THE TIMELESS WAY

We passed through the strangest, funniest,
undreampt of old towns, wedded to the customs and
steeped in dreams of the elder ages, and
perfectly unaware that the world turns round!

Mark Twain

In the unconscious there is no time, only continuous space. One could say that time and space are the same thing. One may be dreaming in the past, present or future, for example. This is something that takes a little getting used to. Moreover, the more one becomes grounded in the instinctual body the more likely one will have afterthoughts (Epimethean - of Gk, Epimetheus) about events in life to contemplate and evaluate for the refinment of spirit... in compassion... on one's own quest for the Grail, however conscious of it one may be.  

We find that in the in the Castle of Manta frescoe sequence (Images: Google 'FAI Manta Castle Baronial Hall') as mentioned earlier, the creative hero's task for the 'Chevalier Errant', or Errant Knight who is in the psyche of each of us becomes unblocked and progresses (in the female it would be an inner animus figure), and one eventually is likely to have synchronistic experiences of 'Promethean' forethoughts. They may surface in consciousness constellated from events in the inner landscape, with a premonition or comment on specific things which then take place in the future, in the outer landscape. These inner constellations would not likely be the cause of the outer events, however, as it is more the other way around, where the outer events that are constellating and are about to take place serve in a synchronistic way to constellate the inner phylogenetic program as the archetypes begin to compute the outer play of events. They then may be imaged in dream symbolism, however obscure the meaning may be, requiring some decoding skills. In a predestined way, one thus becomes accustomed to participating in the great Promethean Mystery, and we may attribute this intuitive instinct to the religious function.  

Prometheus, a Titan in Greek mythology whose name means 'the one who thinks in advance', symbolizes belief in humanity even against divine decree. The idea has value and meaning which can be understood only by those who have been initiated to this kind of extrasensory perception. It is the art of seeing intuitively as around blind corners, without the aid of the 5 senses. In the Manta fresco cycle one of the 9 female Amazon heroine figures is Delfila. She holds up a garden hoe in both hands displaying it for all to see, with a faint smile on her face. It is a symbol for cultivating in the garden experience the fruits of the soil, plants or vegetative and mineral levels of the unconscious for the creative-intuitive connection. It comes with a ritual grounding in Mother Earth, a symbol for the collective unconscious. It enables one to receive the wisdom of the unconscious. Sophia, hence philosophia, or philosophy, is the natural wisdom of the earth, also known as the wisdom of the heart described earlier. The prototype our attention is being drawn to in the fresco is the ritual experience of some of the Ancient Greeks who cultivated predictive wisdom via the 'filo' (It. for thread) known also as the Delfic oracle, with rites which 'took place' in that special site at Delfi.  

According to tradition, Prometheus created man out of clay. In the course of a ritual sacrifice he outwitted Zeus for the benefit of mortals, leading Zeus to withold from them the gift of fire. Its the dark side of god that would prevent humans from ever becoming conscious. Prometheus then stole fire from the heavens and brought it to down to man on earth. This is the refiner's emotional, spiritual fire. It brings grounded intuitive knowledge and the wisdom of the heart. It thus made possible the birth of civilization, in humanitas, which we may take in metaphor being a symbol for wider human consciousness, with compassion and direct intuitive aperception of events and their ultimate meaning. Zeus then sent Pandora as a punishment for mortals. Its as if the mortals had disobeyed god (the dark side) by eating the golden apples thus digesting and assimilating their purpose and meaning. Prometheus in punishment was bound to a rock where his liver was torn from his body by an eagle -- only to grow back every day, then to have it torn out again -- until Hercules, the hero, killed the bird with an arrow. The arrow is a symbol for penetration of the heart of the noble bird who flies the highest off the ground together with the death of an attitude followed by a psychological rebirth, a reawakening with the love and compassion of Eros. For many artists and writers over the centuries, Prometheus has symbolized the creative thinker's stubborn refusal to yield to fate which would cause one to let go, to follow the star of personal destiny guiding one in an ever widening, more balanced consciousness. It is to work with mastery and competence informed by an inner authority, thus enabling one to live to one's fullest potential. We cannot all be a Michelangelo, yet we may strive to better ourselves.  

Intelligence is a rare commodity, it can't be bought.

Those who have discovered Promethean insight on a daily basis may describe the Mystery as being spiritual, even religious in nature. After all, where could such things have come from as creative synthesis in the form of knowledge not yet in libraries. Or of events before they happen, however symbolically encoded so to need an initiation in the form of interpretive training, or considerable self-discovery through observational comparison of inner and outer occurances, to actually 'get the picture', to see the 'light' as 'in-formation' streams to the surface from liminal land. It may come by dreams, or in an instant flash of insight, or in some other creative manifestation of the unconscious as when doodling with a pencil or other forms of expressive art, sandplay, etc. And possibly minutes, hours, a day or two, a week, even years in advance of an event or creative act.  

An example would be writing down, not just image descriptions and feelings, but words, phrases or sentences from dreams in the night, and then picking up a newspaper the next day, or 2 or 3 days, or weeks later, and there they suddenly appear in a headline or column, once again. Something to be taken seriously on both the inner and the outer level as the Self begins to inform ego-consciousness. It is puzzling to the individual after it has happened many times and eventually begins to occur on an almost daily basis, when it no longer can be explained as mere coincidence. It is more than coincidence, it is the workings of synchronicity, a meaningful, chance occurance of events that is acausal, as Jung explained in his famous Eranos paper on "Synchronicity". These events may be of a compensatory nature. They may provide clues during writing, design or other creative work. They may occur at times when one may be discouraged about how things are going in life, as if some kind of reminder from the inner Self, that one is somehow part of some larger, or implicate order in nature which is a Mystery. One can only regard it with awe, in a reverential attitude of wonder, humility and respect. Such experiences in the unconscious of world soul, and of the anima mundi connection with the larger universe serve to 'animate' us. They enliven us and fill us with renewed psychic energy, and with a feeling of being free as the windblown grass on the dunes beside the sea. Its as if one has come from a swim in the waters of the unconscious up onto the beach to dry off among the sandunes in the warming rays of sunshine. Its like a baptism, a dip in the unconscious waters followed by a rebirth with renewed consciousness and new levels of awareness which also may contain new creative images or seeds for ideas and for planning-design solutions.  

