why suffer?

In the darkest days of my psychic journey into the unconscious I dream I am standing on a wild black ocean under a black sky, in the thickest darkness I can imagine. I am buffeted by a cosmic wind and I am calling for someone and someone is calling out for me. But the wind is obscuring our voices and I am completely lost and alone.

Glenn-Gray says that ‘the experience of Dread’ is a confrontation with the truth that at the ‘end of all striving….is the abyss of Non-being’. He considers it to be a most difficult truth to discover and even more difficult to face up to but that it is an experience to be ‘sought and endured’. (Glenn-Gray, 117)

Just recently someone commented that the journey into darkness was 'over-rated' and to be avoided if at all possible, and I absolutely agree. So does Uncle Carl. In Aspects of the Feminine he 'advises us to let sleeping dogs lie because the perilous journey into the unconscious is neither useful or necessary until we are driven to it out of necessity. (Breaux 1989: xi)

The temptation to ask 'why me' is natural but really unnecessary because I know that unfortunately we learn little from being comfortable. Despite my cries of 'it's not fair' and 'I just want an easy life', I am overwhelmingly grateful for the insights I have gained through adversity.

But I do look forward to the day when I can rest.

image: My drawing Unhappy Judas, form the original mediaeval tale of the Brendan Voyage.

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