During both of my Jungian/archetypal depth psychology study sojourns in Switzerland I also worked on myself without fear of a generally negative, North American attitude toward the one who takes time to introvert. One needs to get a conscious perspective on what is really going on, inside, in the greater inner personality. One needs a vantage point rooted in the entire Self, the archetype of wholeness and instinct, to understand one's relationship with a relatively unconscious society as we discover there is general cultural malaise 'out there'. Jung says that there is no sickness in the collective unconscious. Objectively, in itself, it cannot be defective so one would think if it appears defective it could only be because of a wrong ego attitude. The individual needs a self-made foundation based on a certain amount of insight, then the whole unconscious constellation changes, and it is at this point that we really begin to see the world in which we live and how the total environment may be affecting our health and well-being, physically and psychologically.  

It took a lot of effort, however, to convince myself of the truth in the wisdom of Confucius 2500 years ago, "great things have no fear of time". One has to work hard for a long time. One has to learn to put aside nagging fears that, somehow, something may be wrong 'in here', before one realizes the individual is caught up in the world, like a fly in a giant spider web. One may feel sick and depressed with physical symptoms and completely lost and helpless as to the cause or meaning. And then as one looks into the shadow the 'Divine spark' of truth ignites and one begins to see the problem is really 'out there', in an unbalanced, collective world that is not whole. And by going against instinct trying to get on the bus for the ride to fit in with the great herd that is like a bunch of goats -- when we are not even meant to be goats at all, but like true-Self tigers -- it makes us unbalanced too. If ignorance about spiritual growth and how we functionally relate to the world limits us to standing around masticating grass, when the cellulose is indigestable rather than eating our proper tiger food, we deserve to become weak and sickly. Prolonged Adaptation Stress Syndrome (PASS) is a violation of one's natural disposition as a result of external influences, i.e., work life. It is a consequence of the falsification of type (in Jung's typology of psychological functions).  

As the ego begins to gather strength with more psychological (including symbolic) understanding and a healthier outlook, one seeks clues as to where to go. The psyche begins to compensate and generally tries to produce a compromise -- namely, to indicate the direction in which there might be some enthusiasm, or where the psychic energy may flow naturally. It is easier to train oneself to work in a direction where one can go more with the flow, like down the river supported by one's instincts. That is not quite so hard as paddling one's canoe upstream against a strong current in opposition to one's nature and flow of energy. Therefore, it is usually advisable to introvert, wait a while and monitor the psyche, to find out where the natural flow of interest and energy lies. And then one tries to find a way to get there, to actually work there.  

At a turning point, in 1987-88, I was in Italy, beginning the study abroad programs for landscape architecture students. Before leaving Switzerland, I had been under considerable pressure to apply to complete the Propadeutical exams in the Training Program on a path to becoming a Jungian analytical psychologist. At the same time, I had been under pressure to have a significant portion of my colon removed by one of Europe's most highly recommended medical specialists. I was uneasy about this. I had been told of people who had similar operations, appearing to some as if the potential to let go in areas of sensuality and relatedness had been frozen in time, leaving a rather cold, stiff, mechanical man, matter-of-fact personality. We've all met him as the 'Tin Man' in the Wizard of Oz. I worried that I might be cut-off from such matters of heart as relatedness to self and other people, nature and appreciating timeless qualities rooted in gut sensation, emotions and deeper feeling.  

I had returned to Zürich for a coloscopy, when I had what would seem like a paranormal experience, as a signal. It happened in the room where I stayed the night before my appointment, in a separate guest/sauna suite accessed from a passage below the barn attached to an old house in Horgenberg, midway down the West side of the lake, belonging to Canadian/Swiss friends. It delayed my arrival by more than an hour at the surgeon's clinic in the main Zürich teaching Hospital complex. It was for the last inspection before a final decision was to be made whether to operate. Four different electronic clocks including 2 of my own, a Swatch and a Braun travel-alarm, were moving back and forth, independently, registering different times on each occasion, when I got up throughout the progress of the night for the usual visits to the bath before a coloscopy. I observed this several times during the night thinking my perceptions were a little strange from the laxative I was given in pill form. But in the morning all clocks remained at varying times. And the alarm on my travel clock did not sound to wake me up. All 4 clocks were delayed, as I discovered after daybreak. It was winter and I should have been on the road earlier for an 8:30 AM appointment. The only time which remained correct was outside, on the electronic clock in my car parked on the far side of the house-barn complex, which I verified over it's radio as I sped away.  

Like several numinous experiences with the unconscious I had at major turning points in my life when danger was at hand, this was an experience of incorruptible, compensatory value. We had been going along for several years with a completely rational medical approach. When I arrived at nearly 10 AM and explained the events which caused my delay, the work was rescheduled during the clinic's lunch hour. The internal medicine specialist discovered my colon (seemingly, my gut level of sensation and emotion) had become so extremely sensitive with pain as they had never observed before in his clinic. It was necessary to put me under general anaesthetic to finish. The entire experience signalled the surgeon, a Dr. Funk, to exercise caution, to wait for some further time and to maintain a 'watching brief', having worked with Jungians previously sent to him. The body symptoms soon diminished, and without medical prescriptions. As both of us quickly concluded, I had begun to change my work environment and lifestyle for the better since I left Zürich and the Jung Institute. It appeared with my Eranos experience and development of the landscape architecture study abroad program I may have shifted to a healthier path which was most true for me.  

As I came to understand, later, I was beginning to discover the unique path toward my own personal myth, down the very long road toward my own Christ or Buddha-like nature in the Self. I had begun to move forward. It was the real and the mythical Journey to become that which one is from the beginning, accessing the DNA of the human psyche, the source patterns originating 'in here'. I was no longer attempting to imitate some Christ-like 'role' impressed from without by society, according to some externally imposed cultural/religious dogmas based on a supposed historical fact, 'out there'. The professional 'worldview' may be regarded in much the same way. That 'role' is just another collective dogma externally imposed. We all have our externalized 'religions', or perhaps a better expression would be cult 'possessions', and for many these days the professional persona is it. That's all there is! We tend to define ourselves in terms of professions or job titles, etc. It gives us something to believe in, to get by, but what if it should be wrong, or if work is suddenly removed by recession, redundancy or retirement. We are suddenly nothing, nobody. Psychological depression ensues. In alchemy this is called the Nigredo, the beginning of The Great Work. I had arrived at another benchmark already well into this creative process, which began at midlife during my teaching years in Canada.  

Creativeness presupposes a great capacity for being genuine and for letting go, for being spontaneous--for if one cannot be spontaneous, one cannot really be creative--and therefore most artists and other creative people have a normal and genuine tendency to playfulness. That is also the great relaxation and means of recovery from an exhausting creative effort.

Marie-Louise von Franz

I had been letting go and widening my mental horizons, rounded out from one-sidedness of your typical, normal citizen, 'landscape architect' practitioner and professor. I was committed to moving forward to become ever more functionally developed, more mature and more conscious. I was on a path, to find the mythic key to my professional, personal and historical existence, carrying me nearer the spiritual source and into greater becoming. In this timelessly universal endeavor it is adherence to the life-long inner growth process which counts, not simply the immediate treatment of a symptom, or a power-head trip to acquire some other material goal or destination in the outer world. Its like being asked the proverbial question, "Now that you've done what your supposed to do, what you should do, what your parents or neighbors would have thought best, what were you actually put here on earth to do?" We may have projected on an opposite and taken on a particular profession, or a marriage partner for example, and then many say: "This is not it, I'm taking this projection back for reprojection." It may turn out to be 'the same' and we have merely acted out something which is internal, which still needs to be addressed which is represented by that role, or other person. What everyone can choose to do when the imperative presents itself is to search for a purpose in life leading to meaning and happiness, and that can only come from within.  

Marriage is an ordeal. It puts 2 people in positions favorable to the psychological growth and maturing process, and love is a projection of something we may see in the other person, out there. It usually mirrors an opposite, something which needs attention in here. It is usually a short-term affair of the emotions, until we have assimilated or transmuted what that was, internally. And then another archetype of psychic energy constellates, and so on... are we going to divorce a partner and remarry again, perhaps 3, 4, 8 or 16 times or more in one lifetime? I don't think so.  

Reducing lectures and seminars attended while in Switzerland with all the mind-spinning that goes on, I began to spend more quiet time in contemplation and had walked or wandered on cross-country skis in the Alps almost daily, also learning Tai Chi, Hatha yoga and other body-psyche centering exercises with fellow students who were trained teachers, or in similar classes for groups at the Institute.  

UETIKON AM SEE -- A SWISS FARM WITH A VIEW

At one point in these studies and in my personal process, I obtained a work permit and driver's licence for operating specialized Swiss farm equipment, along with the larger apartment in an old rental farmhouse with views over the Lake of Zürich and the mountains, and my own vegetable garden. All this was part of a package including part-time paid help for an elderly Swiss farmer couple who could no longer keep up with their traditional outdoor work. They had advertised in the newspapers for 11 years and were unable to get any more people to assist them. It involved dealing with a difficult farmer who had progressed far beyond the grumpiness of 'irritable male syndrome' that is evident in many older men. The depression and aggression in this cynical, angry and frustrated old codger had reached the level of serious disease and had alienated all his relatives and neighbors, save his wife who was dependent on him. The unfortunate man appeared to have been rigidly entrenched for many years with an outworn, overbearing patriarchal standpoint. It was as if his legs and his inner masculine standpoint would no longer support this false ego, as he was inflicted with an affect causing such incredible pain in his legs and back that he often fell into psychotic episodes, with outbursts of anger, 4-5 days after weekly cortizone injections into his legs wore off. I was able to deal with this situation for a year, before I had to admit fallibility. I failed, becoming too distracted by his crazy antics and demands during his explosive temper tantrums.  

At a crucial moment under intensified pressure from this, I failed to notice my dreams were attempting to draw to my attention I might be needing to assist a fellow student by driving to hospital emergency, a medical doctor, who was a very lively, well-liked person and apparently a well-known pediatrician in Brazil, having discovered some rare diseases peculiar to Amazonia. She was studying at the Institute, also belonging to a small group doing private seminars with local analysts on special topics of interest to us. It was just before she went into something like a toxic shock syndrome, which I knew nothing about medically. She had phoned several times in previous days asking for rides to lectures, as I passed nearby in my car, saying she had little energy to walk to the train. When I dropped her off in front of her apartment one Thursday afternoon, she seemed so weak I suggested she see a doctor. She insisted as a doctor herself, she understood what was happening to her, not to worry, she was just a little anemic.  

