Weaving The Traditions: the Natural Wisdom of C.G. Jung
and the Kichwa traditions embodied in the wisdom of don Alverto Taxo
by C. Michael Smith
Nature is an incomparable guide if you know how to follow her. She is like the needle of a compass pointing to the north…
-C. G. Jung
We can enter into the secrets of Mother Nature [Pachamama], and we can be sons and daughters, apprentices to the Wisdom of Mother Earth [Ashpamama].
When I reflect on why the teachings of don Alverto so initially attractive to me, I keep coming up with the same answer, that his teachings are so convergent with, and complementary to the wisdom teachings of C.G. Jung, my great psychological mentor. While the path of the Iachak is in many ways deeper and richer than any modern depth psychology, my clinical practice and my life had been strongly influenced by Jung, one of my lineage Elders. So it felt good to find a way I could initially begin integrating the wisdom of don Alverto with that of C.G. Jung and the tradition of analytical psychology. There is a strong shamanic elements in Jung’s life and his work, as I brought out in detail in my book, JUNG AND SHAMANISM IN DIALOGUE [Paulist Press, 1997]. It was a milestone to write that book, but in the past 7 years I have so much deepened my practice and understanding of the shamanic path, that I was inspired through the path of the Iachak to developed a psychology of the heart, which you can find in theory and practices throughout this website. This piece I wrote in my 5th year of apprenticeship, and it reflects some of the common themes between Jung and the tradition of Jungian thought, and don Alverto and the Kichwa tradition, and the Iachak path for the interested reader.
______________
When I met and began studying with don Alverto some years ago, I asked to become his apprentice in the path of the Iachak. Yet there was some reservation about being anyone’s apprentice. He responded that I was welcome to follow my own path and simply walk along side of him—perhaps we could share things with each other. I must admit that I feared that he might want me to give up the wisdom tradition I had done my spiritual spade work in for 25 years, that of the analytical psychology inspired by C.G. Jung. This would not be the case, and what I have come to notice is that the more I have studied with don Alverto, walked the path of the Iachak with him, the more I have become a better individuator, having developed more feminine feeling values, standing more in my own truth, and feeling more whole than ever. I have become a better psychologist as well.
It has amazed me the great similarities between the wisdom tradition of both men, and I believe the reason for this is because both have followed a natural path in life. Since this book has given ample attention to the natural way of the Iachak, to the development of feeling, using the four elements to get in balance and so on, I would like to compliment it by emphasizing a bit of the natural wisdom of C.G. Jung, pointing out the natural resonances as we go along. For me this is very important because I want my life, my daily walk, and my therapeutic talk and action to be integrated, all of a piece, so to speak. Don Alverto gave me the one thing I did not get from Jung, and that was a daily devotional practice that was ongoing and thoroughly natural. Jungian psychology had given me some very powerful techniques of inner work, including skill in working with dreams and doing what Jung called ‘active imagination’. These were ways of working with the wisdom of the Great Mother as She reveals herself in the human psyche. I have employed these tools faithfully, and I and my clients have benefited greatly from them. But these methods, deeply as they reached into the heart of my living never thoroughly took the body and the physical world into my daily consciousness practices. They never helped me sufficiently developed the “feminine feeling values” which Jung so often stressed as important to our health and wholeness, and they rarely affected my eating, and bathing, and breathing. My Jungian practices, while open to the synchronicities of the day, were essentially confined to my period of inner work in the morning, in which I worked my dreams and reflected on what needed more attention each morning. When the period of inner work was over, I turned my attention to other things, including my professional responsibilities. So I had in essence put walls or boundaries around my inner work and benefited greatly from the discipline. But as my personal journals show, my dreams repeatedly spoke to me of a need to develop what Jung called the ‘anima’ the feminine values of feeling, receptivity of consciousness, and instinctual and intuitive living, intimate relatedness. I made many intellectual recognitions of this need, yet over a period of 20 years I felt I hadn’t succeeded in developing or integrating anima. Perhaps this is why I often felt myself longing for a set of practices which were thoroughly grounded and earth-honoring, and completely compatible with the useful wisdom I had learned from C.G. Jung and yet resourceful in helping me develop the feminine more.
