Solitude and Fasting

“Solitude and fasting have from time immemorial been the best-known means of strengthening any meditation whose purpose is to open the door to the unconscious.” Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, par 519

So much is made of dieting in our culture.  Does it ever really work? My slant is this: with dieting the ancient purpose of the act has been subverted for a lesser good which has some admixture of vanity woven through it and the unconscious itself will not have it. We can see the same revolt from the unconscious when drug and alcohol use spirals into addiction, sacraments twisted into nightmares.

The practice of conscious fasting was carried out of our prehistoric times when a sense of plenty was irregular and hunger commonplace, a time when the manifesting unconscious and less developed egos were more unified.  It was carried into and maintained in our earliest of cultures as a spiritual practice because it was effective.  Out of that collective great wanting of sustenance, much that was magical transpired: miracles and mysteries, intuitions and calamities.  Stories that seemed a step beyond the margins of the ordinary, a value outside the spectrum of the visible: encounters with the numinous, visions.

And solitude.  How afraid do you think we are as a culture to be alone?  Perhaps the greatest service we can bring to our young people is to teach them how to traverse paths of solitude.  You know why we avoid it.  We are semi-afraid of talking to ourselves, and we’re terrified of talking to the unconscious.  The door is always there for each of us.  We just tend to set up our televisions in front of it.

Lent’s coming.  Could your purpose be to open the door?