Chiron Volume 30, No. 2 Winter 2011 Le Chemin

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Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Foundation of Ontario

ISSN 1918-6142

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Jean Conon Unda on Walking Le Chemin

This September, I walked a 220K section of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in France – Le Chemin, from Le Puy En Velay to Conques. It was a profound journey, an experience of walking into deeper and deeper attunement with the mystery of the natural world and of my own nature. How can I even begin to communicate something like this? As Rumi says, “Language is a tailor shop in which nothing quite fits.”

Experience in depth requires the use of symbolic language, as in poetry or art or spirituality. Jung says a word or image is symbolic “… when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider ‘unconscious aspect’ that is never precisely defined or fully explained. Nor can one hope to define or explain it. As the mind explores the symbol, it is lead to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.” C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, p. 20-21

Even physicists turn to symbolic language when they talk about mystery. Erwin Schrodinger writes: “...this life of yours that you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense the whole; only the whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one simple glance. This … is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula that is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, that is you.”

Symbolic modes of expression allow the “unsayable” to be circumabulated, glimpsed and felt from different angles, hinted at through multiple images and metaphors, all the while honouring the numinosity of the experience. For it is a “secret of life” that we cannot pin down in logos terms - to try to do so would be to reduce, distort, even suffocate it. At most we may sketch it with a light hand, leaving spaces where the gods might enter. With that in mind, I’ve chosen some photos I took along Le Chemin. I invite you to spend some time with these images – perhaps some will speak to you.