ARTIST STATEMENT 2017
A Meandering Self-Exploration
Iona Miller, (c)2017
I consider myself an artist, but my medium tends to drift from psychotherapy and healing, to cutting edge science, and bleeding edge art. My interests flow from fine and digital art to writing, to ephemeral and therapeutic acts. Once in a while an angel visits with a brilliant idea which comes through with blissful fluency.
My specialty is in creativity and extraordinary human potential. For good or evil, I am a creative geyser. In past decades I have fallen in love with painting and collage, magick, archetypal and transpersonal psychology, hypnotherapy, metaphor, subquantum physics, consciousness studies, multimedia and chaos theory. But I have always remained faithful to my main interest: the interface of psyche and matter ~ that point where psyche matters. It is in finding meaning and expressing that meaning that we exalt our humanity through our individuation.
We are not struggling with ways to become superhuman (Heroic Journey), but with the ways in which we can become more fully human in a deeply connected more-than-human world. This Journey is represented by the Major Arcana sequence of the Tarot, beginning with the Fool. The journey of life is not always about growth. Rather than a Hero’s Journey, it is (more wisely) known as the Fool’s Journey: the pilgrim soul making its rather more humble way through life. The human journey itself--collectively as well as individually--is unknown, difficult, and improbable.
We step between the worlds and fall into the magic, mystery and wisdom of the unconscious. There are many kinds of archetypal journeys, soulful innerworld journeys, visionary journeys. We can enter the inner drama as a participant. Freedom needs to be internalized as an inner freedom from “demand” itself… that comes when you’re free from those compulsions to have and to own and to be someone.
"There's a long story in every sentence, every word we say has a huge story, every metaphor is full of historical symbolism. Our words carry all of that story that once was so alive and still exists in every human being ." -C.G.Jung, Dream Analysis. Seminar 1928-30
The longing to tell one’s story and the process of telling is symbolically a gesture of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a sense of reunion and a sense of release.” -–Bell Hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work
"Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for 'harmony' and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry." --Aristotle, Poetics
"With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning..."
--T.S. Elliott, "The Little Gidding"
On Self-Knowledge
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.
And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul."
Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself like a lotus of countless petals.
-- Kahlil Gibran
The longing to tell one’s story and the process of telling is symbolically a gesture of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a sense of reunion and a sense of release.” -–Bell Hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work
"Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for 'harmony' and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry." --Aristotle, Poetics
"With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning..."
--T.S. Elliott, "The Little Gidding"
On Self-Knowledge
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.
And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul."
Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself like a lotus of countless petals.
-- Kahlil Gibran
We live through “There's nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth.” -Joseph Campbell.
"A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom."
-Joseph Campbell.
"A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom."
-Joseph Campbell.
SELF EXPLORATION
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
"You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean.
You are not a stranger here." ~ Alan Watts
Common sense self-awareness is about our strength and weakness, abilities and preferences and their implications, and how we impact others. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) claimed, "Humanity's task is to become responsible for its own actions, conscious of the oneness of everybody with its soul."
For example, former astrophysicist, Giuliana Conforto has applied Bruno's ancient Art of Memory to recall human origins. Thus, we “see” within and communicate with the “only Force, which links and gives life to infinite worlds” that Bruno and other sages praise. She proposes an anthropic and astronomical revolution, centered on each being’s direct communication with this Force that actually is universal Life.
Like any Great Work, Jung suggests that the opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part for more coherent organization, but in the second and third parts moral strength takes on a predominant role. Marie-Louis von Franz noted, "Jung's idea was that the goal of evolution on this planet seems to be to create more consciousness."
So, knowledge of the source field is self-knowledge. Consciousness is described as the root of matter, including our own matter. The fundamental state of human consciousness is the ur-ground, primordial awareness. Whether we call it the boundless reality of God, or the pre-spacetime vacuum that gives rise to matter, this Mystery is the quintessence of impenetrable darkness that contains the spark of life.
https://photonichuman.weebly.com/exotic-matter.html
Ervin Laszlo proposed that the quantum vacuum, the field from which the universe is born, is conscious with all the information from the Big Bang to now. Laszlo says the universe as conscious life emerges from the quantum vacuum.
If we are linked to all people who have ever lived, we can access them through the primordial field, assuming the past has never gone away, and informs the present. We can access extraordinary abilities that are completely natural, including plumbing our own depths, experientially.
We can find inspiration in culture-heroes, but ultimately must make our own way through the 'dark forest', like the Grail Knights. Krishnamurti said, "I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect." (The Dissolution of the Order of the Star, 1929). As Einstein remarked, "I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me."
As Baudelaire suggests, symbolism and 'correspondences' help us "Extract the eternal from the ephemeral." Generic symbolic languages such as esoterics, alchemy, and Qabalah help us articulate the phenomenology of inner experience. They help us wake up and grow up.
Our deeply human experience of awe spans from “awful” to the “awesome” and all ambiguous spaces between. including technology, storytelling, the narrative arc, and the evolutionary, even empathetic value of having our minds blown by direct experience of expansive knowledge or gnosis. We can all grasp these ideas conceptually, but experience makes them real. As the Bard says, "We are the stuff that dreams are made on."
All quantum phenomena arise as electromagnetic wave functions from the zero point of vacuum fluctuation. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho suggests what ours is like: "What would our wave function look like? Perhaps it is an intricate supramolecular orbital of multidimensional standing waves of complex quantum amplitudes. It would be rather like a beautiful, exotic flower, flickering in and out of many dimensions simultaneously. That would constitute our quantum holographic self, created from the entanglements of past experiences, the memory of all we have suffered and celebrated, the totality of our anxieties and fears, our hopes and dreams."
She proposes that, "quantum coherence is the basis of living organization and can also account for key features of conscious experience - the 'unity of intentionality', our inner identity of the singular 'I', the simultaneous binding and segmentation of features in the perceptive act, the distributed, holographic nature of memory, and the distinctive quality of each experienced occasion." http://www.i-sis.org.uk/brainde.php
There is much for us to learn about psyche, spirit, mind, life. and earth, or matter.
Fundamental Awareness
Absolute space is the absence of matter, or fundamental, irreducible primordial energy.
But matter is entirely dependent upon nonmaterial primordial energy, the force of resistance to the Higgs field, and cannot exist in the absence of that energy, or vacuum flux. This is the fundamental uncreated, unconditioned primordial foundation of nonmaterial and material physical reality just-as-it-is, described by both mystics and scientists.
Our excursion here into subquantum physics can be brief, but it relates to our deepest self-knowledge and collective quest for knowledge of reality as more than metaphor. Science claims, physicists can't interpret the Higgs boson itself as giving anything mass. But they argue that by interacting with other particles, the Higgs field gives resistance to the particles' motion, which gives them mass.
The vacuum is a pure virtual particle, massless charge flux; a virtual state, timeless spacetime itself. It is a highly dynamic state where everything is disintegrated. It is filled with massless charge, or rather is identical to massless charge (disintegrated dynamicism). It is a plenum, not an emptiness. It is also pure action, undifferentiated.
We now assume some particles face more resistance in the Higgs field so gain more mass while some feel less resistance and end up with lesser mass. Physicists describe light particles such as electrons and neutrinos, traveling through the Higgs field like they are running down the street. But, heavier particles, muon and tau, experience more resistance, as if they were running in a full swimming pool.
A massless particle travelling at the speed of light is slowed down when it interacts with the Higgs field. The field 'drags' on it, like the particle is moving through molasses. In other words, "the energy of the interaction is manifested as a resistance to acceleration."
The Higgs energy field is thought to exist everywhere in the universe. The field is accompanied by a fundamental particle called the Higgs boson, dubbed the God Particle, which the field uses to continuously interact with other particles. We can also speak of it in terms of experience of the deepest human awareness.
The self-arising Ground of Being, as the esoteric core or center, underlies all varieties of spiritual experience. The deepest unconscious is unthought and unthinkable. Because of the obscuration of the light, the very ground of being is felt as death or deprivation and annihilation. This Emptiness is both the groundless ground and goal of evolution. Naked awareness is the goal of all transformative spiritual practices.
Awareness is recognized in natural self-revealing Presence as the original ground of being. Radiant awareness is primordial as the original state, beginningless, endless, uncaused -- the absolute, the now; the primordial isness of reality; the original void; the ground of creation. Awareness is clarity funneled through the imaginary and symbolic grid of meaning into the structured world.
Urgrund precedes being and God. Non-dual Presence is universal Presence that saturates our being. All our experiences are the manifestation of self-existing awareness, the self manifestation of the transcendental primordial ground. Uncreated, unconditioned pure consciousness is egoless and possesses no self-awareness.
All experience is of Being manifesting. The primordial vision of being includes instinctual-intuitive-perception-awareness characteristics with a ground of being that is metaphysical and based on sensing, feeling, seeing, and being real.
But many layers of implicit believing, thinking, knowing, and having ideas form the content of unconscious psyche. The mandate of know thyself is to raise them to consciousness. One of the most fundamental is worldview.
Worldview
"Nevertheless, we are beginning to feel the consequences of this atrophy of the human personality. Everywhere one hears the cry for a Weltanschauung; everyone asks the meaning of life and the world. ...There have been numerous attempts in our time to put the clock back and to indulge in a Weltanschauung of the old style—to wit, theosophy, or, as it is more palatably called, anthroposophy.
But if we do not want to develop backwards, a new Weltanschauung will have to abandon the superstition of its objective validity and admit that it is only a picture which we paint to please our minds, and not a magical name with which we can conjure up real things.
A Weltanschauung is made not for the world, but for ourselves. If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round.
Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments." (Jung, CW 8, Para 737).
Worldview is a belief system (such as scientific or spiritual), a perception of the world through a certain philosophy. A world view is a set of presuppositions or assumptions that we consciously or subconsciously hold about the basic makeup of our world. We all have a worldview, whether we can explain it or not. It can be likened to a pair of glasses through which we view the world. It is important to have the right prescription, or reality will be distorted.
Jung thought "whether we take this tool in hand or not depends on the sort of Weltanschauung we already have. For no one is without a Weltanschauung of some sort. Even in an extreme case, he will at least have the Weltanschauung that education and environment have forced on him."
There was no “Weltanschauung” in the ancient world, everything was projected into space. Man at that time was bound to say: “The world is such and such”, no one could say: “I think such and such about the world ”. We find the first signs of a “Weltanschauung “in the Greek Philosophers.
At the heart of our knowledge and self-knowledge is our worldview or Weltanschauung, our universal frame of nature. This “weltanschauung” is intimately connected to unsettling changes in the outer world, which at a deeper level reflect a shift in archetypal orientation in the depths of the unconscious.
In the wake of these changes and shifts however, there are very few collective symbols that help to contain fear and uncertainty and to provide meaning or direction. As a result, the individual can feel very alone, alienated and without direction, like a boat at sea without a rudder or a compass.
When the outer symbols no longer provide meaning or containment, the challenge for the individual is to undertake an inner journey in order to find orientation and guidance from one’s inner compass. A confrontation with one’s own inner multiplicity can foster a non-judgmental openness to the other, a capacity for acceptance and empathic understanding of the other which, in turn, can lead to genuine care and love, of self and of other. (Kelly)
We are faced with a supermarket of world views; all of them claim to represent reality, but they are points of view about reality -- mental constructs, beliefs. Psyche is more interested in the potential effects of beliefs than doctrines or worldviews. They provide:
Worldview harks back to world conception with its three "domains," with seven or nine skies, one above the other, and with corresponding "underworlds." The "world-pillar" or world axis runs through the center of the whole system, crowned by the "north Nail," or "World Nail" (Polaris). The bond goes back; holding the Universe together is simply the straight axial shaft or a circular band of light, suggested by the Milky Way linking earth and sky.
The concept goes back to the most ancient Near East and the idea of a cosmos. The shaman climbs the "stairs" or notches of his post or world tree, pretending that his soul ascends at the same time to the highest sky. He does the very same thing as the Mesopotamian priest who mounts to the top of his seven-storied pyramid, the ziqqurat, representing the planetary spheres. We experience through our frame of the cosmos by moving through stages of worldviews.
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
"You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean.
You are not a stranger here." ~ Alan Watts
Common sense self-awareness is about our strength and weakness, abilities and preferences and their implications, and how we impact others. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) claimed, "Humanity's task is to become responsible for its own actions, conscious of the oneness of everybody with its soul."
For example, former astrophysicist, Giuliana Conforto has applied Bruno's ancient Art of Memory to recall human origins. Thus, we “see” within and communicate with the “only Force, which links and gives life to infinite worlds” that Bruno and other sages praise. She proposes an anthropic and astronomical revolution, centered on each being’s direct communication with this Force that actually is universal Life.
Like any Great Work, Jung suggests that the opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part for more coherent organization, but in the second and third parts moral strength takes on a predominant role. Marie-Louis von Franz noted, "Jung's idea was that the goal of evolution on this planet seems to be to create more consciousness."
So, knowledge of the source field is self-knowledge. Consciousness is described as the root of matter, including our own matter. The fundamental state of human consciousness is the ur-ground, primordial awareness. Whether we call it the boundless reality of God, or the pre-spacetime vacuum that gives rise to matter, this Mystery is the quintessence of impenetrable darkness that contains the spark of life.
https://photonichuman.weebly.com/exotic-matter.html
Ervin Laszlo proposed that the quantum vacuum, the field from which the universe is born, is conscious with all the information from the Big Bang to now. Laszlo says the universe as conscious life emerges from the quantum vacuum.
If we are linked to all people who have ever lived, we can access them through the primordial field, assuming the past has never gone away, and informs the present. We can access extraordinary abilities that are completely natural, including plumbing our own depths, experientially.
We can find inspiration in culture-heroes, but ultimately must make our own way through the 'dark forest', like the Grail Knights. Krishnamurti said, "I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect." (The Dissolution of the Order of the Star, 1929). As Einstein remarked, "I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me."
As Baudelaire suggests, symbolism and 'correspondences' help us "Extract the eternal from the ephemeral." Generic symbolic languages such as esoterics, alchemy, and Qabalah help us articulate the phenomenology of inner experience. They help us wake up and grow up.
Our deeply human experience of awe spans from “awful” to the “awesome” and all ambiguous spaces between. including technology, storytelling, the narrative arc, and the evolutionary, even empathetic value of having our minds blown by direct experience of expansive knowledge or gnosis. We can all grasp these ideas conceptually, but experience makes them real. As the Bard says, "We are the stuff that dreams are made on."
All quantum phenomena arise as electromagnetic wave functions from the zero point of vacuum fluctuation. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho suggests what ours is like: "What would our wave function look like? Perhaps it is an intricate supramolecular orbital of multidimensional standing waves of complex quantum amplitudes. It would be rather like a beautiful, exotic flower, flickering in and out of many dimensions simultaneously. That would constitute our quantum holographic self, created from the entanglements of past experiences, the memory of all we have suffered and celebrated, the totality of our anxieties and fears, our hopes and dreams."
She proposes that, "quantum coherence is the basis of living organization and can also account for key features of conscious experience - the 'unity of intentionality', our inner identity of the singular 'I', the simultaneous binding and segmentation of features in the perceptive act, the distributed, holographic nature of memory, and the distinctive quality of each experienced occasion." http://www.i-sis.org.uk/brainde.php
There is much for us to learn about psyche, spirit, mind, life. and earth, or matter.
Fundamental Awareness
Absolute space is the absence of matter, or fundamental, irreducible primordial energy.
But matter is entirely dependent upon nonmaterial primordial energy, the force of resistance to the Higgs field, and cannot exist in the absence of that energy, or vacuum flux. This is the fundamental uncreated, unconditioned primordial foundation of nonmaterial and material physical reality just-as-it-is, described by both mystics and scientists.
Our excursion here into subquantum physics can be brief, but it relates to our deepest self-knowledge and collective quest for knowledge of reality as more than metaphor. Science claims, physicists can't interpret the Higgs boson itself as giving anything mass. But they argue that by interacting with other particles, the Higgs field gives resistance to the particles' motion, which gives them mass.
The vacuum is a pure virtual particle, massless charge flux; a virtual state, timeless spacetime itself. It is a highly dynamic state where everything is disintegrated. It is filled with massless charge, or rather is identical to massless charge (disintegrated dynamicism). It is a plenum, not an emptiness. It is also pure action, undifferentiated.
We now assume some particles face more resistance in the Higgs field so gain more mass while some feel less resistance and end up with lesser mass. Physicists describe light particles such as electrons and neutrinos, traveling through the Higgs field like they are running down the street. But, heavier particles, muon and tau, experience more resistance, as if they were running in a full swimming pool.
A massless particle travelling at the speed of light is slowed down when it interacts with the Higgs field. The field 'drags' on it, like the particle is moving through molasses. In other words, "the energy of the interaction is manifested as a resistance to acceleration."
The Higgs energy field is thought to exist everywhere in the universe. The field is accompanied by a fundamental particle called the Higgs boson, dubbed the God Particle, which the field uses to continuously interact with other particles. We can also speak of it in terms of experience of the deepest human awareness.
The self-arising Ground of Being, as the esoteric core or center, underlies all varieties of spiritual experience. The deepest unconscious is unthought and unthinkable. Because of the obscuration of the light, the very ground of being is felt as death or deprivation and annihilation. This Emptiness is both the groundless ground and goal of evolution. Naked awareness is the goal of all transformative spiritual practices.
Awareness is recognized in natural self-revealing Presence as the original ground of being. Radiant awareness is primordial as the original state, beginningless, endless, uncaused -- the absolute, the now; the primordial isness of reality; the original void; the ground of creation. Awareness is clarity funneled through the imaginary and symbolic grid of meaning into the structured world.
Urgrund precedes being and God. Non-dual Presence is universal Presence that saturates our being. All our experiences are the manifestation of self-existing awareness, the self manifestation of the transcendental primordial ground. Uncreated, unconditioned pure consciousness is egoless and possesses no self-awareness.
All experience is of Being manifesting. The primordial vision of being includes instinctual-intuitive-perception-awareness characteristics with a ground of being that is metaphysical and based on sensing, feeling, seeing, and being real.
But many layers of implicit believing, thinking, knowing, and having ideas form the content of unconscious psyche. The mandate of know thyself is to raise them to consciousness. One of the most fundamental is worldview.
Worldview
"Nevertheless, we are beginning to feel the consequences of this atrophy of the human personality. Everywhere one hears the cry for a Weltanschauung; everyone asks the meaning of life and the world. ...There have been numerous attempts in our time to put the clock back and to indulge in a Weltanschauung of the old style—to wit, theosophy, or, as it is more palatably called, anthroposophy.
But if we do not want to develop backwards, a new Weltanschauung will have to abandon the superstition of its objective validity and admit that it is only a picture which we paint to please our minds, and not a magical name with which we can conjure up real things.
A Weltanschauung is made not for the world, but for ourselves. If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round.
Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments." (Jung, CW 8, Para 737).
Worldview is a belief system (such as scientific or spiritual), a perception of the world through a certain philosophy. A world view is a set of presuppositions or assumptions that we consciously or subconsciously hold about the basic makeup of our world. We all have a worldview, whether we can explain it or not. It can be likened to a pair of glasses through which we view the world. It is important to have the right prescription, or reality will be distorted.
Jung thought "whether we take this tool in hand or not depends on the sort of Weltanschauung we already have. For no one is without a Weltanschauung of some sort. Even in an extreme case, he will at least have the Weltanschauung that education and environment have forced on him."
There was no “Weltanschauung” in the ancient world, everything was projected into space. Man at that time was bound to say: “The world is such and such”, no one could say: “I think such and such about the world ”. We find the first signs of a “Weltanschauung “in the Greek Philosophers.
