Sometimes it's good to be a sheep

More stuff coming up about the puella and... drumroll please... my "romance" with G is a part of it. As are my work issues... it's the whole trifecta enchilada of my current concerns! It's not surprising but it is pretty cool when things come together this way. For a while I've been working mostly on these areas and, although there was a sense of them being connected, that connection has been just made clear.

I was re-reading von Franz's Puer Aeternus (expect more stuff on this book) and came across the following:

It is the sheep mentality, the crowd-man, which drives them into military service, but this collective adaptation can be - and is sometimes temporarily - a help to pull away... it is the moment to pull away from the mother.

You can say that all kinds of very humble, unindividualistic, collective adaptations help against the mother complex; namely, as I mentioned before, doing one's work, going to military service, trying to behave like everybody else, not having that kind of fancied invdividuality which is typical for the mother-complex man - and giving up the idea of being somebody special, someone who does not need to make all such low kinds of adaptations - for that is a poison of the mother complex. Therefore, to give that up and to accept being just somebody or nobody, in the crowd, is to a certain extent a cure, although only a temporary one and not the whole cure. Still, it is the first step in pulling away from the mother.

I read this just today, after asking the I-ching if I would ever have a love relationship last night and getting the following in the reading reading:

One light line is in the place of the Queen, the other her minister. These two gather all of the dark principle together. "Crowd" and "joyousness" indicate the basis of the gathering together, and the two nuclear trigrams "standing still" and "exerting influence" also indicate gathering together.

Only collective moral force can unite the world - such times will leave great achievements behind. This is the significance of the great offerings that are made: there is a need for great deeds in the time of gathering together.

The mass is devoted and at the same time joyous. In order to gather people together, the ruler needs joyousness, and the people devotion.

When I first threw the reading I had no idea what the significance of "crowd" was. Then I read the part in von Franz about the importance of being like a sheep, or a "crowd person" was to pull away from the mother complex, the feeling of being special which is actually so common and actually not special at all, just a part of the puella neurosis. And of course what's going on here at work immediately came up - I've always felt separate from all the other "peons" who took this job as a career or something silly like that. But not me, I'm too special! I have a special destiny! Not like all the rest of my co-workers... except for the cool ones, like the musicians and writers who were just doing this to pay the rent. Those people I could identify with, but not the regular 9-5ers.

Well, apparently I need to be a peon!

It's just this kind of "I'm too special to effing live" attitude that has to go. Von Franz goes on to say that you can't stay in the sheep mentality, but by giving up the false, neurotic idea of "specialness," and being carried away by the current of the group, the puella grows beyond that neurosis.

Looking back at hexagram 45, I'd have to say that being a 100% enthusiastic member of the crowd - taking my grubby, earthbound work seriously and being conscientious about it - along with working joyfully, is what I have to do now. That and devotion; devotion to my job, to my position in society, my family and my job. Devotion to doing my job, all my jobs, well; to not be sullen and resentful at having to crawl around in the dirt but to have an attitude of comradeship with my fellow dirt crawlers, to enthusiastically crawl around in the dirt to the very best of my ability. It's only by crawling around in the dirt that we puellas can fulfil the command of Heaven... that is, to fully come down into the Earth and to finally fully live our lives.