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Twilight Rating: 7 on a scale of 10 Review Recently, my staff has been quite enthralled reading the Twilight series. I would hear them discussing the books in quite passionate conversation. I was coming up on a vacation when I asked them about the books. They assured me I needed to read at least the first book. They were sure I would find it interesting. I read Twilight and I have to say I found it fascinating. Yes, it is a book about vampires. Vampires are mythical creatures common to our modern culture via movies and books. Ms. Meyer has taken the genre and given it some definite new twists. This book is written from the perspective of "Bella", a high school age woman who has moved back to live with her father in Forks, Washington, after living with her mother in Phoenix Arizona. As she develops her new social network and gets to know her father she becomes aware of a fellow at school that truly fascinates her. As you would expect, he turns out to be a vampire. The book is about their relationship. I have noticed that it is mostly women who find these books fascinating. At some level you could say this book is just a romance story. However, I believe that would be a rather shallow and superficial consideration of the book. From a Jungian psychological standpoint this book is about a young woman and her relationship to her "animus". Edward, the vampire, would be her animus. The female animus symbol is the male equivalent of the anima. We are generally more familiar with the anima as the world seems filled with images of the anima's of men. Carl Jung wrote a great deal about the anima of men, and as some would say, "He should know". The anima is that energy which "animates" a man. At one level it seems to be of the world, the present "love goddesses" of our age. But, the true anima is not of this world. The true anima is a spiritual entity that provides a connection to the world of God and the spiritual realm. The anima represents a very high level of energy. The anima is basically a spiritual connection which gives men energy, purpose, and drive. Unfortunately, men try to bring the anima into the "world" and project it onto women, demanding of them that they be this spiritual energy. This does not work very well and creates many problems for both sexes. It leads to many perverse consequences when you try to take spiritual energy and create real worldly things from it of the wrong form. There are ways to do this successfully, but often men are unaware of how to work with such energy. The female animus is quite similar. It is a spiritual connection to God and the realms beyond the physical world. It is a source of energy, drive and purpose for women. The male anima is often highly sexualized when brought into the world in a projected form. Similarly, the female animus can have a highly sexualized character when projected onto the men of this physcial world. This energy is necessary to support the woman with inner spiritual energy. If Edward were to completely "take in" Bella using his vampire abilities, he would destroy the very essence of what he loves about her. If Bella were to let herself be taken by Edward completely she would lose the essence of who she was. This exemplifies the spiritual dilemma and reality that we all face. If we were to acquire complete union with God we would lose ourselves in God and we as an individual would cease to be. At some level we all wish we would have an experience where we were lost in God, but such an experience in its complete form would be the loss of ourselves, which is not really what we desire. We exist in relation to God just like Bella to Edward. We can know God, adore and desire God's presence always in our conscious awareness, but we will ever remain creations of God and separate to a degree. This fits precisely why we are in such need of fellowship. We welcome God, we desire God's closeness, but like the vampire, to be to close would be destructive. At first blush, this all may seem like a bit strange and a rather bizarre way to look at this book, but let me explain. It is clear that Bella's vampire boyfriend, Edward, represents a classic animus figure. She is drawn to him in a powerful way. He wants her but cannot have her. She wants him but cannot have him. This is the way it is with the anima and animus. It is a powerful sexual sort of energy, an energy that wants to join two beings together in union, but we never really get to consummate the relationship sexually. It is as I remember the romantic music of Tchiakovsky explained to me years ago in a Fine Arts class. The music would take you to the brink of something, to a near musical "orgasm", but then it never quite completed the deed, leaving one wanting more somehow. This is in some fashion how we relate to God. We can learn and experience more and more of God, but we never get to truly possess God. God is never hours to contain or encompass completely. There is always more to unfold, more to learn about, there is union but never complete satisfaction. As soon as we think or feel we have known God, God becomes bigger, more unreachable and there is a need to expand the heart and mind further to comprehend what we did not know or feel. This can be understood as what I describe as the experience of "the other". We experience two "major" forms of "the other", but there are many. The first is our spouse and the second is God. How we work out these two relationships greatly influences our satisfaction with life and our ability to develop and grow over the span of our lives. "The other" is in truth much broader and prevalent in the world. The other is basically anyone who differs from us in our preferred personality type. It may not seem so obvious, but if we had the same preferences except for me having a preference for "thinking" based decision making values and you preferred "feeling" based decision making values, we would find each other to be remarkably different. As it turns out we often marry someone who is different than us in terms of psychological type preferences. Often we marry someone who is or is very nearly our complete opposite. This makes life rather complicated in many ways. God on the other hand actually transcends type preferences. God is both just like us and completely opposite to us. The interesting part is that God is perfectly comfortable and balanced in regard to these differing preferences. We on the other hand are not so comfortable with the differences. It is very challenging for us to understand God as God's character that is opposite to us. We are not real fond of doing this. In truth, we resist knowing the other rather vigorously. Our experience is much like marriage. We start off wildly in love with this person who has preferences which are in fact complementary to our own. Then we begin to notice the little chinks in the armor of our beloved. Slowly, gradually our beloved begins to be less perfect. We begin to notice how they seem to have flaws. The very things we are best at they are not good at, and after awhile it becomes bothersome and then obnoxious, followed closely by unacceptable. It is about this time that the work of marriage begins. The same happens with God in a slightly different form. We love God in a similar way. We love how God complements us. God transcends type, God has all the abilities we lack. At first this seems wondrous. Then we begin to feel small and incapable in the face of God's abilities. If we could only be more like God, but then, being more like God is being something we are very poor at, and we begin turn away, we begin to ignore God. We begin to fear what we are not. And then we begin to project it onto the world. How do we become complete, how do we acquire the the full image of God intended for us? This is a difficult task, the task of mid-life. And that is another very long discussion I will not attempt to cover here. So, for me, this was a fascinating book. It was steeped in the issues of the life of a young person, the developmental issues of a young person. It was a metaphor of our Spiritual journey. These metaphors become increasingly important to us in this age where we are drifting away from organized religion. I believe one of the reasons we are drifting away is the failure of religion to grasp just these sorts of issues. As a result, we are seeking other places to learn what we need to know. Does this book give the answer? No, not completely, but the metaphor resonates with us inwardly. For those who believe this is poor quality literature, I would encourage them to look much deeper into the symbols being portrayed. For those who wonder why our Spirituality is devolving, we need to become much more honest with ourselves and begin to investigate how the clear Spiritual connections of this seemingly simple romance novel relate to our very nature as humans and Spiritual beings. Read and enjoy this book, but use it to study your inner person more clearly, use it to study your soul connection to God. All opinions are those of Curtis Climer, MD Copyright 2011
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