When I dropped by to see how she was the following afternoon, she said it was a turning point in her life and psychological growth process, that becoming anemic had a purpose in helping her to be more receptive and to settle down into her own training process. She had intended to deal with her medical condition after completing the interviews for the next phase in the Institute's training program and had done so and just received her acceptance by phone that day. She insisted she would would be alright and chose not bother local medical people on a weekend. If necessary, she would see a Swiss doctor on the following Monday. Her 3 Brazilian teenagers (not speaking anything but Portugese) and I looked at each other feeling otherwise, that she might better go with me to hospital emergency immediately. But she was adamant, reminding me again she was a doctor and knew best. She insisted it was not necessary.  

I went home and the next day, Saturday, was under a kind of state of psychological siege, as my instincts reacted to the situation I had encountered the 2 preceeding days, and in conflict with the angry farmer who was telephoning constantly, demanding work of little importance be done immediately, and on a weekend, while complaining about the world in general. He was roaring away in our common language, but in barely understandable Italian, with many words in Swiss-German and an impossible Swiss+Southern Italian accent he had acquired in the post-war years, when dealing with seasonally migrant farm workers before much of his land rights had been sold for urban expansion.  

The farmer's psychotic episode carried through Sunday as well, with frequent calls and demands, where it was like working in an acute psychiatric hospital ward where the patient had the key rather than me. I was not able to react in time to realize the severity of our fellow student's situation, to take my car and go and try to persuade her to let me take her to hospital from her apartment in a nearby town, telephoning her to inquire about her condition and offer assistance again, which she declined. She finally admitted she was really in deep trouble, calling with a much weakened voice early on the Monday morning, asking me if I would get the phone number of the personal doctor of an artist neighbor next door to me, who worked in the psychiatric hospital where students went for case demonstrations. After driving to the student's place immediately and delivering her to the clinic, the doctor, a woman, made a quick examination. She then came out and directed me not to wait for an ambulance, for the woman's older son and me to help her to my car, as she was now too weak to stand, to drive her to the nearby Mannedorf Hospital emergency entrance where staff were waiting.  

After checking her in, I left and returned with an older American student in her sixties who boarded down the hill with a family and then discovered they were long lost Swiss relatives. I suddenly remembered at a meal all together at the house it was revealed she had been an intensive care nurse for many years in former life. Our colleague now in a hospital room bed explained, as she began to cry, she had been given an x-ray and had been told she was in advanced stages of 'white lung' with her lungs filling rapidly and would have to go on a respirator immediately, while they attempted to drain the fluid. She told us she understood the critical diagnosis and as a medical doctor knew her chances for survival on a ventilator were something less than 23%, before she was taken away to the Intensive Care Unit. Students were allowed in to visit and try to communicate with her and help nurses massage her feet to attempt to keep her in the body. After a week there being unconscious on different ventilators, none of which worked well for her, she finally was taken in the region's large 'helicopter hospital' ambulance on respirator where there was a heroic team effort to save her life in the Zürich main teaching hospital. I had terrible feelings of sadness and regret and could not hold back the tears as I watched the enormous red helicopter with the white cross on it lumber over the garden behind my farmhouse apartment where I sat in the grass on the edge of the orchard as it slowly became a tiny dot and disappeared over Zürich. Two of the students, Brazilians in analytical training who had known her for some years and were very close to her, also had tried in vain to persuade her to go to hospital that weekend. They had gone to stay with her children after I had driven her to hospital.  

Like many of the medical staff, our friend also was a middle-aged doctor. And her Zürich intensive care room quickly filled with tubes and machinery as they brought in every antibiotic and resource they could think of to stop what appeared to be an infection. Near week's end they informed we fellow students there was very little hope, but they would operate to see if they could isolate the source. I then went home and began to get dreams connecting clues picked up by my psyche since she had arrived at the Institute 9 months earlier when she had joined our on-going study group, and then while she related to me her life story unconsciously in rapid fashion in a stream of consciousness on the drive to the hospital. Chung, one of her Brazilian friends was with her the morning she died and called me with the news. The phone rang again and it was my training analyst Toni offering empathy with compassion. In the same weeks as this episode Toni Frei, one of the most respected senior international training analysts, who had been only Director of the renouned experimental Zürichberg Klinic for people with acute psychology disorders had been subjected to a takeover by medical people on his board. He had been suffering through the agonizing decision to resign from the successful clinic he had founded and developed with international recognition, and to expand his private analytical praxis with increased involvement in the Jung Institut's training colloquia and on its propadeutical and diploma examination committees. The ordeal aged him visibly.  

When she died our student colleague had been nearly 3 weeks on respirators in care of the most sophisticated treatment and medical teams available in Switzerland. They could keep her alive no longer. When she first arrived in Zürich she had told several of us she had been practising as an analyst for some years in Brazil under supervision of a respected and accredited older Jungian training analyst in a case colloquium. She had been refused admission to Brazil's only training program because she had done her first personal analysis with a blacklisted male analyst. She actually had told us she wanted to get a head-start on her 'next life' by coming to Zürich, and it was a last-ditched attempt to deal with the patriarchy, the powers running the world by getting professional recognition for successful work she had been doing with her clients. Funding was very tight, but she had managed to secure additional support from the Brazilian Government to see her through the Zürich-Küsnacht program. I made a slow, long drive alone to the morgue - crematorium on the far side of the city to pay my last respects and took some very long walks in woodlands and mountains and alongside remote lakes. I consulted Ruth Ammann, a teaching analyst and sandplay therapist who was also a Swiss ETH educated practising architect. I agreed to do a series of sandtrays as a personal experiment to see if I could determine what my self might reveal on my own personal and professional direction. And I also booked an appointment with Jung's daughter the astrologist to prepare for a reading of my chart, to try to gain further clues as to what might be constellated regarding my future path.  

I had terrible feelings of guilt, that I had been unable to see or understand my dreams had been warning of a potentially dangerous situation which then developed so quickly. Prior to this episode, our paths had not crossed as our friend and several others in our English-speaking group of foreigners were busy with interviews for advancement to the next stage in the Küsnacht program. I had not talked to her in more than 2 months, although she had been in close communication with several others going through the interviews and the 2 Brazilians. It looked to others who were angry about her process, that she had been confronted head-on with too many personal issues in the interview process and appeared to have become rather complexed, knocked into a kind of 'abaissment de niveau mentale', which was von Franz' interpretation after her dreams had been taken to her by the student's new analyst who had only seen her several times. Von Franz had suggested from her dreams it did not appear our friend was actually meant to die from the experience. I concluded this unfortunate woman had become rather too unconsciously 'in the head'. She was complexed, distorted or blocked in one or the other of the psychological functions (sensation, feeling, thinking and intuition) and was completely neglecting her body and other instinctive functions and, furthermore, it appeared to friends she had been unconsciously procrastinating, letting something like a common female infection go untreated for months. And it suddenly took an irretrievable turn for the worse.  

The person in our group who had been closest to this Brazilian student who had been a physician also had a child in Switzerland with her, new about the interview process and was a very earthy woman of the arts with a personality with a lot of empathy and warmth. She was a musician, also a potter who worked with clay, having set up a wheel and a kiln in her apartment so she could continue this work which she found to be very grounding. She had begun teaching other women in the program to work with earth materials with their hands. Like me she was also turning out for anything organized, locally, for bodywork promoting a balance with headwork and a centering in the psyche, such as hatha yoga, Tai Chi, etc. She had been making little turtles and putting a glaze on them around this time and gave one of them to me along with a beautiful crystal from a collection she had. This instinctive gesture in a moment of warmth and sharing gave me something to contemplate over time. She organized a memorial service which was attended by students and many analysts in the Sala Terena of the Institute. She then confronted one of the interviewers, privately. She too had been accepted into the next phase of the program, but was immediately thrown out and returned to America, her only alternative being an even more academic program. She eventually did a Phd in Jungian psychology at the Pacifica Institute, got cancer in the process, but survived the experience and became a Jungian 'therapist', although she could not call herself officially a Jungian Analyst. She later wrote a book about her story.  

It was not until recovering from the shock of this unfortunate event, months later, that I was able to see, with hindsight, how my dreams were beginning to signal something. A situation was evolving, revealing our Brazilian colleague was not very grounded in her 5 senses, or in the body, and there was some potential problem brewing. I suppose my psyche picked up various clues, listening to her talking half-consciously as many people do on such occasions, as a group of students would meet in a cafe while waiting for the train, or while walking to classes, where she described several dreams in the course of conversations with several in our intensive study group. She also took nearly 5 months after her arrival in Switzerland to find a male training analyst she felt she could trust. I had become concerned and, instinctively, I brought her and several others into an ongoing class for yoga and other body movement exercises, with meditation, in the Kellershal in the basement of the Institute. This ongoing class, which was cancelled, abruptly, several years later, had been very grounding and relaxing for people in such a heavy depth psychology lecture/seminar environment, particularly for those who had various body symptoms. After this unfortunate sad event, which was very upsetting to me and everyone in the entire student and analyst group in Zürich, and to the local Brazilian community, I had to admit to what I felt was a personal failure trying to get through to someone in a time of need. Moreover, I just could not deal with the sick farmer any longer.  

I asked myself, "What can I learn from all this?" I came to heal myself, but returning to a university campus to teach and do research in the academic way of a 'head trip' that was unacceptable to my instincts and the body would be courting with disaster, and this was confirmed from time to time in my dreams over the years. My training analyst, one of the most senior in the profession, was echoing what my whole Self seemed to be saying, as we monitored the dreams. Using the Institute and my own process was helpful in evolving a healthier life and professional approach more true to myself, more centered in feeling. Becoming an analytical psychologist didn't seem my individual way forward either. The training program was too 'academic', too much in the intellect for one who was not needing to be even more in the head.  