Dreams: A Gift of the Great Mother
My longing for an earth-based, earth-honoring path was reflected in my writing and reading over the past couple of decades. This is reflected in my first two books, Psychotherapy and the Sacred,[i] and Jung and Shamanism in Dialogu[ii]e in which I sought to revitalize modern psychotherapy with shamanic and indigneous healing resources. However, I now realize that my approach was too intellectual, non- experiential, and that not much insight or wisdom is gained from an intellectual look at a natural systems of healing. One of my colleagues told me the books lacked ‘anima.’ It is largely because of don Alverto’s influence that I live, write, and practice from a different place today, a deeper place, with an ongoing, rhythmic flow of practice no longer confined to set times of the day.
Today I am less interested in Jung’s theory and technical writings, marvelous as they are in their attempts to bring a natural way into modern psychology. But they are primarily candy for the mind if they are not felt, experienced, and lived. I am more interested in Jung the naturalist of the psyche, and in Jung the nature-mystic, which is reflected in the earthy retreat he built with his own hands, called Bollingen Tower, and which gave real soil and grounding to his life’s work. At Bollingen he felt himself in the midst of his true life. He had no running water or electricity. He chopped his own wood, cooked over open fires, lit oil lamps at night, and attuned himself to the Earth Mother with feminine receptivity and feeling. This passage from his autobiography shows to what degree he had succeeded in attuning to the elements of nature:
At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of seasons. There is nothing…with which I am not linked. [MDR 225]
Jung had, in his own way, recovered and considerably developed the capacity to feel, and sympathetically enter into the essence of things, commune with what don Alverto calls the their “ushai”. Jung lived as well as advocated a natural way of living. He was deeply concerned that modern life had neglected nature and that this was the source of many of the ills he saw in his patients. He felt modern science and technology had brought many good things, but that we had failed to establish a balanced relationship to them. He advised us, in a manner reminiscent of don Alverto’s invitation to deal with modernity by living more simply and intentionally:
“to live in small communities, to work a shorter day and week; to have a plot of land to cultivate so the instincts come back to life; and to make the sparest use of radio and television, news papers, and technological gadgetry. [Sabini 19]
Consider, also, these comments Jung put in a letter to one of his clients, in which the good doctor dispenses a practical and earth-honoring wisdom in words that could almost be those of don Alverto:
Dear N:
I was very pleased to hear that you now have house and land of your own. This is important for the chthonic powers. I hope you will find time to commit your plant counterparts to the Earth and tend their growth, for the Earth always wants children—houses, trees, flowers—to grow out of Her and celebrate the marriage of the human psyche with the Great Mother, the best counter-magic against rootless extraversion!
With regards to you and your dear husband,
Always your friend,
C.G. Jung
[LT II, 320]
Jung’s intent, here, is not to motivate us to repair Nature, but to let Nature repair us and bring us back into balance. Like don Alverto, Jung had a natural view of healing and the work of a healer. He knew the ultimate healer was not the doctor, but Nature herself. Sometimes he spoke of the healer as God or the Self, sometimes he preferred to speak of the Tao who is the ultimate Mother of us all. He claimed that the peoples of the modern industrial countries had lost touch with the Great Mother and advocated one sure way to reclaim Her natural being in us through listening to, and working with our dreams. Through dream work we can reclaim the natural being that has been forgotten, for dreams are an activity of Nature. Jung believed that we had 2 different psychologies in us. The one he considered to be the modern ego, the mind of modern man, and this corresponds to the “Eagle” in don Alverto’s view, as this statement should make crystal clear.
