“Crossing the Bridge into the Second Half of Life” by Christina Becker
The Initiation into the Second Half of Life
The road that would take us to the top of the mountain in Southern India was very narrow and winding. I felt a mixture of awe and anxiety as the bus driver swerved around the sharp turns avoiding oncoming traffic. This road could not possibly accommodate two directions; miraculously it did. Outside of my bus window, a hillside tea plantation stretched for as far as the eye could see. Women carried large woven baskets which hung from their heads and were harvesting the tea leaves
SUPPORT: The Jungian Path
“Tribute to Carl Jung” by Alan Watts — and Jung’s Lecture (excerpt) ‘The Shadow Self to Religious Life’
I’m sitting late at night in a lonely cottage in the country surrounded by many favorite books which I’ve collected over a number of years. And as I look up at the shelves, I see that there’s a very large space. Occupied by the volumes of one man. Carl Gustav Jung, who left this world not more than a few weeks ago. And I’d like to talk tonight about some of the great things that I feel that Jung has done for me. And also the things which I feel to be his enduring contributions toward the science of psychology of which he was such a great master. I began to read Jung when I first began to study Eastern philosophy in my late adolescence. And I’m eternally grateful to him for what I would call a sort of balancing influence on the development of my thought. As an adolescent, in rebellion against the sterile Christianity, in which I was brought up, I was liable to go absolutely overboard for exotic and foreign ideas. Until I read the extraordinarily wise commentary that he wrote to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the Chinese Taoist text called the “Secret of the Golden Flower.” And it was Jung who helped me to remind myself that I was by, upbringing in by tradition, always a Westerner and I couldn’t escape from my own cultural conditioning.