Of Virgins, Brothels and Understanding

 

“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.”
— Carl Jung

 

Can a virgin ever understand a brothel? He can come to know how the business works I suppose. He (or she) could come to understand the clientele, how the bookkeeping works, who has to be paid off and when and even know the workers by name. But to understand viscerally what really goes on, one has to plunge right in and experience the needs that are met and the physicality of the act involved.
Academia can be pretty dry. On the one hand a university education can teach and encourage critical thinking. On the other hand it can encourage a constant dissection of ideas without a visceral feel for whatever is being studied. It is easy to become so involved in critiquing the form an argument takes that the point of it gets lost. Analyzed and examined but not understood much like our poor virgin.
Sometimes the only way to fully understand an idea is to inhabit it and see how it fits. Otherwise we remain on the outside looking in and critiquing without getting the full gist.
<Blessings, G

 

Click on images to see full-sized:

 

Emotion of the ShadowEmotion of the Shadow by G A Rosenberg

 

Lighting the WayLighting the Way (Blue Yods) by G A Rosenberg