The self-realization or, in Jung's terms the 'individuation', or psychological maturing process in development of personality with an initiation to the Mysteries, involves a long period of circumnambulation of the Self, the inner center, or core of the psyche. It is often likened to a gradual peeling away of the layers of an onion. It leads to more and more meaningful experiences and, understandably, it is a very slow process owing to the long repressed feminine Yin, or receptive principle in the 'Freudian', or personal, biographical 'subconscious'.  

Repression may be due to the 'shadow shocks' of one's personal life experiences that may have been negative against it, and formal education resulting from more than 2000 years of cultural oppression of a Gnostic Tradition. One's personal subconscious lies above the deeper rooted 'collective', or universal unconscious common to each individual. This underlays our civilization as well, which swings back and forth like a pendulum over time. It shifts back and forth between surges of romanticism and classicism, between the Yin receptive, feminine principle and the Yang active, or masculine principle, as each opposite compensates for too much emphasis on the other in individual lives and in civilizations. There is an unconscious instinct in the psyche like the principle of homeostasis which tries to balance these opposites and find the still centerpoint, until some influence internal or external to the psyche may cause a wider swing in another cycle. We may observe these swings and the interplay of opposing principles, ever seeking the inner marriage of Yin and Yang, as the forces are projected into creative works, in the history of various movements in art, architecture, garden design, music, drama and literature.  

If you bring forth what is within you, what you will 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 Gospel of Thomas--Gnostic Gospels

A perceptually more sensate, imaginally intuitive, metaphorical, value laden and cross-culturally universal, planning - design approach may be evidenced more in pre-industrial 'old world' environments. This may be assimilated as we mature -- with both heart and head working together -- with an attitude toward the resources and forces of nature characterized more by Martin Buber's "I - Thou" relationship.  

This 'timeless approach' is more in sympathy with ecology and human needs for creating more inspiring, balanced, less harmfully stressful environments than modern, mechanistic or electronic "I - It", more unrelated and statistical processes, working abstractly and coldly out of the head/intellect normally associated with ego. As 'the timeless way' is more warmly containing, organic, originative and spontaneously creative, it does not require the repression of key instincts. Being of both body and mind, it is both instinctive and more objectively conscious. And it is more holistic and balanced. It may be better characterised by "i - my Self", where the persona previously attached to the ego is no longer working at odds with the greater Self. The narrower ego must let go and yield to the more balanced Self. It allows one more freedom simply to be, 'oneself', without pretensions, in a more grounded, simple, wholesome and healthy way of life... which is also less stressful.  

The 'Timeless Way' is genetically encoded in the DNA, enfolded within the maturational process, or growth cycle for initiation and completeness Jung called 'individuation', otherwise known as self-actualization and self-realization. There are various grades or steps involving a widening of awareness, with the number 7 commonmost in mythology and religion. The planes of differentiated consciousness include sensation, feeling (especially conscience, values, love, sympathy, empathy and compassion refined from the raw emotions), reflective intelligence, intuition, spirituality, will, and an intimation of the divine.  

GENIO LOCI IGNOTO ... to the genius of places, unknown.

inscription on stone sculpture made at request of C.G. Jung -- facing the outdoor dining-discussion table for visiting lecturers on garden terrace,
the Eranos Foundation, overlooking the Lago Maggiore near Ascona CH

I've always enjoyed sharing with others many of the very special old world places discovered in my travels. These places have an ageless central 'quality' which speaks to the human soul. It informs and inspires our lives. It is archetypal, like the 'genius locus' or 'sense of place', something with a recurrent symbol or motif inherited by all. It is the very essence of life and spirit, whether it be in a person, a town, a piazza, a house, a garden terrace, a cultural landscape or a wilderness.  

The search which we make for this 'quality', in our lives, has more to do with a religious instinct linked up with 'the creative drive'... our highest instinct. It is the central quest of any one person. It sets the stage and provides the 'prima materia' for the opus, the individual's story. It is the search for those moments and those places which allow us to be most alive, most whole and centered, most like the 'True Self', described by Jung, as opposed to the 'false self' detailed by the psychoanalyst Winnicott and others.  

Places with this quality are given character or personality by archetypal patterns of events that keep on happening there interlocked with patterns of forms in space. The specific patterns out of which a town, a piazza, a house, a room or a garden is made may be alive and whole. When they are merely engineered, mechanically and electronically, they are often dead because they are not whole, being one-sided, and therefore out of balance. We find no center which lives, 'there is no there there', as Gertrude Stein once remarked, having seen for the first time the endless, repetitive, and for a time treeless, 1950's 'can-of-worms' street layouts and cookie cutter stamped houses of the suburban tracts of Oakland and other areas in California. It is as if we are unmoved by such non-places. It is as if we are turned to stone, and are like Promethus chained to the rock, prisoners locked in inner conflict.  

When the 'genius locus' is honored and environments are alive with a sense of place, they allow our inner forces to find their center and set us free.  

It simply makes sense, the more living patterns there are in a place of any kind -- whether it be a piazza, a room indoors with windows on 2 sides, or an outdoor room in a garden with a fountain in a ray of sunshine penetrating the shadows sparkling the water -- the more it comes to life as a whole, the more it radiates a certain warmth as if it has a self-maintaining fire, like the timeless quality referred to. It is like the fire Prometheus stole from the gods and then brought down to earth to share with all. When a place has this warmth, it becomes a part of nature, as if there is a connection to a hidden archetypal source or creative wellspring.  

When we are in places embued or organically layered with many of these patterns we feel the warmth radiated and a certain sense and feeling of containment. In such moments we may feel connected to our most whole Self, our greatest potential, via this source, which is like a wellspring. 

In a way which is timeless, we enjoy the experience of being close to Mother Earth (Ger. Mutter, Lat. Magna Mater, or simply, 'matter'), contained, on the ground, of the planet, a small part of the resources and forces of nature that are interdependent within the greater universe. At the same instant we also may experience the feeling of being as free as the windblown grass, in a world of great diversity created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. It is in these special moments that we dwell, knowing where we are, and who we are, as we experience the essential quality of life.  