At the heart of our knowledge and self-knowledge is our worldview or Weltanschauung, our universal frame of nature. This “weltanschauung” is intimately connected to unsettling changes in the outer world, which at a deeper level reflect a shift in archetypal orientation in the depths of the unconscious.
In the wake of these changes and shifts however, there are very few collective symbols that help to contain fear and uncertainty and to provide meaning or direction. As a result, the individual can feel very alone, alienated and without direction, like a boat at sea without a rudder or a compass.
When the outer symbols no longer provide meaning or containment, the challenge for the individual is to undertake an inner journey in order to find orientation and guidance from one’s inner compass. A confrontation with one’s own inner multiplicity can foster a non-judgmental openness to the other, a capacity for acceptance and empathic understanding of the other which, in turn, can lead to genuine care and love, of self and of other. (Kelly)
We are faced with a supermarket of world views; all of them claim to represent reality, but they are points of view about reality -- mental constructs, beliefs. Psyche is more interested in the potential effects of beliefs than doctrines or worldviews. They provide:
- An explanation of the world
- A futurology, answering the question "Where are we heading?"
- Values, answers to ethical questions: "What should we do?"
- A praxeology, or methodology, or theory of action: "How should we attain our goals?"
- An epistemology, or theory of knowledge: "What is true and false?"
- An etiology. A constructed world-view should contain an account of its own "building blocks," its origins and construction.
Worldview harks back to world conception with its three "domains," with seven or nine skies, one above the other, and with corresponding "underworlds." The "world-pillar" or world axis runs through the center of the whole system, crowned by the "north Nail," or "World Nail" (Polaris). The bond goes back; holding the Universe together is simply the straight axial shaft or a circular band of light, suggested by the Milky Way linking earth and sky.
The concept goes back to the most ancient Near East and the idea of a cosmos. The shaman climbs the "stairs" or notches of his post or world tree, pretending that his soul ascends at the same time to the highest sky. He does the very same thing as the Mesopotamian priest who mounts to the top of his seven-storied pyramid, the ziqqurat, representing the planetary spheres. We experience through our frame of the cosmos by moving through stages of worldviews.
https://zoe-s-wiki.wikispaces.com/file/view/strategic+planning.pdf
EVOLUTION OF BELIEF PARADIGMS
Stage 1: Archaic: Survival, the Ground Zero of Existence. Self-preservation, isolation; antisocial. Paranoid or idiosyncratic beliefs.
Stage 2: Tribal: Truster/Trickster. Social; love, belonging. Self-sacrifice vs. selfishness. Transgression; taboo. Ethnocentric magical and superstitious beliefs.
Stage 3: Egocentric: Power; Esteem; Autonomy, heroic. Unscrupulous Competition/Hero. Shame vs. honor. Exploitation vs. Respect. Mythic beliefs.
Stage4: Moral/Patriotic. Rules; Initiative. Shame and guilt vs. conformity and conventionality; purpose, virtue. Systematized truths. Emotional, nostalgic beliefs.
Stage 5: Materialist. Reasoning; mental analysis. Rational beliefs, truth; goodness; consumerism, greed. Head vs. heart. Progressive if rewarded, compulsive, workaholic. Perspective. Rational beliefs.
Stage 6: Wise Empath. Service, rapport, intimacy, empathy. Politically correct.. Inner wisdom, meaning. Self-actualization. Intuitive, mystical beliefs.
Stage 7: Distancer/Self. Paradoxical; individuated, reclusive; universalist. Deconstruction and Synthesis, gestalt, the big picture. Integral, synergetic beliefs.
Stage 8: Global Village. Complex Dynamic Beliefs. Post-Metaphysical Integrative Spirituality. “Express Self Now, but not at the expense of Others or the World, so that Life May Continue.” Integrative Sustainable beliefs.Models of collective history and psychological perspectives on society effect our worldview. The collective psyche of many groups has been brutalized. We need new models of collaboration and conflict resolution at the individual and collective level.
The levels of the evolutionary spiral, from the bottom to the top, are identified are below:
1. Help me (Basic survival): This level focuses on nature and basic survival instincts. Results in loose clan based survival groups and is rarely found today.
2. Tribal we (Collective survival): This level is tribal in organization and spiritual in outlook. Blood bonds are strong as is respect for clan rules, allegiances and leaders.
3. Gratify me (Immediate wants): Exploitative, rough and harsh – this level is characterized by rugged authoritarianism, and is expressed in slavery or virtual slavery, exploitation of unskilled labor. It is currently found in street life and gangs in many cities.
4. Righteous we (Stable authority): This level is purposeful and patriotic and leads people to obey authority, feel guilty when not conforming to group norms and try to serve the greater good through self-sacrifice.
5. Competitive me (Material success): Entrepreneurial, with a focus on personal success – at this level, each person rationally calculates what is to their personal advantage. Motivations are largely economic.
6. Holistic us (Global harmony): The focus of this level is community and personal growth, equality and attention to environmental concerns. Work is motivated less by economic concerns than human contact, contribution and learning from others.
7. Interdependent me (Sustainable world): Those working at this level are motivated by learning for its own sake and are oriented towards integration of complex systems. Change and challenge are welcome parts of life. This level is characterized by systems thinking and an orientation to how parts interact to create a greater whole.
8. Spiritual we (Collective Renewal): Holistic, experiential and transpersonal – work at this level must be meaningful to overall health and life. Feelings and information are experienced together and enrich both. (Graves/Wade https://zoe-s-wiki.wikispaces.com/file/view/strategic+planning.pdf )
Additionally, it is a cultural mindset, a personal metaphysics, a framework of ideas and beliefs forming a global description through which an individual, group or culture watches and interprets the world and interacts with it. It is our cultural foundation.
Our epistemology is what we believe about knowledge and knowing: their nature, basis, and validation. Maybe you believe that your knowledge is a localized manifestation of the contents of a Cosmic Mind. You may feel that you can claim access to real truth, perhaps directly through revelation, and that your actions can be grounded in fundamental reality.
Bucking the present trend of relativistic thinking, you might consider value to be a concrete property of the elements of the universe. All such definitions are problematic and it may be simpler (and perhaps more correct) to believe that value is a primitive, indefinable term that every thinking person understands without explanation.
There is no test of certainty and truth. Your cosmology consists of your beliefs about the origin of the universe, of life, and particularly, of humanity. Your teleology is your beliefs about purpose. Your theology is comprised of your beliefs about God.
What is our place in the universe? We may be an infinitesimally, insignificant part of the universe or a key step in the progress of evolution towards new and better beings. We may be merely a part of earth's global ecosystem or a steward responsible for the well-being of the lower organisms and the inanimate elements.
Perhaps we would go so far as to say that our unique place in the universe is as a moral agent, to think and act in such a way as to realize the good. Axiology is our beliefs about the nature of value and what is valuable: what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong. Virtually all elements of our worldview, from your epistemology to our anthropology, are intimately related to your axiology. It is our beliefs about the value of things that are the proximate cause for most of our behavior.
What is the difference between knowledge and faith? What we believe about knowledge, affects what we accept as valid evidence and therefore what we are willing to believe about particulars. It affects the relative significance we ascribe to authority, empirical evidence, reason, intuition, and revelation. It affects how certain we can be about any knowledge and therefore what risks we will take in acting on that knowledge.
Our worldview may not be explicit. In fact few people take the time to thoroughly think out, much less articulate, their worldview. Our worldview is implicit in and can be at least partially inferred from our behavior. The elements of your worldview are highly interrelated; it is almost impossible to speak of one element independently of the others.
Speech maintains worldviews. Worldviews are not prisons which contain and constrain us. They are the spaces we develop within, create and resist creatively in speaking together. Becoming conscious of our worldview is a vital part of the process of self-knowledge.
Worldview can be expressed as the fundamental cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things, and which they use to order their lives. They underlie religions and ethics, a framework for generating various dimensions of human perception and experience like knowledge, politics, economics, religion, culture, science and ethics.
And why do we crave order? Death. Worldview threat. Our death thoughts increase after worldview threat. According to terror management theory (TMT), it as a buffer against death anxiety.
Living up to the ideals of our worldview provides a sense of self-esteem which provides a sense of transcending the limits of human life (e.g. literally, as in religious belief in immortality, symbolically, as in art works, or children to live on after one's death, or in contributions to one's culture). It remains a set of presuppositions we hold about the makeup of our world, the context of our world.
The sensing, thinking, knowing, acting self exists in the milieu of a world (more accurately, a universe) of matter, energy, information and other sensing, thinking, knowing, acting selves . At the heart of our knowledge is our worldview or Weltanschauung.
A worldview is the set of beliefs about fundamental aspects of Reality that ground and influence all one's perceiving, thinking, knowing, and doing. Your worldview is the set of beliefs about fundamental aspects of Reality that ground and influence all your perceiving, thinking, knowing, and doing. Your worldview consists of your epistemology, your metaphysics, your cosmology, your teleology, your theology, your anthropology, and your axiology.
Our worldview is also referred to as our philosophy, philosophy of life, mindset, outlook on life, formula for life, ideology, faith, or even religion. The elements of our worldview, the beliefs about certain aspects of Reality, are our
- epistemology: beliefs about the nature and sources of knowledge;
- metaphysics: beliefs about the ultimate nature of Reality;
- cosmology: beliefs about the origins and nature of the universe, life, and mankind;
- teleology: beliefs about the meaning and purpose of the universe, its inanimate elements, and its inhabitants;
- theology: beliefs about the existence and nature of God;
- anthropology: beliefs about the nature and purpose of humanity in general and, ourself in particular;
- axiology: beliefs about the nature of value, what is good and bad, what is right and wrong.
What does this mean to self-knowledge?
Assuming that a worldview can be incorrect or at least inappropriate, if your worldview is erroneous, then your behavior is misguided, even wrong. If you fail to examine, articulate, and refine your worldview, then your worldview may in fact be wrong, with the above consequences, and you will always be ill-prepared to substantiate your beliefs and justify your acts, for you will have only proximate opinions and direct sensory evidence as justification.
If you fail to be conscious of your worldview and fail to appeal to it as a basis for your thoughts and acts, you will be at the mercy of your emotions, your impulses, and your reflexes (not that such responsive behavior is always bad); you will be inclined to "follow the crowd" and conform to social and cultural norms and patterns of thought and behavior regardless of their merit.
The sophistication of our beliefs about the way ourselves and the world works has evolved over time. But not everyone lives in the Present, with a belief system that is consistent with our current rational knowledge. Beliefs are influenced by emotional and psychosocial pressures.
Many people are firmly invested in the spiritual practices of by-gone eras, for good or not so good. Regardless, time and technology march on, impacting our psychophysical organism with challenges never faced by humanity before. The future-oriented are already living there. As has been pointed out: "The future is already here; it just isn't evenly distributed." To truly live mindfully in the Now, which is all we ever actually have, is to live at your Cosmic Zero Point.
For thousands of years, tribes were so well adapted to their environments, they had little need to evolve. Their worldviews and reality differed, but not so overwhelmingly as for repressed cognitive dissonance to drive them to higher-numbered stages
Belief systems are like reality wormholes into the past.
Part of us can live in the 14th, 17th, or 19th century, depending on eclectic spiritual ideas we have embraced or gotten stuck in. The same individual, such as a religious scientist, can embrace conflicting beliefs from different centuries. Compartmentalization is the only way to deny this cognitive dissonance.
Self-regulatory techniques can be adopted without this psychological baggage, with or without maintaining the spiritual or religious context. Somewhere on the planet, humans are living in every niche of the evolutionary belief spectrum.
Which existential experience you perceive depends on the filters of your options (environment), beliefs and values. Each stage represents a limited understanding and repressions until its liabilities force us into the next stage. Alternating stages are self-expressive and social. First new traits and states are emergent; then they stabilize.
Our archetypal experiences can be regressions or expressions of our present highest state of development or emergent, then stabilized intuitions of still higher states. Each stage is a worldview with its own needs, belief style and existential ground. Each is its own trance state, a lens through which the world is perceived with certain distortions. Each can be a trap of complacency as we enjoy its rewards.
Soul Field
The soul is the 'friend' or the heart of the beloved that gives us generosity, moderateness, and eloquence -- the opening heart, experiential understanding. The emotion we have when we are open and motivated to explore the unknown is a positive emotion -- openness to ideas and creativity, the aspiration for a better life.
It doesn't take seeing a therapist to see yourself. Many more people have used Jungian and post-Jungian models of the psyche with good results for their own self-understanding than ever went to therapy. A self-taught grasp of the categories, concepts, and dynamics can be applied to oneself, producing realizations. It certainly doesn't need to be overly intellectual at all, and can involve such traditional activities as journals, expressive arts, dialogue and dream work.
Focus means noticing intuition more often, rather than ignoring or missing the psychic dimension of activity. Emotionally engaged intuitive understanding allows us to relate to one another as people. We can only do it if we innately know who we are, and why we are here. Self-awareness is connection to inner instinct, the inner voice -- the truest expression of ourselves as human beings. Are we fully here, or are we distracted?
Metaphor is important because if we can't say what a thing is "like," we are held in its thrall unable to incorporate it as an experience. In other words, when you are 'in it', you can't 'see it'. As well as a mirror the soul has also been likened to symbolic metaphors of a journey or quest, a stream of consciousness, a vast ocean of energy, and a deep cave of eternity containing the treasure of all mankind.
Self-knowledge and awareness helps us navigate our way through our suffering. Psyche or soul is a root metaphor of the self-deepening reflective process, reflexive mirroring with its infinite re-valuing and re-visioning. In imagery self-reflectivity is expressed as repetition: recurrent references, intrinsic circularity, reflexive epistemology.
The mirror motif suggests the emergence of self-awareness and self-consciousness -- being aware of being aware of being. Soul's reflective perspective is a reflexive, self-reflecting, or feedback-based model of self-consciousness.
"Emergent phenomena in our brains — for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will —are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself is determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing "resonance" between different levels... The self comes into being the moment it has the power to reflect itself. (Hofstadter 1980 p. 709)”
Jung distinguishes between the small self and the archetypal Self, as a guide of the spirit. He considers the later the core of individuation and spirituality. However, by attributing it godlike manifestations of awe and numinosity, he does not imply an ontological entity at large in the universe. He insists we can only relate, whether 'God' exists or not, to a god-image or god-complex and its phenomenology of the psyche.
The soul has many personalities and we are one of them. Hillman diverges from Jung by adopting a multi-centered approach to natural and 'divine' phenomena. In either model, this personified relationship is at the core of our self-exploration, whether we 'believe' in God or not. We don't need to have a crippled childhood or post-traumatic stress to be disturbed in today's post-postmodern world.
Most of us experience nightmares, anguish, fear of death and life. We question the whole socio-political landscape, undeserved inequalities, and our responsibilities to our fellow beings. Personal and collective evil may suppress our actions or create obsessions and the paralysis of fight/flight/freeze. Society is rethinking old assumptions and roles.
Evil is about the absolute nature of reality. Such evil that plagues us leads toward seeking gradual recovery of self through a new birth in consciousness. Even our own self-awareness and affective knowledge can emerge from traumatic realizations, beyond self-deception.
Tragedy must be distinguished from evil. Our human existence is a confrontation between the finite and infinitude, forming the existential conditions of life. We are always overwhelmed by the infinite, so we suffer from our limitations, including mortality. It's central to the nature of our being, and we deal with it everyday.
There is no existence without limitation. Trauma is part of our DNA. It's a constant tragic reality that we remain vulnerable. Tragedy reveals our vulnerability but isn't evil as a condition of human existence. How are we to understand a story like this?
In his book on evil John A. Sanford suggests, "For the most part, it is only when people encounter evil in some form-as pain, loss of meaning, or something that appears to be threatening or destructive to them-that they begin to find their way to consciousness. And only when people are tested in the fire of life, so that what is weak within them is purged away and only the strong elements remain, does individuation take place. This purging can only take place in the context of a certain amount of suffering and struggle. Paradoxically, without a power in life that seems to oppose wholeness, the achievement of wholeness would be impossible. From the point of view of psychology, then, evil is a necessity of individuation is to occur." (Evil. The shadow side of reality. 1981)
As Hermann Hesse says in Demian, "My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”
Ancient wisdom and modern science agree that consciousness is not something we “have” but the fundamental nature of both ourselves and the entire Universe. Psyche and matter are synonymous, unifying the nature of reality. We have to look at the world through a limited frame of reference we can comprehend at any given moment. There is no real life or spirituality without archetypal experiences.
https://books.google.com/books?id=BR3uFXbDWsgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Spirituality & Trauma Suffering
Our ongoing dialogue with God is the dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious, including the visions, reflections, and comments that arise in the course of our journey to the center of existence. There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites, Jung reminds. "There is no form of human tragedy that does not in some measure proceed from [the] conflict between the ego and the unconscious."
The nature of our consciousness is transcendent, before our concepts of space and time. Still, we must stop short of the tyranny of vision that that ignores flesh-and-blood people.
The psychospiritual development of individuation is a relationship with the numinous archetype of the god-image, the deep Self -- God realized in one -- superconsciousness realized in one. If we go deeply enough into our souls, we find truth.
Such truth is beyond the content of our delusions about self, other, and a god that keep us from the direct experience of primordial awareness. The realm of the sacred ground beyond objective psychic contents means the dissolution of conceptual structures. We can see through this experience what heaven is. Plotinus called it, "the flight of the alone to the Alone"., the soul in man searching forever for the eternal soul in life.
"Man is a gateway, through which you pass from the outer world of Gods, daimons, and souls into the inner world, out of the greater, into the smaller world. Small and inane is man, already he is behind you, and once again you find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller or inner infinity. ... Man here, God there. Weakness and nothingness here, eternally creative power there.
Here nothing but darkness and clammy cold, there total sun." (Jung, Red Book, Page 354).
Being overwhelmed by the burden of a hyperactivated unconscious can feel like being crushed, torn apart, or drowned. Even the transformative power of the psyche appears first as a monstrous or numinous threat as it targets the old ego which must dissolve or "die" for the new personality to arise. Dreams may reveal we are threatened by archetypal powers that bring disintegration, pain and fear to the ego.
We discover the particular images that hide behind the emotions and tyranny of our own ego, thoughts, and automatic reactions. We can deploy our own imaginative and symbolic capacity. We foist our human compulsions on the god of our own image, who historically shares some of our personal and collective foibles.
The soul is who we are, our deepest essence. We imagine the divine imprint within us. If we imagine ourselves 'divine' we usually implicitly choose from the menu of positive qualities. We look at the outside world from the inside.
Trauma creates existential desolation, isolation, and confusion in relationships, and our relation with the divine can be one of them. It can also bring a treasure of soulful wisdom and compassion. The mythic wound is the legend of the grail king, as Hillman implies, "...in the goblet of the wound, there is the soul. This means that it is the psyche, the purpose of our love, bleeding, and that the wound is a grail."
The impulse should be present in the soul for spiritual knowledge, spiritual understanding, deep self-knowledge and ways for self-expression. Emma Jung called it, “the psychological expression of an extraordinary stirring of the unconscious”, an unconscious projection of the Self. As the feeling function, the Grail helps us distinguish good and evil.
That impulse is inextinguishable and informs the quest for renewal of the mysteries. The journey into self-knowledge is the quest for the Grail. We recognize the interrelation of things as an experience of the Self and love at its highest level.
Trauma is sacred wounding. When the ribbon of our fate unravels, the wound may be physical or psychological, but is likely psychophysical. We may feel like the wound is our master, but must remember that we are not our wounds.
Wounds and scars help forge our character as we tend our sacred wounds. In some sense we're all wounded by the overwhelming nature of modern life and the escalating arc of technological and socio-political adaptation.
Old rules no longer apply and we must search and find our own path through it all. We can embrace and prioritize woundedness, humanity, and limitations over a quest for perfection, transcendence, and transformation. As Jung says, "To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the "thorn in the flesh" is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent." CW 12, Par 208.
