Title
Rand, E: Geometry and Individuation in Times of Crisis: The Mandala and the Indigo Dye Vat: A Love Story
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Conference Proceeding
Repository Citation
Rand, E. (2022). Rand, E: Geometry and Individuation in Times of Crisis: The Mandala and the Indigo Dye Vat: A Love Story. Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/phenomenology-iajs/36
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Abstract:
From the eleventh year his life, Carl Jung declared that it had been “permeated and held together by one idea and one goal: namely, to penetrate into the secret of the personality,” that central point, a living substance, from which everything can be explained. All his later works relate to this one theme (MDR, p. 206). The Red Book was the result of Jung’s intense preoccupation with his own images from the unconscious—particularly through the First World War (1914–1918). By the middle of the Second World War (January 1943), he cautiously suggested that, because of the remarkable agreement between the insights of yoga and the results of psychological research, he decided, correlatively, to call this deeper layer of unity by the Sanskrit term ‘Mandala,’ “a geometric structure raying out from a centre.” The dreams and reflections of physicist Wolfgang Pauli became enormously influential for Jung’s exposition. In critical post-Second World War, autumn 1945, he announced the birth of something ‘quite new’ with the denarius of the Axiom of Maria (a cosmology of qualitative and primary number and geometry, the tetractys) expanded by Alexandrian Euclid. Jung references Dorn’s alchemical text (that accompanied him to India 1937–1938) and the small but pithy recommended self-examination suggested by the Arab Gnostic, Monoimus.
Cambray’s reflection on two of Jung’s early dreams (1894) of radiolarian ‘oneness’ nestled in the world of Nature and her ubiquitous patterns, Wolfgang Pauli’s suggestion to Jung that Euclid’s Geometry could act as a “receptacle or wet nurse” for what the “unknown woman” wanted to reveal (1953), Cambray’s reflections on Jung’s late in life “multi-dimensional geometric imaginings” (1959), and my own twelve-year engagement with primary–qualitative number and Euclidian geometry all underscore Hogenson’s suggestion of the need for “research into the geometry of individuation,” even fractal cosmologies.
Maria’s anciently rooted geometric Tetractys, the “most pregnant expression of alchemy” (CW12, §26), reveals a world-embedded yet emergent, human and non-human “selfobject”—“a psychic organizer,” even “a state of transition” (Mills’s descriptors, 2019), thread to the long-lost Gnostic Wisdom and earth jurisprudence of Sophia. Its neutral and healing ‘language,’ both personal and expansive, can manifest spontaneously during urgent traumatic disruption and chaotic seas, potentially enhancing wonder, courage, and a navigational sextant.
Presenter Bio:
Evangeline M. L. Rand, Ph.D., has practiced as a Registered Psychologist (Canada), first at the Child Development Centre, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, subsequently starting the Child Sexual Abuse Program. For twenty years she served with an ecumenical and trans-disciplinary faculty of the Doctor of Ministry Program, of Edmonton’s St. Stephen’s Theological College. She was chair in 2005. She is currently adjunct faculty in the Master of Counselling Psychology: Art Therapy program of Adler University, Vancouver. Dr. Rand still currently maintains a private practice. Before her career change in 1981, she was an early childhood educator.
Dr. Rand was born (1943) and raised in India, completed undergraduate studies at Goldsmiths College (London, England), and her graduate studies were through the University of Alberta (Canada) (M.Ed.) and International College, California (U.S.A.) (Ph.D.). She has published three books: Recovery from Incest: Imagination and the Healing Process; Recovering Feminine Spirituality: The Mysteries and the Mass as Symbols of Individuation; and A Jasmine Journey: Carl Jung’s Travel to India and Ceylon (1937–1938).