What happened was that while all this was going on during my first sojourn in Zürich, attending lectures and seminars and working with my dream process and discussing various things with people in all stages of the program, at the Küsnacht Jung Institute during the mid-1980's, my dreams continued with a subterranean theme, whereby in the unconscious, I completed the Institute's propadeutical exams, supervised casework and the diploma exams... with one exception, the thesis requirement.  

Few among the modern Jungians are aware the original analysts like San Francisco's Joseph Wheelwright (autobiography: Saint George and the Dandelion) worked with Jung on their own shadow and inner growth process until, one day, it was obvious they had 'become', from within, and were ready to take clients either under a supervised phase, or to work on their own with preference to the Law of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, 'the doctrine of justification by works'. This was in a leather bound codex, one of 52 Coptic translations made about 1,500 years ago of still more ancient manuscripts. The Gospel of Thomas may include some traditions even older than the gospels of the New Testament, according recently to Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University (see The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, also excerpted in Secrets of the Code, edited by Dan Burstein). They were discovered hidden in a jar in a cave at Nag Hammadi, in upper Egypt. The Gospel of Judas Thomas was bound into the same volume as the Gospel of Philip. In the Gospel of Thomas and other passages in the Nag Hammadi codices, Quispel found attributed to Jesus acts and secret sayings as cryptic and compelling as Zen koans, entirely different from those in the new Testament, e.g., the "living Jesus" said:  

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

This passage is part of the secret Gospel of Thomas translated and first published by Professor Gilles Quispel (and his collaborators), distinguished historian of religion at the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Quispel was a frequent lecturer at the Zürich CG Jung-Institut, whose lecture series this author attended in the period 1984-86. Earlier he had persuaded the Jung Foundation of Zürich to buy the codex containing the Gospel of Thomas after it had been smuggled out of Egypt and offered for sale in America.  

There were other people, including some well known individuals with inquiring minds, like Canadian author and Professor Robertson Davies, and the American philanthropist Paul Mellon and his wife -- who set up the Bollingen Press Foundation in the USA when they had to return at the outbreak of World War II -- who had gone to Switzerland and analyzed with Jung, as the Mellons did, or with others. These were very 'learned' people. They sought to live more in the service of their own process, the philosophical journey to the Self, in the spiritus intus alit (the spirit that nourishes eternally), seeking 'veritas', or truth, which happens to be the Latin motto of my alma mater (meaning kindly nourishing mother), Harvard University:  

'VERITAS'... in the Womb of Mother Harvard...
and then to the provinces

The typical 14 or more (unofficial) hours per day of work in the design studio for many of my classmates in the Harvard Graduate School of Design in those days had been in a corner of the basement of Robinson Hall. The studio surrounded a street-found oriental carpet, with a bookshelf, couch, easy chair and a refrigerator on it. The building was in the NE corner of Harvard Yard, across Quincy Street from the Fogg Museum. We had jokingly referred to this little place for mastering our 'analytical' thinking functions as being in the womb of 'Mother Harvard'. My classmates used to tease me in a somewhat complementary manner, I suppose, by saying I would be the one who would remain at the GSD forever, always being so questioning of conventional wisdom and wanting to find better truths for 'design criteria', etc., incidentally, attracting substantial outside funding for research. When the Grand Tour year in Europe on the Charles Eliot Travelling Fellowship finished I got a phone call from Victor Chanasyk, the founder of the University of Guelph's School of Landscape Architecture, requesting I return there, this time to teach. The call came just before I left IUCN headquarters in Switzerland, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau had become the popular Prime Minister who was placing Canada on the world map. And that was it, I was out of Mother Harvard's womb on a wave of patriotism.  

Unfortunately, I had completely forgotten what Southern Ontario born Professor J.K. Galbraith had said, in his Harvard 'economics' lectures, his books and in the press, about the wisdom gained from his own 'conservative Canadian experience', as a creative individual at the Ontario Agricultural College. It had been one of several federated colleges which became a part of the new University of Guelph, in 1964-65, when I was in Toronto working on the consultants' team as site planner for the the Master Plan for University expansion. If he had stayed at the Guelph College, Galbraith felt he would have been stifled, remaining forever a local Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics never to realize his full potential in work and life and the international recognition he later received.  

My relationship with the University, the School of Landscape Architecture and Director Victor Chanasyk (deceased, 8 February 2006) was very friendly and most productive, creatively. The 2 of us were friends and relished debating various issues over the years. All the Faculty had great energy in the developing years and quickly built the School into a leading North American program in Landscape Architecture, whereupon all things being cyclical, it from time to time suffered the tendency to rest on laurels. This Faculty - program success story also was assisted by very energetic and intelligent students, who in early 1970's came up with the idea for a North American annual student conference for the 50 or so university programs in Landscape Architecture at the time. (A New York Times article dated 17 June, 2004 -- "From the Ivory Tower, Lessons in the Dirt" -- reports the number of landscape architecture departments in the U.S.A. swelled from 57 in 1986, to 76 currently. With 5 in Canada, that's a North American total of 81, not to mention the many technical college programs in 'landscape design'.) The Guelph students aptly called their conference the L.A. BASH, also honoring French Canada and bilingualism. The roster of guest speakers has been inspiring over the years, as LABASH quickly became an annual institution in its own right, meeting on different campuses. LABASH returned home to Guelph several times over the decades. The author gave a slide talk on the present work at the 2003 LABASH at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Intersting, the 2004 LABASH was held at the University Maryland with the professed theme, supposedly: 'Be the Change', but in profession and in education it seems to be always 'business as usual'.  

Following Victor Chanasyk's tenure as Director at Guelph, my inquiring mind and creativity soon became oppressed to the point where I felt, slowly, I was being suffocated. This, I may add, often happens in particular to creative people around mid-life while interacting with their work environments. In the longer run the effect should be positive if read correctly at the time, nudging one forward in life and psychological growth. At the time, in the conservativeness of chill, long winter skies, with a prevailing intellectual ethos handed down from a colder, 'Northern', Anglo Saxon Protestant mentality that had been transplanted in Southern Ontario (according to JK Galbraith), intuition, warmth and an openess to basic truths of a psychological and ecopsychological nature and the academic freedom to share them was blocked, no matter how well one might try, thoughtfully, with friendly good humor, relatedness and above all with compassion. It's simply too easy for the male persona always to escape into externals from any too 'soft' and therefore fearful, consciously intimate scene.  

My efforts up and down the faculty office corridor and in the faculty lounge were simply ignored, with an icy silence or a change of subject. There was little philosophical debate, or discussion of fundamental principles, a lot of superficial discussion of things like R-V's and materialism, or accreditation of the Ontario University of Guelph's program by the Washinton D.C. based American Society of Landscape Architects increasing the BLA program from 4 years, to a 5-year curriculum. It may be viewed as an attempt to make up for the non-existant, aesthetic-philosophical, or so-called 'human factors criteria', better described as an in-depth foundational framework or knowledge base for the profession rooted in biological habitat theory, and in other fundamentals in archetypal and depth psychologies, all grounded in universals in step with the latest acknowledged hypotheses underlying the scientific and philosophical view of the world.  

The new vision required students to 'spend' a fifth year in a BLA program with an increased list of outside, non-LA courses, and an internship, or a study abroad semester alternative with the latter evolving into a 'get thee away to another university' semester. A rather unconscious wish one would surmise, as if to make up for a theoretical framework in human behavior that was incomplete 'in house'. And there was no discussion of Canadian sovereignty, or of evolving the professional education in Canada to meet distinctly Canadian needs, with a more introspective and therefore deeper intrinsic value based population than its more extroverted neighbor to the South. Canada would be more open to integrating the feminine principle or Yin aspects in education with more Canadians on faculty, particularly influenced by the very intelligent, arts supporting Pierre Trudeau as Prime Minister. And the Canadian academic establishment was inspired by such giants as Marshal MacLuen and others who had been leaders in the arts including professed Jungians Robertson Davies and Northrop Frye. Enlightenment on these and other matters at School policy discussions by Faculty-Student Council was viewed by some with alarm, and almost a disdain for more Canadian or in-depth content. It seemed at the time as if there was an unconscious attempt to evolve landscape architecture education into a pseudo-science based technology, ignoring the integration of the arts and sciences reflected in the works of American founder Frederick Law Olmsted a century before. An integration also waas reflected in the original educational programs at Harvard and at Michigan State University which were then followed by other institutions.  

To survive, creatively, by moving forward in life and work, one necessarily takes matters into one's own hands and resolves to go ahead on one's own. That is if one does not want to be continually oppressed into stagnation in a depressive state of psychological putrefaction, or even physical illness. An atmosphere of hostility developed among the faculty in which there were others with similar sensibilities. Several key faculty simply got fed up and left. Students got caught up in this attitudinal problem as well. And many remarked they had no choice but to put up with it, as it was only for 5 years (3 for first professional degree MLA students), asking how I could go on, staying there year after year. And in such a mechanistic atmosphere hostile to peoples' feelings and meaningful life, to putting the questions of the timeless way of building, archetypal pattern languages, spirit, creativity, the feminine, the Great Mother Earth mythology, the 'Gaia principle', quality, value and values in designed environments smack bang in the middle of the table for discussion.  

One has to face politics and the reality of the psychological and biological crisis of soul, living in a world that came to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches the existentialist world view... i.e., in a man-made environment becoming increasingly mechanistic, atomised, soulless, and self-destructive... a crisis of modern man which is essentially a one-sided masculine problem. Over the years the atmosphere, which may be found just about everywhere one would add, caused me no end of stress, personally.  

As professionals we are all caught up in a time and culture that is part of a stupendous Western evolutionary project. It is but a necessary and noble component of a great dialectic, struggling to bring forth something new in human history. Each perspective, whether it be labeled as masculine or feminine, yang or yin, classicism or romanticism, etc., needs to be affirmed and transcended, recognized as part of a larger whole with each polarity requiring the other for its fulfillment. A synthesis is required leading to something beyond itself. It lies beyond reason, in a new reality for any given field and for every individual, who requires some sort of initiation, either vicariously, as is more often the situation, perhaps associated with an illness, or rarely by personal choice. It is a creative act toward a larger reality that, unfortunately, cannot be grasped by intellect or before it arrives. One has to have faith in the self and one's own developmental process. One has to say 'Yea' to nature's plan and the great adventure in life.  