In terms of trauma this needn't be defined by the type or degrees of trauma we experience, nor specific stress or trauma management we use, spiritual or not. Jung believed that what remains unconscious (blocked, suppressed, or repressed) does not dissolve, but resurfaces in our lives as fate or fortune.
Jung noticed, “Whatever does not emerge as Consciousness, returns as Destiny.” We repeat our unconscious patterns until we bring them into the light of awareness. Greater or lesser trauma is naturally inflicted on us by living life and that relates to our self-care and self-exploration.
'All here is a mystery of contraries,
Darkness, a magic of self-hidden light,
Suffering, some secret rapture's tragic mask,
And death, an instrument of perpetual life'
- Vashishtha Ganapati Muni
Trauma is also where a spiritual dimension arises in terms of our lot in life, our inner support resources, and our reactions to it. What one can shirk off may incapacitate another. If trauma is buried in a family’s unspoken history, when pain is too great, it is denied, blocked, and avoided, unconsciously stunting the necessary healing process leading to natural release.
"We are all faced with a positively terrifying parental backlog of repressed muck for which we are ultimately responsible as individuals, in terms of how we deal with this heritage. No one escapes. . .Many people never heal it, and their children must then deal with the problem." --Liz Greene, The Development of the Personality, (p. 160)
Spirituality becomes a field for working this out. It may be unconscious, presenting as depression or anxiety, numbness, spaciness, turbulence, lack of motivation, or a failure to connect or thrive. We feel loss of control or might simply feel stuck, uncomfortable, or confused, either as an individual or in relationship.
What happens when yearning for emotional succor becomes traumatic, unavailable, misdirected, or overwhelming in itself? We may also misinterpret signals from our inner authority and can enter dangerous detours or distorted self-interpretations.
Boundless good and unspeakable evils have been done in God's name. Some of them involve our own self-defeating and self-destructive impulses, shame, blame, and projection. We project onto our God like any other psychic entity.
Trauma is one of the ways that death pervades life. The trauma of atrocities, combat, war, and terrorism, the trauma of abuse, or drug-related violence, or natural disasters etched in our psyches, have similarities, but are not the same.
Trauma is a break, a tear, a rupture, a splitting open. It strikes like an unexpected bolt of life-changing lightening. It comes in many forms from accidents, to huge events or a more subtle pain that we try to overlook, though it continues to haunt us.
Many child victims never learn healthy ways to manage their own needs and responsibilities. Severe or chronic childhood trauma can result in a set of negative core self-beliefs, grief, stuckness, and bereavement. Certain parts disintegrate and fragment. Trauma leads to an adaptive preservation of Self at any cost, unconscious ways of avoiding pain. What doesn't work is a spiritual bypass.
There are many kinds of moral injury or affront and trauma but one of the most overwhelming is an uncontainable encounter with infinity. There is a tradition of equating God with trauma in a variety of ways. We can't represent the ineffable because the trauma remains unsymbolized, unintegrated into normal memory.
Traumas are events that induce intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Dysregulation induced by that trauma becomes a body’s default state in PTSD. Trigger a person with PTSD, and the heart pounds faster, startle reflex is exaggerated, we sweat and the mind races. The amygdala, which detects threats and releases the emotions associated with memories, whirs in overdrive. Meanwhile, hormones and neurotransmitters don’t always flow as they should, leaving the immune system underregulated.
Surprising us utterly, trauma slips unaware into the very fabric of our being. as a past that was never present. Grief can turn a life upside down. According to Mark Wolynn, the deeper layers of suffering in our psyche might not be personal at all but part of a long chain of human trauma, passed through epigenetic markers. Inherited family tramas can shape us. https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/the-bread-crumb-trail-of-inherited-family-trauma/
Historical trauma includes triggers from our epigenetics, passed down through generations of traumatized ancestors. Triggers are overreactions to perceived danger. The past interrupts the present, without warning. The reaction may be delayed and untethered -- unconscious surges of anxiety and anger arise seemingly out of nowhere.
What speaks to the depths of suffering a person experiences? Trauma is enigmatic suffering that doesn't go away. It is too much to bear the continual crisis living within. Such a wound buries itself deep in our consciousness and physical being as tragedy too heavy for us. It happens in the past, but asserts itself over and over, if not continuously, in the present.
"A well-documented feature of trauma, one familiar to many, is our inability to articulate what happens to us. We not only lose our words, but something happens with our memory as well. During a traumatic incident, our thought processes become scattered and disorganized in such a way that we no longer recognize the memories as belonging to the original event. Instead, fragments of memory, dispersed as images, body sensations, and words, are stored in our unconscious and can become activated later by anything even remotely reminiscent of the original experience. Once they are triggered, it is as if an invisible rewind button has been pressed, causing us to reenact aspects of the original trauma in our dayto-day lives. Unconsciously, we could find ourselves reacting to certain people, events, or situations in old, familiar ways that echo the past." (Wolynn, It Didn't Start With You)
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/an-excerpt-from-it-didnt-start-with-you-how-inherited-family-trauma-shapes-who-we-are-and-how-to-end-the-cycle-viking-april-2016-by-mark-wolynn/?gclid=CjwKCAiA3o7RBRBfEiwAZMtSCRd9i-8QSdLBCTqyay6CZEw1WU1q5k3ss5mfQH6xsGJDoWEDrzJ3dBoCfqkQAvD_BwE
The precipitating event comes with unexpected force and shatters familiar frameworks of meaning and existential trust. Devastating incidents include sudden death, sex too early, familiar violence, intimate betrayal, prolonged neglect, normalized violation, excused abuse, oppression, neglect, pervasive pain, or the terror of letting go into unconsciousness.
The past occupies the present in traumatic time. Tragedies vary in type and intensity—such as abandonment, suicide and war, or the early death of a child, parent, or sibling. They can send shock waves of distress cascading from one generation to the next.
Symptoms persist long after an event is over. Trauma and violence affect our imagination, as well as body and soul and our capacity for altered states. Time, body, attachment style, and words ("speechless terror'; loss of words) -- the language of soul -- are altered. Energy infuses our deeds and words at the real level of our motivation from either fear or love.
The less avoidant and less anxious, the more secure we feel in close relationships. We don't know how to faithfully navigate the overwhelming wounds and unpredictable triggers, even with social support. We feel angry, fragile, powerless, and vulnerable. Trauma interrupts our lives and we can lose confidence in our navigating skills.
Restructuring our imagination of self and the world is part of the healing process. .Should we insist on our “need to process” — the need to focus exclusively on our trauma? Do we need to speak at length about the pain, to obsess over it, to become preoccupied with our wounds? It may or may not be that only in giving ourselves over to our trauma we can be free from it. We may only be able to listen and tend to it with the poetic voice of reality.
Research in spiritual emergency vs. spiritual emergence (Grof) shows that numinous experience can be traumatic in its overwhelming and life changing dimensions.
The temporal lobes plays a key role in emotional stability. It interprets and integrates input to give it meaning, in the deeply emotional rather than intellectual sense.
People can be traumatized by anomalous experiences for a number of reasons. Their content may be positive or negative. Such mystical experiences often arise from prayer, meditation, or the sensitivity of elevated temporal lobe activity.
They include among others, seeing God or spirits, out-of-body experiences, episodes of meaningfulness, spirit mediumship, sensed presence, vision quest experiences, prophesy, and hearing the voice of spirit guides, with different intensities subtlety, and frequencies.
More: https://ionamiller.weebly.com/temporal-lobes.html
Some imagine 'angels' or 'demons'. Left temporal lobe hallucination may involve single words, verbal monologues, sentences, commands, advice, or distant conversations which can't quite be made out. Such experiences affect our worldview and sense of self and others.
Spirits are not ontological or metaphysical facts, but imaginal realities. The psychological or therapeutic approach does not require ontological speculation or meta-questions. We perceive them as epistemological metaphors, or 'how we know what we know' and what it's 'like,' which awakens their psychophysical aspects.
Dream imagery or psychedelics are associated with the right temporal lobe. The interconnected amygdala, hippocampus, and temporal lobe can act in concert during mystical experience. Hyperactivation infuses perceptions with tremendous religious and emotional feeling, endowing it with special or religious significance.
Issues of the spirit can initially present as tie strength, addictions, shadow possession, soul loss, and other problems. Too often protection, stability, and love are ripped away by the blunt realization of humankind's dire situation.
Finding our own words for articulating our suffering helps by framing categories, concepts, and even prayers that foster a means of finding meaning. The strategy of inner dialogues has the cathartic effect of "tragedy." Dealing with cycles of trauma the challenge is to continually resist the temptation to cover over or smooth over the suffering. mirroring the dissociation process with witnessing and the language of redemption.
One-sided identification with good also arouses confrontation with personal and collective evil. Trauma disrupts our moment to moment self-narrative and is a deep challenge to theology. It can be an encounter with death, or disconnection from what we know to be true and safe in the world -- a suspension in the psychic darkness of limbo. Our spirit may be a sustaining power through all the witnessing of ruptures as we move between life and death. It suggests that death is not an event that is ever concluded.
Research in complex post-traumatic stress shows that dynamic effects remain long after a traumatic storm and we cannot will, wish, or even pray them away. In fact, often no life after the storm can be imagined. Trauma is virtually unimaginable because it is the experience most difficult to put into words and concepts. Languages cannot account for traumatic or ineffable experiences. Often we feel no one can really understand our own particular pain.
The storm remains, occluding our straightforward visions of life or death. Pushing the process can be dangerous by amplifying suffering and repetition. The whole self can be held in the shock waves of chronic violence. It's always there. After traumatic events some people turn away from religion while others seek solace by immersing themselves in it, seeking grace that a post-traumatic god may or may not manifest on their behalf.
The experience of God can be beautiful even if the content is questionable. 'Sensed presence' or experience of a positive or negative being can be induced by magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes of the brain. Spirit beings and wisdom figures are evoked on the left side of the limbic system (prayerful, compassionate, contemplative). And, malefic beings arise from the right (inward, silent, dark). We experience what we are prone to.
Todd Murphy - https://www.god-helmet.com/wp/religious_mystic_in_evolution.htm
Church, temples, or mosques rarely provide a place to bring such unresolving experiences, including historical and political trauma, institutional trauma, and global trauma. We know it affects us materially, genetically and psychically. The history of the wounded heart gets buried. We want God or someone to speak to our story, not erase the truth we cannot fully bring into words.
We are affected and remain affected spiritually by overwhelming trauma. Hence, the saying, 'there are no atheists in foxholes.' They also say, "God shows up next to us in the foxhole, with words meant for the foxhole, words we never could have fully understood anywhere else."
Well, maybe. But what if God remains absent when we're under fire? Trust and beware. The traumatized must feel their ways through spiritual warfare, dogma, and propaganda like everyone else, but with a peculiar handicap.
The God who can allegedly do anything may not grant your desires or even fulfill your true needs. Can we embrace the possibility, with or without faith? If we imagine there is a God who could bring resolution but doesn’t (like an emotionally unavailable parent), we feel isolated or perhaps unworthy, compounding our pain with self-recrimination.
All perceptions are filtered through a distorting lens of trauma. Whether we dwell on it ornot, the past keeps returning to wound long after the precipitating events are over. Overwhelming or violent events return with unaccountable impact on present and future. Life is more uncertain, tentative, murky. A fragile presence of spirit may be marked by absence, abandonment, foresakenness, and alienation.
The fixation or repetition compulsion often has an unconscious spiritual component. Guilt, survivor guilt, toxic shame, despair, confusion, emotionalism, terror and nightmares, suspicion, self-harm, dislocation, fragmentation, disorientation, temporal distortions, epistemological ruptures, panic, and anxious uncertainty remain.
Falling in the same hole, we are re-traumatized with repetition compulsion. No one can simply 'get over it' anymore than someone could make themselves sane. Resorting to extreme spirituality as a presumed refuge may create re-traumatization, rather than relief. Life may never again be the same as we knew it. Trauma is suffering of the heart, soul, and mind beyond human capacity and comprehension.
Often we expect mental healing to follow closely after physical healing, but it is often not so. We may heal physically but not psychologically or spiritually. And conversely, we may heal our psyche and spirit even when the body remains afflicted.
Our worldly traumas can carry a deeply felt spiritual dimension within their matrix, content, and effects. This is not to reduce 'God' to a trauma, or insist on a spiritual core for traumatic experience, but the God-image or God-complex is an aspect to consider in a psychological approach. Imagination is not an abstraction of reality. As a creative activity of the spirit, it gives coherence and resonance to what dwells in us.
In his book, God as Trauma, Mogenson points out, "Whether a divine being really exists or not, the psychological fact remains that we tend to experience traumatic events as if they were in some sense divine. Just as God has been described as transcendent and unknowable, a trauma is an event which transcends our capacity to experience it."
No one remains untouched by overwhelming violence, either personally or intergenerationally, vicarious traumatization burden. Working through the invisible loyalties of the family system is just the beginning of our journey back through time, the unconscious, and our genetic history. Epigenetics demonstrates that we inherit our parents' trauma and family secrets. Children of survivors may be born less able to metabolize stress, more susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules, neurons, cells, and genes.
Being a witness can wound as deeply as being a direct victim. Trauma is what does not go away but persists in symptoms, sensations, intrusive memories, and internal images in the body. Because they are not amenable to rational explanation, the symptoms need to be lived through, not interpreted.
We don't interpret or understand fantasies, but experience them more deeply. We can treat visions as works of art, with respect, gentle attention, lyrical and raw realistic tones. Our self-care stimulates reflection, raising questions about the secrets of the soul and inner urges. We discover visions that sustain and regenerate us through the use of symbols which various characters carry, but not in any cognitive or formulaic way.
Imaginative activities feed us with the psychic energy of dreams, visions, and fantasies. The visions are telling: involuntary tales of psychic life, that represent processes and paths of biographical events. We may have valuable premonitions of unknown things, within a mysterious and inexplicable world.
"A psychological identification ... exists between overwhelming events and the categories theology would reserve for deity. The psyche is irrational. It constantly makes deductions and ellipses which philosophy and theology would judge to be mistaken. But these identifications are the facts of the psyche, regardless of their value to other disciplines." Our psychological concern is with the brute fact that the traumatized soul is a theologizing soul--not with the merits of that resultant "theology" as theology. (Mogenson)
Speaking of Mogenson's book, David L. Miller says:
"It will not be easy at first to sense that God is a trauma, that 'the jungle fire-fight, the early morning rape, the speeding automobile of the drunk driver...may be God images if, like God, they create us in their image, after their likeness.' But little by little, this 'gnostic analysis' gets under the skin, & one begins to see, indeed, that 'whatever traumatizes us becomes our parent' & our God, & that our religion has traumatised us by being 'religious kitsch,' covering our hurts. Greg Mogenson makes the point sensitively, therapeutically, & compellingly that 'the notion of salvation is eternally corruptible,' & that 'we need salvation from the very notion of salvation itself.' It may be as important for souls today to wrestle God as a Trauma as it was for Jacob to wrestle God's angel traumatically...and for the same reason!"
Jung himself used self-care and artistic expression to explore and express his own search for meaning and to recover his own myth. He created his Red Book, an autobiographical narrative of the soul. Identifying with our innate images without explanations or interpretations that betray them becomes a unique process of self-initiation. (Shamdasani, Red Book Introduction, Turin, 2009, p. XXXI-LII).
The vile part of ourselves -- baseness, contemptability, and inability to find peace -- is both a danger and the source of grace that can even heal our God-problem. We are anointed with danger. We may complain and be angry at the impossibility of uniting our unpredictable vile part with the law of love. We fear the danger is greatest where the God is nearest. Fear and doubt stand as guardians on our your path. Gving it shape opens the locks of chaos. If the vile exists, so must the holy.
We learn to trust that process. Internal feelings are valued more than interpretations. The process conjured up a waking fantasy Jung entered as if it were a theatrical representation. He approached the autonomous unconscious with his own moral base in an 'as if' reality. We, too, can learn to discover visions that regenerate through the use of symbols carried by various characters in our unconscious dramas.
Jung's visions included characters that were autonomous, dynamic, and numinous so he took them very seriously. He respected them spiritually. The myth is the charm of intimate feeling, intuitive not discursive, incantational not logically argumentative. It may be more of a crisis, a close birth or death that spurs the quest for deeper meaning.
Our threshold moments may be full of anxiety or tentative ambivalence. Movement toward self-integration and transgenerational integration can be another portentous threshold. The point of reference remains the threshold experience where we go from ordinary awareness toward the synchronous and numinous.
The god-image underpins or provides the foundation and grounding for the rational as well as the ethical. In a deeper sense, however, it is just as much a source of the numinous and irrational aspects of manifestation. It is the eternal dance of chaos and order, the
mysterium which is simultaneously deterministic yet unpredictable.
There is a long-standing tradition of the therapeutes, who were in service to the soul or the gods in the interest of healing. Psyche meant soul in ancient Greek. Therapeutes meant attendants in the temples of Asclepius (or Asklepios), the Greek god of healing.
So the literal meaning of psychotherapy is "tending to the soul," even in a self-help context. It moves rapidly away from issues with the professional 'other' or failures of the system or scientific models. We learn to tend to our own soul and tend our own dreams. That is, we pay attention to the emergent images and honor them -- becoming, sharing, feeling, releasing, yielding, accepting, deepening, intensifying, surrendering, healing, and integrating.
Everything in the dreamtime occurs in the present tense -- it is happening. But it is linked in a non-linear fashion--through association--with the past and the future. Becoming the image creates the experience of a new state of consciousness, new sensations, awarenesses, feelings, visceral and kinesthetic reactions, responses, acceptances. We experience multiple consciousness states beyond ordinary consensus reality.
Typically, the preferred approach for many therapies is through the symptom as a virtual doorway opening the deeper levels of psyche. This is how we cross the threshold into the unconscious. Therapy works best when it emerges from one's inner healer, through one's own imagery, rather than via guided imagery or imported metaphors suggested or imported from outside.
Epistemological metaphors -- how you know what you know and what it's like -- are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams and symptoms. Content-free therapy can be done through metaphor, rather than through directly reliving trauma in a linear time dimension, thereby avoiding re-traumatizing processing.
In chaos theory, old forms must break down to make way for new ones to emerge. Healing occurs at the creative edge where new order emerges holistically. from rapport and resonance of local and global mind. A small change in attitudes, the messages we send to ourselves, can make huge differences. Change the image and you change the attitudes and feelings associated with it.
Attitudes also are related to our body chemistry, to stress hormones, activity, and lifestyle. Emotions control the immune system. The psychosomatic network can be easily accessed through natural trance. There is a biological, emotional, mental and spiritual aspect to healing. As we journey deeper and deeper into the psyche we eventually encounter a state characterized either as "chaotic" or void of images.
In a therapeutic context, chaos is experienced as a consciousness state -- the ground state. This state is related to healing, dreams, and creativity. Shamanic approaches to healing involve co-consciousness states which lead to restructuring both physical and emotional-mental senses of self.
Dreams, creativity, and healing arise from this raw, undifferentiated "chaotic consciousness." We can use images as portals for consciousness journeys to facilitate transformations ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes.
Imagery (virtual experience) affects the immune system, activating psychosomatic forces, such as the placebo effect and spontaneous healing. Much of our journey lies in our continued struggle and our commitment to ourselves and our spirituality. Fear and doubt may continue to guard our path, warning of potential danger. To integrate grieving, self-knowledge, and critical thinking is to align with self-awareness.
"Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your feelings need you, your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things." - Thich Nhat Hahn
Somehow we abide, remaining ourselves through the whole process, though our experiences may differ markedly in different phases of life. Jung reminds us that, "we can't live the afternoon of life following his morning program. Because what is big in the morning will be small in the evening. And the truth of the morning will become the falsehood of the evening."