THE QUALITY WITHOUT A NAME

As this quality of being we find mirrored in some human and biophysical environments is archetypal, deeply rooted in innate feeling within the human psyche, with links via the emotions, it cannot be seen directly, or named. Unfortunately, this non-conceptual quality eludes industrial world design processes which are calculatively mechanistic. Computer-assisted design tools are no exception any more than is designing with a fine-tipped mechanical pen or pencil against triangle and 'T' square. Once the quality has been built-in from the beginning, in the planning and design phases more sensitive to quality and values, only then may computer assistance be used to advantage in the detailed drawing and construction communication process, especially in rather more complex projects.  

We've had a tendency in design to avoid the whole issue of 'quality' and the question of 'value', or 'values', retreating into the world of technique, or the 'techne' and to the ephemeral, in an escape to the cold externals from the too intimate scene involving warmth and the 'arche' realities of the emotions and feeling.  

A computer never thought of anything. Use your heart, your head and your hands. Feelings will find form.

Morris Lapidus Architect
banner hanging above the cafe in the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt,
National Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, New York NY

My own curiosity led to a 'Fall' from the conventional wisdom of design professions moving more in the direction of manipulated environments that are cold, lacking human feeling. I saw this owing to cultured blocks to the human spirit and matters of heart. Trying to do things that were not true to myself made me stressed, depressed and led to serious colon problems. I got the picture on why I had these problems and a near disaster with cancer that was set in motion, unravelling symbolism in warning dreams, with medical confirmations later. I felt a call to move forward from this toward a more healthy, mature approach to work, more aware of the impact of the biophysical, social and symbolic environments on human health. Slowly, I followed a circuitous, or spiralling path forward, moving toward a better understanding of healing aspects of good environments, gardens, and relationships between the landscape of the outer, biophysical world and the inner world in the landscape of the human mind.  

THE TIMELESS WAY OF BUILDING
WITH ARCHETYPAL PATTERN LANGUAGES FOR TOWNS, BUILDINGS, CONSTRUCTION

I had known about the work of Christopher Alexander, a Harvard PhD Architect, teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, much talked about in urban planner and site planner Kevin Lynch's lectures and seminars I had attended at MIT in the 1960's. And I eagerly awaited his books in the Oxford Press Series: The Timeless way of Building, A Pattern Language: Towns - Buildings - Construction, The Oregon Experiment, A New Theory of Urban Design. This early series of books has been followed up by the just published 4-volume series on The Nature of Order.  

The 'Pattern Language' appeared first, published in 1977. I immediately began introducing the patterns to landscape architecture students in my history-theory and design studio courses. Around 1980, after 'The Timeless Way of Building' had been published, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's CBC-Ideas produced an excellent informed series based on Chris Alexander's work which aired as: Pattern Languages and the Dream of Livable Cities. I recorded the series from the FM radio broadcasts and obtained copies of the original tapes of all the CBC interviews made in Berkeley with Alexander. Slowly, I came to the realization that teaching in this way, calling attention to built environment with good archetypal patterns of enduring quality was healthier for me, but it conflicted with the conventional wisdom of the day in design schools which prevails to the present day. I actually was given a chance to meet Alexander, to talk with him briefly and attend a lecture he gave at the School of Design in 1982. I had returned to Harvard on an academic leave semester for a reading sabbatical to explore archetypal psychology and to begin reading C.G. Jung's 'Collective Works' published by Bollingen Press.  

Eventually, after another sabbatical in 1984-85, then dropping out for another year to remain at the Zürich-Küsnacht Jung Institute to obtain a better foundation in archetypal psychology, I tried to get around the problems I had in the academic workplace. I taught at a distance for 5 years, this time, coordinating and teaching study abroad semesters welcomed by the University of Toronto Landscape Architecture students. The program was for fourth year students in a 5-year baccalaureat curriculum. It began to attract students from other Canadian university landscape architecture programs at Guelph and the Université de Montréal, which was what I wanted, to provide a service in mature life of value to students from all 5 of the Canadian programs. A mix of English and French Canadian students during 2 of the programs added another layer to a positive cultural experience. The programs were enrichened by the French students' ability to grasp course content, having more differentiated intuition and feeling, and thus more receptivity and a better foundation for philosophical discussion integrating both classicism and romanticism. It wasn't necessary to plunk down the wine bottle or bicchierini on a table in an outdoor café, or on a mountainside stone picnic table or low, sittable garden wall gathered about in order to get a spontaneous and whole-hearted discussion on value, or values, and archetypal design patterns. 

For Toronto faculty, however, it was like introducing something into the architects' world coming from another universe. In the second year I was told by the member of the faculty visiting from Toronto during the semester I could coordinate and teach my program for the remainder of a 5 year period, indicating I would have to leave or not have my contract renewed, when they would refocus the program on 'the church of what's happening now', "postmodernism", "destructivism", "shockism" and other current buzz-word concepts. As I had copyrighted my entire program, after the 5 years, UotT Landscape Architecture, through a newly appointed architect Dean, then informed me I was no longer wanted and moved their students to Spain the following year, where their own landscape program was cancelled after one semester, by the College which administrated both programs. And that was the end of it for the Landscape Architecture students. They could do Architecture study abroad programs with the architecture students, and that was it.  

Just prior to, and during the beginning of this 5 year period, the University had tried unsuccessfully to shut down Architecture, and the latter had entrenched themselves, with outside help from the profession aided by the the media which had been rallied to the cause, and were doing their thing. Having the same surname as the deceased President probably did not help my situation. Before his untimely death just beyond age 50, Don Forster had left the President's position at Guelph and returned to Toronto as President, where years earlier he had been a highly respected Provost. During the transition from Guelph back to Toronto, it was known he had been part of a UofT administrative campaign which included shutting down the College of Architecture which had been a source of continual disappointment for University administration. Donald Forster also had been recognized in the Canadian press being under consideration as a possible successor to Pierre Trudeau as head of the Liberal Party and thus a potential Prime Minister of Canada.  