In our time, it’s the intellect that is making darkness, because we’ve let it take too big a place. Consciousness discriminates, judges, analyzes, and emphasizes the contradictions. It’s necessary work up to a point. But analysis kills and synthesis brings to life. We must find out how to get everything back into connection with everything else. [Jung, JS 420]
Don Alverto would say that it is through the development and use of feeling that we can reconnect, and that it is we who have disconnected ourselves by forgetting the way of the Condor---for the heart knows that everything is already connected. It is just that the mind, has forgotten this in our modern civilization. Again we cite Jung, in agreement with don Alverto, that many problems in modern living are generated by this loss of connection with wisdom of Nature:
In the final analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us. [Jung JS 89]
The other person within us is the age-old natural person, who Jung sometimes called the “2 million year old man”. In calling it this, Jung was drawing attention to our natural evolution as a species, one of many on the planet, and that the wisdom of our species is thus the wisdom of the Earth who nurtured us into being. Dreams are natural occurrences that must have value or they wouldn’t be. They have been taking place in other mammals for 140 million years. Dreams serve up the natural instincts and desires we have forgotten. Their striking images and arousing emotions and desires are often shocking or embarrassing to the modern mind because the modern mind has repressed, dissociated, or otherwise cut itself off from feeling and awareness. Dreams relentlessly, remorselessly rub our noses in the “unvarnished truth” and serve to remind us of those poles or sides of ourselves that are part of what we are as natural beings. In reminding us of the side of ourselves that we tend to forget or ignore, they seek our acknowledgement, our consciousness, and want us to give them due place in our lives. Thus we could say that dreams are one of the ways the Earth Mother speaks to us and tries to help us grow, come more into balance, and live fully in tune with Nature. Other ways don Alverto has suggested: through cultivating feeling and using the elements of Nature. Don Alverto, when discussing dreams, speaks of “traveling” to other dimensions, while “leaving” our bodies in sleep, Jung accented a different aspect of the power of dreams. In so far as they are natural expressions of the Great Mother, and the wisdom of the species passed on from generation to generation, and in so far as the Self or the Divine within evokes dreams to help bring us into balance by compensating with our less conscious or undeveloped potentials, Jung advocated working with dreams as a regular practice. This daily practice aims at getting the complimentary message of the dream, the one that adds to or expands our ordinary, everyday thinking or attitude. Yet Jung also acknowledged the other realms, sometimes classifying them as dimensions of the “collective unconscious” a conception similar to Wiracocha,[iii] the “Lake of Wisdom” of the Iachak tradition. In his autobiography, Jung tells us about travels experienced as “out of the body”, meeting with a meditating guru in some stone temple in outer space. Both men invite us to see the power of dreams to expand our perception, knowledge, and way of living by accenting different attributes of the dreaming process.
and the Kichwa traditions embodied in the wisdom of don Alverto Taxo
by C. Michael Smith
Nature is an incomparable guide if you know how to follow her. She is like the needle of a compass pointing to the north…
-C. G. Jung
We can enter into the secrets of Mother Nature [Pachamama], and we can be sons and daughters, apprentices to the Wisdom of Mother Earth [Ashpamama].
When I reflect on why the teachings of don Alverto so initially attractive to me, I keep coming up with the same answer, that his teachings are so convergent with, and complementary to the wisdom teachings of C.G. Jung, my great psychological mentor. While the path of the Iachak is in many ways deeper and richer than any modern depth psychology, my clinical practice and my life had been strongly influenced by Jung, one of my lineage Elders. So it felt good to find a way I could initially begin integrating the wisdom of don Alverto with that of C.G. Jung and the tradition of analytical psychology. There is a strong shamanic elements in Jung’s life and his work, as I brought out in detail in my book, JUNG AND SHAMANISM IN DIALOGUE [Paulist Press, 1997]. It was a milestone to write that book, but in the past 7 years I have so much deepened my practice and understanding of the shamanic path, that I was inspired through the path of the Iachak to developed a psychology of the heart, which you can find in theory and practices throughout this website. This piece I wrote in my 5th year of apprenticeship, and it reflects some of the common themes between Jung and the tradition of Jungian thought, and don Alverto and the Kichwa tradition, and the Iachak path for the interested reader.
______________
When I met and began studying with don Alverto some years ago, I asked to become his apprentice in the path of the Iachak. Yet there was some reservation about being anyone’s apprentice. He responded that I was welcome to follow my own path and simply walk along side of him—perhaps we could share things with each other. I must admit that I feared that he might want me to give up the wisdom tradition I had done my spiritual spade work in for 25 years, that of the analytical psychology inspired by C.G. Jung. This would not be the case, and what I have come to notice is that the more I have studied with don Alverto, walked the path of the Iachak with him, the more I have become a better individuator, having developed more feminine feeling values, standing more in my own truth, and feeling more whole than ever. I have become a better psychologist as well.