Lifting the Veil
The world is a complicated place, depending on how we perceive it. We think we are sure of what we are or what we think we are. But the life of our human soul is a movement in the dark, in the uncertainty of our conscience. Each of us finds our own small story of suffering and joy writ large in the universal tale of mankind. As Hillman said, "when we are dealing with the unknown-and the future is the unknown - we are forced to imagine."
In self-liberation from life experiences, we simultaneously experience non-duality within duality. Duality within the experience of non-duality is the unfolding course of self-liberation. Coherent relational events empower us. As well as waking up we all need to grow up, to awaken awareness in each other through the medium of our own awareness.
Whether we like it or not, the truth is that we are the cause of ourselves. We are the victims of our own modernity: the family, the ethics of responsibility and sacrifice, religion, the community spirit. However, it is not about class, status, or even age. We seek out truth and connection. But it is not easy to bring down something which is a truth for ourselves. The difference between those who succeed and those who fail to achieve its goals is the belief system.
Sometimes taking a few steps back is the key to a positive change. We have to leave an old limiting belief system, a rotten foundation, to liquidate and find a new foundation for existence. Positive self-consciousness has been the root of the quest from time immemorial. Value is what you perceive and pursue.
We see what we are through narrative, dialogue, and vision. We imagine and our images, models that suggest possibilities, prime us for the appropriate action. Part of the task is to 'see' through the conditioned ego and get around it.
We all have idiosyncracies, vulnerabilities, and passions. Other people know us differently than we know ourselves through our self-concept or primal self-image. We have real individual differences. Subjective self-examination is always a struggle with our conscience, conscientiousness, conditions, and limitations. Negative self-consciousness is a neurotic trait linked to anxiety and stress.
We don't have to prove anything to ourselves to be more present in the imaginal part of our journeys through life. Aspirational self-understanding signifies the unification of consciousness and unconsciousness which represents the psyche as a whole, expressed as wisdom, conscience, empathy, and compassion. Soul shapes us to reveal more of who we truly are. There is even a religious dimension to overwhelming traumatic events.
There is an intergenerational field of transmitted experience, a living relational structure. Ancient Greeks practiced the cult of the ancestor to prevent unconscious transmission through generation. This power of awakening awareness is transmitted through mothers and fathers, through brothers and sisters, through great teachers, through friends, through lovers, through companions, through strangers, through practitioners of awareness, through enemies, and of course through pets and animals. Timeless awareness manifests in time.
The vortex of the internal structuring process progressively de-structures conditioned patterns of organization. Hillman says "the experience of death offers each experience the opening to the tragedy" (p. 115). The undecomposable level of consciousness is experienced as the pure, unconditioned imprint of the whole, resulting in a new primal self image and sense of relationship to the greater whole which emerges through transformation.
Hillman suggests transformation is guided by our daemon, the guide and bearer of our destiny. We don't have to create or make up this innate phenomena, just listen deeply. The daemon may appear personified as soul-guide, guardian angel, elder, ancestor, or wisdom figure. Though our companion before birth, we tend to forget our companion and feel empty when we come into the world. Archetypes will use and abuse us all before we fall into the luxury of oblivion after death.
This knowledge depends on a long journey into yourself to a new expanded perspective.
"Every part of the world vibrates with the others. Thanks to this immanence, man is given to internalize, to expand his place, to identify him, in ethical terms, with the whole world."
(Pavel Nikolayevich Evdokimov)
Carl Jung notes, in his "Zarathustra Seminar", that "It is a general truth that one can only understand anything in as much as one understands oneself" (p.742). We live in a matrix of the deepest imaginal memory, rooted in our physical structure. Truth like the unconscious is always multidimensional. Others have recognized the mystery of how the soul transcends finiteness with infinity.
Jung further declared that, "Psyche and body are the same thing, to which we have attributed an independent existence". (Spirit and Life, CW. Vol. 8) The body is the medium of the field, an instrument of perception and knowingness, pulsating in resonance with and within Being itself. More than merely our external vehicle, we are the lived body, ‘lived’ embodiment, pure presence.
The symbolic dimension opens understanding, a world of reciprocity, nurtured by image, coherence, and modes of being in the world. Discernment and understanding of symbolic dimensions is a step towards reflection on the matrices from which we arise. As liminal phenomena, myths open the context of many dimensions, describing how chaos becomes cosmos. As lived reality, myth is sacred reality. Jung was uncompromising in his vision that myths are psychic manifestations representing the nature of the psyche.
Myth has a functional dimension. We can access deeper levels of self-awareness and self-understanding through epiphanies, feedback from others, listening to intuition, and simple directed attention. Stimulating the imaginal opens up new possibilities. Mirroring our own symbolic narrative processes, myth's narrative processes arouse mysterious or awe-inspiring spiritual or religious emotion, filled with the sense of the sacred or holy.
This apprehension is not 'God' in the ontological sense, but in the epistemological sense of 'how we know what we know.' It is the direct experience of our images and fantasies about God that nevertheless have a numinous and determining effect on our psychic life. In this sense, 'god' can even be a synonym for trauma in the psychic sense of religious category, in the form of images and guiding fictions.
Dreams seem to have something to tell us about the hidden dimensions of ourselves. Dreams are a key to self-knowledge, connecting what exists now with what is coming into existence with all the necessary detours. More than a detour it can remap the lifemap. The soul is the friend or the heart of the beloved that gives us generosity, moderateness, and eloquence -- the opening heart.
We needn't be concerned with interpreting our dreams or literalizing meanings that stop the imaginal process cold. Hillman suggests, "sticking to the image," as presented. Simply return to the image without letting any 'A-ha' moment derail it's immediacy. Just take it for what it is, re-experiencing it with deep listening without assumptions.
There are many kinds of dreams, including mundane dreams later recognized as signposts, conflict resolutions, precognitive sequences, and dreams from the transcendent domain. Remarkably, when something is about to occur, we sometimes have subtle emotional hints as dreams unconsciously already know it’s going to happen.
Depth Psychology approaches the exploration of the subtle, unconscious, and transpersonal aspects of our human experience. The poet Rilke calls this, "dialogues with eternity." We come to recognize mythic patterns and meaningful coincidences in ourselves and their healing potential.
Fritz Perls describes how, "We live for the pleasure, the fun, for the unaccountability. Everything's fine as long as it's nice. Looks nice. Much better than moralism. It is, however, a very serious setback. That is, we have become anxious towards pain and suffering. Let me repeat this sentence: we have become anxious towards pain and suffering. We must avoid anything that is not fun or pleasant. So we escape from any frustration that could be painful and try to limit it to the maximum. The result is a lack of growth." (The Approach. Eye Witness of Therapy, p. 112)
Yet somehow all the pain is bearable once it enters our story and we can tell it. Fixation on trauma obscures. In this state we experience hiddenness, concealment of spaciousness, disappearance of awareness, obscuration of the light, and reduction of the bliss of beingness.
In a fixated state we cannot experience the sea of lifeforce, the magical sea of synchronicity, the sea of love. We experience tremendous angst, a type of terror, and feel tortured. Unlike obsessive fixation and compulsion, alchemical fixation is stabilizing by re-opening the capacity to spontaneously experience field phenomena. We can amplify the voice of the afflicted psyche.
Each phase of life has problems that arise naturally and incessantly like relentless surges. We cannot escape them. But we can have problems and be in the field of awareness. Realizing that the unfolding field of experience is indeterminate in its vast potential brings forth the the awareness field as spontaneous manifestation. Fixation, spontaneity, and creativity arise out of indeterminacy.
Psychologist C.G. Jung insisted that, depending on our own approach and readiness, "by exploring our own souls, we come upon the instincts and their world of imagery should throw some light on the powers slumbering in the psyche, of which we are seldom aware so long as all goes well." He elaborated on it in The Undiscovered Self (Pages 75-79).
We simply need to listen to what is going on inside of us, our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, memories, and dreams with an expectation of inner discovery. We slough off the layers of our defenses to realize who we are in the present. "The long path I have traversed is littered with husks sloughed off, witnesses of countless moultings... They conceal as much as they reveal. Every step is a symbol of those to follow." (Letters Vol. 1, Pages 404).
As James Hollis puts it, "Stepping into largeness will require that we discern our personal authority – rather than the authority of others or the authority of our internalized admonitions – and live this inner authority with risk and boldness."
Self-exploration is about expression, discovering and unpacking our own unrealized spiritual, relational and intellectual capacities. It can help us resolve core issues by taking a hard look at our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We are in this present "that which is becoming." The abyss of the transcendent imagination lies between the self we imagine we are and our undiscoverable self.
Why do we pursue and generate knowledge and self-knowledge? Can we renew our confidence in the value of self-knowledge? We may seek understanding because we find ourselves bewildered, or we may simply pursue it for self-enrichment. It isn't so much for personality development as expressing soul, relating soulfully with self, others, and cosmos. If we question someone's self-knowledge, they often react quite defensively or aggressively.
We may rage or react violently to any questioning of our "knowledge," including self evaluation. People go to war to defend systems of knowledge they believe are true. We war with ourselves through self-loathing and lack of self-compassion. Besides our open public self, we have the hidden self of the projections of persona and shadow, the blind self of our scotomas (especially around love, relationships, and beliefs), and the unknown self of the unconscious.
Primal emotions drive the pursuit of knowledge. We believe that if we know (are "right") we are protected from the unknown. When we don't know (are "wrong"), we lack protection, and are vulnerable. So, when knowing/not knowing is a life-or-death situation, to question someone's knowledge challenges their security of being. (C. Moore) <http://sites.psu.edu/moore/self-knowledge/>
Self-knowledge is a perspective linked to the constant of worldview. But we don't really know what counts as evidence for the validity of a world view, from survival, tribal, or power models to more integrative, compassionate, and inclusive modes.
Self-knowledge is more exploratory than acquisitive -- an exploration of the unconscious, the dark chaos of our subjective experience.
We learn from life-experiences. We discover the direction of the soul's path, our destiny. The integration of the unconscious into consciousness becomes a basis for experiential self-education. Ancestors, family relations and personal ties represent necessary and fated connections as impossible to escape as the Gods. Relations with the living, the dead, and the imaginal are the inescapable facts of collective and individual history.
We are often moved in midlife for various reasons to pursue greater self-knowledge. We all undergo structural changes where the symbols of liminality frequently represent such ideas as death and birth.
Real knowledge of the human soul is healing. Chalquist describes it as, "Absolute knowledge: the acausal foreknowledge, relatively independent of limitations of time and space, possessed by the unconscious and apparent in constellated archetypes and in synchronicity."
Reflection is needed for the expression of our psychic wholeness. The unconscious process of symbolization is the primordial manifestation of the human spirit. Knowledge of the future, subtlety of emotion, and hidden knowledge is in the image and in the phenomena that happen along the way as we work with images, even without the metanarratives of telos, purpose, and goals.
In "Platonic theology" (1482), Marsilio Ficino attributes a central role to the human soul. He describes the conscious link the link between the corporality of matter, the angelic intelligence and God on the other. "It can descend into the multiplicity of time and space and then trace the physical forms. When the soul flies above the mind, it provides for the future."
Ranier Maria Rilke said, “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” Only when we begin to see in depth do we begin to discover ourselves. It is the unconscious within us who changes. We draw on such information to answer questions such as "What am I like?". We don't know the core of longing but perhaps it is for the longing itself.
Contemplation of nature includes human nature. Creation myths mirrors the emergence of consciousness. A Promethean impulse underlies philosophy. Recognizing the unconscious side of ourselves fundamentally alters our pursuit of self-knowledge and inspire us to live authentic lives. Jung thought the unconscious, "compensates the attitude of the conscious mind and anticipates changes to come."
"The unconscious has a kind of absolute knowledge, but we cannot prove it is an absolute knowledge, because the Absolute, the Eternal, is transcendental." C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 375-391.
"Man’s consciousness is receptive to what Jung called ‘absolute knowledge’ a cosmic principle or quasi intelligence outside the psyche. All thinking which takes place in the ego obscures this ‘knowledge”. A quieting of the ego is required before one can approach it." Marie Louise von Franz, Aurora Consurgens,
Jung thought, "All knowledge of the psyche is itself psychic; in spite of all this the soul is the only experient of life and existence. It is, in fact, the only immediate experience we can have."
"For the alchemists it was wisdom and knowledge, truth and spirit, and its source was in the inner man, though its symbol was common water or sea-water. What they evidently had in mind was a ubiquitous and all-pervading essence, an anima mundi and the 'greatest treasure,' the innermost and most secret numinosum of man. There is probably no more suitable psychological concept for this than the collective unconscious..." Jung, Collected Works vol. 14 (1970), Mysterium Coniunctionis (1956), ¶372 (p. 278).
Modern consciousness studies suggests much the same in a reframe of neurological theory: "We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated "behind the scenes" by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains. All this happens without any interference from our personal awareness, which sits passively in the passenger seat while these processes occur. Put simply, we don't consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them." https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-11-consciousness-human-mind.html
Self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know our specific individual facts beyond all theoretical assumptions within the chaos and irregularities of our destinies. We need an open and unprejudiced attitude. There are certain things we should be concerned about.
At certain life passages we come to mythical intersections that can radically alter our present and future depending on how we meet the challenge. We can travel the way of personal and collective soul -- awareness and experience of superconscious processes.
It is an ancient pursuit, as Novalis describes, in The Disciples of Sais (1789): "a favorite of fate sought to find the mysterious abode of Isis. He came to the threshold. He came in and saw his beloved. He lifted the veil of the goddess of Saïs. And he saw miracle of miracles - himself."
But self-knowledge requires discernment not marginalizing truth for idiosyncratic views and a high self-opinion. Fake experts invite us to conspire in their own self-deception and illusory powers, to join the folly of creating a fantasy world, pulling a veil over unwanted realities.
Our control fantasies are largely a reflection of our desire to hedge our fears, pain, and uncertainty. This is dangerous ground because whenever desire is opposed to will a tragic conflict appears. The deterministic view is contrary to our experience. Do we owe it to ourselves to doubt our doubts when we can dig under that to an even deeper level?
Will is a useful agent in the service of the self. But, will power cannot overcome unconscious motivations, which transcend our powers of comprehension. Assagioli defends it: "The will is not merely assertive, aggressive and controlling. There is the accepting will, the yielding will, the dedicated will. You might say that there is a feminine polarity to the will—the willing surrender, the joyful acceptance of the other functions of the personality."
"At the heart of the self there is both an active and a passive element, an agent and a spectator. Self-consciousness involves our being a witness—a pure, objective, loving witness -- to what is happening within and without. In this sense the self is not a dynamic in itself but is a point
of witness, a spectator, an observer who watches the flow. But there is another part of the inner self -- the will-er or the directing agent -- that actively intervenes to orchestrate the various functions and energies of the personality, to make commitments and to instigate action in the external world. So, at the center of the self there is a unity of masculine and feminine, will and love, action and observation." (Assagioli) http://synthesiscenter.org/articles/0303.pdf
Jung concluded that,"The middle is the center where the jewel is located, where the incubation or the carrying out of the sacrifice or the transformation takes place ... [...] the one who happens to come across that cave, that is, in the cave that each one carries in he or she, in the darkness behind his conscience, is involved in a process of transformation that is unconscious at first. By entering into the unconscious, he creates a connection between his consciousness and unconscious contents; a transformation of his personality with consequences of a positive or negative nature. This transformation is often interpreted as an extension of the natural duration of life or as an omen of immortality. " (C.G. Jung, 1939)
The Blind Leading the Blind
Intellectual territory has been opened to the propagation of nonsense in an aggressive bid to be accepted. Often it is branded or institutionalized simply to sell itself. Therefore, a lot of self-help seminars and literature actually foster a more grotesque, egotistic, and controlling attitude. Yet the natural wild glory of the psyche remains uncontrollable as a mirror remains unaffected by what it reflects.
Posers critical of established modalities claim to originate 'astonishing breakthroughs' and radical conclusions. But somehow they are bootstrapped or congealed from a kernel of wisdom elaborated by personal and collective idiosyncratic thoughts with supernatural conclusions. Somewhere along the way, the logic train jumps the tracks on the wings of self-serving emotions. Paranormal conclusions come untethered from hypotheses and reality checks, leaving the process ungrounded.
Critical thinking is discouraged or disparaged. Claims are rarely checked or questioned. Stridently, insisting on shakey 'proofs' in repetitious podcasts doesn't make them true. Stridently, insisting on shakey 'proofs' doesn't make them true. Believers cocoon themselves in a mental fortress of groupthink confirmation bias with their own kind.
They hold 'conferences', begging for the persuaded response: 'yes, you are right, it is like that'. We may enjoy hearing about how godlike and divine we are, and in a certain sense that is core. But any grandiosity or compensation for our functional deficits it brings may just prevent us from becoming more fully human.
Such originality and transgression are just cliches arising from chains of mistaken ideas and emotions manipulated by rhetoric and even disinformation. Without real culture we remain emotionally uneducated, bewildered, lost in private fantasy while dismissing more functional alternatives. It turns quest into cliche.
For example, before obsessing on the threat or influence of aliens we might consider finding the alienated parts of ourselves, whether we literally believe in them or not. Similarly, religious dogmatism begs the question of whether we need more wholeness than holiness for the authentic life. Also, sometimes we keep an alienated or absent parent near by unconsciously acting out their shadow and behavioral traits.
Perhaps the best that can be said for alternative thought, is it all becomes part of our imaginal journey if we don't stay mired down in such memes, personality cults, dogma, -isms and collective confusion. Adopting the twisted reasoning of others or even their quirky interpretations is not the way to individuation.
We cannot take it for granted that we know ourselves any better than the ancients did. Most of the psychic facts of our being are hidden from us. The Delphic injunction “Know Thyself.” opens the question of “selfhood” and the nature of “recognizing,” “knowing,” “acknowledging”.
Some measure of self-deceit, arrogance if not megalomania, is always involved in our being, whether it is infantile or garden-variety narcissism [sociopathic narcissism is another issue]. Some have an innate urge to 'reach homeward' through self-discipline, artistic expression, healing, faith, or other means.
Knowing oneself takes determining what we count as this “self” that we ought to know, beyond simple self-regulation. We are motivated to experience positive emotional states [pleasure] and avoid negative emotional states [pain]. We're motivated to feel good about ourselves in order to maximize ego-traits and feelings of self-worth and self-esteem. But ego is just one aspect of psychic life though it imagines itself as central.
We react without thinking and call it instinct. But even peak experiences can leave us much the same as before without constant repetition and work. Unintegrated, it's just an experience. Thinking about the unity of the self generates paradoxes which actually have depth and importance to introspective penetration and transparency.
Recent events show a large part of the population can't tell fact from fiction. Historically, those with loftier intellectual aims have prioritized our search for meaning and purpose in life as most fundamental. It helps give our lives the structure and the context we need to ground our lives between desire and the infinite.
Individuation incorporates our unconscious selves into our egos. It means a commitment to knowing the nature of the psyche through direct, personal experience. We emerge with better self-awareness, acceptance and sense of purpose. We can refind our roots, reclaiming what was alienated from the matrix.
Myth opens the archetypal field of the symbolic dimension, of chaos and eros, with its shadows. Hillman suggests that, "Loving is a way of knowing, and for loving to know, it must personify. Personifying is a way of knowing, especially knowing what is invisible, hidden in the heart."
Rafael Lopez Pedraza describes the erotic nature of Eros and Psyche that, "takes place with mature slowness through the learning of pain, and never in youthful frenzy. ... the final fruit of love and psyche, pleasure, brings us closer to the mysterious and mystical character of the myth [numinosum], far beyond what we can express with simple words."
Eros, desire, motivates our loves, art, and violence. Eros is the guidance of our instinctual spiritual urge for psychic relatedness. The imaginal includes our metaconversations, the thoughts beyond the words. It combines desire with knowing the nature of the psyche through direct, personal experience.