HOUSE SYMBOL OF THE SELF

In my previous design studios at Guelph, the students and I particularly enjoyed a project many remember being one of their more meaningful learning experiences. It was, to effect: 'Design your own villa as an expression of your most whole, most valued true Self'. A similar project was undertaken in Italy in several study abroad semesters attended by Toronto and Montréal students.  

We know from the analytical psychology of C.G. Jung and neo-Freudians and, in the design world, post-occupancy evaluation sociologist (and Jungian 'mediator'-mentor) Claire Cooper Marcus' widely circulated paper on 'House as a Symbol of the Self', the house with the hearth at the heart, or center, is a common symbol representing the whole Self in the collective or universal unconscious. Archetypal psychology and ecopsychology also support the observation that projection of the villa from the inner landscape (house, with garden surround) when revealed in original, or 'originative' design -- from one's own origins -- is a symbol of the unfolded Self, our utmost, whole potential in life.  

The aim in teaching site design in the early stages of the Guelph 5 year program (and much later in the Toronto experiment as well) was to remove cultural blocks to creativity for more typologically balanced design. It meant freeing the mind to allow the 5-senses, intuition and feeling to function without being overridden by the thinking function. Known since the time of the Greek philosophers as the 4 humors, this ancient wisdom elaborated by Jung in the 20C is certainly more common today, being the foundation on which vocational-type aptitude testing is done everywhere in education.  

In the design studios we borrowed local countryside property the students could access for sites, with hills, stream and open and wooded areas. In Italy, due to time restrictions, students used our schoolhouse-villa setting to which they proposed renovations and worked on the gardens and open terraces below the building, although some selected local undeveloped sites. Students initially were to put aside mechanical instruments, coldly abstract concepts and ideas about styles, and a modern calculative litany of form and line and a crazy-quilt of facts and many unknown presumptions. This mostly modern 'head stuff' invariably caused a predesign phase to block the creative synthesizing functions of the psyche, in what we called an 'analysis paralysis'. As an antidote I had students model the site and simply play to engage the imaginal landscape. Students who became blocked or feared letting go of working mechanically were encouraged, if they wished, to begin design in a big box of sand as something more original got constellated in their creative process which I came to describe as 'ecodesign with human nature', remembering Ian McHarg's assigned task at that meeting in Washington during my Harvard years -- Ian was my house guest on several occasions when came to lecture at Guelph.  

The Guelph design studio sandbox experiment simply 'arrived' after one of many discussions about the students' progress with Pat Tucker, the University's Superintendant of Grounds. He taught the same class year plant materials, and we would have coffee in my office and compare notes to coordinate due dates for assignments to even out the students' semester workload. Pat was also a Master's student in Landscape Architecture and we had been talking about problems of 'analysis paralysis' and how to get students' imaginations freed up to be more receptive to design synthesis, and getting grounded sufficiently to support creativity needed for a more organic, pragmatic problem-solving process. The problem was in the early stages of design process. I needed to get them out of their heads and away from a rigidly mechanistic triangle and T-square design mentality for them to be more open to this genuinely organic and original approach.  

In one of these discussions I had recalled the liberating effect of playing in the sand on the beach during childhood. It was along the edge of lake Erie at the base of clay embankments, on family and friends' properties, which have little springs emerging onto the beach running across the sand to the lake. They were dammed to create little lakes, with found or crafted objects, or toys, to make houses, gardens, farms and villages, etc. I was always doing this as a child and I more recently recalled that I began this play, on my own, which I continued on an almost year-round basis, after a doubleheader of very serious illness, bed-ridden with hepatitis for a long period (I had also been fishing and playing around more polluted creeks and ponds which bordered built-up areas and uncertain septic fields) followed by a very serious case of mononucleosis, where I remained in bed also for months which caused me to be absent from school almost a year. The doctor had confided to family he had all but given up on me, as I became so weakened they did not expect me come back during the worst of this. I had spent a long time very close to the unconscious from which I remember very little today. And it probably had a lasting effect so to remain closely connected, or able to reconnect, and thus would experience difficulty, even health problems, in straying too far from the true nature of the self for very long.  

Immediately following the discussion with Pat Tucker about playing in the sand on the beach, I had the students put down a plastic liner and 6-inch high curb around the top edges of a little-used 4x5 foot cutting table in the studio. One of the Grounds Maintenance crews then delivered bags of construction sand. I got the students to model the topography, vegetation and existing conditions of their project site, so they could walk around it and view it in 3-dimensions. Thereafter, when individuals got stuck in design projects, I encouraged them to play in the sand until a solution emerged. This worked extremely well for those who tried it and I kept photographs of some of these very successful outcomes.  

Now, for some students more open to it, the mind was freed for more ecologically sound creative work. More organic, practical and down-to-earth solutions emerged. Some who could 'let go' in the first project-design studios in the curriculum then came up with, and illustrated, with little graphic or technical training, work of a better quality than typically 'graphic design' generated solutions in the fifth year with meaningful content either missing, or not so very well in-formed, not there 'under the trees', so often cleverly and impresssively rendered on paper plan presentations so its hard to see what's missing on the ground plane. I had introduced meaning and emotional intelligence content during my History of Cultural Form courses which I originated at Guelph, then in students' design studios the following year they were encouraged when designing to place their hearts before their heads... their designer 'false self' egos.  

These students were learning to design places for experiences -- not abstract 'spaces' as areas without 'meaningful enclosure', or objects, or things, related to fads or styles that would be dated, mainly of interest to others in their 'designer' subculture.  

MINIATURE LANDSCAPE PROCESS

In Switzerland when I was curing my colon problems while trying to evolve more genuine work I eventually discovered and studied 'sandplay therapy'. As part of the training I had to do my own personal experimental sandplay process. Following what in hindsight appeared to be a biologically determined, nine-month, intensive, psychological rebirthing process, as a kind of creative byproduct, I synthesized and subsequently wrote-up a more holistic process recalling various play/work activities from my own past. They included the making of miniature indoor gardens in shallow jardinieres and the rooting of cuttings from tropicals in a large greenhouse crop production and commercial florist business on a farm owned by relatives.  