It has amazed me the great similarities between the wisdom tradition of both men, and I believe the reason for this is because both have followed a natural path in life. Since this book has given ample attention to the natural way of the Iachak, to the development of feeling, using the four elements to get in balance and so on, I would like to compliment it by emphasizing a bit of the natural wisdom of C.G. Jung, pointing out the natural resonances as we go along. For me this is very important because I want my life, my daily walk, and my therapeutic talk and action to be integrated, all of a piece, so to speak. Don Alverto gave me the one thing I did not get from Jung, and that was a daily devotional practice that was ongoing and thoroughly natural. Jungian psychology had given me some very powerful techniques of inner work, including skill in working with dreams and doing what Jung called ‘active imagination’. These were ways of working with the wisdom of the Great Mother as She reveals herself in the human psyche. I have employed these tools faithfully, and I and my clients have benefited greatly from them. But these methods, deeply as they reached into the heart of my living never thoroughly took the body and the physical world into my daily consciousness practices. They never helped me sufficiently developed the “feminine feeling values” which Jung so often stressed as important to our health and wholeness, and they rarely affected my eating, and bathing, and breathing. My Jungian practices, while open to the synchronicities of the day, were essentially confined to my period of inner work in the morning, in which I worked my dreams and reflected on what needed more attention each morning. When the period of inner work was over, I turned my attention to other things, including my professional responsibilities. So I had in essence put walls or boundaries around my inner work and benefited greatly from the discipline. But as my personal journals show, my dreams repeatedly spoke to me of a need to develop what Jung called the ‘anima’ the feminine values of feeling, receptivity of consciousness, and instinctual and intuitive living, intimate relatedness. I made many intellectual recognitions of this need, yet over a period of 20 years I felt I hadn’t succeeded in developing or integrating anima. Perhaps this is why I often felt myself longing for a set of practices which were thoroughly grounded and earth-honoring, and completely compatible with the useful wisdom I had learned from C.G. Jung and yet resourceful in helping me develop the feminine more.
Dreams: A Gift of the Great Mother
My longing for an earth-based, earth-honoring path was reflected in my writing and reading over the past couple of decades. This is reflected in my first two books, Psychotherapy and the Sacred,[i] and Jung and Shamanism in Dialogu[ii]e in which I sought to revitalize modern psychotherapy with shamanic and indigneous healing resources. However, I now realize that my approach was too intellectual, non- experiential, and that not much insight or wisdom is gained from an intellectual look at a natural systems of healing. One of my colleagues told me the books lacked ‘anima.’ It is largely because of don Alverto’s influence that I live, write, and practice from a different place today, a deeper place, with an ongoing, rhythmic flow of practice no longer confined to set times of the day.
Today I am less interested in Jung’s theory and technical writings, marvelous as they are in their attempts to bring a natural way into modern psychology. But they are primarily candy for the mind if they are not felt, experienced, and lived. I am more interested in Jung the naturalist of the psyche, and in Jung the nature-mystic, which is reflected in the earthy retreat he built with his own hands, called Bollingen Tower, and which gave real soil and grounding to his life’s work. At Bollingen he felt himself in the midst of his true life. He had no running water or electricity. He chopped his own wood, cooked over open fires, lit oil lamps at night, and attuned himself to the Earth Mother with feminine receptivity and feeling. This passage from his autobiography shows to what degree he had succeeded in attuning to the elements of nature:
At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of seasons. There is nothing…with which I am not linked. [MDR 225]
Jung had, in his own way, recovered and considerably developed the capacity to feel, and sympathetically enter into the essence of things, commune with what don Alverto calls the their “ushai”. Jung lived as well as advocated a natural way of living. He was deeply concerned that modern life had neglected nature and that this was the source of many of the ills he saw in his patients. He felt modern science and technology had brought many good things, but that we had failed to establish a balanced relationship to them. He advised us, in a manner reminiscent of don Alverto’s invitation to deal with modernity by living more simply and intentionally:
“to live in small communities, to work a shorter day and week; to have a plot of land to cultivate so the instincts come back to life; and to make the sparest use of radio and television, news papers, and technological gadgetry. [Sabini 19]
Consider, also, these comments Jung put in a letter to one of his clients, in which the good doctor dispenses a practical and earth-honoring wisdom in words that could almost be those of don Alverto:
Dear N:
I was very pleased to hear that you now have house and land of your own. This is important for the chthonic powers. I hope you will find time to commit your plant counterparts to the Earth and tend their growth, for the Earth always wants children—houses, trees, flowers—to grow out of Her and celebrate the marriage of the human psyche with the Great Mother, the best counter-magic against rootless extraversion!