Suffering is virtually universal. Evil, misfortune, and injustice are part of life, of culture, as well as coincidence or misfortune. For example, society is undermined by the shadow tendency to be cruel to people less powerful than oneself, personally and collectively. We're flooded with confusion and lies.
The goddess of nature contains dark, sinister aspects -- cunning wickedness and cruelty, unfathomable depths of passion, and the uncanny gloom of death as well as light and the potential for rebirth. Immanent transcendence is found in the unconscious. Transcendence emerges from balanced mind and body, conscious and unconscious, self and nature. Yet, Jung cautions, "Occasionally we must also inquire whether something that wants to go upwards has not taken a false route downwards into the body." (Letters Vol. 1, Pg. 403).
The vast and unpredictable universe inspires fear of the unknown, and particularly, of death. To reduce this fear, we seek knowledge and self-knowledge, through which we hope to control the unknown and stave off death. So, fear and pain motivate striving for knowledge as a balm for dis-ease. Dysregulation and disintegration of personality are a hindrance to deeper self-knowledge, though periodic disintegration of the old outworn self image naturally occurs..
Knowing oneself is ultimately a therapeutic goal, knowledge of our own psychophysical states, framed or conditioned by our conscious and unconscious beliefs. Our subjective conclusions about our own being carry a special authority or presumption of truth, including misguided inner authority about psychological or spiritual self-awareness.
According to Jung, "The middle is the center where the jewel is located, where the incubation or the carrying out of the sacrifice or the transformation takes place ... [...] the one who happens to come across that cave, that is, in the cave that each one carries in he or she, in the darkness behind his conscience, is involved in a process of transformation that is unconscious at first. By entering into the unconscious, he creates a connection between his consciousness and unconscious contents; a transformation of his personality with consequences of a positive or negative nature. This transformation is often interpreted as an extension of the natural duration of life or as an omen of immortality. " (C.G. Jung, 1939)
We think we are happy when we are living and participating in our ideals. But, ultimately, self-awareness is more than just objectively evaluating ourselves against our ego ideals. It aims toward the ground of primordial awareness, which is beyond mind: self-arising, self-revelatory, and nonconceptual.
The undesirable alternative to individuation is to remain enmeshed in the collective:
"Human culture has mutated into a sociopathic marketing machine dominated by economic priorities and psychological manipulation. Never before has a cultural system inculcated its followers to suppress so much of their humanity. Leading this hostile takeover of the collective psyche are increasingly sophisticated propaganda and misinformation industries that traffic the illusion of consumer happiness by wildly amplifying our expectations of the material world. Today’s consumers are by far the most propagandized people in history. The relentless and repetitive effect is highly hypnotic, diminishing critical faculties, reducing one’s sense of self, and transforming commercial unreality into a surrogate for meaning and purpose." -newint.org
Jung and the Anima
In "the Red Book" the soul appears in the most diverse forms: as a dove and a snake. I am talking to you about the dismay of your detachment; you are happy to see her again. After she has lived happy and sad hours, as well as joys and sorrows, her journey must continue with her. It is the spirit of the deep to see it as a living creature, with its own existence, it is not a epiphenomenon object of scientific investigation, it is not dependent on man and it is not built. As such, he escapes every classification, his borders are admire, writes Jung, echoing the eraclitea vision of the soul as an enigma, as the great mystery of being. Not being a processing of intellect like that of philosophers and not having a metaphysical Genesis, which is essentially its essence and function?
The soul is living "Psychic reality". She, by sending images, is a mediator between the unconscious and the conscious world. It's possible to find her to divert her desire from outer things. If not, we are overwhelmed by the horror of the vacuum as a result of the of this world, only when desire is removed from the exterior, whether it is about things or men, and bends over itself, then If he senses a large void, it means that he will desperately seek his soul out of its own property. Only blind people do not see it, seizing reality that deplete: so they are possessed by the desire of things, rather than having the desire as an " image " and " expression " of the soul. It's the images that make the reality understand. Owning the world, and not its image, is equivalent to it, because its soul is " poor " and " indigent ". the " things " Deplete even if the material wealth they offer is consistent; the result of having, To put it bluntly, it's to make your soul sick.
Since the richness of the soul is made of images, its loss is risky: the insatiable greed leads to madness; only inside it is possible to find it; it is the images to be its true wealth and those who walk in the path of its knowledge is Already An Alchemist. Those who do not feed the soul of images, as well as not being wise, raise devils and dragons in their hearts. With the image image of the psychic enemies to be free from the descent into the world of the soul, Jung shows how to grasp the essence of the psyche, which speaks for symbols: Decodificandoli, the seed produces the tree of life. Instead of continuing with full success in the world, he now finds the strength to give voice to sweet inner research, and with the spirit of time which, despite the blunder of appearances, is invaded by fragility and inconsistency.
godtrauma http://gregmogenson.com/GOD%20intro.pdf
"The divine light irradiates all things equally, but this is
assimilated in different ways: the lower, coarse heart swallows it like a black hole, the upper, subtle heart absorbs and emits it."
--R. Fludd, Philosophia Sacra, Frankfurt, 1626.
assimilated in different ways: the lower, coarse heart swallows it like a black hole, the upper, subtle heart absorbs and emits it."
--R. Fludd, Philosophia Sacra, Frankfurt, 1626.
"You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself." --Alan Watts
SOUL KNOWLEDGE
Iona Miller, 2017
“The concept of individuation plays a large role in our psychology. In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology. Individuation, therefore, is a process of differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality” (Jung, CW 6, para. 757).
"In the critical passage in this dialogue attributed to Plato, Socrates discusses with his eponymous interlocuture the question of how the soul can know itself. In the immediately following passage, subsequently added by a later Neoplatonist, this argument is linked to a preceding discussion about the injunction of the Delphic Oracle, "know thyself". and the role of vision as a model of knowledge." (Alcibiades I, 133c; in Plato, 1997, p. 592 cited in Re-encountering Jung). “The essence of knowledge is self-knowledge,” claimed Plato.
Gathering the Seeds of Light
In antiquity, the Pythagoreans, Orphics and Platonists taught that the soul possessed a kind of radiating subtle body as a vehicle for its manifestation. Pythagorean life principles sought to free the soul from coarse matter and make it "bright" (augoeides).
The "brightness" of Plato became the "light soul" in Neoplatonism, embodying the idea of the body of light or of a higher immortal subtle body. This eternal shining vehicle is also called 'star-like.' Paracelsus suggested we have 'two' bodies: one composed of elements and the other of stars. We know now that elements of stars are literally the same as our own elements, all forged in supernovas. Ruland claimed, ‘Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.’
Nature is matter, soul, and spirit. Thales recommended a look inward to “know thyself,” many centuries before Augustine. Hillman speaks in Healing Fiction how "'Know Thyself' is revelatory, non-linear, discontinuous; it is like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act."
But those who are in this process often cannot see it, cannot see its imaginative metaphorical quality and mistake it as literal and concrete. Creating any approach to the image and results attained are skewed by our presence.
Perhaps the best claim we can make for our approach is that at least it is a fertile one. 'Know Thyself' is more of an invitation than a heroic exhortation driven by ego or will. Plotinus admonished, "The way to truth was the journey of a lonely person to that which is eternally alone."
Hillman cautions, "The autochthonous [native to the place where found; indigenous] quality of images as independent . . . of the subjective imagination which does the perceiving . . . First, one believes images are hallucinations (things seen); then one recognizes them as acts of subjective imagining; but then, third, comes the awareness that images are independent of subjectivity and even of the imagination itself as a mental activity. Images come and go (as in dreams) at their own will, with their own rhythm, within their own fields of relations, undetermined by personal psychodynamics." (Archetypal Psych 7)
In Answer to Job (p. 59) Jung reminds us, "We must bear in mind that we do not make projections, rather they happen to us. This fact permits the conclusion that we originally read our first physical, and particularly psychological, insights in the stars. In other words, what is farthest is actually nearest. Somehow, as the Gnostics surmised, we have "collected" ourselves from out of the cosmos."
Jung alludes to mankind's aeons of observing signs in the sky and explaining all manner of celestial phenomena with human intuition, projected imagination. The great megaliths attest to the discovery and veneration of immense astronomical cycles and geophysical measurements. The vast story of the Precession of the Equinox was widely known in early antiquity, and formed the basis of most early cosmologies, myths, and religions. That primeval cosmic night was the soul.
James Hillman argued for an animated or panpsychic approach to cosmos, rooted in the soul of the world: “A self-knowledge that rests within a cosmology which declares the mineral, vegetable and animal world beyond the human person to be impersonal and inanimate is not only inadequate. It is also delusional. No matter how well we may know ourselves, we remain walking, talking ghosts, cosmologically set apart from the other beings of our milieu.”
Is it adequate to know only what we know consciously? Many dynamics take place occluded by the veil of the unconscious but inferred from their effects. We need some knowledge of the unconscious and its contents or we cannot claim to know ourselves. Something in us knows the signs. Much of it has to do with the complex relationship between the observer and the observed -- the I and the Not-I. The atemporal observer is unconscious but accessible.
For example, the parental images: "the mythical figure of the parent that hurts, or is injured, becomes the psychological statement that the parent is the wound. In literal terms, this means that we think our parents are responsible; but the same wording, as a metaphor, can mean that what hurts us can also be a parent. Our wounds are the fathers and mothers of our destinies." (Hillman)
Sometimes we can overcome almost insurmountable difficulties if we recognize the unconscious. The unconscious has the power to manifests in symptoms when unrecognized at the symbolic level. Then parts of ourselves remain in the shadows with painful manifestations, unconscious baggage, and even transgenerational legacies of secrets that deprive us of our roots.
Hillman suggested, “‘Know thyself,’ means also ‘know thy peculiar images.'” Jung stated that "image is psyche" (Jung 13: para. 75) and Hillman emphasized that "images are souls, and our job with them is to meet them on that soul level" ("An Inquiry" 81). That is, both prioritized a loving approach rooted in eros with the autonomous figures of psyche. Psyche's naked truth appears in symbols and images.
It is the soul not the ego we seek in 'Know Thyself.' We are often unaware of our inner states and pathologies, and lack adequate vocabulary and categories to conceptualize and ponder it. Complexes are beyond our conscious control. When it comes to the unconscious, the more we know of one area, the less we know about other dynamics -- sort of a psychospiritual "uncertainty principle."
The unconscious is the part of personality that is forced out of mental awareness by the ego's defense so transpersonal contents are never encountered. New life emerges from increased self-knowledge and expanding awareness of the Divine unfolding in the human soul. The ego intuits preconscious information often associated with the inner God-image. The transpsychic is transformed into new conscious knowledge.
Self-knowledge changes our attitudes and lifestyle, relationships to self, others, and cosmos, giving us a different view of the world. Accessible to all, Jung's approach encourages self expression, pursues self knowledge, rekindles meaning and enables us to realize our optimum destiny which Jung called individuation.
An unconscious side of our being fundamentally alters the pursuit of self-knowledge, the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This autonomous influence relativizes the over-emphasized position of the ego. If we deny that dimension of relationship with the cosmos, it distorts our self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge, the understanding of our thoughts and behaviors and their influence on our lives, naturally makes the unconscious conscious. We cannot take it for granted that we know ourselves because the real psychic facts are for the most part hidden, because our ego only focuses on its own contents and exaggerated self-importance. Our path is uncertain, but consciousness is the core of our being, a divine gift and an inherent mystery.
Jung called the path to self-knowledge the individuation process. The emergence of the whole person is the path to self-knowledge, creativity, greater coherence, and well-being. If we ignore this quest for our authentic self, unfolding knowledge of our whole human nature, neurotic symptoms may arise.
Perhaps the only truth is direct experience of the self, of pure self-awareness, transcendent, unchanging part of ourselves that leaves us vitalized and enriched. With a new perspective we align with the actualization of our life-purpose, reducing internal conflict and increasing adaptability.
We only need to look into the river of our life and see how the river flows past while simultaneously all else stands still. Ideally, psychic energy is moving between the poles in a fluid, dynamic way. Awareness of the realm of myth, poetry, image, dreams, and meaning is the realization of the imaginal. In ancient times no one had decided what was 'real.' So, in primordial awareness the boundaries of real and unreal, outside and inside remain fluid, as expressed in Chan poetry:
"The Great Way is not difficult,
Just don't pick and choose.
If you cut off all likes or dislikes
Everything is clear like space.
Make the slightest distinction
And heaven and earth are set apart.
If you wish to see the truth,
Don't think for or against."
~ Faith in Mind (Xinxin Ming)
Niels Bohr, in The Art of Genius (1998) suggested how to go about this: “If you hold opposites together in your mind, you will suspend your normal thinking process and allow an intelligence beyond rational thought to create a new form.”
Many streams converge as Jung describes, "Opposites can be united only in the form of compromise, or irrationally, some new thing arising between them which, though different from both, yet has the power to take up their energies in equal measure as an expression of both and of neither. Such an expression cannot be contrived by reason, it can only be created through living." CW 6, Para 169
In The Report, Nathan Schwartz-Salant says, "change always takes place through the union of opposites because the change in internal structure is the death of the union and the acceptance of the next nigredo. Through This sequence "Coniunctio-Nigredo" the process works to create a new stable form."
In The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male shall not be male, and the female shall not be female: . . . then you will enter [the kingdom]."
The notion of paradox comes from a consciousness conditioned to think in terms of opposites, dualistic paradox. Self-referential paradox feeds back and annihilates itself. Such bivalence (binary logic: this or that; true or false; black or white) can be superseded by multivalent consciousness which perceives in terms of degrees. Multivalence more accurately reflects the complex dynamics of consciousness. As in the case of fractal generation, solutions are not found in terms of this or that, but in terms of degrees of fractional transformation, relationships.
Rooted in uniting the opposites, this is not an overly rational intellectual approach, though feeling types may react to it as lacking heart due to their own anti-intellectual bias. M-L von Franz pointed out that people get emotional when their inferior function is triggered.
The inferior function responds unconsciously to the primary function. When unprocessed, repressed, or raw content emerges the emotional charge turns negative. Shadow aspects arise that can actually be a gateway to our depths. But not so long as we remain one-sided, without deeper insight into the depths of our nature. It blocks the flow. In one-sidedness, the unconscious is alienated from the conscious.
When we cling to our conditioned social identity or mask, focus too much on sweetness and light (sugar-coated spirituality), and repress our shadow aspects, the dynamic inner flow gets stuck, and the equilibrium of libido is lost. This can result in compulsions which cause the libido to go wild, “untamed” as it “streams off to one side,” becoming more daemonic the more the situation remains unbalanced. (CW 6, ¶347)
Slivers of insight, fragments of a lively examined life, can coalesce in myriad ways. We submit ourselves again and again to the intrigue of a hall of mirrors where ideas and images bounce off one another. Divine light illuminates memory and faith stares down doubt and fear. We hear the siren songs of possibility, of creation.
Destiny is different from the reality we may be experiencing. Life's great lesson is that love and fate will lay you bare, strip you naked, and force you to surrender. We must die and surrender egoic control to love and trust it, in order to find and be transformed by our own unwanted, unclaimed, and denied aspects. Sometimes it takes surrendering our dreams and opportunities for self expression.
Destiny is larger than what goes on in the heart. Because everything is partially hidden, we start to imagine what is felt. The darkness comes to us in doubt, in our mortality. The contradictory world merges into another world, a timeless world, where desire becomes a crescendo or rising tide of emotion, integrating will and surrender. We act, but are also acted upon by transpersonal forces. We must embrace them willingly in our descent to experience the mysteries of transcending duality.
This approach is a middle way, balancing rational and emotive approaches. It doesn't hurt to spend some time in thinking, reflection, and contemplation. We have to move beyond the feel-good flow of our neurotransmitters to unite our heart, head, and soul. Bridging conceptualization and felt-sense we don't need to mystify the process any further. Then we can mine the treasures of our depths.
Raising consciousness changes thoughts and behavior, prevents our false beliefs, negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors from directing our fate. We must be careful to distinguish “self-knowledge” from knowledge of our conscious ego personalities and self-critical awareness of assumptions and biases or suffer psychic multiple system atrophy.
We need to recognize the paradox and polarity all life implies. We can move beyond cultural attitudes of intellectual arrogance accompanied by crudeness of feeling.
Jung noticed that, True, the unconscious knows more than the conscious does; but it is knowledge of a special sort, knowledge in eternity, usually without reference to the here and now, not couched in the language of the intellect. Only when we let its statements amplify themselves does it come within the range of our understanding; only then does a new aspect become perceptible to us.
"The profundity and pregnant significance of the symbol appeal just as strongly to thinking as to feeling (qq.v.), while its peculiar plastic imagery, when shaped into sensuous form, stimulates sensation as much as intuition (qq.v.). The living symbol cannot come to birth in a dull or poorly developed mind, for such a mind will be content with the already existing symbols offered by established tradition. Only the passionate yearning of a highly developed mind, for which the traditional symbol is no longer the unified expression of the rational and the irrational, of the highest and the lowest, can create a new symbol." Jung, CW 6, Para 825
Meaning is born as 'knowing' from the symbol that was pregnant with it. Myth always feels real – otherwise it would not be myth, and would have no effect. Mary Karr assures us, “A psychological self-awareness and faith in the power of truth gives you courage to reveal whatever you unearth, whether you come out looking vain, or conniving or hateful or not.”
Soul Knowledge
The value of self-knowledge has always been recognized across cultures. We have to be willing to accept radically honest personal self-examination, awareness of objective self-knowledge, and the rigorous demands of sticking with the process, long term. Knowing our dark characteristics is endless painstaking work, because the soul is without end.
Jung considered self-realization as the highest potential of human awareness. Higher knowledge emerges from intuitive processes and spiritual experiences engaging and integrating archetypal forms or images with sense perception, illuminating both the inner and outer environment. We have to engage the deep mind to amplify self-awareness to know what is right for ourselves.
We have to see past our blind-spots or complexes and the silence of others who merely indulge or flatter us. To really get an accurate reflection of ourselves we need an honest, objective mirror, which our intimates rarely are.
The unconscious mirrors us as we are, in dreams, visions, fantasies, accidents, active imagination and synchronicity. The mirror is a metaphor for our meetings with 'other' in the mirror-like nature of the reflective mind, uniting knowledge and understanding as well as other contradictory aspects, feelings, and impulses at the heart of the matter.
“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” Hillman, The Soul's Code
We need some knowledge of the unconscious and its contents or we cannot claim to know ourselves. The unconscious is the part of the personality that's forced out of mental awareness by the ego's defense and transpersonal contents never encountered. New life emerges from increased self-knowledge and expanding awareness of the Divine unfolding in the human soul. Self-knowledge changes our attitudes and lifestyle, relationships to others, and a different view of the world.
Accessible to all, Jung's approach encourages self expression, pursues self knowledge, rekindles meaning and enables us to realize our optimum destiny or what Jung called individuation. Recognizing that there is an unconscious side of our being has fundamentally altered the pursuit of self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge, the understanding of our thoughts and behaviors and their influence on our lives, will make the unconscious conscious. We cannot take it for granted that we know ourselves because the real psychic facts are for the most part hidden, because our ego only focuses on its own contents. Krishnamurti taught that it takes vulnerability to face life, not "the respectable wall of self-enclosing virtue that you cultivate" that gets you nowhere.
We seek connection with the original force of creation. We are rooted in the living reality of psyche. Numinosity [mysterious or awe-inspiring divine presence] is luminosity. Our unknowable nature is inherent. We have an affinity for substancelessness. What has been projected is re-collected. The ground of all phenomena is knowing and can be known.