In my own assimilation of sandplay I combined aspects of what are today known as art, music, horticulture and nature therapies with sandplay therapy. I called this creative integration 'miniature landscape process', after it emerged with my own evolutionary stamp upon it from part of my individuation journey. I saw the larger teaching benefits of such a mutually supportive combination of what amounted to successful isolated therapies for sick people while in a in compensative transformative process that included a balancing of the psyche and the rounding out of typology. I saw the more immediate benefit for designers not as therapy, rather on a one time/short term basis to help people constellate creative process and simply 'let go', to unblock in order to begin to design more organically, ecologically, out of origins in the self during a particular design studio, or project. This was a major refinement of what my students and I discovered long ago in the Guelph landscape design studios.  

What convinced me, ultimately, to try sandplay myself, with Jungian Dora Kalff's son Martin, some years after Dora had passed away, was having attended a year of her seminars on Jungian sandplay therapy many years before. I was very impressed by its effectiveness from cases presented. I also consulted Ruth Ammann in Zürich, an architect and a Jungian training analyst, who had trained as a sandplay therapist with Dora Kalff, and who became one of the prime movers in the International Society for Sandplay Therapy. The ISST was started by Dora Kalff and her son Martin and other former students of hers from America, Britain, Italy, Germany, Japan and Switzerland. Like Dora, Ruth also wrote a book on sandplay and much later I was to read these books and various literature on sandplay. Beforehand, however, I tried a series of sandtrays in Ruth's praxis which helped get my creative energy going once again in landscape architecture, just before I moved down to the Eranos Foundation at the top end of the Lago Maggiore in 1986.  

Moreover, it was the theme for cases presented with slides in 1985-86, in Dora Kalff's seminar room in her country style home, built in 1485, one of the older homes in Zöllikon, which made an enduring impression on me. The cases presented were sandplay processes mainly of North American women. They were highly educated, successful, busy professionals and married people. Most had tried to become pregnant, without success. Having tried various therapies they had heard of Kalff, arrived, took daily walks in old world environments and nature, and did sandplay for an hour or two a week -- with a spiritual healing personality -- staying away from libraries and too many lectures and seminars at Dora's insisting, being too much head activity. They spent more time out in nature on walks in the countryside. Her sandplay praxis room was at the back of her house in one of the older rooms with windows looking over garden areas frequented by chickens on 2 sides and the room itself once had been occupied by pigs. What could be a more true symbol of the Great Earth Mother archetype and of nature-nurturing than the sow! It has been deified in various cultures as a symbol of fecundity and plenty, rivalling the cow in this respect, thus representing the female principle in its basic reproductive and nurturing functions.  

Kalff integrated sandplay therapy in Jung's psychology. She was a very spiritual person, who had travelled to Tibet and to Dharamsala in India and knew the Dalai Lama, donating a house next to her home as a permanent Swiss Center for several senior Tibetan refugee monks. In typically around 9 months, the women clients completed a sandplay process, went back to their husbands and had their babies, after another 9 months and a little more, obviously. I found this symbolic gestational healing process fascinating, later observing it working in other therapeutic problem situations for people of both sexes and of all ages, in Martin's, Ruth Ammann's and other Sandplay 'Foundation Seminars' in Switzerland, and at regional and international conferences I attended for the ISST required hours. One would advise a word of caution however because a 9-month time period for a healing process to uncover the Self may not be typical in the work of all sandplay therapists as there are a number of variables involved. It takes time after a sandplay to assimilate the creative fruits of the process into consciousness, especially for the seeds to germinate and grow and come into bloom in life and in work.  

The soul never thinks without a picture.

Aristotle

Sandplay is a creative, primarily non-verbal process enabling access to the deeper layers of the psyche. We can become so overwhelmed by our world and so overloaded with information that we lose connection with our creative potential. Given the freedom and a safe, sheltered place for a kind of inner gardening... each of us has, within the psyche, the capacity for reconnecting with our creative source, finding new energy and solutions to problems which may be afflicting us. They may be as simple as 'letting go', to create originally from our center.  

By spontaneously building a series of enclosed landscapes in boxes of sand -- using miniature reproductions of plants or vegetation, trees, shrubs, flowers, etc., and where practical, to minimize plastic and maximize living, organic materials by providing small, live potted plants or rooted, commercial greenhouse 'plugs', found objects from nature, a large collection of miniatures representing animal life, people from all historic periods and activities/professions and the client's own artwork -- one can integrate conditions blocking natural growth and/or creative process. This has been found to happen more quickly with earth-play work than with other forms of therapy. The series of scenes created reflect the delicate heart's renewal -- to find one's own wellsprings of creativity, release of new energy, and sense of being alive and free as the windblown willow -- centered in time and grounded in space.  

In Jungian sandplay therapy people may discover wisdom and spiritual dimensions in themselves they did not know existed. Visually creative people welcome it as they have a normal and genuine tendency to playfulness and for letting go and being spontaneous. It is particularly effective for very tense or driven people who tend to relax, for reaching people who oververbalize, rationalize, or intellectualize who are too controlling with words, for people with schoolphobia, or who are more feeling-intuitive and less articulate and can't communicate directly, and for those who are very intuitive who benefit from the process, which tends to slow them down and ground them in the body particularly in their 5-senses and/or feeling which may be more difficult to access.  

Gardening -- both in the inner and in the outer world -- helps us maintain a feeling of being, 'at home' in the world and in the universe, to cope with life down here on earth in wellness with a holistic sense of identity. We become 'placed', in both inner and outer landscapes, knowing where one is in orientation to both worlds, and who one is from one moment to the next.  

Almost anyone feeling at times stressed, depressed or anxious finds work in a garden invigorating. Psyches's all-weather miniature landscape approach may surprisingly lift blocks and black moods and liberate people as they renew their connection with nature, with what is really important in life.  

Nothing can ever be absolutely guaranteed for all people. In a curative/healing, 'containing' environment for inner/outer gardening process, as one plants the seeds, plucks the weeds and cultivates the inner and outer resources and forces of nature, there would be a likelihood there would be a natural or autonomous tendency to work on many issues, including some of the following...  