In Guelph, my collaboration and personal relationships with the College of Agriculture and other colleges and departments and non-LA faculty was very positive, productive and encouraging and my relationship with the LA students was friendly, good humored and mutually inspiring for the most part. Studio projects were relevant, often real, taking us into communities for joint projects with local authorities, or a lot of fun, for example while getting students to come forward with eco-humanistic principles and more deeply felt values while designing a house-garden villa on a country property as a reflection of everything which correponds with one's most whole, most true self. At the College level my insight and creativity was recognized and given freer reign, however. I was given a major role on a committee which set the overall 'Mission for the College of Agriculture for the 1980's'. I also began to shift more of my energy off-campus, to legitimate, required 'community service' work which was at Provincial and Federal levels, governmentally, and with conservation NGO's.  

I became a Board Member of The Conservation Council of Ontario, debating government policy and coordinating communication and efforts of some 34 non-governmental organisations with widely varying conservation interests. There were frequent invitations to make policy presentations to Government committees and we also made many unsolicited interventions. I also chaired a standing Parks/Reserves Committee, which reviewed and commented on Federal and Provincial policies and park management plans. The CCO President, George Cadbury descendent of the English Cadbury (chocolate) family took me under his wing and got me involved as a Private Member of the CCO Executive so I could speak for myself, independent from the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects I had represented earlier in the Council Membership together with Michael Hough. Cadbury had retired in Canada after serving as the European Director for Reconstruction for the entire post-World War II international effort. I became very active in the Conservation Council over the years with this encouragement and got other faculty from around the university involved in the work of the organization on occasion. In those days the CCO was frequently consulted from the highest levels in government. I made a number of interventions to the Premier and a Cabinet Secretariat consisting of Ministers and Deputy Ministers concerned with the Province's natural and cultural resource base together with Mr. Cadbury, well known planning consultant Max Bacon, pioneer of the Bruce Trail Association Ray Loewes and several others.  

My lifelong passion for integrative and interdisciplinary research, and major creative task identified while at Harvard, of trying to put qualities of warmth and timeless, meaningful character into design process and built environment simply went underground. It was limited to some innovative teaching in courses which I revamped substantially each year, building on experimentation and what I learned from the previous years, and with one-on-one work with graduate students, in a creativity-discovery and mind-broadening, personality-unfolding, mentoring process, which communicated along the faculty corridor only in a very limited way. It happened on infrequent thesis or integrative project committee work that was sometimes received in a heavy-handed, put-down fashion by some of the LA faculty, or often in the form of back-stabbing. My academic C.V. expanded to 17 pages, nontheless, being maintained in University format by the Director's Secretary. As communication on my work effectively was shut down, I was criticized constantly for not publishing enough. It happened in a visciously calculated cycle, peaking after annual tenure and promotion meetings, where it was more than insinuated that with a Harvard background it was my obligation to publish quantities of statistically verified research to make up for what the University considered a weak funded research and especially publication record for the entire Landscape Architecture faculty during the 1970's and early 80's.  

Education of Intuition and Feeling for Designers/Design

As the faculty person responsible for the School's guest lecturer program, in 1984, at the request of the students on the committee I scheduled a public lecture I had given previously at Harvard in 1982, and at the University of Toronto in 1983. It was 'The Education of Intuition and Feeling for Design'. This was read (it was almost a condensed, introductory course) with humorous asides, using many slides including cartoons and one-liners from highly respected authorities, from Ancient times to the present, to lighten material rooted in philosophy and depth psychology which people with no background might fear as an unknown. The large lecture hall was filled to overcapacity with our students and people from other disciplines and the outside community. All of the LA faculty had been invited and one showed up. It was of course, Victor Chanasyk, who also participated in the lively and lengthy discussion that followed. Victor had a well-developed introspective side and an understanding on matters more of meditative, contemplative and spiritual concern unknown to many students and the profession.  

I used several short films to illustrate how creative process connects with psychological developmental and maturing processes. To bring the research environmental support context to consciousness -- how difficult it is to dare to question the 'status quo', how society typically treats people doing fundamentally creative work -- in this lecture I showed a Canadian National Film Board feature: Bambi Meets Godzilla. It's a very short, animated film, taking less than several minutes without words (and without any explanation on my part) to illustrate the work of a malingering dark, if relatively unselfconscious, Neanderthal-like mentality. A little deer, a fawn appears. It leaps into a ray of sunlight in a clearing in the woods. It has blinking, soft-focussed, compassionate eyes with long lashes as it pauses to look out into the eyes of the audience. Its newly born little legs are in a spread position as if to lend support to a just born, but well-placed standpoint, involving hope, academic freedom, ideas and what the mercurial and creative fecundity and rhythms of growth and rebirth the adult stag and the deer stand for: wisdom. Symbolically, both the stag and deer embrace the active masculine and receptive feminine principles in the conducting of souls. As the little fawn stands there looking in a friendly way from the projection screen toward the audience a giant dinosaur-like foot suddenly smashes down from directly above to obliterate into a cloud of dust this dear little earthly creature of creativity and fragile new beginnings. Extinction... murdered!  

There is a rich mythological tradition full of such tales about conventional wisdom, and how society unconsciously reacts to block new truths and the mercurial aspects of creativity. Perhaps in the near future we may come to see there is an aspect of this archetype behind the human rights abuses of so-called 'religious' extremist groups and the horrible terrorism attacks of September 11, 2001. When we look at abusive methods of a few American and British military toward prisoners in Iraq that have been broadcast around the world we are really seeing two sides of the same coin. And it comes again in publishing forbidden cartoon likenesses of the Prophet Mohammed. Christian and Islamic societies have misoginist tendencies which get projected on each other.  

From this 'opposites' viewpoint, we might well look into our own collective dark shadow, to see what it is that, possibly, may be similar in our North American 'subconscious' (according to the intellect-power psychology of Alfred Adler and reductionist psychology of Sigmund Freud), and therefore attracted such atrocious acts against buildings occupied by thousands of people. They were built 'taller' than cathedrals of the past, as if giant file cabinets for efficiency of business and anonymity, with external appearance to reflect a 'light' that may not be too spiritually illuminating. Such buildings and often their surrounding landscapes have become powerful visions of a fast-track, intellect-without-spirit, coldly calculative mentality and global economic and cultural powers which do little for the common soul on the street and have-not regions of the world. We may care to re-evaluate this celebration of bigness, quantity and confusion with such huge, secular erections, and the anxieties and the personal and cultural alienation and poverty in remote and disavantaged regions that are increased by globalism incorporated in such monumental, symbolic architecture... realizing all that glitters is not gold.  

As if to make matters worse for me, my course outlines for 'History of Cultural Form' and 'Design Studio' (including a House Symbol of the Self Project) were sent up the line in the university where they were not discredited at all as may have been calculated. They actually reached the President's office. They were placed on a special President's Honor Roll created for such examples of sought after multi- and/or interdisplinary offerings to be encouraged throughout the university and advertised as special 'creme courses' in the outside community. Notoriety was failing me again. My 'History of Cultural Form' lecture courses began to attract older 'mature students' with inquiring minds from the greater drive-in service region. There was some faculty recapitulation when they saw more University dollars might be allocated on the basis of increased numbers attending.  

Envy can be a wicked thing and I just kept falling into situations which then catapulted me onto a stage which I never anticipated, exposing normal neurotic tendencies in some individuals, a minor psychological crisis due to a state of disunity with oneself. Neurosis is a mild dissociation of the personality due to the activation of complexes with emotional reactions like a sudden abaissment in consciousness after being 'hit' with new information when an ego possessed by intellect thinks it knows all there is to know about something. It reveals an incompatability of character, with too great a split between the thinking and the feeling function. Yet it has a purposeful end in the longer term, as it presents an opportunity to become more conscious of who we really are, as opposed to an adapted persona like a professional role, or some other aspect of personality we merely 'think' is our totality, or that we should be like. By working through our conflict, fear and anxiety, and any anger, depression or guilt associated, we become aware of our limitations. We then may discover our true strengths, our more gifted potentialities and more of our balanced whole self. According to Jung, it is simply a way for a self-regulating psychic system to restore a balance between functions. It is similar to the role of dreams, but more forceful and drastic. Establishing a connection between consciousness and the unconscious would be the overall aim resulting in a renewed progression of energy in life. It is at the center of the notion of renaissance meaning to be reborn with a wider, or more differentiated, conscious view of oneself in participation with the world with the opposites in play.  

My little UNESCO - published and IUCN - worldwide distributed National Park planning handbook, Planning for Man and Nature in National Parks: Reconciling perpetuation and use, written in Switzerland with the help of a grant from The Conservation Foundation in Washington, got me invited as a member of the Canadian Government delegation to 2 interrelated, major, international conservation conferences. They were back-to-back at Banff in Canada, and at Jackson Hole in Grand Teton National Park USA over a 2-week period during my early teaching years at Guelph. The first conference was the General Assembly of the IUCN - International Union for Conservation of Nature (today's World Conservation Union) an NGO with membership throughout the world which met every 5 years. The other was the Second World Conference on National Parks and I was invited by Parks Canada as a member of the Canadian delegation.  

Taking an active vocal part in the sessions and at various informal meetings at these important international, invitational conferences got me noticed in the Canadian conservation network. A very prominent, in her own right, and tireless, Canadian and international conservation supporter, married and in partnership with a prominent Canadian multinational businessman, with factories in many countries and stores in many cities worldwide, several times a year after University of Guelph Board of Governors meetings, began to park her Maserati-Citroen leaving the engine running in a no-parking zone on the street in front of the Landscape Architecture Building. Quietly, but not unnoticed, she would arrive at the end of the faculty corridor and appear in my office to plan conservation strategy and meetings. Being unique, or perhaps one of several in a country with no import distribution or dealer network, this luxury automobile was not likely to be stolen, but it was highly visible to all.  

