So begins the first of seven sermons delivered by Carl Jung during his early days of inner exploration. What a powerful statement regarding traditional Western religious practices - an often passive collection of systems that often demands complacency and submission in place of active participation and exploration. This has long been my complaint: dogma is valued over individual experience.

Author and gnostic scholar Stephan A. Hoeller takes great strides in translating and interpreting the sermons, allowing the American reader to clearly see the psychologist’s central belief: the psyche needs to know about the spirit - about itself, not just hope or be told.

It would be a foolish task for me to attempt to summarize the seven sermons or Hoeller’s interpretations. I can only recommend that if any of the above resonates, you dig in and find out for yourself.

Under the pressure of this many-fronted assault, I have come to understand the distance between naturalists, who gaze benignly on all of nature’s operations, and the experienced gardener, who perforce has developed a somewhat less sentimental view. Particularly toward woodchucks. I am not ready to see them banished from the planet altogether – they must have some ecological purpose – but I seriously doubt that news of some form of woodchuck megadeath in this part of the country would put me in an elegiac frame of mind.

But in giving up my romantic views of the local fauna, I may have gone overboard in the opposite direction. I tried everything I could think of to eliminate my woodchuck problem, in an escalating series of measures William Westmoreland would have understood. I started with elaborate campaigns of behavior modification – my send-in-a-few-advisers phase, in which I confidently deployed the accumulated wisdom of Western civilization. I had done my reading and learned that woodchucks can’t stand getting their fur dirty. Thinking I had located my adversary’s Achilles’ heel, I introduced a few choice items into his tunnel: a dozen eggs, smashed and dribbled down its side; a jar of molasses; half a can of motor oil; a dead field mouse. And, lastly, a quart of creosote, vile stuff so sticky he’d need his fur steam-cleaned.

When this didn’t work – evidently, my woodchuck lacked his species’ Felix Unger gene – I found myself attracted to less cerebral approaches. It’s astonishing, actually, how much anger an animal’s infiltration of your garden can incite. I would not, after all, go hungry as a result of his depredations. No, this was no longer about any cool calculations of self-interest. This was about winning.

A rifle was out of the question; I’ve always been afraid of guns, and have never owned one. But I came up with something equally unsentimental: I found a somewhat flattened woodchuck along the highway, scooped it into a crate and brought it home. I hacked the corpse into several pieces and jammed them into the burrow. This amounted to terrorism, I admit. But either he did not get it, or he did not care, because in two days’ time he had dug a detour around the corpse and the pillaging resumed.

Next, I decided to incinerate the woodchuck in his burrow. I poured maybe a gallon of gasoline down his tunnel, waited a few minutes for it to fan out along the various passageways, and struck a match.

Evidently, there was not enough oxygen down there, because the flames shot in the wrong direction – up, toward my face. I leapt back before I was singed too badly, and watched a black-orange fountain of flame flare up toward an olive tree. I managed to smother the fire with earth before the entire garden went up. I guess this was my destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it phase.