--- resolve conflicts and solve problems, expand horizons, transform and reach your potential  
--- improve relationships with family, neighbors, friends, co-workers, employees or employers  
--- deal with school/intellectual phobias  
--- find more grounding, satisfaction, spiritual meaning and enjoyment in life  
--- find meaningful existence in an an increasingly abstract and technical world  
--- appreciate beauty in the everyday world and live in peace and harmony with Mother Earth  
--- get to the root of problems of conflict, alienation, shadow, lack of food for the soul  
--- reduce anxiety and stress  
--- overcome stress-related disease (i.e., migraines, & etc.) from adaptation/work which does not honor one's gifted side  
--- recover the feminine and a feminine way to the spirit, releasing creative potential  
--- refine the masculine logos, evolve the spiritual out of the Self, find strength and vitality in inner life  
--- round out one's ability to see and to deal with life balanced in all of the instincts: including the 5 senses, feeling in relatedness to universal values and to others with sympathy, empathy and with compassion, thinking analytically, and seeing the what is directly as an animal would, even around corners without the aid of the 5 senses, with intuition  

Words are cerebral. Verbal instruction, especially in the form of lectures, or in counselling and various therapies makes it difficult to stay away from being in the head on a power trip between the egos of the persons involved. Power in the healing professions is a much discussed topic. There is a tendency for everything to stay up in the head, which is not where most problems or blockages may be found. Words dilute the immediacy of shared experience, name something, are not the thing itself and bring semantic difficulties that interfere with immediate communication. Descriptions, explanations or rational-intellectual head therapies at best are a step removed. Ultimately, verbal work may prove to be more short-term in value, particularly in crisis intervention with less lasting, long term effects, requiring a very long period amounting to years in costly Freudian, Adlerian, or Jungian analysis before there may be substantial transformation or growth in personality. The prime language of the soul -- of the unconscious -- is the three dimensional image, as Jung effectively demonstrated in so many ways.  

The psyche knows how to heal itself.
When you work for the psyche it works for you.

C. G. Jung

Known since the 1930's, sandplay was expanded and refined for adults by Dora Kalff, who was a close friend of Jung's eldest daughter, astrologist and housewife Gret Baumann-Jung. The 2 women first met in Grindelwald while summering at their places with children of the same ages. Jung's daughter had been so impressed at the positive behavior of Dora's children while playing in the village with her own children, she simply had to meet their mother and it was the beginning of a long friendship. When Dora bought and renovated the old house in Zöllikon, the Jung family came to see it and Dr. Jung was so impressed by its timeless archetypal character, he jokingly offered Dora an even trade for their bigger, rather formal house on the lake. Having lost her husband and needing a profession after WWII, Dora had been encouraged by Carl Jung and his analyst wife Emma, to go to England to study and work with Margaret Lowenfeld's 'Sand-World Technique' for children. Jung had discovered Lowenfeld's work long after his own personal 'beach' experiment while speaking at a congress where Lowenfeld was also one of the presenters.  

Apart from Carl and Emma Jung who understood the value of sandplay and earth-connected activity, it was many years before any of the Swiss Jungian analytical community who followed them recognized Dora's work. In fact the Jungs had warned Kalff her work would probably not be approved, not to expect recognition from the C.G. Jung Training Institute people. Today, many psychoanalysts only see Jungian sandplay as a brief adjunct to verbal therapy, being more useful on a short-term basis working through rather difficult blocks during a long verbal process lasting 3-5 years. They don't like to view it as potentially a more cost and time-efficient therapy in its own right. A completed sandplay process cycle is normally followed by several analytical sessions to review slides taken of the trays which were made in the presence of the sandplay therapist. It is usually done after a minimum 2-year period of natural assimilation, which begins after energy for the sandplay activity has run out when a natural process cycle to the Self is completed in the sand.  

The problem with some analysts not seeing the value of sandplay therapy probably has more to do with Psychological Types, perhaps having become stuck in the intellect themselves, thus lacking appreciation for the necessity of rounding out the typology of the 4 functions and evolving and maintaining a closer balance between introversion and extroversion. Modern 'analyst' Jungians may be more 'academic' than the Jungs and some of the original analysts who trained directly with them. Some may be weak in sensation, a necessary function to have up before attempting therapeutic work if it indeed is the inferior function, or an auxiliary second, or third function, assisting the superior function. Indeed, if intuition may be the superior function, in our culture it may take many years for one to get really grounded in sensation. The more intuitive practitioners, with thinking as a second function and feeling as the third, may have a tendency to be more like 'couch potatoes', or 'into the books' and imagination, ignoring balance, proper food, exercise and other more earthy activity which grounds and centers one in the body, providing a more balanced point of view.  

I found it remarkable, that one of the founders of each of the New York and San Francisco analytical training programs in Jungian analytical psychology trained in sandplay many years later with Dora Kalff. It was closer to the end of their professional careers, when illness or other circumstances of life sometimes call upon some people to have to work on the inferior function, perhaps not given adequate attention in life. Both of these particular analysts worked more with sandplay in their final years of practise. One had a clinical psychology - social work background and the other a medical background. Both were founding members of the ISST, organized by Kalff, and wrote important books on Jungian sandplay around the time they retired from full-time practises.  

In sandplay the psyche simply works as one cultivates 3-dimensional landscapes of the soul. The psyche is given the freedom to go where it needs to go, to process the work it knows it needs to do, and with relatively little verbal expression. Results are quicker with earthplay work, because it is more linear-efficient and more apt to trigger synchronistic healing process, being less under the powers of therapeutic interference than verbal therapies, swinging back and forth with changing themes on more superficial levels, sometimes prolonging narcissicism and staying in the head.  

The basic postulate -- given an empathic-therapeutic temenos, or 'good enough', safe, home-like parenting sacred holding space, at the matriarchal image level deep in the unconscious -- there is an autonomous tendency, or teleological principle, for the psyche to heal or rebalance itself... given genuine warmth, empathy and a positive, healing environment with containment and a sense of place. The actual physical setting would benefit from a layering of as many architectural supporting patterns as possible supporting archetypal feeling (see next page/chapter for details).  