Mrs. Bata had me serve as Treasurer, then President of the Canadian Committee for the IUCN (then viewed more a research arm substantially funded by and sharing Swiss headquarters with the World Wildlife Fund for Nature), for organizing and chairing meetings, communicating and coordinating the work of scientists across the country participating in IUCN-sponsored 'NGO' projects or intergovernmental conservation efforts. The meetings were held in the Bata International Centre in Toronto and our Executive group enjoyed the special priviledge of holding our regular meetings in Mr. Bata's high-tech executive boardroom while the larger group meetings were held in their meeting hall with excellent food laid on. The boardroom was an electronic marvel with moving panels like a high security Pentagon situation room which could be focussed at the push of a button on a particular time zone, manufacturing or sales region and facilities anywhere in the world. In appreciation for my efforts I was sent to take special management courses of my choosing -- social-environment impact assessment for large resource development projects -- at the Banff Centre in Canada's Banff National Park. This was courtesy of an ear-marked donation to WWF-Canada.  

These events made academic worklife more bearable as my contributions were appreciated and recognized outside the University. Locally, they were like a fly in the eye for some of our faculty and certainly did not help my situation. Neither did my lending a hand to my brother-in-law and close friend, the Associate Executive Director of the Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens NY, on one occasion, with a weekend fund-raiser for social services programs. My contribution primarily was moral support, and in coping with pedestrian circulation and crowd control, faced with an instant overwhelming success during the Great Irish Street Fair, which attracted a New York weekend crowd of around a million people.  

I spent many delightful vacations at a heavily fortified refuge from academia, an Italian sanctuary, with my sister's family near the mountain headwaters of the Po river in the larger region of Piemonte. I always helped with the enormous amount of work needed to maintain and eventually with strategy discussions to give public access to a medieval castle rebuilt at the beginning of the 15C, later modified in 1860. Castello della Manta, near Saluzzo, is particularly known for its many exquisite and remarkably well-preserved frescoes. I could never find colleagues to share my enthusiasm for this incredible place, to discuss the significance of fresco motifs which had apparent connections with recurring creative themes in the history of architecture and urban design, and gardens especially. The castle's baronial hall is surrounded by frescoes, which on close inspection were found to be based on alchemical and mythical compensatory themes: for gardens of the mind/psyche. These 'inner landscape' motifs connect with other works prevalent at the time, and have influenced for centuries 3-dimensional architecture and gardens in the 'outer landscape'. This baronial chamber fresco sequence is in a castle (where there are other rooms painted later on) with themes which appear to be part of a larger cycle mirroring creative process going on in the collective psyche, leading up to the beginning of the Renaissance. It was done in 1420 and has been attributed to an unknown 'Maestro della Manta'.  

The Manta Frescoes in the International Gothic style are part of a subterranean train of thought stemming from the Alchemy of the Ancients and the late Middle Ages, which carries over into the Italian garden villas of the Renaissance, with important motifs which seek not necessarily to inform outsiders. Rather, they provide subtle and not so subtle hints, valued as 'environmental cues' for initiates in philosophy on the way forward in their quest. One of the aims in alchemy was to produce a universal, 'imaginal' medicine for disease with an added enhancement effect, visible to the initiate, in constellating archetypes of wholeness in the human growth and wellness process, for example, in balancing the various faculties of mind (including the psychological functions Jung later defined), thus nurturing the unfolding of greater personality and creativity.  

The environmental cues may serve to inform the lives of all people experiencing such places embued with certain qualities and, at the very least, give weight to a language of archetypal patterns to look for in evaluating the psychic health and balance provided in contemporary environments. Basically, the spaces we inhabit must be places -- with soul, in order for us to be healthy in them. It gives us a better qualitative framework of understanding to attack and prevent such problems as 'Sick Building/Environment Syndrome', with many symptoms which baffle our imagination as to how to get a handle on what remains an enigma for us today.  

Alchemy was a non-ecclesiastical philosophy, notwithstanding the fact that alchemists unconsciously projected, and many did hope to synthesize base metals into precious silver and gold. Until Carl Jung came along, alchemy was mostly seen as 'erroneous pre-chemistry' in the history of science. Alchemists mainly were striving to extend the spiritual realm of 'light' by pushing back what we might see as materialism, what they felt to be the heavy and dark world of matter. Alchemy resembles some of the diverse sects of early Christian Gnosticism. It may be likened to sport and the Olympics, where athletes often have to work hard and discipline themselves for years, suffer defeats, and climb up through the ranks until they reach the bronze the silver and the gold... with visible character accomplishments in the unfolding of greater personality. When we speak of the 'great ones' transforming silver into gold we are unconsciously recognizing a process with a bewildering proliferation of symbolic and allegorical images. It often involves exposing oneself to a kind of 'carnivale', to undergo an 'Odyssey' in life of epic proportions. It seems the whole world conspires to prevent anyone leaving closed ranks and the conventional wisdom held by established societies, by succeeding creatively and on the spiritual plane.  

Awe is what moves us.
As you proceed through life, follow your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off.

Joseph Campbell

The Manta frescoes depict 18 historical heroes and heroines, life-size in contemporary costume, in groupings of 2 and 7 males next to 7 and 2 females, respectively. There is an implicate order which is immediately recognizeable to those who work with dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious and/or symbols, including the Rosicrucians and Freemasonry. There is a crucifixion scene and an allegorical cycle of the Fountain of Eternal Youth. There also is repetition of an eagle theme which appears to involve a symbolic transformation projected in the form of the bird which has been thought locally depicted as the preregrine falcon. It is repeated, thus connecting the baronial chamber sequence with frescoes in 2 other rooms not all done at the same period in time, but complementary to the prevailing theme in the castle, nevertheless, as a larger narrative was set up with introduction of the opposites which are then worked on, in an integrative 'opus' similar to a fairy tale.  

The eagle is the incarnation principle of the deity. In Classical times it was the highest god, Zeus. And in the first fresco in a 3-room sequence, the noble bird portrays the downcoming of the god into the field of time. He literally falls down from the heights, on his back, descending into the world of the pairs of opposites, like good and evil, yin and yang, and etc. He is looking down at the world intertwined by a laurel leaf with 7 leaflets. Laurel is an emblem of victory and distinction and also suggests peaceful and sensitive conversation with courtly manners. And 7 also is the number of 'self realization' described by popular sociologist Abraham Maslow who had worked with C.G. Jung, or 'individuation', which is Jung's original term for the psychological maturation process.  

So, what does the eagle really represent here? Well, we look above his head and we see 2 things. A golden crown with 5 points on top which is the number of the 5 senses and life's essence (heraldic systems notwithstanding). But closer inspection reveals only 3 of the points on the crown are surmounted by golden balls indicating actual self-achievements in the field of time. It would suggest there may be some homework imminent for this bird who seems to have a very youthful countenance. Above this scene is a banner which encloses the bird's head space in the shape of the Greek figure omega, the end or aim (as in alpha and omega -- beginning and 'end', which is also the purpose). What may follow elsewhere in this castle? The banner turns itself into an acanthus leaf at both 'ends' representing duality and the opposites. In the center of this omega band is written in old German "wand gott wild". It translates as 'what god wills' and/or 'what a wild god' more in archaic German. And so one can see as in all symbolism there are 2 sides, 2 aspects to be considered.  

Now, this inner self represented by the eagle, which is the incarnation in you of aspects of the highest god that you have realized at a particular point in time, is really Grail stuff. The Grail is that which is attained and realized by people who live their own lives. It is brought from 'in here' by the neutral angels. The Self is our potential, inner-human nature personified 'out there' as God. The inner Self intends the Grail as spiritual life evolving like the bouquet or essence out of nature. The Grail symbolism is authentic life lived as a result of its own organic impulse from one's inner center, one's true being, while leaning toward the 'light', or intuition which actually appears in the castle in the power of 'word' in a stencilled 'leitmotif' in the other 2 frescoed rooms in part contemporary, elsewhere not, but complementary to the frescoes which have been described. The word is "leit", again in Modern/Old German with the dual meaning also, 'a lead' and/or toward the 'light'. The inner Self is the godhead of intuitive light incarnate within us. If love is god and god is light, then light is also love... also, very importantly, for the love of wisdom... but in terms of more refined feeling and values, and this is the end or autonomous, teleological aim of one's Grail quest. Following the light of the inner Self with intuition and feeling thus brings us to compassion, which includes sympathy and empathy and thus meaning able to function with feeling and relatedness. Also, when we are animated - enlivened and illuminated with intuition and feeling, we emit a kind of radiating 'warmth' which comes from our inner nature. The warmth is for oneself, and other people, and all nature's nature including the anima mundi, or soul of the world. Environments organically charged with mythemes and embued in the timeless way with character qualities from archetypal patterns appeal to the human soul. They are simply inspiring however conscious we may be of detail.  

...relationship to the self is at once relationship to our fellow man, and no one can be related to the latter until he is related to himself.

Carl Gustav Jung

The Manta frescoes are based on illuminated manuscripts preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. There is some material also on file in the Morgan Library collection in New York. The main works surround a large Baronial Chamber for jurisprudence and form one of the more interesting fresco cycles of this period, widely considered to be secular. However, when viewed today from the broader perspectives of archetypal psychology and symbolism, we may see what appear on the surface to be unconnected themes as an interrelated network, undoubtedly spiritual and therefore religious at a much deeper level, with an implicate, sequential order in evidence with reference to an initiation process not of the literal, outer world as depicted, but on the figurative level of psychological growth processes common to the inner and imaginal world of the human psyche, as evidenced metaphorically in different mythologies from around the world.  

The Frescoes and the process they allude to serve higher development in terms of wider consciousness and conscience, embracing moral and ethical purposes where aspects of gods and goddesses are bundled together within a higher Self contained in each individual human being. The Self may unfold, gradually, into individual consciousness in an individuation process involving initiation and psychological growth in which maturity and aspects of personality evolve, including self-control -- the Law and Order of the Universe -- as perceived through receptivity to the matrilineal or female principle and the individual's inner conscience, ethics and morality one discovers for protection against wayward impulses. It may be seen as complementary, but it is each individual's inborn, originating source for his/her own and external law and order, or such external authority as the person's father or anyone who seeks to impose conventional morality, standard religious principles, etc. However, such external authority that has been imposed in ways which are too dogmatically patriarchal may instill complexes with inhibitions overriding inner authority, where the conscious mind may go too far and may be controlling or hindering the rest of the personality and a balancing of the various instincts. One then is always on the edge of being pulled by a wayward impulse into an enantrodromia, a flip-flop in behavior, thus initiating a Fall (out of the Garden of Eden) and a more conscious balancing process which may follow in the aftermath.  

