Readers who follow our other websites across Syntagma Media’s network will know we have for a while had an informal supplement, or grouping of blogs, concerned with spiritual and paranormal topics.

Now that A Spirit of Place is no longer with us, owing to the author losing interest in writing about places she had never visited, we have just two sites left in this section: this one and Supernatural, authored by Deborah Woehr.

However, in September we are going to extend the group with a number of new sites based on different topic areas. One we are very hopeful of setting up arrived as a result of A Spirit of Place and may manifest in the form of a blog written directly from Arunachala, that mystical place which was the home of Ramana Maharshi in the first half of the 20th century.

Others are in the pipeline and will make up a new supplement called MetaSyntagma. Stay tuned for more information.

This is a piece found on the Internet, author unknown. But it has the ring of truth:

If we could shrink the Earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look like this:

There would be:

57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western Hemisphere (North and South), 8 Africans.

51 would be female; 49 would be male.

70 would be non-whites, 30 white.

70 would be non-Christians, 30 Christian.

50% of the entire world’s wealth would be in the hands of only 6 people, all citizens of the U.S.

80 would live in substandard housing.

70 would be unable to read.

50 would suffer from malnutrition.

1 would be near death, 1 would be near birth.

Only 1 would have a college education.

No one would own a computer.

I’ve been researching the posthumously-published aspects of the work of C.G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher of mysticism. In particular, the late chapters and appendices of his memoirs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which show how far he had progressed beyond the orthodox science of his day.

It’s always interesting to view the private jottings of public people. The enormous lengths they go to in trying to hide their real views from critical gaze is fascinating. In Jung’s case, his belief in the purpose of “Individuation” contrasted starkly with the nihilism of many of his colleagues.

Here’s his personal view of Individuation:

“When the summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges … and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation, he who is inwardly great will know that the long expected friend of his soul, the immortal one, has now really come.”

C.G. Jung

Jung’s enlightenment was a western one, though inspired by a deep understanding of eastern, particularly Chinese, thought patterns. He stressed, over and over again, that the ego was not to be given up lightly. His experience had taught him that many disturbed people crowding the mental hospitals lacked a coherent conscious ego and were swamped by the symbolic contents of the collective unconscious, which they were unprepared by their culture and education either to combat or assimilate. Such was the extent of the conscious development of the western mind, that an abyss of the greatest proportions separates us from our natural selves and the wholeness of our being.

Enlightenment for him was the unconscious made conscious in a kind of partnership with the differentiated ego which, at this point, relinquishes its total domination over the stultifyingly intellectualized mind of western man.

Jung was aware that the East had a much better relationship with the symbology of the collective unconscious and could handle its intrusions without losing control. He felt that the West no longer lived a symbolic life, largely because of the failure of the churches, and therefore had no psychological immunity against the deeper contents of the psyche.

He emphasized a western way to enlightenment. A way of balance and proportion. And he called it by the very western name of Individuation. For Jung believed that, “The sole and natural carrier of life is the individual, and this holds true throughout nature.” It is only the individual who can sacrifice his ego, and it is the individual who is called to do so. It is only from the enlightened Absolute viewpoint that this so real individual is seen to be illusory and empty.

It is clear that Jung’s mental furniture comprised all the elements necessary for a full participation in the rich philosophies of the East, with their almost total concentration on the path to spiritual enlightenment.

At his home in Switzerland, Jung carved the following words on a block of stone: “Time is a child — playing like a child — playing a board game — the kingdom of the child.”

John M Evans