Cruises, Birthdays, and Dreams

Dear friends, Last night we returned home from a two-week birthday cruise that took us from Lisbon to Barcelona by way of the Gibraltar Strait and up Spain’s east coast to Barcelona. It was an amazing journey with lots of new places and adventures, including a tour through the Dracht’s (Dragon’s) caves, and a camel […]

Living and Learning To Love

After writing two posts a week for years, then one post a week, and now even less, the time has come to give more time to other needs and interests. For those of you who’ve wondered about the title of this blog, “Matrignosis”, it means “Mother Knowing.” You won’t find it in any dictionary.  I […]

The Power of Inner Work: Three Questions

“We have all experienced the destructive effects of the projections onto the feminine in Western societies. These projections trace their origins to the joining of the patriarchy with institutionalized monotheism. The patriarchy grew out of the middle ages into the Age of Reason, and this movement birthed a cultural mentality that became rational, verbal, and […]

My Season of Surrender

“Rebellious leaves going out in a blaze of glory, setting trees aflame in riotous color. Reluctant surrender to rumors of coming winter.” ~John Mark Green “Dreams and myths take us into the dark world of our personal and cultural unconscious, where the roots of the continuing oppression and the spiritual imprisonment of lives lie. If […]

Ego and God-Image: Part IX

“The crux of the matter is man’s own dualism, to which he knows no answer. This abyss has suddenly yawned open before him with the latest events in world history, after mankind lived for many centuries in the comfortable belief that a unitary God had created man in his own image, as a little unity. […]

Ego and God-Image: Part VIII

“Anything conscious can be corrected. But anything that slips away into the unconscious is beyond the reach of correction and, its rank growth undisturbed, is subject to increasing degeneration. Happily, nature sees to it that the unconscious contents will irrupt into consciousness sooner or later and create the necessary confusion.” C.G. Jung, Mysterium Conjunctions, CW […]

Ego and God-Image: Part VII

Intellectually the Self is no more than a psychological concept, a construct that serves to express an unknowable essence which we cannot grasp as such, since by definition it transcends our power of comprehension, It might equally well be called the “God within us.” The beginnings of our whole psychic life seem to be inextricably […]

Ego and God-Image: Part IV

[T]he individual who wishes to have an answer to the problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremost of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of his own wholeness. He must know relentlessly how much good he can do, and what crimes he is capable of, and must beware […]

Ego and God-Image: Part III

In the history of humankind the differentiation of man and woman belongs among the earliest and most impressive projections of opposites, and early humankind took the male and the female as the prototype of opposites in general.  Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness So far in this series I’ve written about three qualities […]

The Extraordinary Gift of a Longer Life

“Life behaves as if it were going on, and so I think it is better for an old person to live on, to look forward to the next day, as if he had to spend centuries, and then he lives properly. But when he is afraid, when he doesn’t look forward, he looks back, he […]