We may see this latter problem playing out in the ongoing debate between advocates of Darwinian evolution and various indoctrinated, North American Bible-belt 'creationist' groups. Likewise, the existence of Muslim extremists who abuse human rights or have terrorist behavior patterns may be due in part to having certain instincts repressed in extremist fundamentalist societies, religious seminaries, or in refugee and terrorist training camps. Taken in its proper historical context, the term jiha'd, or jeha'd meant, figurativeley, a holy or religious campaign and therefore a war against one's inner demons as unbelievers. Its a problem, once again of losing sight of the need to maintain balance with an introverted attitude in segments of society that have become far too extroverted with a tendency to act out, literally, when the stone picked up in the street really needs to be thrown at one's own head, figuratively. One has more success in changing the world by first truly changing oneself and thus setting an example. The savior complex in the hero may get projected into some cause in the outer world by the ego, but the calling which really comes from within needs to be heard as one to save oneself by getting in touch with one's inner needs.  

To be sensitive to oneself and to others -- that is an aristocrat.

The themes of the Manta Frescoes are part of a larger creation story, when considered from a Jungian perspective on creative process and alchemy. This may be contrary to current belief held by some psychologists who see no connection between the several themes depicted around the walls of the large Chamber, or in the antechamber next to it, and in the great hall immediately below the Chamber, all within the Valerano di Saluzzo part of the castle. The fountain scene appears in a local manuscript which was taken to Paris for illumination, and it also appears in other contemporary works. This fountain theme returns, in 3-dimensional form, in various 15C-16C Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque courtyards and gardens alluding to allegorical journey themes and alchemy.  

There is a common thread which also may be in evidence here, which led Jung to his 20C contributions in understanding creativity and the unfolding process of the human psyche. The deeper significance of the frescoes has not been appreciated by many observers. The problem is some of the academics and psychologists who held a conference on the frescoes more than a decade ago are of a school of thought which tends to block the reality of a timelessly universal or 'collective unconscious', connected with the DNA, which Jung first demonstrated in his early work: Symbols of Transformation. The collective unconscious contains the archetypes and it lies in deeper layers of the psyche below the societal, family and the personal, or biographical 'subconscious' which Freud wrote about. We are not born with a 'clean slate' as many have thought. It would explain how similar themes turn up in mythology in various periods in different parts of the world at times when there was no possibility of communication between them. We will return for an interpretive look at the frescoes and other contemporary garden themes in a later Chapter. The meaningful thread which connects with garden design may hold the key to the education of future designers able to connect with the Creative Source for design works more in tune with the great Music of the Spheres.  

The Manta frescoes had been preserved in the last 2 centuries by Provana-DeRege family, partly with some ongoing assistance with a small bequeath from a New York philanthropist. In 1984, they were donated along with part of the bundle of rights to the castle, to Italy's FAI - Fondo per L'Ambiente Italiano, in an arrangement similar to the National Trust in the UK. The frescoes in the baronial chamber were cleaned in 1989, bringing remarkable color and detail to light for the first time in centuries. When the castle donation was received, an announcement banner was placed by the FAI across the head of the railway quays under the entire interior roof span of Milano's railway Stazione Centrale. The castle has since become the 'crown jewel' of the FAI properties.  

Contemplating the meaning of these important frescoes led me to make connections with the 'Romance of the Rose', Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' (which include a reference to the Saluzzo della Manta Castle Chaucer visited on his 'grand tour' travels South of the Alps early in the 16C), the 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili' and other contemporary literary works having considerable influence on the visual arts. Pondering the environmental design connections and the meanings was one of several quests into streams of research which led me to the study of symbolism, the archetypes, ecopsychology, alchemy and ultimately the psychology of C.G. Jung.  

MASTER PLAN 1964-5: THREE COLLEGES ON A HILL BECOME THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH  

During the 1970's and 80's with such apparent begrudging by some toward one member of a professional faculty with an admittedly inquisitive disposition, and at times needing to be receptive to an in-depth, intuitive-innovative and synchronistic mind, and moreover, not being afraid to open doorways to new understanding, or to speak up on various issues, I felt it openly threatening people to have my Harvard diploma placed in a glass frame and, as is customary, hung on the wall of my office. I had push-pinned it to the wall behind the closed door at the back of the coat closet in my office. Near it, on the front side of the closet door, was a little hand drawn working sketch with a specially pulsating texture of line weight, giving it a certain character one can only describe as numinous, although this in fact was due partly to early onset of Parkinson's by the hand who made it. The sketch was made during a 'blue ribbon' special design review panel critique of my organic, Olmsted-like preliminary concept plan for spatial-functional, topological, vegetative and architectural enclosure development, and pedestrian, vehicular and service access circulation for the 1964 original University of Guelph Master Plan, projecting an eventual enrolment of around 17,500 students.  

Architect Josè Luis Sert had rendered a squaring off of the 'inner campus' ring road (we also had an 'outer campus' traffic circulatory - diversion road) in green and terra cotta colored Prismacolor pencils, on an approximately 8x11 gridded piece of paper sketched to no scale, as we had gathered around it tacked in the middle of the presentation room display wall, in the 'Sert, Jackson Associates' Cambridge MA office. We were working on a squaring of my slightly curvilinear FL Olmsted-like ring road, so to be sensitive to existing roads, vegetation and contours, a pedestrian - vehicular separation and service access solution around major pedestrian axes connecting student residences on the perimeter of the campus and connecting walks in the interstices. We were working together with Sert's 2 partners, Huson Jackson and Joseph Zalewski, and my 2 Toronto 'Project Planning Associates Limited' University consultant Master Plan design team colleagues. We were in the preliminary design back-and-forth discussions, between the Cambridge firm and our key design team members, including myself, architect-urban designer Darham Malik responsible for new building concept space allocations, and traffic engineer Werner Billing advocating ambitious and rather imposing 4-lane wide ring roads. Other members of the combined consortium all felt 2 lanes would be adequate  

Every one sought elimination of former Highway 6, Gordon Street, which had unfortunately divided the campus into 2 parts being a heavily traveled Provincial highway. It was unfortunate our proposal to bring the new Highway 6 bypass expressway into Guelph from the 401 expressway East was not implemented as it favored a substantially heavier traveled desire line to and from the Toronto region angled south and eastward of the original Highway 6 alignment. The bypass eventually built was the 'Hanlon Expressway', to the west, angled in the direction of the lessor traveled desire line to 401 West, more in the direction of London and the Windsor and Sarnia borders. Our integrated traffic solution optimzing access and traffic objectives for the region, and locally both town and gown interests, was not promoted sufficiently by the University preoccupied with a major building expansion program and on-campus construction projects during expressway planning by the Province and City of Guelph. The PPAL solution would have eased traffic congestion locally in the Toronto region 401 - Guelph corridor, while at the same time eliminating the bisection of the present University campus with an increasingly busy, high volume, 3-4 lane major traffic artery.  

The little sketch by Josè Luis Sert grew out of heated discussion which went on for several days in the Cambridge office of the Spanish born special University 'Design Review Panel' architect, of the firm 'Sert - Jackson and Associates'. This firm was the special design consultant for the newly amalgamated University's new arts complex in the center of campus, which was to set a humanistic tone and set the character for future projects. Sert was Dean of Harvard's Faculty of Design when I worked in the Toronto PPAL office, 1964-1965. The University of Guelph Master Plan had been my single most time consuming project. This plan, with several design review critiques held in Cambridge MA, took form during the year before I applied to Harvard. I returned to Cambridge as an MLA student at Harvard's Graduate School of Design in Fall of 1965. The much celebrated architect and brief personal mentor and critic during the University of Guelph's design process was known for his influential buildings and respect for sites, as the more 'humanist' architect from the modernist Bauhaus School of Walter Gropius. Dean Sert, or the 'Teeny Weeny Deany' as we Harvard students referred to him, privately, in admiration for his short height and heroic achievements in architecture and for his tenure at Harvard and as a local resident of the City of Cambridge MA who had built a landmark atrium/courtyard house for himself and his wife, was considered a major contributor on the world architecture scene by fellow architects and critics. He had been an earlier associate of architect Le Corbusier in Paris.  

The little unsigned Josè Luis Sert concept sketch eventually was removed from my office during a conference when several visiting professionals had used the furniture to store their winter overcoats. It was presumably someone not on the original, 1964 PPAL Master planning team, who knew its source and value, although I never recalled identifying its architect to anyone, or suspected anyone might run off with such personally valued memorabilia. This pair of documents tacked inside and outside my office closet, including the HGSD diploma, had been visible mainly to myself during most of my tenure at Guelph, a reminder in darker moments an aspiring humanist and design education innovator with some differentiated feeling and intuition was definitely worth something, especially when my efforts toward better design for human - aesthetic needs was being put down constantly.  

Following the ceremony where my daughter graduated with an arts degree, the University of Guelph President, Don Forster, saw us observing the convivial congratulatory crowd from the edge of the Campus Green in front of Johnston Hall. He brought over to meet us the University's Chancellor who was the first woman to be appointed Lieutenant Governor of the Province of Ontario. Our conversation with these 2 learned individuals was as remarkable in wisdom shared as it was animated. Pauline McGibbon also happened to be Honorary President of the C.G. Jung Foundation of Ontario, who's Patrons included internationally recognized and much locally celebrated academics and writers. They were Canada's Northrup Frye, Robertson Davies and Hans Seelye (or Selig? - stress researcher), all from the University of Toronto. From time to time, they attended Foundation lectures by internationally well-known Jungian analytical psychologists, mythologists, authorities on comparative religion, archaeology and other subjects. As a member and frequent attender of lectures and seminars I had seen them gathered in lively discussion with other members around bookstall tables during the lecture breaks.  

