Reflective - Thank you Marie Louise von Franz

Thank you Marie Louise von Franz

Recently at a local feast here in the First Nations Community of Mistissini, Qc. where I live, I observed an Elder carefully peel strips of beaver meat from the cranial bone he held in his swollen, work-worn hands. Small, sharp blade incised just so, he peeled back a strip of meat so cleanly that only the bald white bone remained.
Clearly, he’d learned, in times of want, to eat respectfully and thoroughly. Nothing wasted.

Similarly, I too so deeply appreciate the nourishment provided by the devoted Jungian scholar, Marie Louise Von Franz (1915-1998) in On Dreams and Death (Shambala Publications, Inc. 1986) that I would like to share some of the strengthening ideas, dreams and images that have satisfied my own cravings, especially in this time of global challenge.

Let me begin with a dream of an analysand of Von Franz:

                         She was at a garden party where many people were standing around on a lawn.
                         Jung was among them. He was wearing a strange outfit: in front his jacket and
                         trousers were bright green; in the back they were black. Then she saw a black
                         wall which had a hole cut out of it in exactly the same shape as Jung’s stature.
                         Jung suddenly stepped into this hole, and now all that one could see was a
                         complete black surface, although everyone knew he was still there. Then the
                         dreamer looked at herself and discovered that she, too, was wearing such clothes,
                         green in front and black behind. (Pg. 155)

Von Franz reports that upon waking from this dream, her client received a phone call telling her that Jung had just died. Von Franz does not think that in death, the course material body will one day rise up out of the burial plot and resume its life on earth as fundamentalist religion would have it. But the Self will: Inside the material body of our cells, skin, blood, and bone there is included energy known as ‘subtle body’, comprised of our awakened consciousness, the character we have conscientiously developed - all that which has been rescued from the unconscious.

Marie Louise von Franz encourages personal growth – and promises important rewards of increased consciousness. It is our very thoughts, ideas, new attitudes, deeper understandings, in other words - our constructed character, that, at death, part from the course material body, a container it no longer needs since it has, by its own effort to individuate, created a new receptacle. The meaty returns of our own brave hunting adventures contribute to our own ‘subtle body’. She suggests that it is this subtle body that joins with the individual’s soul spirit to become part of the vast collective unconscious. Is the essential goodness of each person carried forward after death?
Is character development the subtle body evolution that, in death, gives birth to us?

 
Marie Louise Von Franz advises we meet death consciously. One way of doing this is to play the spiritual game of “letting go” of resentments, agenda, will and control.
This may feel like death at first – but soon, the Wisdom of Life surprises. Sometimes it is the peace found in acceptance. And then to do the next right thing while we wait, a kind of physical prayer, an act of trust even if that is cleaning the bathroom or making a soup or just lying down on the couch and bravely feeling our feelings.  
 
There’s much work in tearing ourselves away from the approval we exchange for truth and reality. Von Franz supplies the following dream of a man who had been unhappily married but who had tried all his life to maintain his marriage according to conventional Christian standards:

He was in a church beside his wife – apparently to be married to her again or
to reconfirm his marriage. But in front of him was a blank white washed wall.
The minister was a person whom he knew in reality, a very decent but depressive,
neurotic man. Suddenly, a most beautiful Gypsy woman broke into the ceremony,
fettered the parson with ropes and began to drag him away. At the same time
she looked with flaming eyes at the dreamer and said, “And with you, I will soon 
lose my patience.” (Pg.51)
 
Von Franz explains that the above dreamer died of a heart attack shortly after having this dream, that his anima was angry because he had not loved his wife but had entirely suppressed his Eros-nature for the sake of false convention. Eros- nature, betrayed, can become quite angry!
 

This reminds me of a dream had by Jungian scholar, Marion Woodman, who related that she had consistently ignored her instincts. Over and over they had urged her to take a particular action. She did not listen and constantly brushed aside what she knew she should do. One night she dreamed that an angry woman appeared to her, screaming that if Marion did not obey her, then she’d snatch back the pearls she once gave her.
I think of my frightened father. He could not defy his church, which, he believed, dangled his salvation. If only he had been encouraged to establish his own inner place of worship; his own instincts his sacraments.
If it is our important life work to “make conscious” all that which is unconscious, we are to be constantly birthing the new ideas sent to us.
 
Marie Louise von Franz examines a dream by J.B. Priestly (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jpriestley.htm ) related in Man and Time:
 
“I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon the myriads of birds flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now, in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and the time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek and then, in a flash, bled and shriveled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless biological effort?
As I stared down, seeming to see every creature’s ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us at all, had been born, if the struggle ceased forever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy.
But now the gear was changed again, and time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But, along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket-burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of beings.
Birds, people or creatures not yet shaped and colored, all were of no account except so as this flame of life travelled through them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought of as tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never felt before such happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds.”
 
Priestly, explains Marie-Louise von Franz, understood the flame in his dream as the eternal cosmic Self.

Rather than cowering uselessly behind a belief that we are insignificant and unworthy in the grand scheme of things, we can view ourselves as critically important and essential participants in the shaping of not only our own immediate futures, but our eternal ones.

Jung said that to the degree we do not participate in this Divine Awakening work, in becoming the best we can be, then to that very same degree does the Divine Self remain unrevealed – and the world unevolved forever.
 
Finally, the thrill of the following passage from the architect Stefan von Janovich, someone who died and then was revived:

One of the great discoveries I made during death…was the oscillation principle…
Since that time “God” represents, for me, a source of primal energy, inexhaustible
and timeless, continually radiating energy, absorbing energy and constantly
pulsating … Different worlds are formed from different oscillations;
the frequencies determine the differences… Therefore it is possible for different
worlds to exist simultaneously in the same place, since the oscillations
that do not correspond with each other also do not influence themselves….
Thus birth and death can be understood as events in which, from one
oscillation frequency – and therefore from one world – we come into another.
(Pg.147)

Right now we are hunting for the inner gifts to contribute to the vast spiritual fund of conscious cosmic energy. Like the elder in Mistissini, we shall gladly leave only bald bones behind; happy with the nourishment we have been given, nothing wasted.

(To view/purchase titles by Marie Louise Von Franz:  http://www.innercitybooks.net