Ancient mystics collected the seeds of the light of nature, scintillae or fiery sparks of the world soul, dispersed throughout the universe; this self-gathering of cosmic seeds was an increase in self-knowledge. Jung speaks of archetypes as luminosities or radiant patterns or points of light, momentary flashes of consciousness.
Seeds of unconscious fantasy become symbols and images. Archetypal images have links to instinctual life and myths that personify nature and mirror the presence of meaning. Hillman claims, "the gods are "places", and myths create a place for psychic events." Also, he thought, "each god contains shadow and projects it according to the cosmos that God gives shape to. Each God is a way in which our shadows are given to us." Transformations of consciousness are mirrored in instinctual experience. We find our lived connection with the autonomous psyche.
An accelerating frame of reference with an observer at its central focus can arise even in empty space. This is the key insight of the holographic concept of reality. Physics, metaphysics, and depth psychology place the observer at the center of this discussion.
Gathering the dispersed psychic energy together fixates the "shining white soul." Concentrating consciousness as a purely energetic manifestation is integration of split-off contents into consciousness. The inherent light of nature is the breath or subtle body, a psychophysical unity, the 'inner firmament' of our inner being, the 'undulent quiescence.'
This light is paradoxically both one and many and corresponds with the Anthropos, original Man. The wholeness of infantile cosmic consciousness is not confused with the transpersonal unity of ultimate Being.
Consciousness rests at the zero point. Luminous ground suffuses all. Virtual photons self-transform to photons and biophotons. Luminous mind, the nondual source of creations, is empty of thoughts and potential harmonic cascades.
The Pleroma is the ground of being where all opposites are united: energy/matter, living/dead, time/space, creative/destructive, good/evil, hot/cold, one/many, sun/moon, fullness/emptiness, light/dark. truth/falseness. Paradox retains the darkness in spiritual mystery and its inherent unknowableness.
In CW12, Jung cautions, “Experience of the opposites has nothing whatever to do with intellectual insight or with empathy. It is more what we would call fate.”
Kabbalah, (or Qabalah), Hermeticism, and Gnosticism claim much the same about the primacy of wisdom light emerging from Nothing and the yoking of opposites in their cosmologies. Kabbalah graphically depicts a 'consciousness map', the Tree of Life.
This symbol system is a key to understanding the natural world and our own capacity for self-realization. Symbols contain the seeds of further developments. An invisible universe exists just behind and within the known visible world. Soulful guidance suggests we are more than we appear to be and we can explore that inner terrain at different levels of existence.
Still, Jung lamented, "No one has time for self-knowledge or believes that it could serve any sensible purpose…. nobody has drawn any conclusions from the fact that Western man confronts himself as a stranger and that self-knowledge is one of the most difficult and exacting of the arts.” (CW12)
"Astonishingly enough, the alchemist conceived his imaginationes as something quasi-corporeal; a sort of “subtle body” that was half spiritual. They were, therefore, of a psychoid nature, forming an intermediate realm belonging to both matter and spirit. On account of the mysterious and manifold implications of the imaginatio, Jung called it 'perhaps the most important key to an understanding of the opus.'" ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 72
"And, finally: imagination is, therefore, not “a question of actualizing those contents of the unconscious that are outside nature, that is, not a datum of our empirical world, and therefore a priori of archetypal character. The place or the medium of realization is neither mind nor matter, but that intermediate realm of subtle reality that can be adequately expressed [only] by the symbol.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, § 394
***
Body & Soul
"… the flesh is getting its own back… the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit—the two being really one—then we can understand why the striving to transcend the present level of consciousness through acceptance of the unconscious must give the body its due, and why recognition of the body cannot tolerate a philosophy that denies it in the name of the spirit…" (CW 10, ¶195)
We can remain fascinated with the self-arising phenomena of consciousness, or look at its dynamics from a top-down perspective. In contrast to the analytic reductionism of classical science, systems philosophy integrates theory and philosophy to foster reorganization of thinking and knowing perceived reality.
Rather than explaining what things are, we explore and describe how things work, integrating events and actions into meaningful patterns. The hidden language of the archetypes of nature helps us translate the dynamics of our Being and Becoming. A multidisciplinary approach can present and explore a variety of theories and models without advocating them, ideally leading toward best practice. The world of experience remains one of perceived reality and worldview.
Soul is the healing core of being human. We experience many orders of inner and outer experience. Soul, as psychological experience, is a third order of highly reflective and expressive reality, like body (sense perception) and mind (conceptualization). Our creativity always derives from an experience of seduction that coincides with the awareness of the inner world itself. We are rooted in nature.
Aldo Carotenuto says, "We can of course live solely within the collective, with the illusion of speaking a common language and of not being alone, but this deception can cost our lives. If we act according to the general rule, we are following a code that is not our own. Everyone must find his or her own tune, accepting the resulting abandonment by those who continue singing in concert. Great artists create modes of expression that are uniquely their own: they enter so deeply into their sense of life that preexisting modes no longer serve their purpose. They invent new ways of writing poetry, of painting and making music.” (Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering)
The transcendent function produces awareness of soul, converting ego energy into soul. As energy is deliberately transformed in individuation, so is consciousness. Jung suggests a union of opposites takes place in the transcendent Self when body and spirit join. When we explore the nature of self, we explore the nature of being. Primacy of psychic reality serves as the basis for creative transformation, only possible through the compelling power of inner vision.
Depth and Transpersonal psychology study human nature based on the assumption that we possess potentials that exceed the limits of our ego. We can integrate the spiritual experience within a broader understanding of the human psyche and consciousness. Self-exploration leads to a radical shift away from ego identification toward self-arising realization of inseparable union with a timeless, all-encompassing psychic reality.
Some suggest an algorithmic self-instructing consciousness. If self-informing consciousness corresponds to the capacity to integrate information, then the system should be able to generate self-revelatory consciousness to the extent of having a large repertoire of available states (information). (Scopec, Neuroquantology, 14:4)
Suspending ego's opposing, conflicted, and defended content releases its energy. New conscious content transcends the old at a higher ontological level, when polarized opposites are reintegrated. Opposing forces are held together without acting out or identifying with destructive conflict. Psychological faith is sticking with and trusting the Process.
Conscious subjective attention to objective unconscious processes transforms both. Just witnessing withdraws energy from old structures and symptoms. Instead of feeding a complex, that energy centers and grounds in the soul with a felt sense of higher meaning, living wholeness, and greater awareness of light or depth in all phenomena. Self-revealing awareness is unitive consciousness of the numinous and divine.
The key difference is that the core of Western knowledge has emerged from a dualistic understanding of mind and matter while Eastern science and philosophy is nondual. Soul harmonizes the dual-unity through self-realization. The seer can see past physical phenomena. We trust our higher spiritual form to create greater mental and emotional stability. We can learn to live vitally, intelligently, and cooperatively with our spiritual path.
We are complicated; others don't really know us and we don't know ourselves because we focus on our illusions and self-delusions. When we dig within, we find the crumbling 'truths' were simulations all along. What felt authentic, even sacred, at the time is revealed as a sham, as our own projection. We are consciously reluctant to admit the polarity of our own background.
Our change of heart correlates with the revisioning. Our belief in the sacred comes from our own attribution of divine authority, not its inherent qualities. We tend to 'worship' the dynamics of our understanding, divinize the presumed truth of a numinosum -- ontologically, metaphysically, historically, and personally. We only know what we know through epistemological metaphors.
It isn't pleasant to encounter ourselves, to know ourselves. Shadow is our repressed ego that we reject and deny -- the personal unconscious and the defensive armored aspect of the body. It is our primal cruel, sadistic, rapacious, envious impulses. So, Jung cautions, "Man should first strive to know himself, and then live in harmony with his own truth. Who is in a position to see his own shadow and to bear the knowledge has already fulfilled a small part of the task."
Conscious awareness of the unconscious emerges from the union of opposites. Individuation is the conscious journey through this "middle way." Polarity generates energy that is released in a new form when they unite, like a dream fuses the conscious and unconscious into a psychospiritual dynamic.
In Inner Work, Robert Johnson claims, “when we experience the images, we also experience the inner parts of ourselves that are clothed in the images " (p. 25). Psychic intensity can transfer among different symbols and images, channeling the energy of transformation and individual destiny.
Life plays out in the tension of opposites. Jung discovered the reality of the objective psyche, which lies beyond the inner/outer disjunction. The reality of self-presentational living language or inceptive language supersedes traditional language. Its conceptual forms, such as inner/outer, spirit/matter,subject/object, are destroyed.
The transformation of imagination to inspiration is accompanied by a transition from metaphor to personification, and from myth and symbol to transformed allegory. Psychic engagement with sacred mythic imagery characterizes this profound inner process.
We learn to accept the opposites over unrealistic polarizations. Our psyche is the microcosm containing light and dark. Conscious-unconscious, inner-outer, depth-breadth, dark-light, feeling-thinking, life-spirit, etc. unite in a paradoxical or transcendent third. For example, in a vortex, outer coexists with inner in a dimensional morphing. Criss-crossing waves of probability originate in the past-present-future.
Soul is not a 'thing' but an inherent imaginal process self-revealing the subjective meaning of life. Mythological and physiological threads are interwoven to give us the courage to live. Hillman says, "the myth is not only what is spoken with the mouth, but also what the mouth does not say: Mythos without logos."
Images are soul's native language, a deepening perspective recognizing imaginative possibilities including the potential to realize the whole universe within of the somatic and spiritual unconscious -- original source of the human spirit.
Inter-subjective Engagement
The adventure of self-discovery allows us to re-integrate and delimit the body. Our body contains the memory of every experience we've had, so we can 'read' our biography from the dynamic structure of the body and embedded tissue memory. The body-mind is realized as one reality. Associations shape the functional identity of the body -- our arousal levels, symptoms, pains, irritations, inflammations, contractions, and blocks.
The unconscious body is also the shadow, primordial, instinctual, chthonic, perverse, denied, mercurial, deadly. It is the dark and animalistic naked underbelly, the background, the peripheral, the unaccepted and yearned for. When we cast light on the previously unknown, we cast a shadow of the archaic, rebellious, and unstable upon something else. Attitudes and mental processes affect body function.
Body processes influence and determine thoughts and images, even the primitive, magical, and mad. Through self-care and self-regulation, we can modulate energy, breathing and chronic muscle tensions bringing out the emotions, thoughts, and images through expression. The cycle of energy includes movement, emotions, thoughts and images.
Each body expresses its specific individual dynamic character structure and helps us understand our personality, pain, rigidity, and conflicts. The character may change but remain present so the self-knowledge process represents the journey of a lifetime. This means we need to take responsibility for our own way of being in the world, keeping our body consciousness alive.
Rather than identify with it, we build a relationship with the body, its unconscious body language and embedded memories, and suppressed emotions. Pain is associated with unfulfilled desire, injury or humiliation, loss or frustration.
Understanding patterns in the individual parts of the body (mouth, eyes, shoulders, pelvis, feet, etc. ) is like reading words. Being able to read correctly does not in itself imply the ability to understand the meaning in the individual context.
We become desensitized and numb, including to the emotions associated with it. Blocks are expressions of suppressed emotions. The jaws, shoulders, throat, or pelvis may harbor unconscious aggression, anger, screams, or sexuality. Reconnecting with pain brings release of tensions that restores pleasure and vitality.
Consciousness grounded in soul and living wholeness reveals a depth at the center of all phenomenon. Soul and its felt-sense and psychic image are related to the transcendent spiritual archetype, but remains unconscious until self-realized. We live with myth in our lives, permeated with metaphor, spirit, self-reflection, and guidance. Psyche is numinous, luminous, and sonorous.
In The Room in the Dark, Aldo Carotenuto says, "Whoever discovers the soul discovers the impossibility of looking at life in its more superficial aspects, delivering it to its rhythm without giving it a new, dense sense of meaning. For those who do not know the soul, living is disappearing without leaving a trace. Different is the fate of those who are forced to stop their steps and put their aspirations into inner life by making the soul the space to live in."
We try to understand what ourselves and others seem to believe, what is 'core' and what is projection. Jung distinguished theological notions of soul from his psychological notions -- the living imaginal properties of human life, and the images produced by the anima/animus complex psychic function:
"I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality.” [“Definitions,” CW 6, par. 797]
Imagination moves us. Being undefinable, soul is more of a symbol than a concept. It is an ambiguous root metaphor, a reflective way of viewing things with subjective differentiation. We are encouraged by the presence of the different forms of nature. Soul animates the body in natural union, and the spirit in supernatural union.
Where religious soul is unconscious, psychological soul is conscious, a channel to see the spiritual world. Soul animates the body and world and unites the opposites by seeing and understanding. Conscious and unconscious unite through reflection, the intersection of two worlds as persistent transcendent realization.
Thomas Moore says, "We know intuitively that soul has to do with genuineness and depth, as when we say certain music has soul or a remarkable person is soulful... Soul is revealed in attachment, love, and community, as well as in retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy." (Care of the Soul, xi-xii)
In The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, "The soul answered and said, 'I saw you. You did not see me nor recognize me. I served you as a garment, and you did not know me.' When it had said this, it went away rejoicing greatly." ... "And the soul said, 'why do you judge me although I have not judged? I was bound though I have not bound. I was not recognized. But I have recognized that the All is being dissolved, both the earthly (things) and the heavenly." James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library, revised edition. HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1990.
Ours is not a purely individual existence; there is also an infinitely larger paradigm. We want to know ourselves and yet we avoid it, deny it, fictionalize and even fear it, consciously and unconsciously. It's like we have a view of infinity in the vast night sky but we rarely turn our gaze that way or wonder in amazement at that vast domain and its implications. But it remains the ground of our being, nevertheless.
The process of self-discovery is one of emerging self-knowledge. A psychological self-awareness and faith in the power of truth gives us the courage to reveal whatever we unearth to ourselves with radical honesty whether it is complimentary or not. We need to be more critical of our basic assumptions.
If we are dissociated from nature, we may also dissociate or ignore the body, rather than living in it with its shame, symptoms, and vulnerabilities. Our vulnerabilities allow us to open ourselves to our feelings of fear, sadness, loneliness, to get in touch with the same feelings we meet in the other, love, jealousy, suffering, fear of loss and all the confusing states we experience while falling in and out of love.
Our torments only have meaning within our personal experience. We can only understand the body through embodied awareness, a felt sense of subtle pulsating energies that transforms our way of being in the body. Awareness perceives through our embodiment which is the medium of the field. The images and memories themselves change to different frames of reference that give us multiple perspectives on what we have experienced.
We unconsciously hide our true face from the world with our Persona, our negativity from ourselves with our Shadow, and our vulnerability from our relationships with Anima/Animus projections when they could be our soulguides.
Marie Louise von Franz states, “If an individual has wrestled seriously and long enough with the anima (or animus)... The unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form...as an initiator, guardian, a guru/teacher, a wise old man....” The sages call this soul work, which lies beyond theories, beliefs, and mind.
It's not that we refuse to see, but when we're in it, enmeshed or identified with it, we can't see it. But, soul wants to be heard and recognized. We hide from our Adult self with the Eternal Child and from the higher Self with the false ego. The Wise Old Man and Wise Old Woman are venerable mana figures who mentor us through our dreams and insights, as wise extensions of our numinous mother and father images, ancestral rational and feeling wisdom.
In times of transition the Wise Sages, Elders, and Ancestors support us with the awareness of generations, helping us find psychic connections between past and future, our link to wholeness. They embody the self-realizing potential for spiritual development yet, they still have moral short-comings, or human flaws. In their non-dual form, they are our universal Higher Selves, knowing that comes not from thinking but from experience that knows ultimate reality.
The narrated identity as a social presentation is the self-organizing part of the soul that gives us the illusion we are in control of ourselves. Such a mask hides our real face. Shame and a narcissistic craving for attention or fame stem from the same root.
We become convinced such stories are the truth of ourselves and the world. The self-image as believed is defended as a matter of life and death to protect the naked soul in its acute sense of vulnerability from attack.
"The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual," says Jung (CW 7, Pg.305).
A defensive labyrinth of self-justifying stories is thrown up, but inflated, self-enhancing and deflated, disparaging attributions create conflict and dissonance. Jung considered primordial image of the labyrinth a symbol of the unconscious mind, and our unconscious journey through dreams. This is the labyrinth, the essentially metaphorical, paradoxical, symbolic maze we must walk for self-knowledge, the manifold essence of the inner world.
But it is a dark and dangerous place, an entangling and confusing world, where it is easy to get lost or assailed by personal and collective evil (Shadow). In crisis, we battle our mortality, evil and darkness with reason and intellect, resolve and faithfulness. Our wounds, dedication, and suffering become ways of patiently tending soul. How we feel makes the difference in essential situations.
This is the perilous journey into unknown psychic territory. If we are disoriented, solutions elude us. The center remains an empty space until inhabited by the Presence of the self, the divine life-force, opening the possibility of devotional surrender (sacrifice) to the Source or ultimate Reality.
Jung famously said, "There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." To do so we have to enter an autonomous realm of nature, to listen deeply to the voice of nature, to find the fertilizing spirit of each place.
James Hillman, in "The Pleasure of Thinking" says, Seeking the anima mundi for me means to cross the world like a tribal hunter ... a gold seeker. It means scrutinizing everything carefully and 'divining' as it is said, the specific genius loci. For this we must be sensitive to the representations of the world ... "
More than an inner entity, soul is a virtual process. Soul comes to us in our predictable life passages, inner turning points, including foundational stages and childhood's end. It includes gradual integration of dependency, socialization, rebellion, character adaptation, responsiveness, and responsibility which form the seed of devotion, the spiritual qualities of faith, love, and surrender.
The Catch-30s, Midlife (36-42), and late liminal life, often strip us bare, revealing the truth of who we are. Beginning with psycho-physical individuation, such archetypal passages are the unfolding of human potential, more modes of intuitive self-transcendence than intentional self-development.
http://jungiancenter.org/enjoying-the-afternoon-of-life-jung-on-aging/
Midlife, a developmental imperative, opens the socially conditioned beliefs, feelings, and false self to the true self, and this self is the world. The second half of life is more about maturing than growth. Naturally, they overlap one another, and are reiterated throughout life as social, personal, and spiritual responsibilities. These foundational transitions, inherently liminal states, used to be facilitated by myths, initiation ceremonies, and rites of passage.
Midlife is often a time of reexamination of self. If we have repeating patterns, it is a good time to look into our transgenerational legacies, family loyalties and dissociation, sibling position, epigenetic inheritance, marital puzzles, and more, relating our patterns to those in our family tree. It can help us unlock the blocks produced by unconscious inheritances, such as transmission of trauma. They can unwittingly affect our health, our relationships, our work success, the life of our children, and our chances of being happy in a relationship.
We return to questioning who we are and where we are going. But, we can always uncover deep, core issues and themes from our unconscious buried past that negatively influence our current life. Our psychic processes include reflections, doubts, and experiments. We can engage with the autonomous natural functions of vision and imagination. Visions are primordial forms of symbols.
Archetypal dimensions of awareness arise in us as experiential beingness. The 'imaginal' is a transformative field where we are connected and can recharge. It is simply a more expanded consciousness and reality. The unconscious is a vast ocean of many shores. We chart our course through the ebb and flow of existence. When we gaze within it is through the whole body as awareness, gazing through awareness into awareness, yoking past, present, and future together as an image.
We might concur with Jung: "But when we penetrate the depths of the soul and when we try to understand its mysterious life, we shall discern that death is not a meaningless end, the mere vanishing into nothingness—it is an accomplishment, a ripe fruit on the tree of life."
Healing Wisdom
The antidote to our stressful experience is healing wisdom, often personified as Sophia, Shekinah, or Soul, anima mumdi. In the Feminine we find the solace for life's bitterness. Gnosis is participatory knowing. Belief is a substitute for gnosis. We all believe in something that can't be proven. Freed of belief we open into direct perception, trusting our experience as it unfolds over and beyond time.