When spontaneous expression begins it enables 3-dimensional concretization of undeveloped, inborn, archetypal unconscious content common to all humanity. The pictures in the dry/wet sand container of specific dimensions, within reach from a stool or standing position, visible overall in the cone of vision, represent figures and landscapes of inner and outer worlds with alchemical-mythical-religious symbolism. They may be culturally enclothed, but in thematic life-stages they are timeless and of all cultures. As one projects a 3-dimensional picture of the psyche at the moment, conflicts, pain, anger, any inner material can be worked through quietly. Conscious and unconscious aspects interact, somewhat like a waking dream. The images concretize mediation and connections between inner and outer worlds.  

The effect is healing. It may lead to a deep connection to the center of the Self which is the seat of the soul and source of the human spirit. This takes place on a deeper intuitive image and feeling level, far beyond shallow conceptual-intellectual interpretation.  

In my University of Guelph experiments, after modelling in the Studio sandbox, the landscape architecture students' designs sometimes embodied an ageless quality, evoking feelings of comfort and containment more typical of 'old world' places.  

Successful students were able to analyze the site, then set aside mechanical processes to work in a more imaginal, intuitive-feeling way, similar to the way in which a poem simply comes. The poet then continues to work on it, compressing into it layer upon layer of metaphorical content. In a similar way, in design, more and more patterns of human activity and/or qualities of experience, physical form and character come into play synchronistically, in a spontaneous, meaningful synthesis of different streams of creativity and events.  

The patterns found everywhere in vernacular or pre- or non-industrial environments are so full of feeling they are said to be archetypal.  

The pattern 'Master and Apprentices' appeals to common sense, where the fundamental learning situation is one in which a person learns by helping someone who really knows what he is doing. Although Alexander's work does not suggest it, the concept of 'Shopfront Schools' may be extended for the 'Master and Apprentices' along the lines of the Ancient and Classical alfresco and Renaissance Academies of learning of the philosophers. The 'University as a Marketplace' also makes sense in appropriate contexts. It implies anyone who knows what he is doing ought to be able to offer a class and anyone qualified ought to be able to take a class. Concentrated and cloistered universities with closed-door admission policies and rigid rules for students and procedures which dictate who may teach a course kill opportunities for learning.  

Many design patterns may be timelessly universal, as 'South Facing Outdoors' for patios and alfresco dining, the 'Alcove' pattern and windows admitting 'Light On 2 Sides Of Every Room'. Windows with many 'Small Panes' of glass each framing a separate view like a picture in its own right are instantly recognizeable to most people. The outside 'Front Door Bench' for removal of boots, chatting with passers-by thus enabling social contact, and providing a shelf for placing grocery bags while taking out one's keys and unlocking and opening the door offers a practical solution, while 'Paving With Cracks Between The Stones' filled with grass or scented groundcovers is softer, less glaring and has wide appeal. People simply like these cross-cultural design patterns found everywhere in more vernacular environments. They are so full of feeling they are archetypal.  

Alexander's books may be found in just about every public library and they are being used by people. Although they are in most architecture school libraries, nobody there pays much attention to them. The reviews of the Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building posted at Amazon.com are telling about the lack of feeling in design professions and schools, for example we see it in the leading clip of many reviews. It is from an architect teaching in South America asking the question, "Why did my teachers never tell me about it as a student?" And then of course there is Alexander's Center for Environment Structure's popular web site: Pattern Language.com 

Like the places some of my students designed, holistic creative process was fun. It grounded them. They felt less stressed, more at one with themselves, more confident and at home in the world, alive and free. This accidental discovery seemed a positive step in a healthier direction, but it went unnoticed by the faculty and I was not yet aware of Jungian Sandplay as an effective therapy for unblocking tight and/or analytical minds.  

Including more feeling and intuition in my teaching with the 'designer ego' favored 5-senses and thinking relieved a serious stress symptom from working in a way that was against my Self. I had become stuck like many people, focussed in, or one might say, 'possessed' by calculative and coldly mechanical, abstract thought processes, when in truth, I had been exposed in my many Grand Tour travels to results from a more wholesome process. I knew better, but was trying to ride the bus, playing a superficial game like so many others. It's perhaps why ordinary people find modern environments typically so boringly cold. They may even contribute to 'sick building and/or environment syndrome', with diverse psychological and physical symptoms. One sees many calculatively assembled projects, with little charm or 'Music of the Spheres', no poetic quality, little genuine 'earth magic' to delight or enchant the soul. Yet we have known, always, in our civilization, that music and poetry (particularly metaphor) are part of the language of feeling.  

In the years approaching midlife, for me, the mechanical design approach in landscape architecture was on the way to becoming locked into a professionally accredited licensing process. I could not play the game anymore with this superficial professional role, or push it onto the innocent, or the many very gifted and instinctively rebellious students our curriculum attracted. It had failed. Teaching then became an exhausting, meaningless, depressing treadmill. I fell into a deep depression which reached clinical proportions. I did not, nor did any experts around at the time have the archetypal depth psychology background to reveal its meaning and purpose.  

Reacting instinctively, I unconsciously projected a more balanced state into my outer world. I began designing and building my own house symbol of the self in 1974. In retrospect, it was full of archetypal design patterns, built several years before Alexander's books in the Oxford Press series began to appear on the scene in 1977. I came out of my depression immediately as the house project got underway. But the body wasn't going along with the workplace and the psychological symptom was replaced with 'irritable colon syndrome' problems which began during my Guelph teaching years and then intensified. I was not getting the complete picture on all this interdependency between outer and inner landscape, other than to react instinctively with alarm, realizing something was drastically wrong with the contemporary designers' view of the world.  

In teaching we were making sound advances in the 'techne' in environmental design. But I could muster no more energy for hollow esthetics in a superficially mechanical design process that was moving rapidly in the direction of becoming computerized. We knew little of working with the 'arche'. It could not be acquired easily or taught. There were those who were fond of saying it could be learned as technique, "by osmosis", by following the hand of the 'Master', but not everyone seemed to have differentiated the opposites sufficiently to develop a wider conscious standpoint to know what they were doing or talking about. It became apparent that in the profession there were fewer true 'Masters' and more unconscious 'actors'.  

