The view from above

by Richard Reeve on September 11, 2009

in AziMuth

Labyrinth vor St.
Image via Wikipedia

“The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.” Carl Jung

I know quite a few people who have been living life along one vector.  It’s as though the compulsion in that direction has no allowance for variance.  I’ve ridden vectors for extended periods as well.  It’s been my experience that such a vector eventually constellates opposition, which for lack of a better definition, feels like fate.  Actually, it feels like a brick wall.

As I cycle through the seasons and the phases of my life it’s always with a sense of mystery that I recognize certain patterns unfolding in my life that resemble earlier periods. It’s like getting a glimpse of a much larger design which in many cultures gets rendered as a mandala.

The symbol of the mandala provides a view from above, as it were, the experience of winding through the labyrinth of our life.  It’s useful for me these days to consider what seems like a roadblock as just another turn in the path.

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  • Funny, I was just thinking how my inability to trace a vector for more than a relative instant in life, has been an endless source of misery.

    I like the way "source," as in "wellspring," crept in there!

    Have to remember the journey is always toward the center. As some traditions call it, toward the Source. Yet another coloration of that word!
  • I tend to follow vector beyond the point of the needed turn, and
    thereby end up in the weeds...
  • Jeb
    What a great insight by CJung. Perhaps I like it because it suggests purpose in my many detours. But the recurring patterns...they're not precisely the same then, right? Similar, but with slight distinctions that bring us closer and closer, eventually, to center? Like a marble swirling down a funnel...round and round we go, each revolution (revelation) so much the same, but ever so slightly closer to the core...
  • ...Exactly, a similarity of pattern, if not details, or details if not
    pattern. The recognitions can fire in a multitude of ways. To you

    insightful sense of centering, I'll add another complementary idea,

    and that is one of finding the out circumference. Where it really get

    \"peculiar\" is when these to opposing realities seem to be taking place

    simultaneously...
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