to imagine a way forward. Then I had an idea ... I used to do this when I was a little younger, when I was studying the I Ching, and Jung's principle of Synchronicity etc. I used the books of great and creative minds as oracles. Here is how:
You get yourself centered, come up with a question to ask, hold the book to your heart and ask your question. Open the book randomly and point to a passage and that's your answer. One question, one answer.
This time I felt I wanted more than just one great mind's wisdom and I wanted to ask more than one question. SO I went up to my library and I pulled Jung, Denise Levertov, Whitman, Terry Hauptmann (an ecstatic poet), Thoreau, John O' Donohue and Rumi. I asked: "What is happening?" I wrote down their responses. Then I asked: "Where now? What now?" Again, I wrote down their responses. I'm going to write this up as a blog entry. One of the most interesting responses was from Jung. He "gave" me Trump's psychological type based on his (Jung's) Psychological Types (which constitutes one of the chunkiest volumes of his Collected Works, Vol. 6, and provides the basis for the Briggs / Myers test). It was very enlightening and helped me understand Trump much better.
(Still to Dave:) I don't expect you to respect the "objectivity" of this whole exercise, but it isn't hocus pocus and it makes no claim to objectivity anyway. It is based on the principle of synchronicity, which is what brought Pauli, the great Swiss quantum physicist, and Jung together and was what kept Dad's mind busy until the day he died. (See our father's, David Lindorff (Sr.'s) book: Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds.)
Now I will share what I learned from these 7 great minds in order of the two questions I put to them:
Question One: "What is happening?"
Jung (from The Portable Jung, A Penguin Book, 1971, p 205):
Note: This quote requires a little gloss: I will highlight the exact phrase I pointed to.
Jung warns of the second-hand or second-rate nature of thinking that is "repressed by a conscious attitude". He explains this kind of thinking as unconscious or projected thinking, a narrow kind of "nothing but" thinking.
Denise Levertov (from Sands of the Well, A New Directions Book, 1996, p 55):
(from her poem: "The News and a Green Moon" )
" ... Slowly, one speck
to a square meter, cometary dust, continually as if from an inexhaustible
talcum shaker, falls unseen, adding century by century its increment
to Earth's burden. Covered in that unseen dust I'm peering up to see
the haze of green radiance the moon gives off this night, this one quick
breath of time. No lunamancy tells me its significance, if it has one.
It is beautiful, a beryl, a disk of soft jade melting
into its own light. So silent.
And earth's cries of anguish almost inaudible."
Walt Whitman: (from Leaves of Grass, Rhinehart & Company, 1958, p 193):
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