Let It Rain, Undiscovered Self

Even after a relatively restful Sunday, I got up Monday morning feeling like a truck ran over me. Not sure if it was a bug, fatigue, or just age catching up with me. Amy and the kids made a meat delivery to Knoxville Monday afternoon, so we got coolers filled after chores that morning. While they were gone, I moved a couple groups of cows and did some barnyard mowing. 

Amy and the kids made it back safely Tuesday afternoon. We caught over 250 chickens from the shelters in the field for Wednesday’s harvest. Usually when we empty out shelters, we also fill them back up with chicks from the brooder. However, with heavy rain forecasts, we opted to leave the chicks in the brooder a few more days. Our shelters provide access to both sunshine and shade, but sometimes the chicks don’t have enough sense to get out of the rain and under the shelter, so we thought they’d fare better in the brooder til the weather passes. That also meant a few days of less chicken shelters to move which is fine by me. 

On Wednesday we had our smallest processing crew of the season, but it still took only two hours to get over 250 birds killed and on ice. We had them packaged and in the freezers by around 3:30 that afternoon. It rained on and off (mostly on) all day which was fine by me. In my ideal world, processing days and Sundays are the best days for it to rain. This week we were blessed with heavy rains on both. 

Yesterday, aside from the norm, I hauled hay bales off the field while Amy devoted her “office day” to catching up on the admin side of the farm. With my mom content keeping the kids, Amy and I quit early to enjoy one of the several date nights I owe her. Of course a stop for ice cream on the way home to make it official. 

Mowing and moving hay I started listening to UNDISCOVERED SELF written by Swiss author C.G. Jung in the 1950s. I’ve listened to many of Jung’s writings, a lot of which I can’t understand what he’s saying or even figure out the point that he’s trying to make. However, this one so far has been easier to follow, especially given that both the tractor and the book are requesting my attention. Here’s a few quotes. (Amy said these are the worst, most boring quotes I’ve ever used). Ha

“The moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the state… Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have public welfare and the raising of the living standard. The goal and meaning of individual life, which is the only real life, no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the state which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself. The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life and instead is ruled, fed, clothed, and educated as a social unit.”

“Then the individual is bound to be a function of statistics and hence, a function of the state or whatever the abstract principle of order may be called. The religions, however, teach another authority opposed to that of the world. The doctrine of the individual’s dependance on God makes just as high a claim upon him as the world does. It may even happen that the absoluteness of this claim estranges him from the world in the same way he is estranged from himself when he succumbs to the collective mentality.”

“The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this, he needs the evidence of inner transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass.”

“I can therefore see it only as an delusion when the churches try, as they apparently do, to rope the individual into a social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility instead of raising him out of the torpid mindless mass and making clear to him that he is the one important factor and that the salvation of of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul.” 

“In the clamor of the many, there lies the power to snatch wish fulfillments by force… The infantile dream state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never thinks to ask, ‘Who is paying for this paradise?’ The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased, and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes. Wherever social conditions of this type develop on a large scale, the road to tyranny lies open, and the freedom of the individual turns into spiritual and physical slavery.”

“It is time we asked ourselves exactly what we are lumping together in mass organizations and what constitutes the nature of the individual human being, ie, of the real man and not the statistical man.” 

Have a good week.

Will