Tag Archives: Assagioli

When Spider Webs Combine

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Faith in the Future Conference. Photo by ARC

Faith leaders representing 24 world religions gathered at Bristol, England, this month and committed to helping the world’s poorest people. Photo by ARC.

One of my favorite Assagioli quotes, which I actually have printed on my business card, is as follows:

“When spiritual light is focused on the most complex of individual or collective problems, it produces solutions…and spares us much suffering.”

These words resonate with the news that the UN is now actively inviting spiritual leaders to become involved in 17 sustainability commitments for the next 15 years. On 25 September, world leaders will gather at the United Nations in New York to adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. These commitments include a worldwide end to poverty and hunger, full employment across the globe, and gender equality in every country.

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Visions of God, the Cosmos and Humanity

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Hild vision only

Hildegard von Bingen receives her divine visions and writes them with wax tablet and stylus while the monk Volmar inscribes her visions on vellum.

Recently I found myself with a group of pilgrims in the Land of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), near the Middle Rheine in Germany. Most of travelers were transpersonal and/or Jungian psychologists who had traveled all the way from South Korea in search of the wisdom of this saint, prophet, poet, dramatist, physician, abbess, preacher and Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. A visionary in every sense of the word, Hildegard is perhaps best known for the hymns and canticles that she specifically wrote for the nuns of her own convent.

As a child, Hildegard saw and heard visions, but it wasn’t until she was “42 years and seven months old” that she received a disturbing vision from God commanding her to, “Write what you see and hear,” in order to spread news of God’s words and ways. Thus she began work on her first book, Scivias (Know the Ways). Written over a period of ten years, the book describes a total of 26 visions on the subjects of creation, redemption, and sanctification.

It would take a lifetime of scholarly pursuit to fully explore and come to some understanding of Hildegard’s theology. Nevertheless, I am going to boldly describe one of my first impressions, from a psychosynthesis point of view. What particularly struck me was the remarkable similarity between her third vision, called “God, Cosmos, and Humanity,” described in the first part of Scivias, and Assagioli’s model of the human personality. Perhaps, you also will intuitively recognize some similarities, but here are just a few that appeared before me.

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The Healing Paradox

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Are you like Ava and afraid of falling? Then try to fall!

Are you like Ava and afraid of falling? Then try to fall!

Ava came to see me because she had been suffering with extreme vertigo for the past three years. Uncompensated labyrintis occurs when the inner ear becomes damaged and does not heal after eight weeks. Basically, the brain must then relearn how to correct the faulty signals that are coming from the sufferer’s damaged inner ear. Until then, you can experience dizziness, imbalance, and fatigue.

Ava’s brain was taking a long time to learn how to reinterpret the signals coming from her inner ear. Hence her continual bouts of vertigo which were unpredictable and could last for days. The strange part is that dizziness is actually part of the healing process as it shows that your brain is trying to correct the faulty signals.

Despite all this, Ava kept insisting that her life, in general, was happy and that she was happy. But still there were things she missed doing like skiing and dancing. Ava (30) was married and also wanted to start having children, but she was constantly afraid of falling down and didn’t dare have a baby for fear of falling while carrying the child.

Underneath her presenting issue of vertigo, however, was another story. When Ava was 18 and just beginning university, 200 km away from home, one morning, she spoke to her mother on the phone. Later that day she received a call that her mother had died in a car accident. This tragedy was particular difficult for her for many reasons, not to mention, the accident being so unexpected and her mother’s death so sudden. Ava was an only child. And finding herself far from home, without any real friends at the new school, she had no one to go to for immediate comfort.

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