There was another Toronto CG Jung Foundation Patron I would meet personally 5 years later, Switzerland's Marie-Louise von Franz. She was a gifted and prolific writer who had researched together with Jung for over 30 years. She was reknown in the field of analytical psychology and had been one of the several founders of the original CG Jung Institute in Zürich-Küsnacht CH. Jung's contributions to knowledge were most certainly recognized in Ontario's 'company of the wise', whose members included at the time at least several hundred individuals including these several men and women who were recognized as truly 'learned' on the higher intellect and spiritual plane.  

When one works on a creative contribution involving a major step forward in consciousness, one almost Darwinian in sweep for a given field, one may expect there will be enormous resistance.  

Years later, after the fall term of 1992, when my University of Toronto Landscape Architecture Study Abroad Program had been terminated in the spring of 1993, for reasons explained later, I was left in Italy without work or income. Working from Oggiogno di Cannero Riviera where my program was based, I sent copies of program and course outlines to all of the Landscape Architecture faculty at Guelph, and to the other 5 programs in Canada at the time with landscape architecture undergraduate, technical, or graduate curricula. I then corresponded and spoke with Guelph's Director of Continuing Education and with people in Alumnae Affairs and University Development who arranged a meeting with the University of Guelph Vice President-Academic in the South of France. I had also met earlier in Guelph with the Vice President for Alumnae affairs and development, who with great interest helped set up this meeting. We worked toward the proposal to develop my study abroad Europe program for Canadian Landscape Architecture students and some additional work for me helping to coordinate or facilitate some other UofG academic study abroad programs. They were to be based either in Villefranche, on the Cote d'Azur in France, or in Italy, should local probelms with public transportation access for students not be resolved for student access to the corniche site which was high above the town and Cap Ferrat. The place was in a commanding position with impressive views down over sea and Riviera coastline and toward Nice also below in the foreground.  

The College of Family and Consumer studies had the beginnings of a restaurant school set up above Villefrance on a trial basis in a renovated older villa with classrooms and newer residence accommodations. It was built as a Bata family investment for use by Canadian universities. 15 years earlier, Guelph's College of Family and Consumer Studies had co-sponsored along with the Ontario Agriculture College's School of Landscape Architecture the 2 'History of Cultural Form' courses Owen scott and I had developed and taught together with one of the CFCS faculty, architect Joan Simon. She was one of my colleagues who got cancer and later died in a car accident. She was married to architect Charles Simon, a former design studio co-teaching partner, who had helped on the design and construction drawings for my house in Arkell Springs area. Having discussed, read summaries and course outlines and understood my work and grasped the foundation of knowledge presented on which it was based, the University Vice President-Academic, with much enthusiasm, went back with copies of my material, to Guelph and Landscape Architecture who's cooperation was needed. The response which later came back over the phone from the VP was most unfortunate... "It is sad, they refuse to move forward." End of Story on the second attempt after going on the creative journey -- to interest Guelph's Landscape Architecture faculty on design for human needs from the viewpoint of psychological understanding et al.  

Not long after the second attempt briefly outlined above, I found examples of student work hung in the Landscape Architecture building corridor with references to archetypes on which the designs supposedly were made. But they were done conceptually, in a calculative, reductive, deterministic and mechanical fashion. There was no evidence any of the work had been created with intuition and feeling in an organic and timeless way, or with any in-depth understanding of pattern language. Information 'about' archetypes was being instructed, but the mechanical results were as lifeless as designs made with the usual site design 'concept' approach.  

In frustration I had returned to Canada where I consulted the Italian Embassy in Ottawa on what my options might be, especially without my Italian partner verifying my status on a local commune basis for Visa or Permessi di Soggiorni. I presented my entire situation to the Cultural Affairs Attache, a Sig. Coniglio, with a typical, 'classic' Italian education who quickly assimilated the nature of my program and what had happened to me, my legal status, my teaching background and experiences working with communities and connections with old families, the FAI -Fondo per L'Ambiente Italiano and WWF-World Wildlife Fund for Nature, Italy. As his surname translated as 'rabbit' and his intuition worked at lightening speed and he had a good sense of humor as well about this, we made a joke of the fact it was like a confession between the fairy tale figures of the Hare and the Tortoise, in a bar, after the fact. He said not to worry, that time and the Italian State were on my side, to be patient, recognizing I had undergone a kind of initiation in Italy and "You are as one of us." There were alternatives but the best thing to do was to remain with one foot in Canada, residentially. I needed to wait and try to attach my study abroad option to any Canadian College or University. This would be the better way forward as under my unique circumstances the Italian State would be in a diplomatic position to assist me.  

A new cultural protocol had been completed between Italy and Canada and with my qualifications the way would be most desireable. I had relatives in good standing from a diplomatic family in Italy going back many generations, with places in Vercelli and in Manta-Saluzzo in Cuneo Province. The Castle commune of Manta had been the real home for me in Italy since 1968, where I had been known locally and had stood in for my brother-in-law at various events. But if one of the several places in Italy where I had excellent cooperative relations were to host a student residential base for university programs they would be only too happy to become my own longer term base in Italy. The State in sponsoring me would sweeten the pot for a university. It would underwrite the cost of my required trips back to the university on State-owned 'Al Italia'. Further, it would reimburse setup costs and some of my expenses for travel and accommodation while away from home base in Italy for non-local guiding and teaching on student field trips in other parts of the country. We concluded my research and understanding of the 'Grand Tour' for foreigners and 'universals' and 'la psicologia Jungiana' were something more recognized and thus respected in old world Italian society, but I was far ahead of my field in new world Canada and, like the Tortoise, I would have to wait patiently and try to find private groups to bring to Italy in the meantime.  

In Zürich a decade earlier in 1984-86, I had sought a sabbatical reprieve to attempt to deal with medical symptoms at the C.G. Jung Institute. My gut began to react very seriously as it had in Guelph after a while, this time, to being 'pushed' into the 'academic', analytical psychologist training track, stiffening under stress like it was turning into a piece of Roman, lead sewer pipe surrounded by concrete. In fact my Swiss colon specialist had shown me drawings and descriptions from medical texts which fit this description, graphically. In compensation, as one may see in hindsight, I had a dream, indicating I was like a combination of frigate or battleship, and large merchant marine ship on the high seas aimed at North America, having developed more armour plating for protection of the body and internal organs from stress, and such highly sophisticated sonar, radar and electronic radio shack equipment close to being illegal for a non-military, normal citizen in today's New World, North American milieu. I was beginning to feel the grounded X-ray like vision I had developed enabling me to see right through many situations was making me appear to the unwise like some kind of heavy duty, shamanic menace to their society being the 'unwashed', so to speak, thinking of that old adage: "cast not your pearls". It seemed I had acquired some rather unusual perceptual abilities and an ability to forcefully communicate, emotionally and intellectually. And I had pulled this up out of the collective unconscious by some form of 'Theft' with reference to mythology.  

It was around this time in the summer of 1986 I decided to consult Jung's eldest daughter, Gret Baumann-Jung, on my astrological chart to look for more clues as to what I might do. I was determined to pay even more attention to my colon which had been reacting severely during previous years, noting in my journals what was going on in both the interior and outside world around the times it became irritable. I also continued to record and monitor my dreams very carefully in the journals, noting feeling. Some time after this, I had an archetypal dream -- which comes from a place deeper than the personal, or biographical unconscious -- from the collective, or universal psyche common to everyone. It concerned the tortoise, which I was advised to contemplate very seriously, recalling also the little glazed turtle I had been given by a friend when mourning the sudden death of our student colleague. The tortoise is an important symbol of cosmic order and it stands for obstinate strength and the notion of power conjured by its 4 stumpy legs, as well as, patience, endurance, stability, creative fecundity, longevity and above all, slowness. It supports the world on its 4 legs as if to mediate via its body (representing humankind) between the primordial waters and lower, or flat shell of the Earth, and its curved upper shell like the dome of the vaulted Heavens. It thus evolved in mythic thought as mediator between the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell. It's task of supporting the universe thus relates the tortoise to the greatest gods and for this reason was adjudged to posses the powers of knowledge and prophecy.  

There were personal associations with the Piazza Matteo in Rome. It has a marble fountain with 4 bronze turtles crawling into or out of the upper rim. It reminded me of the 4 humors of the Ancient and Renaissance Philosophers and feelings about the value of bringing up from the waters of the unconscious and differentiating and balancing what Jung described as the 4 faculties of mind with which we relate to the world.  

In Rome and a Villa, one of the most respected books on the culture of 'place', Eleanor Clark writes in her chapter on "The Fountains of Rome", of the Romaness of the sudden little cobble-paved clearing the Tortoise Fountain inhabits and of its unusual beauty in the whole setting. She notes the life-sized bronze tortoises were so valued as to be removed during the German occupation. She described the water moving (it has remarkable symbolism) up in 2 or 3 ways and down in 3 or 4, through marble cockleshells and over the gleaming bodies of boys, whose lifted arms and raised knees make opposing circular patterns through the water. She notes the striking and problematic part for her being the alluring beauty of their smiles... "they are almost exactly that of the Mona Lisa". Animated. These are examples of genuinely original, 'true-Self' artistic expression embued with the 'Music of the Spheres'. Rome's revered Fontana of the Tartaruge (turtle fountain) is undergoing cleaning and complete restoration, 2005-6.  

This is real art made while connected with the 'Music of the Spheres'. It is not merely an outrageous comment on society and environmant mirroring some unsettling, unbalanced state of affairs within the artist, unconsciously caught up in the world, like a fly in the web of some enormous spider (often a symbol for the negative or terrible mother) from a societal point of view. Rather it has the call and the 'allure' of Magic. It is embued with the power of myth which in some mysterious way either reflects wholeness, or suggests the path forward to a more balanced situation, to freedom and to a more whole environment, biophysically, culturally and psychologically. Taking the water connection metaphorically as standing for the collective unconscious, it is like the creative tidal wave ridden by the greatest artists like a Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarotti, or Henry Moore.      

It simply means working from a conscious standpoint. It is to work creatively, maintaining a balanced 'state of mind' or being, connected with the body -- and the whole, or True Self -- being centered in the 4 faculties (also known historically as the 4 compass directions, 4 elements, 4 humors, 4 seasons, 4 temperments) -- via 'liminal land' where creativity flows from a well spring, or from that tidal zone which is really between the '2 hemispheres' and the older and lower, 'limbic' parts of the human brain connected with various energy levels, like the Kundalini chakras associated with different parts of the body.  