Psychologist Ralph Metzner suggests, "Comparing and integrating insights from entheogenic experiences, shamanic journeys, breathwork, hypnotherapy journeys as well as meditative experiences and dreams, we find remarkable convergences of modern findings with esoteric teachings..."
Aldous Huxley and others have described the Perennial Philosophy as the core of wisdom that draws on the common ground of the experience of Ultimate Being: primordial awareness, inherent clarity, and unbound sacred space, potential space, shared by all traditions -- fierce and beneficent Beingness. Our question remains how we can express the clarity of any wisdom we’ve realized.
The Renaissance syncretism of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola revived archaic lore, Kabbalah, Greek philosophy, and the therapeutic approach of practice and service. Giordano Bruno concluded, "it's not the matter that generates thought, it's the thought that generates matter."
Experience of the Ground is pure awareness of being without the intrusive fluctuating content of mind. Self-arising primordial awareness is Nothingness or openness or emptiness, or voidness or absolute spaciousness that Jung called the Plenum and modern physics knows as the virtual vacuum, from which manifestation unfolds.
Thus, this resting state is coequal with the formative ground of matter and psyche. We experience this boundless nature as a resonant consciousness field coextensive with mindbody. Our body of emptiness and stillness is the center of our own mandala, luminous, radiant light. Consciousness and imagination helps create the reality we experience, including luminous awareness.
When wisdom blooms in its perfection the experiential secret is revealed as wisdom light -- identification and unity with the body of light. Jung suggested "the task of man is to become aware of what is pressing from within, Unconscious, rather than being unaware or identifying with it. In both cases, it is less than its destiny, which is to create consciousness. As far as we know, the only meaning of human existence is to light a light in the darkness of pure being."
We never completely solve our most serious life problems, but perhaps learn how to carry them more gracefully. New knowledge about our true self leads us to redefine our feelings and our view of ourselves. Changes in identity come from a turn inwards and the withdrawal of projections. Joseph Campbell spoke of it, too: "the challenge of life is to become transparent to transcendence."
‘Symbolic’ here means bringing forth the invisible into visibility by ‘shining through.' The symbolic dimension is knowing directly and non-conceptually through suspension of the mind. There is a radiance to symbolic forms, personal forms, cosmic forms, iconic forms, divinity and nature become manifest.
Metaphors are found in myths that point to the transcendent, the eternal Source. Underneath the world of phenomena we can perceive an eternal source that pours its energies into our world of time, suffering, and ultimately death. Transformation is participatory spirituality, more of a way through than a way out.
Circumambulation
The Grail Quest is essentially about restoring life to that condition known as the "wasteland," which is a metaphor for an inauthentically lived life, which is role-bound, highly conditioned, collective, and therefore sterile.
The "underworld" is the primordial cosmological groundstate -- the Spirit of the Depths. Heaven is an image of the transcendent heights, the ascent of attention in spiritual flight, the fascinations of visionary experience, conceptual or utter self-transcendence. Transcendental Being, pure consciousness precedes concepts and excludes phenomena. What goes up must come down.
But before we engage in such lofty endeavors as storming heaven with zealous ascensionism we need to develop insight into our personal unconscious. Over a lifetime, the soul collects wisdom. Conscious living reveals more coherent patterns, revealing the soul-world relationship.
We seek a vital and authentic life, the bedrock of reality underneath all social masks, disguises, armor, emotional possession, defenses, inflation, and self-deception. We are informed by Nature, natural philosophy, therapeutic and expressive arts. Our entire existence is codification of the mysteries of life.
Our arguments for a cyclic circumambulation of the self can travel upwards toward spirit or dive deep into the chthonic realms. The dimensional dyad is really an archetypal circle of lived experience a symbol of becoming whole and a body that is present to being. It symbolizes that any given moment of suffering, challenge, or illness can serve as a doorway to our boundless nature and an opportunity for healing.
An integration of analytical and holistic science is related to personal and transpersonal psyche, including more complex emergent properties. Our experiential sense of identity and worldview extends beyond personal and mundane worldly events from terror-idealization, to wider aspects of humanity, psyche, and cosmos.
Psyche is a hall of mirrors of perpetually reflecting realities, metaphorically expressing the complexities of life through an extension of our subjective perception. For example, silver needs to be tended, polished to retain its innate reflective nature. It requires our attention.
Rumi wisely notes, "man is what his eye covers. He is essentially vision, and the rest is just flesh and skin. The mirror that hides facial defects to respect a person's feelings is not a mirror; it is hypocritical. As long as you can, don't look for such a mirror! You're not a body, you're the eye of the spirit. If you've contemplated the spirit, you're free from the body. Anyone who is free from ego is all ego; when he no longer loves himself he is loved by all. When a mirror is devoid of images it reaches its splendor, since then it reflects all images."
Psyche or psychological soul is a realm of experience, with a quality of psychic objectivity. We can explore our psycho-physical basis, the conscious and autonomous unconscious, through pattern recognition, depth psychology with roots in the ancient mysteries, and spiritual wisdom traditions.
Archetypes are recurrent patterns that appear in myth, fairy tales, or life stories, sometimes as gods and goddesses. “We don’t know how they began. We don’t know how the world began. And it doesn’t matter how it began as far as living goes. It makes more sense to a person’s life that what’s going on has a pattern and a meaning to it rather than it all began in a bang, or came out of a black hole or something." James Hillman, Lang 2004
The holistic context is a visionary mode, a larger vision that includes an imaginative deepening of events into meaningful experiences.. Our lives are ultimately embedded in some sort of myth-making, including personal symptoms, conflicts, and blocks. Symbolism is the normally unheard language, yet it can be a visceral process.
Death permeates our lives. Death and rebirth (the spiritual birth of Consciousness) symbolize psychological loss of conscious control, and submission to an overwhelming influx of symbolic material from the unconscious. The ego plunges into the darkness of the unconscious underworld, to experience rejuvenation.
‘Symbolic’ here means translucidity, translucence, transparency. The openness of phenomena, manifesting light and energy, knowledge, and gnosis are openings of archetypal energies. Emergent manifestation is all light and energy in which the intensity of light varies from one symbol to another. We enter the dimension of symbolic function through transitional or liminal space. Archetypal dimensions and symbolic archetypes appear as manifest.
More than primitive stories explaining the unknown, mythology expresses the richness and wisdom of humanity played out in wondrous symbolical storytelling. Myths and rites of rebirth relate directly to our relationship with our own birth and death, the experience of Nothingness. Something essential has disappeared. Our own pain and shadow necessitate change.
Death Grip
The Shadow of mankind's narcissistic cultural imagination and heartless corporations have the soul in a 'death grip,' torn between left and right. This is a competitive struggle of unattainable ideals and identity politics mired in massive corruption and utter lack of compassion for one's fellow human beings on both extremes. The terror of nuclear war is a suffocating death grip that casts a pall across the entire globe.
We live in a post-traumatic, hypervigilant and vigilante society of propaganda and persuasion. Factions and fanaticism offer hollow promises of literal or symbolic relief from the pain and anxieties that plague us with fear of collapse. Meanwhile the power pendulum oscillates wildly back and forth. Catastrophe and natural disaster can strike anyone anywhere with equal fury.
Culture norms and conformity hurt and even kill people. Technological future shock has sent us spinning back emotionally 300 years. Yet clearly the beliefs of by-gone eras are failing as they failed in their own times. How can we live soulfully in our own century?
Soul can be 'lost' in a variety of ways. Distress is an ocean of suffering, grief, and loss of power. Extreme peril is enmeshed with imaginal and symbolic images, such as black holes, limbo, and utter chaos.
Symptoms are probably our most important unconscious messages. If we over-estimate and essentially lie to ourselves with denial or recriminating judgement about our state of being, we grasp things conceptually, intellectualizing but not embodying them. That includes ego inflation, narcissism, and “spiritual bypassing.” We cannot use spiritual and esoteric concepts to mystify and bypass basic psychological work on our denial, numbness, narrow social roles and blindspots.
Ego-death is a requirement for opening to the broader realm of transpersonal reality. It heralds a change in the form of consciousness. The crux of this consciousness process is reaching the creative state of undifferentiated consciousness. It is in this state that old primal self images dissolve, and from it the new ones form.
It is a death because at the deepest levels we define ourselves by this image and what it has created and frozen into our lives. It ultimately means the dismemberment of our former personality and life patterns. We are it and it is our death when it dissolves into the infinite possibilities of chaotic consciousness.
This unformed consciousness--which we often mistake for death-- is really the essence of our vitality and life force. It is the energy we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of time. It reaches our awareness through dreams and the flow of our imagination.
Yielding to ego-death leads to this consciousness, whether it comes through breakdown, therapy or a spontaneous near-death experience (N.D.E.) or a closely witnessing death. This consciousness can result from a brush with one's own death or that of another. Dissolving is a death that opens into a field of unformed consciousness with infinite creative possibilities.
Theater of the Real
Everyone is traumatized to a greater or lesser degree. The more wounded we are, the deeper the split. Unresolved physical and emotional trauma is often held in the body, in stasis. Trauma lodges in the body, in the total psyche, split-off from ego consciousness. Traumas even change our genes. Psychic dis-ease fragments split off from shock as "autonomous complexes."
Our encounters with the Real deconstruct some of our fantasies and promote others. Our mortality, complications, and failures are the very things that spur us beyond shock (overwhelming stress), trauma (physical or moral injury or damage), and obsession (stuckness; fixation). Shock dissociates us from self and disconnects us from objects and others in the world. We are seized and plummet downward into a dark, isolated, and silent place.
We attempt to deny, repress, or escape the affective nightmare. When something has been eradicated by personal or collective catastrophe, traumatic reaction is a psycho-physical encounter with the full obscenity and unnrepresentability of death and loss of self that breaches ordinary reality. Like Dante, we sense the presence of the living dead, of our ancestral voices.
Putting the danger into words is not enough to overcome the irruptive and devastating destruction. Defensiveness awakens all our archaic aggression, shame, and guilt. Trying to wipe it from memory we lose ourselves in traumatic repetition compulsions. The stupor and shame of the traumatic narrative and psychophysical dysregulation keeps happenING. The shockwave is suspended in time. We try to ward off compulsive re-enactment.
The disappearance of real body, figure, form, and rhythm have carried away our own relationship with traumatic memory. Archetypal 'death' is inconsistent with our existence. If we swallow enough darkness a new narrative memory can blossom. The body can re-enter the human world. The miracle is the restoration of of our Presence in each fresh moment.
In distress, explosions of imagery propel us toward symbolic and imaginary places, bombarding us with hyper-activated material. Disintegration is a breakdown between structural stability and life instinct. We react to formlessness or chaos with terror and amazement, provoking fantasies and myths of our own death and those of others.
For example, if our own relationship with the world crumbles, we fantasize about the eschatological 'end of the world,' a projection of global external catastrophe that mirrors our helplessness that exceeds our capacity. We are bathed in epistemological metaphors with archetypal and healing cores, if we but listen to their voices.
Where we minimize, rationalize, or cleave to the positive and light only, we need to acknowledge our dark unspiritual impulses and intentions, our grandiosity, and our dualistic polarized thinking. Hillman names "our endemic national disease: the addiction to innocence, to not knowing life's darkness, and not wanting to know, either."
Duality creates the conflict between opposites, the paradox of wisdom and paranoia. Thought has built our vanity, attachments, hopes. Sacred psychology reunites us with alienated or lost parts of ourselves, including the repressed, mythic, archetypal, and transpsychic. The quest or journey is a continuous cycling, inner/outward, upward/downward.
But, down in the morass, in the mud and rocks and blood and carnage is where the treasure lies concealed. Joseph Campbell assures us that, "One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light."
We are guided by galvanizing self-discovery: intuition, transformational experiences, tacit knowledge, and educational philosophy based on sound research, personal experience and reflection. When we cannot guide ourselves toward breakthrough, something 'other' arises within us. Getting thoughts down or expressive arts moves emotions out.
Relaxation of repression allows the upward thrust of the traumatic fixation to rise into consciousness. The more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the concepts we are capable of forming. When language falters we dive into silence, speechless and unknowing in that radiant darkness beyond intellect..
"[T]he focal point of consciousness of the observer is the bridge that connects the ultimate being of the void to the becomings of the world. The nature of life in the world can then be understood as about becoming, while the ultimate nature of death can be understood as the final transition from becoming and the differentiation of consciousness to nondifferentiation and ultimate being. This premise also tells us that death is the end of an illusion. The illusion that ultimately comes to an end is not only the illusion of life in the world, but also the illusion of separation." (James Kowall)
Psyche & Cosmos
The soul itself is “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself … ” It is, “an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence — that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego and consciousness go into eclipse.” It is “that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern.” It is “the imaginative possibility of our natures” and it has a “special relation with death.” --James Hillman (2004 Joel Lang)
The most intimate sanctum of the soul opens to primeval cosmos, the unwritten laws of nature. It is a vulnerable, naked, and open way of being in the world with honesty and passion. As seekers, we yearn for greater understanding of self and universe.
Psyche's domain is liminality, in-betweeness. Soul is an infinite power of expression that is essentially unconditioned. It joins with spirit as the prime mover. Aesthetic and visionary experiences activate the unconscious archetypal psyche which floods consciousness. Creative thinking depends on the revelatory unconscious. Every work of art embodies its creator's vision and self-expression. Our entire lives affect our artwork.
"I was thinking of a series of dreams
Where nothing comes up to the top
Everything stays down where it's wounded
And comes to a permanent stop
Wasn't thinking of anything specific
Like in a dream when someone wakes up and screams
Nothing truly very scientific
Just thinking of a series of dreams."
--"Series of Dreams" by Bob Dylan
We face a dangerous descent into the time of the impossible and we must surrender to the ordeal. To do so is to enter the realm of chaos, not as disorder, but as emptiness, as the void. It resonates metaphorically with a dark and terrifying passage into the limbo of our own vulnerability to intrinsic paradoxes and the Mystery of Life.
Myth represents a primeval reality. The myths of the past change the way we experience the present. Holistic depth work suggests a qualitative transformation emerges when all of our experiences come together. The process of becoming who we truly are deepens. Integration results in greater well-being, creativity and spiritual growth.
“Looking inward” means a metaphorical extension of an idea. Personal and spiritual development means working at an inner level. In our depths below outer consciousness is the space between the pain and the darkness of vision. The vision can finally get more transparent, less dark and opaque.
We should remember, in this paradigm of self-exploration we are creating something, not heroically fighting for or maximizing something, including defensive, ambitious, hyperactive development. There may be challenges and battles, but war is not the primary paradigm to heal frightening, painful, unresolved wounds. War is a metaphor of obsession.
We cannot compete against ourselves. Striving leads to self-blame. Nor are we seeking premature transcendental escapism. Well-being is optimization, balance. Our symptoms, struggles, creative imagination, and discernment call out for our participation.
The cosmic unconscious is inhuman nature but useless without the human mind. Natural symbols from the unconscious can be traced back to their archaic roots. They have the capacity to transform and redirect unconscious instinctual energy.
Symptoms substitute for denied and repressed impulses, wishes, and fantasies that are unwelcome, morally or aesthetically painful., or were subjected to an ethical “censorship.” Inhibition prevents them from being remembered.
"...the Indian tradition says: there is no God but the man in the process. Jung declares that the unconscious is an immense and painful effort towards consciousness. That is, as the kabbalah says: God is a wound that man must heal." (Etienne Perrot, The Road to Transformation)
There are many paths to self-discovery. Individuation means you find your own. Jung's Red Book hints, "to those who can proceed in spite of the riddles, a path opens. Submit to puzzles and to what is absolutely incomprehensible. There are bridges, suspended on the depths of perpetual depth. But you follow the riddles." (p. 308) The puzzle is the solution; the question and the answer.
The archetype is a bridge between present-day and archaic consciousness. Jung said that memory uses “the bridges of association,” but that sometimes certain memories do not reach consciousness at all ( Jung 1983, 219; 1980, 282). Memories are strongly connected to physical feeling through every cell that recalls every event impinging on us. Thus, body is the real unconscious which stores pain and fear and our attempts to avoid it.
Imagination is a subtle organ of apprehension and our spiritual creative force. We have been given part of the collective problem of our time to struggle with. We also have the potential for clarity, visionary gnosis and intuitive wholeness -- genuine responsiveness, including the many deaths of daily living by which we become more alive. Trusting life means realizing the risk of living and dying are inseparable.
The visionary experience can become something corporeal, just as trauma can become locked as memory in the structure of the physical body. We can experience psyche through sensual, embodied perception. Experience is embodied as character. Modes include embodied, relational, cyclical, chthonic, receptive, and imaginal.
"To locate a thing you need space, to place an event you need time; but the Timeless and Spaceless defies handling. It makes everything perceivable, yet itself is beyond perception. The mind cannot know what is beyond the mind, but the mind is known by what is beyond it."
(Nisargadatta Maharaj)
With a metaphoric sensibility we move beyond our own intentions to those of the deeper unconscious self with which we are ceaselessly merged. We create a sacred space that allows it to emerge into consciousness. We are linked to deep time, knowledge from the Source, and the macrocosm. Reality takes on depth from its shadow. It grips, overwhelms, and captivates us. It values and embraces paradox yet strips away our assumptions.
We descend into the netherworld of the belly of the earth with feelings too tumultuous to put into words. The enormity strikes us that the human psyche is a deep and timeless fund of archaic instincts and images. The image is a presence. French novelist, Maurice Blanchot claims, "It is the relationship with the absence that defines the image, whose main function is to represent, or to send it to something that is far away, elsewhere."
"Only at times the pupil's curtain slides up soundlessly -
An image enters then,
goes through the tensioned stillness of the limbs -
and in the heart ceases to be."
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
The bottom drops out of our vertical cosmos. Is the absolute itself this immobile impetus of desire towards an anticipated death? Is this dissociated dialectic with death the poetry and truth that emanates from the poverty-stricken flesh? Hegel thought, to name something is to annihilate its unique existence by bringing it under a concept. The negativity of death is not an attribute of the senseless dissolution of life but its ability to shape the world.
We recover what the world has denied, repressed, and forgotten in our dreams as well as indistinct and paradoxical language -- the absent voice of the unconscious and our identity as a relationship, an infinite conversation. This is the base note of our psychopoetic life song, wherein experience draws together insights.
We live most of our life unconsciously. We can bring close what has truth for us only if we love it. Jung notes, "For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the spiritual sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the world and woman, i.e., the anima projected on to the world.” (A Study in the Process of Individuation (1934) In CW 9, Part I, P. 559)
We have an invisible connection to the underworld, which is Hades himself, who hides invisibly in things. Hades is a symbol of the incredible, fathomless depths of the psyche. The true nature of all things is hidden in these depths of the unconscious.
We must penetrate this depth dimension to discover what is hidden there. The Roman Hades is Pluto, whose name means "wealth." This indicates the buried treasures existing in the depths of the psyche and experience of this underworld realm.
Instead of grasping and holding we embrace flow, letting go from moment to moment, giving ourselves to it. Meanwhile, we can make the daily inner gesture of dying in spiritual practice, often likened to 'dying while living.' Only 'dying' in its myriad forms we pass from time into the now that does not pass away, but offers the potential of being real.
Letting go can be a metaphorical death. Death is always immanent. He required no cult worship from mortals, because he already possesses the riches of the depths of experience. The final act is always his, in any event. The final purpose of every soul involves "devotion" to Hades, in a psychic sense. Whether fast or slow, ultimately it takes all our energy.
We are challenged to incorporate the awareness of death into daily living, seeing of every moment of life against the horizon of death, to incorporate that awareness of dying into every moment through which we become more fully alive.
