Findhorn
I spent 5 days at Findhorn Foundation on Cluny Hill for a winter solcetice retreat. It was peaceful, gentle and a much needed space to switch from the busy doing to simply being. This is the room I spent most mornings reading and observing the sky. I found in the library ‘Selected Writings of Jung, Introduced by Anthony Storr’. It felt like my intimate time with Jung, a few hours each morning, to be stimulated, questioned, challenged and humoured by his brilliant mind.
The construction of a collectively suitable persona means a formidable concession to the external world, a genuine self-sacrifice which drives the ego straight into identification with the persona, so that people rally do exist who believe they are whatt they pretend to be. The ‘soullessness’ of such an attitude is, however, only apparent, for under no circumstances will the unconscious tolerate this shifting of the centre of gravity. When we examine such cases critically, we find that the excellence of the mask is compensated by the ‘private life’ going on behind it. The pious Drummond once lamented that ‘bad temper is the vice of the virtuous.’ Whoever builds up too good a persona for himself naturally has to pay for it with irritability. Bismarck had hysterical weeping fits, Wagner indulged in correspondence about the belts of silk dressing-gowns, Nietzsche wrote letters to his ‘dear lama’, Goethe held conversations with Eckermann, etc. But there are subtler things than the banal lapses of heroes. I once made the acquaintance of a very venerable personage - in fact, one might easily call him a saint. I stalked round him for three whole days, but never a mortal failing did I find in him. My feelings of inferiority grew ominous, and I was beginning to think seriously of how I might better myself. Then, on the fourth day, his wife came to consult me… Well, nothing of the sort has ever happened to me since. But this I did learn: that any man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully let all disturbances manifest themselves through his wife without her noticing it, though she pays for her self-sacrifice with a bad neurosis.