I also reflected on the significance of the giant stone tortoise at the Prince Orsini's 'Sacred Monster Park' at Bomarzo. He designed it with Renaissance architect Pierro Ligorio, near the equally famous Villa Lante, in Lazio, made in collaboration with the main architect Vignola. The tortoise at Bomarzo carries a statue of a woman on its back representing 'winged', or spiritual 'messenger' victory... in mediation between the heavens or consciousness and the depths of the earth/waters of the unconscious. The eyes of the tortoise are staring at another large stone sculpture of a greedy mammal appearing out of a ravine below, ready to devour its prey. It is none other than a submarine form of the great (It) nave, a ship on the high seas. It is the whale, a symbol of the colossal in nature with both generative and destructive aspects, implying a necessary containment within the unconscious where a view of the world may need to be destroyed from the inner level, before initiation and regeneration via a rebirth into a wider form of consciousness with a newly clarified state of life. Thus the symbolism implied by the heavily armed frigate cum merchant marine ship crossing the high seas is not piracy as we would normally think of it. The meaning or intent is positive. Indeed it is timely from the psyche's viewpoint stemming from the collective unconscious as we enter this new 'Aquarian' era. The creative individual(s) embodying the archetypal idea must take empowerment seriously and step up to the task going forward with the self and not allow personal ego and base ends to get in the way. Its one's life task or mission vocationally, mindful of the meaning of the True Self and VOCATUS ATQUE VOCATUS DEUS ADHERIT at the top of this Chapter Page, and again the Gnostic Gospels of Thomas, particularly:  

If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.  

The association of the winged woman and tortoise at Bomarzo connects with a woodcut in that delightfully famous Renaissance work which influenced the arts, including garden design and architecture for several hundred years, Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. It depicts a woman holding a tortoise in one hand and a pair of spreading wings in the other. We see here simultaneously both female and male symbolism being carried by the tortoise, the latent potential in the hermaphrodite containing the unconscious opposites, to become the androgyne, the psychologically maturing individual (male or female) in which the masculine and feminine 'principles' become activated and made conscious in a transformation process. It contrasts -- or compares -- the chthonic and celestial properties represented respectively by the tortoise and wings. One also may regard the wings as an attribute of Mercury (Gk Hermes/Roman Mercurius) in ancient allegory and the tortoise as the raw material for the musical instrument, the zither, which Mercury was to make from a tortoise-shell. Music, like poetry is the language of the heart.  

Grounding the above intuitive leap then, the transformation of the tortoise into a zither which emits music, like poetry, a language which calls up emotions -- which eventually may be transformed into spirit, or feeling together with higher intellect -- would epitomize the Art of Alchemy. And we may regard the tortoise as 'the symbol of the raw material of the Art'. The tortoise belongs to Saturn's line like lead, the prima materia of the Work, which may begin, accompanied by some form of psychological depression which may signal its time has come and/or the process may be overdo and blocked. Chinese alchemists saw the tortoise as 'the starting point of the development'. Rather than signalling a period of chthonian involution or regression, on the contrary, we may see the tortoise is on the true path forward in life, toward the beginning of the spiritualization of matter, its goal symbolized by the wings.  

The Roman Philosopher and man of letters, Pliny the Elder regarded the flesh of the tortoise as 'a salutory antidote to Poison', attributing to it the properties of 'a preservative against witchcraft', or evil. All antidotes carry in them a poisonous characteristic and Heremetic (Gk Hermes/Roman Mercurius) philosophers regarded the tortoise as an epitome of the alchemical Work. Thus by biting off a little poison as an antidote or cure it contributes to a psychological death to cure a one-sided attitude or view of the world. And it is said that Mercury gains the infinite wealth as the Philosopher's Stone accords. In the traditions of Hinduism, the tortoise's withdrawal into its shell is an image of the highest spiritual significance. It is a symbol of involution and return to the primeval state to refind a basic spiritual attitude. The head coming forward out of the shell, with obvious phallic significance of the masculine principle, the logos, would symbolize a return to society and the outer landscape with a more grounded 5-senses function brought into consciousness enabling also more refined feeling, higher intellect and, above all, intuition... all centered in the body.  

From the alchemical viewpoint, the tortoise then symbolizes matter at the beginning of an evolutionary process. Within a short time, in August of 1986, I came to the conclusion that going further on the 'Zürich' path was not for me. It seemed like the university the CG Jung Institute had become was too much of an intellectual 'head trip'. I must emphasize this was my personal situation and it may not apply to some Jungians. It did appear to me, however, that some students were already 'overeducated' as far as their thinking functions were concerned (some already had Phd's), and some were needing more grounding, especially in their 5 senses, or other functions, including feeling and intuition -- extraverted or introverted -- to become centered.  

Not all who own a harp are harpers.

Varro, 116-27 B.C.

For me, Zürich was no longer a place for balancing psychological growth in compensation to more one-sided intellectual education, for actually rounding out the psyche as accomplished by the 'mature Jung' in whose name the Institute had been established. Typological labelling seemed to contribute to people remaining stuck in the head, while ignoring the need to differentiate and round out all of the 4 functions and maintain more balance between introversion and extroversion. The Jung Institute's more academic environment was not what all the earth and ground of family and Küsnacht household, the solace of the Tower at Bollingen, of stone and construction, gardening and sandplay that the Jungs had stood for. In fact older and wiser analysts often commented the Institute could do with an even smaller library, with just a few key texts and more emphasis on grounding people in their bodies, while allowing more space for the necessary inner work on the personal 'individuation journey', in preparing the psyche for the healing of souls before beginning to work with clients.  

ERANOS -- SOUTH OF THE ALPS IN CH TICINO

I moved to the Eranos Foundation near Locarno in the Italian speaking Swiss Canton of Ticino. It was south of the alps on the shore of that enchantingly beautiful, very deep, large, dark blue reflecting pool of water, the Lago Maggiore, enhancing a sunny Mediterranean climate contained by mountains. The Eranos Director and annual conference organizer was then Rudolf Ritsema, also an authority, writer, workshop facilitator and interpreter on the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of changes and divination which has existed for well over 2500 years, some say 5000 years. I was welcomed as one of the occasional sabbatical guests and allowed to putter around on the garden terraces for exercise and contact with nature, for maintaining my personal ground needed to support my thinking function. At Eranos I could go my own individual way and evolve my own thing, pulling what I had learned in psychology and the 'inner landscape' together with life experience including my previous background in research, teaching, professional and community service in the 'outer landscape'. Eranos on the west side near the top of the lake also was only a few kilometers from the border with Italy's Piemonte Region and closer to family during the warmer months.  

The Eranos Foundation had a well known history since the 1930's, as a conference center where great researchers from all over the world like Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and other eclectic, cross-disciplinary, philosophically-inclined, creative individuals met and stayed during August. They dined alfresco, discussing topics of interest to themselves around a circular stone table under a very old Cedar of Lebanon on a stone-paved terrace overlooking the lake. They gave morning and afternoon lectures within an annually chosen conference theme to a paying audience, who stayed in nearby hotels on the Ascona waterfront several kilometres away being bussed back and forth.  

Eranos had developed into 3 multilevel houses with rooms and apartments set among narrow garden terraces stepping from a wall along the lake road down to the lake in Moschia. They are overhung with hortensia (philodendron), camelia, azalea, rhododendron, eucalyptus, cinammon camphor, bamboo, cedar of lebanon and fruit trees. The property runs along a steep slope below the now very busy 2-lane lake road connecting Ascona with Brissago and the nearby border with Italy, followed by the Italian villages of Cannobio, then Cannero Riviera on the road to the towns of Verbania-Intra and Pallanza at the mid-point along the West side of the lake. During the rest of the year people from around the world sympathetic to the cause of wider consciousness vacationed at Eranos. It had inspired a number of people who used the setting for writing-sabbaticals including the popular Jungian writer James Hillman.  

Eranos evolved from a fisherman's house bought for the daughter of a Norwegian industrialist, Olga Froebe-Capteyn, its founder. She had been a member of the nearby Ascona 'Monte Verita' artist community located just above the property and discovered Jung's psychology. The artist community was a South-of-the-alps base for Northern European, especially German-speaking, grand touring artists. It was similar to what Pallanza, further down the lake in Italy, had been for the English and where Queen Victoria had stayed nearby in Stresa across the Bay of Pallanza. The waters where this bay meets the lake contain the very famous, sumptuously planted and meticulously maintained 'classic' and 'romantic' examples of island garden villas, Isola Bella and Isola Madre, respectively. They were built beginning in the 16C and evolved over time, from 2 barren, rocky islets. The 2 island villas (a third closer to Pallanza is private) have been owned to the present day by the Milanese noble family, the 'Borromeo'. The Cannero Castle Islands also were placed under Borromeo jurisdiction for a period of time after they had to be taken away by the Milanese Visconti from a band of marauding brigands who had occupied them.  

At Eranos, at the Swiss end within this larger lake setting, I rented a wooden lake skiff for fall, winter and spring from a concession in Ascona, where the owner was happy to let it for very little, as it would not have to be taken out of the water and subject to winter dry rot. I began rowing it to Ascona for groceries on occasion and everyday, when not too windy, I rowed out into the middle the lake and around the 2 enchanting Islands of Brissago with varieties of camellias in bloom from October through March. It is now Swiss government-owned with the opulent villa-house and luxurious botanical gardens open to the public.  

It was like trying to row with the oars while pulling together 2 very different worlds, the 'outer' and 'inner', the 'classic' and 'romantic' of landscapes, represented by the 2 pairs of islands reflecting the inland sea of the unconscious. The task was to fish up from the depths and to bring forth the essence, the truth integrating 'Veritas', the question of value and values, virtually, up out of the waters of the unconscious and onto the Lago Maggiore shoreline integrating the opposites in consciousness. It was placed on the mainland, literally, as 'design on the land', or 'Ecodesign with/for Human Nature' at Foundation Eranos. I was creating out of 2 separate entities what were to be a new third.

LAGO MAGGIORE -- CANNERO RIVIERA