A beautiful day. A list of things done. A meeting, minor enough.
A couple of days ago, finishing up a preparatory paper for one of my upcoming exams, I realized I was tensing up enough to make myself uncomfortable, and in some actual pain – took a medication I had thought I didn't need any more. Perhaps that has made me feel slightly unreal, the past few days...
And being reminded that my exams are a choice, the entire project of studying at the Jung-Institut is a choice... that the very idea of becoming a Jungian analyst, of engaging in individuation (not just therapy, not just the helping profession thing, not just patch-them-up-and-put-them-back-into-the-rat-race) may be a goal, but it may also be an illusion. I want this to be about really moving towards something that is more real, more solid and with a real impact, than most things that we normally do in later life (retirement? being comfortable? gardening? going to see the kids... but of course I don't have kids, so...) but perhaps it is never quite that.
The alternatives that we do have. We are always deeply impressed by those dramatic life events that are not free – things we are thrown to, things that can not be any other way – diagnoses, firings, street accidents. Is it generally true of these serious, unavoidable, real things that they are always bad ones?... maybe not, I suppose it would be possible that one could win a lottery. But even then, that would be a not-quite-real thing – suddenly there is a lot of money, and then one would spend that money in various hallucinatory, not particularly real ways... or even being moved to another place, the same life with some different elements... at what point does change or loss or gain become more than protection, continuity, modification?
The sense of unreality, the sense of – contingency rather than necessity, I suppose: and even among the pleasant day and the pleasant people, nothing I am doing feels particularly real at the moment. Like a movie set, or more accurately the set of a long-running, not terribly successful situation comedy, an ensemble show with no major stars. Even the life I am (perhaps?) aiming to live, something in southern Europe, where the casual materiality of the daily world, the pleasure of it, would be greater – that of course does not guarantee its importance, its reality, its solidity.
The dream world, the world of illusions: it doesn't take much reading of Buddhist sutras to achieve that sense of vertigo. It is familiar also from years in Los Angeles, the pleasant not-quite-city, where being not-quite-real is a common state of being. And perhaps a lot of travel, a lot of living in very different places, helps to make everything seem even more contingent.
It is not that there is anything essentially wrong with the not-quite-real world, either; but it does feel as though there is literally no 'bottom', no core to it all.
Playing games, doing as-ifs... What is my next line? Can we run that again?...
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