Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

When Steffen was released he continued his obsessive creations, drawing between one and three works a day, mostly on brown wrapping paper.

 

 

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His alien creatures all exist in a state of metamorphosis -- somewhere between infancy and old age, male and female, plant and animal.

 

 

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Throughout his lifetime Steffen created thousands of drawings, most of which he would roll up, tape and store in his basement.

 

 

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Yet Steffen was so prolific his sister feared the excess of stored works would incite a fire and destroyed most of them. To this day the only works by Steffen that remain were those crafted between 1989 and his death in 1995, of which there are over 2,000.

 

 

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Just as Steffen obsessively documented the natural history of his inner world, revealing the alien nature of his fragmented self, so Ernst Haeckel created extraordinary images of natural life forms at the turn of the 20th century.

 

 

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His work is no less obsessive than Steffen’s. He was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and the kingdom Protista.

 

 

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The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures.

 

 

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Many of these had never been viewed before, including remarkably accurate renditions of micrsoscopic radiolaria.

 

 

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They seemed like creatures from an unknown and alien world.

 

 

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Haeckel's work made a lasting impression on Jung, who as a young man, recalled a vivid dream in which he saw a radiolaria three feet across.

 

 

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He realized that this dream represented his own struggle for wholeness.

 

 

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He came to the opinion that such dream images were really mandalas - symbols of the self, often manifest not when the dreamer is at one with the universe, but quite the reverse, when they are striving for that sense of completion and belonging in a time of crisis. He began to paint mandalas, of which this was the first:

 

 

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Here is a mandala painted by one of his patients:

 

 

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And another:

 

 

 

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And so before any of the great texts on psychology he later wrote, he created the Red Book, his "confrontation with the unconscious" a labor of some 16 years, on which all of his later work is founded.

 

 

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The Red Book is Jung's voyage of discovery into his deepest self.

 

 

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Perhaps no-one could have been better prepared or equipped to address the meaning and symbolism of UFO's because to Jung, life is a mystery, and that which is unconscious and immeasurable is as essential as that which is conscious and measurable.

 

 

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The absence of comprehension is not the absence of meaning. If anything, the presence of comprehension is a barrier to the apprehension of life's mysteries.

 

 

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Dark matter. Dark matters. For light cannot exist without it.

 

 

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"...Jung often spoke of dreams as compensating for a one-sided conscious standpoint... What conscious attitude on the part of psychology does The Red Book challenge or serve as a compensation for? To answer this question, we need to think in rather broad historical manner about the developments in psychology since Jung's death in 1961. In the past 50 years psychology has become increasingly scientized, far more so than in Jung's own time, and the practice of both psychiatric and psychotherapeutic treatment has become increasingly medicalized ... What Jung, in the Red Book, referred to as the "spirit of this time" (the scientific, hyper-rational mode of thinking) is, within the discipline of psychology, gaining a stranglehold on the academy and profession."

Sanford L Drob