Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

the idea of looking for a deeper, more meaningful way of living.

It is an inner force which guides us, expressed through a symbolic life which connects us with the transpersonal, with whatever it is that we imagine to be beyond us: the Divine, the creative power of the universe, the sacred.

Jung believed there is a dimension of the psyche beyond the ego (the conscious personality) which is the source of spiritual experiences; he called this the “self.”

“Of all those who ever consulted me who were in the second half of life,” he wrote, “no one was ever cured who did not achieve a spiritual outlook on life.”31

then, gives us the opportunity to rediscover the parts of ourselves that we’ve buried, to find the path we have lost.

overculture

In his writings, he repeatedly lamented the loss of the spiritual — what he called numinosity — in the modern world.

The Otherworld, which we might also call the “imaginal world,”* and which has sometimes been conflated with the anima mundi, the world soul,28 is always in some sense the place beyond the veil. Not to know it (those older and infinitely wiser traditions tell us) is to be cut off from the source,

Hildegard of Bingen, then, displays a critical quality of the archetypal Medial Woman in the European tradition: she might be a mystic, but she is still fully present in the world. She doesn’t eschew the physical for the transcendental — instead, she is profoundly connected with nature.