With regards to you and your dear husband,
Always your friend,
C.G. Jung
[LT II, 320]
Jung’s intent, here, is not to motivate us to repair Nature, but to let Nature repair us and bring us back into balance. Like don Alverto, Jung had a natural view of healing and the work of a healer. He knew the ultimate healer was not the doctor, but Nature herself. Sometimes he spoke of the healer as God or the Self, sometimes he preferred to speak of the Tao who is the ultimate Mother of us all. He claimed that the peoples of the modern industrial countries had lost touch with the Great Mother and advocated one sure way to reclaim Her natural being in us through listening to, and working with our dreams. Through dream work we can reclaim the natural being that has been forgotten, for dreams are an activity of Nature. Jung believed that we had 2 different psychologies in us. The one he considered to be the modern ego, the mind of modern man, and this corresponds to the “Eagle” in don Alverto’s view, as this statement should make crystal clear.
In our time, it’s the intellect that is making darkness, because we’ve let it take too big a place. Consciousness discriminates, judges, analyzes, and emphasizes the contradictions. It’s necessary work up to a point. But analysis kills and synthesis brings to life. We must find out how to get everything back into connection with everything else. [Jung, JS 420]
Don Alverto would say that it is through the development and use of feeling that we can reconnect, and that it is we who have disconnected ourselves by forgetting the way of the Condor---for the heart knows that everything is already connected. It is just that the mind, has forgotten this in our modern civilization. Again we cite Jung, in agreement with don Alverto, that many problems in modern living are generated by this loss of connection with wisdom of Nature:
In the final analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us. [Jung JS 89]
The other person within us is the age-old natural person, who Jung sometimes called the “2 million year old man”. In calling it this, Jung was drawing attention to our natural evolution as a species, one of many on the planet, and that the wisdom of our species is thus the wisdom of the Earth who nurtured us into being. Dreams are natural occurrences that must have value or they wouldn’t be. They have been taking place in other mammals for 140 million years. Dreams serve up the natural instincts and desires we have forgotten. Their striking images and arousing emotions and desires are often shocking or embarrassing to the modern mind because the modern mind has repressed, dissociated, or otherwise cut itself off from feeling and awareness. Dreams relentlessly, remorselessly rub our noses in the “unvarnished truth” and serve to remind us of those poles or sides of ourselves that are part of what we are as natural beings. In reminding us of the side of ourselves that we tend to forget or ignore, they seek our acknowledgement, our consciousness, and want us to give them due place in our lives. Thus we could say that dreams are one of the ways the Earth Mother speaks to us and tries to help us grow, come more into balance, and live fully in tune with Nature. Other ways don Alverto has suggested: through cultivating feeling and using the elements of Nature. Don Alverto, when discussing dreams, speaks of “traveling” to other dimensions, while “leaving” our bodies in sleep, Jung accented a different aspect of the power of dreams. In so far as they are natural expressions of the Great Mother, and the wisdom of the species passed on from generation to generation, and in so far as the Self or the Divine within evokes dreams to help bring us into balance by compensating with our less conscious or undeveloped potentials, Jung advocated working with dreams as a regular practice. This daily practice aims at getting the complimentary message of the dream, the one that adds to or expands our ordinary, everyday thinking or attitude. Yet Jung also acknowledged the other realms, sometimes classifying them as dimensions of the “collective unconscious” a conception similar to Wiracocha,[iii] the “Lake of Wisdom” of the Iachak tradition. In his autobiography, Jung tells us about travels experienced as “out of the body”, meeting with a meditating guru in some stone temple in outer space. Both men invite us to see the power of dreams to expand our perception, knowledge, and way of living by accenting different attributes of the dreaming process.
From the work of C Michael Smith
