#35 / The Spirit of the Depths
Hey y’all,
Carl Jung made a distinction between “the spirit of the times” and “the spirit of the depths.”
The spirit of the times is what is going on in the world right now. It’s the Zeitgeist. We have to live in it, of course, but if we over-identify with the spirit of the times, we become too myopic and narrow-minded, and we forget that the world has gone on long before us and will go on long after us.
The spirit of the depths is what is going on in ourselves right now, in the unconscious part of us that is tapped into eternal energies. This part of us is where our dreams come from, and our bold ideas, and our true desires and callings. But if we over-identify with the spirit of the depths, we become totally unmoored from the world, and madness and possession result.
Of the two, I feel as though I struggle much more to go deep. The values of our current times include: always being connected, getting up early and staying up late, being married to our jobs, consumerism, materialism, and the worship of success. Quiet moments for reflection must be seized wherever possible, and I am constantly warding off guilt for doing so.
And sometimes the spirit of the times becomes overwhelming, with external events threatening to subsume our existences completely. This is clearly one of those times. To the anxiety of an enveloping pandemic, we’ve added an economic and political crisis and a monumental election that has unfolded in slow motion.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. “May you live in interesting times” is a cliche with a lot of staying power. And I have to admit, as we were watching the returns on Tuesday night—until we realized nothing was going to happen and turned on Schitt’s Creek instead—I found myself feeling excruciated but also very, very alive.
The challenge in boisterous, feverish times is to not lose sight of the unconscious and the spirit of the depths, and to not become ungrounded. I don’t want to move as fast as the world moves today, at the speed of Twitter and the 24-hour news cycle (which increasingly seems more like a 12-hour or 6-hour cycle). I find that what really matters to me is in the depths: the beauty in life is in things that take time to build, like relationships and understanding how the world works.
I’m reminded that this is a privilege, to be able to on occasion tune out the world and focus on my inner world instead. There are many people who don’t get to take a day off from the struggle to survive, and the question of who will be in power for the next four years is of paramount importance. For me, my life won’t change that much; I spent plenty of time worrying about what Trump might do next, but it was mostly an abstract worry.
The anxiety of the past week has made me more resolute in wanting to control what I can control, let go of what I can’t, and to act more often from my own sense of purpose rather than from what the world wants from me. But at the same time, I want to be involved. I want to feel like I matter and that I am doing good work.
One of the ballot initiatives in Illinois this year was called the Fair Tax: Illinois is one of only eight states with a (constitutionally mandated!) flat income tax. This initiative, had it passed, would have removed that mandate from the state constitution, allowing us to implement a graduated income tax with higher percentages for higher earners. But it didn’t pass.
Now, I’m involved in some social justice stuff, but I didn’t get very involved in the Fair Tax campaign—even though I deeply believe in the need for a fair income tax—in part because the campaign was heavy on phone banking and canvassing and I don’t really like those activities. (Those weren’t the only things I could have done, but they were the simplest and most advertised opportunities.) I knew it was important, I felt guilty for not doing more to put my values into action, and, when the measure didn’t pass, I had the embarrassing but very real feeling of relief that I hadn’t done much phone banking or canvassing because it would have been for nothing anyway.
And then I realized something: the people who phone banked and canvassed for Fair Tax didn’t look at it the way I was looking at it. They didn’t see their actions as being for nothing, even though the Fair Tax didn’t pass. They got something out of it, something that was unattached to the outcome of the campaign.
I don’t get anything out of phone banking or canvassing, and that’s not something to feel guilty about. It just means that, if I want to feel like I matter and feel like I’m doing good work, if I want to put my values into action, I have to work a little harder to find the right activities for me.
For example: I sometimes have trouble remembering the rebuttals to the common objections to the Fair Tax, stuff like, “won’t all the rich people just move out of state?” This is the kind of thing I enjoy writing about—clearing up my own questions—and I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who had trouble keeping that stuff straight, so a good activity for me would have been to produce some kind of “Guide to Talking About the Fair Tax.” I would have gotten something out of that.
Gotta keep the spirit of the times and the spirit of the depths in harmony. That’s the long game.
Some Thoughts on the Spirit of the Depths from 1894
John Altgeld was governor of Illinois from 1893 to 1897, a forerunner of the Progressive movement who was ahead of his time. He pardoned three labor activists who were unjustly convicted for throwing bombs at the Haymarket Affair in Chicago. He refused to step in to break the Pullman workers’ strike despite massive pressure. He was a champion of workplace safety and a crusader against child labor.
We were walking through Graceland Cemetery in Chicago today, where a lot of the city’s prominent citizens are buried. It was getting on toward lunch, and we were only halfway through our self-guided tour, so we started to hurry it up a bit. Altgeld’s grave was a little out of the way and, assuming he was just another rich white captain of industry or corrupt politician, we were about to skip him. But after reading the beginning of his entry in the tour book, we wanted to go pay tribute.
And on his gravestone we found Altgeld speaking to us directly in our time, as if by magic.
Under the law as you assume it to be, a president, through any of his appointees, can apply to himself to have the military sent into any city, and base his application on such representations as he sees fit. This assumption is new and I submit that it is not the law of the land. The jurists tell us that this is a government of the law, and not a government by caprice of an individual.
I am not discouraged. Things will right themselves. The pendulum swings one way, and then another, but the steady pull of gravitation is toward the center of the earth. Any structure must be plumb if it is to endure. So it is with nations: wrong may seem to triumph, right may seem to be defeated, but the gravitation of eternal justice is toward the throne of God. Any political institution which is to endure must be plumb with that line of justice.
Mood
Mary J. Blige — “Work That”
There’s so many girls I hear you been running
From the beautiful queen that you could be becoming
You can look at my palm and see the storm coming
Read the book of my life and see I’ve overcome it
(I don’t want the drama, get lost)
Just because the length of your hair ain’t long
And they often criticize you for your skin tone
Wanna hold your head high ‘cause you’re a pretty woman
Get your runway stride on and keep going
Girl, live your life
Work That - song by Mary J. Blige | Spotify
Mary J. Blige · Song · 2007
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Thanks for reading. Please take care, and write back if you can!
Love,
Aaron