And feelings were considered subjective, irrational and forbidden. At the Master degree level many years ago, any mention of feeling or any similar expression, however 'objectively' couched in a thesis or integrative, 'terminal' project, meant approval would be delayed for months, until all offensive subjective content had been purged and the student had atoned for such display of what was thought to be weakness. Women got the more heavy hand than the men for this and any balancing of the opposites or professional confidence in themselves they had gained was destroyed by this oppressive treatment, until they learned to smile demurely and play the game for that diploma. Playing one's life habitually in this way, as if it were just a little game, draws one into a superficial and potentially disastrous situation of not taking one's life seriously enough, as our Brazilian student colleague, the pediatrician Doctor had explained to me on the way to the hospital in my car, where in a very lucid few moments she reflected and put her life into perspective with suddenly acquired wisdom.  

Unless the educational system awakens to correct its one-sided emphasis on educating abstract thinking at the expense of fully activating the 5 senses, intuition, feeling and an internal, innate value system, one may expect in the current century the number of neuroses, psychoses, suicides and/or untimely deaths from body symptoms may be greatly increased.  

Collectively, the human brain is evolving further in the neocortical areas, leaving an increasing gap between inner developmental imperatives and conventional wisdom.  

We are already seeing this as many of the spiritual impoverishment and other problems which afflicted the earlier generation at mid-life now seem to be happening to younger adults in their 20s. At the same time, growing numbers of people in their 20s and 30s are suffering from memory-loss because of increasing reliance on computer technology and information overload, without access to an internal value system brought into conscious realization, which makes it difficult to distinguish between important and unimportant information.  

Research in Japan is showing one in 10 in the age 20 to 35 category is suffering from a kind of brain dysfunction. "Young people are becoming stupid" appears in newspaper column headings. Experts in Britain and elsewhere are increasingly recognizing the problem. Aging affects the brain's hardware, but errors are occuring in the brain's 'software' which have nothing to do with age, but are more related to lifestyle, where computers, Palm Pilots and various devices are being used as a kind of external memory.  

The Director of the Psychological Services Institute in Atlanta, Georgia agrees, "Many experts believe information overload is making it difficult for some people to absorb new information as they have reached a limit of what they can store in their brains. These people forget things because they become too distracted to absorb them in the first place." It affects the young, although apparently without brain damage (unless they are on brain tissue destroying drugs like 'Ecstacy'), as Alzheimers with deterioration afflicts the elderly in increasing numbers where some research suggests it simply may not be genetic but in some measure due to the polluted brain's inability to get rid of 'garbage' (biochemical, according to Dutch Researchers, but perhaps it may be due to psychological garbage and unfinished business as well).  

From a Jungian perspective on the typology of psychological functions for how people relate to the world, what is happening is many young people are not only losing their ability to think, they have already become 'senseless', not adequately being grounded in their 5 senses or centered within the body, in feeling. Italians in Piemonte observing younger members of a student group in landscape design in Fall Semester 2006 remarked many lacked common sense on practical maters entirely. Students everywhere are being thrown by the system right off the top of their heads into extroverted intuition as a coping mechanism. But this too is ungrounded as their minds fly off in all sorts of directions completely missing the mark, and students sometimes 'space out' abandoning educational responsibilities entirely. Later on many are being fired or forced to give up their jobs when they find themselves forgetting where they are going, who they are supposed to be seeing, or when they finally get there, what they are supposed to be selling, and etc.  

In Japan over the last several decades, and more recently in England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and America, sandplay has been increasing in popularity as an effective earth-based therapy to ground and rebalance the psyche in school children, and adults, who are under such pressure to perform that, in increasing numbers, they are unable to stay focussed on their studies or work. They are blocking and/or becoming depressed, or sick with one physical symptom or another, ultimately having to drop out of school for one or more years or to quit their jobs.  

Increasingly, the American solution to discovered errors and ommissions in any area has been lawsuits. Addicted to conventional wisdom the education system slumbers to the brink, approaching a turning point preceeding nature's solution, a possible series of economic recessions which nobody wants, but may be triggered by a compensatory process in the collective psyche. There may be a meaningful or teleological purpose in slowing everything down. On the positive side, this would provide people with some time and space for simpler life and more grounded reflection and contemplation. It would allow time and space for new contents to emerge from the collective psyche, thus avoiding something more serious like a 'Fall' into darkness in both inner and outer world depression, where finding 'light' in the darkness of terrorist eruptions and even possible disasters from natural environmental forces may be particularly painful to the individual and society. The above was written several years before the outbreak of avian influenza, the terrible tsunamis in South-East Asia, and the hurricanes that so heavily impacted the Gulf Coast of the USA.  

Weaving feeling into the tapestry of science infuses it with caring and changes our priorities and definitions about "progress" and what makes good science.

Linda Jean Shephard

Universities and education may be in for some major changes. I recall attending a lecture by a depth psychologist from the University of Chicago in the early 1980's, who referred to the 'head trips' and witch hunts against intuition and feeling prevalent in the modern university, comparable on a scale within society in his opinion making "the modern university: truely that last bastion of dark, shadowy medieval man."  

From the symbolic standpoint of primordial motifs, aspects of the goddess, of the receptive and nourishing feminine principle in the sheltering Great Earth Mother may be lacking or poorly represented in modern built environments.  

Patterns carrying the feminine nourish the soul, grounding and evoking spirit and intellect, and everything in us that strives upward -- conscience, ideals, altruism and humanism -- with feelings of love, sympathy, empathy and compassion. But 'high stands on low' (Lao tzu), and there is conscious 'light' only when we recognize our own negative or dark, as well as the positive (light) aspects of shadow. When the artist or designer is unaware of unconscious darker shadow aspects which may be dictating design there is no truly animated spirit involved in the work, only a persona or 'false self'. The roots must be in the ground. One part of the personality must be rooted, connected with a firm deep foundation in the feminine, in the passive and receptive principle, to access creativity from origins and the greater wisdom of the unconscious, from one's inner awareness and knowledge gained from personal as well as the collective human experience of life. Its a foothold for the logos -- the active masculine principle that also works with the tree of library knowledge -- so that feeling and intellect can work things through together.  

But why need there be an initiation at all? Perhaps it is because men know it but cannot experience it, whereas women experience it but cannot know it. Each must learn to acquire the capacity for experience and for being conscious of the experience simultaneously. Only initiation as a rite of passage in some form can accomplish this.

Joseph Henderson

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