Death confronts us by demonstrating that purpose is not enough since we live by meaning. When we can no longer manipulate and control things our life is still meaningful. Purpose is controlling and active; meaning is inherent and moves us. Giving over ourselves to whatever we experience is the gesture by which meaning flows into our lives.
Most experiences are attributed only a relative significance when they are related to the personal experience of death. Even in life, most people are obsessed with death. Hades is the unknowable goal underlying all human experience and the inherent meaning of soul. Death brings life its ability to matter.
The Line of Inquiry
Trauma gets trapped in the nervous system. Healing emerges through the mirror of the soul. "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate," says Jung. Our line of inquiry researches key terms through inherent imagery. It provides a conceptual framework that includes the shadow, the body, and the feminine, through which we can dig below our presumptions, our assumed truths and illusions.
“The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.” (Carl Jung, Aion, 1951)
Some examples of repressed thoughts, memories, emotions, impulses, traits, and actions include: Aggressive impulses, taboo mental images, shameful experiences, immoral urges, fears, irrational wishes, unacceptable sexual desires, judgmentalism, projection of flaws, abusing subordinates, power trips, playing victim, prejudice, savior complex, scapegoating,
We deal with what comes up into consciousness from the underworld. This opens us to related concepts. Purposeful artistic inquiry helps us develop a comprehensive understanding of experience which can be applied to resolving the challenges of our own frenzied world, including the imaginal aspects of reality. In "Architecture, Art, Politics," Hillman suggests, "The task of those who work with imagination is to produce genuine images again, not overly personal expressions."
Our conscious and unconscious psychological knowledge is embedded in our bodies. Individuation creates the subtle body. The subtle body of spirit and matter is the vehicle of the subtle realm, a psychic body in the imaginal world. The transcendent concept appears as the magical child, the elixir, aqua vitae, the philosopher's stone, diamond body, immortal body, glorious body, etc.
Our inquiries form a continuous and sometimes broken path. Most often we are driven by the underlying motivation of our emotional problems, including their impersonal core. They fuse into a 'drunken' path to our wholeness that echoes The Fool's journey in the tarot. While the passionate drunken path seems reckless it is guided from within. The pattern tells us that to escape our conditioning we should never to take the straight line, but always the zigzag path strewn with warning signals and signs.
This psychological awakening is a spiritual initiation that potentially restores vivid meaning to life, cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life. We are directed by the unconscious background with a fleeting awareness of that which abides behind every experience, which connects the imaginal soul realm and our mundane world, interiority and exteriority.
Transpsychic reality is beyond the collective unconscious. It underlies psychic reality, even deep perception of another's mind. Fundamental fantasies animate our lives. Spirit takes on form and body itself changes to include spirit. Space, time and cosmos are relevant to us all, defining our place in the cosmos. From the earliest times, drawing as an art has literally followed this line of inquiry, exploring the shape of the seen and unseen worlds.
Objective reality is interaction. Our line of inquiry is an investigation of images. It is an artful line of reasoning, balancing irrational and logical argument, aimed at demonstrating a truth or falsehood, opposites transcended in the imaginal. We find meaning beyond conventional morality in our spiritual connection. This kindles a light, and awakens a voice that grows through our flesh and blood as we drink at the well-spring of life.
Psyche and its metaphors of raw and cooked emotions are absolutely real to the person who experiences it. Realities have tangible effects, instantiating effects in our psychic lives. We live in multiple worlds, certain perspectives, but they are all shaped by and depend on our concepts. Instead of psychological concepts, they appear as high-impact mythological images, the "mythological unconscious" testing our ability to endure and discover integrity in depth.
Psychic events become lived experiences with which we have relationships. We make soul out of our psychological life. The path leads through the ghost-lands of the unconscious, undead aspects of personality. It illuminates the darkest layers of the inherited personality structure. The daimonic, and the archai are the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life."
Jung says: "The Nekyia is no aimless and purely destructive fall into the abyss, but a meaningful katabasis eis antron, a descent into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge"
(CW 15: 139-40, par. 213). And Friedrich Schiller says, "only the fullness leads to clarity;
And the truth is in the abyss."
Images are the language of life. Metaphors are imaginal tools. Unconscious metaphors make up our images of the world and reality -- our given cultural worldview. Conceptual metaphors map experience and expression. They shape our metaphysical concepts and interaction with the world, even the language we use to portray the tone of our story.
A product of our ability to conceptualize, metaphors are how we know what we know. Different classes of belief diseases can poison what we think and how we think. Our beliefs about belief are the deeper problem.
Thus, we conceive experiential or embodied realism as the basis of our philosophy. Metaphorical pluralism helps us define our everyday realities. We know nothing of reality, only the concept of reality through independently valid conceptual metaphors, which like words represent something that pre-exists them.
It often seems we live in utterly different subjective realities. Our projected notions establish our coherent realities. The vision quest is the heart of all true culture. The content of vision contains most unusual things.
We confront the pitiless monsters of archetypal Grief, Loss, Shock, Trauma, Cares, Diseases, Age, Dread, Hunger, Want, Death, Toil, Sleep, Disability, Catastrophe, War, and Discord. Our demons are the firewall of resistances, instinctual impulses, and unconscious activated complexes that overcome, impel, and possess us.
They include fear of dying, memories filled with emotions, curious detachments, terrifying events, overwhelming trauma, shattered beliefs, isolation, natural disaster, catastrophic disease, despondence, our stony complexes and pathologies, intimacy concerns, and even the profoundly impersonal nature of love when it starts to wake up.
Anais Nin described the autonomous power of erotic intensity: “He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.” "I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted."
Hillman claimed Buddha said there is fear in everything. Our personal suffering is commuted to collective, even transpersonal suffering. French philosopher, Camus describes it:
“In Absurdist experience suffering is individual, but from the moment that a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience, as the experience of everyone. Therefore the first step towards a mind overwhelmed by the absurdity of things is to realize that this feeling, this strangeness is shared by all men, and the entire human race suffers from a division between itself and the rest of the world.”
The middle passage, Katabasis or descent is an archetypal event, a meeting with the daimonic. If a "descent" does not come in initiatory form, it often comes as a dis-ease or ordeal -- as what the Greeks called katabasis. The mark of descent, undertaken consciously or not, is a newly arrived-at lowliness, associated with water and soul, as height is associated with spirit. There is no blacker inferno than the human mind, a paradigm to represent trauma.
The way down and out doesn't require poverty, homelessness, physical deprivation, but it requires a fall from status with emphasis on consciousness of the fall. We have to follow our intuition.
Katabasis carries the whole concept of disaster, of tragedy; we see own darkside, the dark side of those close to us, and they see ours. Long difficult repentance can be a way of descent, of admitting powerlessness. The descent is a response to the something that wants us there -- the Dark Queen.
But if we can detect footprints on the path, we might learn the stories of those who have gone before and in this way lighten the load. We reconnect with the roots of our being using our instinctual nature to dialogue with the unconscious. We may uncover the pattern that connects us to the past and to the future when the path to transcendence reverses itself in more than a regressive retreat into ancient levels of awareness. But it means sitting in the fire of our own fears and suffering while honoring soul's perspective.
The underworld of midlife depression is the ancestral realm and the mythical realm; it is the land of the dead and the land of the dream. The underworld is the psyche. Hillman argued that herculean spiritual ascent is a pathological impossibility, a phenomena of our cultural narcissism and mental state concepts. The soul isn’t monotheistic in nature, it’s full of gods. All forms of identification are essentially an ego inflation from which we eventually come down. He notes,
"...growing in the world, becoming useful to it and contributing to it, requires [us] to descend into the world that is under the world. In order to be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservator and a mentor, you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained by the dead (from the past, which have become invisible and yet continue to reinvigorate our life with their influence). The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in times of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "is", by offering a deeper knowledge and support. They have already fallen, they know the sinkhole; their extraordinary resources. They do not need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything that tends to take us down, on any occasion we do not live up to. They are the gravitational force of the psyche."
"One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power ... If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn't use it, the psychic energy turns to sheer poison. That's why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities." --Marie-Louise von Franz
"But the moment when physics touches on the 'untrodden, untreadable regions,' and
when psychology has at the same time to admit that there are other forms of psychic life
besides the acquisitions of personal consciousness...then the intermediate realm of subtle
bodies comes to life again, and the physical and the psychic are once more blended in an
indissoluble unity....We have come very near to this turning point today."
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 394
"[The Persian Sufi mystic] Suhrawardi’s otherworld was not an invisible aspect of the
world we know....was also not a spatial extension of this world....It was not an upper
world, high in the sky, as is heaven....Suhrawardi’s other world was a different
dimension or order of existence, whose mystery defied logical description and
explanation. It was spatially both within a person’s earthbound body and a distinct
region of the cosmos. It was not simply upper, or nether, or invisible. It was distinctly
other." --D. Merkur, Gnosis,p. 224
http://www.veronicagoodchild.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/SpringJournal74_Article.pdf
"Much has been said of the loneliness of wisdom, and how much the Truth seeker becomes a pilgrim wandering from star to star. To the ignorant, the wise man is lonely because he abides in distant heights of the mind. But the wise man himself does not feel lonely. Wisdom brings him nearer to life; closer to the heart of the world than the foolish man can ever be. Bookishness may lead to loneliness, and scholarship may end in a battle of beliefs, but the wise man gazing off into space sees not an emptiness, but a space full of life, truth, and law."
~Manly P. Hall
*
"Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.
Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being.
That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend.
Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots.
Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion.
But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our up-rootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.
We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness.
We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise.
We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.
The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections.
This statement could also be read as commentary on the self-referential consciousness process expressed as "Know Thyself." This Apollonian dictum is the utterance of the ancient god of logic Himself. The Jungian method of "Know Thyself" means a radical activation of imagination. It calls to us, echoing through the aeons--urging us to turn our consciousness back on itself, assessing and experiencing the relative "truth" of what we find within.
Jung's solution to this injunction is summarized by Hillman: We have already been given the clue in the instructor's manual as to how this third realm traditionally called 'soul' can be re-established--and by anyone. Jung says he treated the figures whom he met "as though they were real people." The key is that as though; the metaphorical, as-if reality, neither literally real (hallucinations or people in the street) nor irreal/unreal ('mere' fictions, projections which 'I' make up as parts of 'me', auto-suggestive illusions). In an 'as-if' consciousness they are powers with voice, body, motion, and mind, fully felt but wholly imaginary. This is psychic reality...
Hillman points out that we can remember, associating backward and downward into the forgotten and repressed. And in psychic reality we find a multiplicity of answers to all major, archetypal, sorts of questions--relative answers. Each archetypal perspective has its way of self-knowing. In alchemy the multi-state paradigm is known as multiplicatio, which touches all points of the soul, all channels of images.
According to Hillman, it is "spirit's self-knowledge in the mirror of the soul, soul's recognition of its spirits." There is no single way of knowing thyself, even though psychology has favored the method of introspection and insight. According to Hillman, "Know Thyself terminates whenever it leaves linear time and becomes an act of imagination. A partial insight, this song now, this one image; to see partly is the whole of it. Self-understanding healed by active imagination." Our unique method of knowing ourselves is through our own epistemological metaphors which reflect "how we know what we know" about ourselves. They are the result of our personal experience of archetypal experiences--our direct experience of the nature of reality, expressed as image. The non-linear co-relationship of simultaneous cause/effect means that archetypes become embodied as specific, yet dynamic, imagery.
The imperative to know ourselves challenges us to reflect on our identity, beliefs, assumed truths, interpretations, and even our archetypal experience and self-understanding. This dynamic recycling of consciousness creates/reveals the dynamic flux of holistic feedback patterns. It establishes a patterning matrix--a strange attractor--reflective of the organism's relationship to the whole, through a unique relationship of chaos and order. The whole brain approach to existence is both/and chaotic and logical--logically chaotic, chaotically logical. It is a holding of the tension of the opposites between the logical and natural mind.
Complex systems, such as human beings, manifest emergent properties which tend to be non-linear. They are sufficiently context dependent that they become unpredictable under normal circumstances. The reason has to do with the fact that sufficient context dependence leads to self-reference. That is, insofar as one part effects another part, which in turn effects the first, the first can be seen to be effecting itself through the mediation of the second. Multiply the parts and the system gets really out of control, at least as an object of modelling.
Godel proved why such self-referential systems are inherently unpredictable. Any finitely axiomatized formal system rich enough in entailment to manifest self-reference displays true theorems not deducible from the axioms. Since all mathematical modelling systems can be formalized as axiomatic systems, and since the project of such modelling is the essence of deterministic reductionism, it follows that systems capable of self-reference cannot be reduced to deterministic causality. They can be modelled, but they become descriptive of organization, rather than predictive of future states (Naser, 1993, Bridge-L).
Like a fractal, the individual embodies the whole, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the initial conditions of existence. The physical body is conditioned by physical laws. At the mesocosmic level, we either exist or we don't, we're alive or dead. But the flow of our essence within the whole is not so black and white. We remain ourselves, despite the loss of discrete body parts or faculties of perception. At the quantum level, our atomic "matter" merges with the environment and the vacuum of non-existence.
The I-Not I dichotomy breaks down in pure consciousness. Our physical constituents remain, even after death, with their own molecular and quantum perceptions, but the genetic information becomes obsolete. We all decay according to the same biological process. Free of the gravitational valley of corpo-reality, consciousness can soar unfettered. When consciousness flows into an "escape-time plot," we experience the boundary-dissolving transcendence of cosmic consciousness. An increased sense of freedom comes with liberation from the gravity of literalism. Yet we are neither exclusively biological nor psychospiritual beings. The nature of our existence is both/and--psychobiological.
"Meaninglessness inhibits the fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness.
Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perhaps everything."
~ C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Iona Miller, 2017
“The concept of individuation plays a large role in our psychology. In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology. Individuation, therefore, is a process of differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality” (Jung, CW 6, para. 757).
"In the critical passage in this dialogue attributed to Plato, Socrates discusses with his eponymous interlocuture the question of how the soul can know itself. In the immediately following passage, subsequently added by a later Neoplatonist, this argument is linked to a preceding discussion about the injunction of the Delphic Oracle, "know thyself". and the role of vision as a model of knowledge." (Alcibiades I, 133c; in Plato, 1997, p. 592 cited in Re-encountering Jung). “The essence of knowledge is self-knowledge,” claimed Plato.
Gathering the Seeds of Light
In antiquity, the Pythagoreans, Orphics and Platonists taught that the soul possessed a kind of radiating subtle body as a vehicle for its manifestation. Pythagorean life principles sought to free the soul from coarse matter and make it "bright" (augoeides).
The "brightness" of Plato became the "light soul" in Neoplatonism, embodying the idea of the body of light or of a higher immortal subtle body. This eternal shining vehicle is also called 'star-like.' Paracelsus suggested we have 'two' bodies: one composed of elements and the other of stars. We know now that elements of stars are literally the same as our own elements, all forged in supernovas. Ruland claimed, ‘Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.’
Nature is matter, soul, and spirit. Thales recommended a look inward to “know thyself,” many centuries before Augustine. Hillman speaks in Healing Fiction how "'Know Thyself' is revelatory, non-linear, discontinuous; it is like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act."
But those who are in this process often cannot see it, cannot see its imaginative metaphorical quality and mistake it as literal and concrete. Creating any approach to the image and results attained are skewed by our presence.
Perhaps the best claim we can make for our approach is that at least it is a fertile one. 'Know Thyself' is more of an invitation than a heroic exhortation driven by ego or will. Plotinus admonished, "The way to truth was the journey of a lonely person to that which is eternally alone."
Hillman cautions, "The autochthonous [native to the place where found; indigenous] quality of images as independent . . . of the subjective imagination which does the perceiving . . . First, one believes images are hallucinations (things seen); then one recognizes them as acts of subjective imagining; but then, third, comes the awareness that images are independent of subjectivity and even of the imagination itself as a mental activity. Images come and go (as in dreams) at their own will, with their own rhythm, within their own fields of relations, undetermined by personal psychodynamics." (Archetypal Psych 7)
In Answer to Job (p. 59) Jung reminds us, "We must bear in mind that we do not make projections, rather they happen to us. This fact permits the conclusion that we originally read our first physical, and particularly psychological, insights in the stars. In other words, what is farthest is actually nearest. Somehow, as the Gnostics surmised, we have "collected" ourselves from out of the cosmos."
Jung alludes to mankind's aeons of observing signs in the sky and explaining all manner of celestial phenomena with human intuition, projected imagination. The great megaliths attest to the discovery and veneration of immense astronomical cycles and geophysical measurements. The vast story of the Precession of the Equinox was widely known in early antiquity, and formed the basis of most early cosmologies, myths, and religions. That primeval cosmic night was the soul.
James Hillman argued for an animated or panpsychic approach to cosmos, rooted in the soul of the world: “A self-knowledge that rests within a cosmology which declares the mineral, vegetable and animal world beyond the human person to be impersonal and inanimate is not only inadequate. It is also delusional. No matter how well we may know ourselves, we remain walking, talking ghosts, cosmologically set apart from the other beings of our milieu.”
Is it adequate to know only what we know consciously? Many dynamics take place occluded by the veil of the unconscious but inferred from their effects. We need some knowledge of the unconscious and its contents or we cannot claim to know ourselves. Something in us knows the signs. Much of it has to do with the complex relationship between the observer and the observed -- the I and the Not-I. The atemporal observer is unconscious but accessible.
For example, the parental images: "the mythical figure of the parent that hurts, or is injured, becomes the psychological statement that the parent is the wound. In literal terms, this means that we think our parents are responsible; but the same wording, as a metaphor, can mean that what hurts us can also be a parent. Our wounds are the fathers and mothers of our destinies." (Hillman)
Sometimes we can overcome almost insurmountable difficulties if we recognize the unconscious. The unconscious has the power to manifests in symptoms when unrecognized at the symbolic level. Then parts of ourselves remain in the shadows with painful manifestations, unconscious baggage, and even transgenerational legacies of secrets that deprive us of our roots.
Hillman suggested, “‘Know thyself,’ means also ‘know thy peculiar images.'” Jung stated that "image is psyche" (Jung 13: para. 75) and Hillman emphasized that "images are souls, and our job with them is to meet them on that soul level" ("An Inquiry" 81). That is, both prioritized a loving approach rooted in eros with the autonomous figures of psyche. Psyche's naked truth appears in symbols and images.
It is the soul not the ego we seek in 'Know Thyself.' We are often unaware of our inner states and pathologies, and lack adequate vocabulary and categories to conceptualize and ponder it. Complexes are beyond our conscious control. When it comes to the unconscious, the more we know of one area, the less we know about other dynamics -- sort of a psychospiritual "uncertainty principle."
The unconscious is the part of personality that is forced out of mental awareness by the ego's defense so transpersonal contents are never encountered. New life emerges from increased self-knowledge and expanding awareness of the Divine unfolding in the human soul. The ego intuits preconscious information often associated with the inner God-image. The transpsychic is transformed into new conscious knowledge.
Self-knowledge changes our attitudes and lifestyle, relationships to self, others, and cosmos, giving us a different view of the world. Accessible to all, Jung's approach encourages self expression, pursues self knowledge, rekindles meaning and enables us to realize our optimum destiny which Jung called individuation.
An unconscious side of our being fundamentally alters the pursuit of self-knowledge, the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This autonomous influence relativizes the over-emphasized position of the ego. If we deny that dimension of relationship with the cosmos, it distorts our self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge, the understanding of our thoughts and behaviors and their influence on our lives, naturally makes the unconscious conscious. We cannot take it for granted that we know ourselves because the real psychic facts are for the most part hidden, because our ego only focuses on its own contents and exaggerated self-importance. Our path is uncertain, but consciousness is the core of our being, a divine gift and an inherent mystery.
Jung called the path to self-knowledge the individuation process. The emergence of the whole person is the path to self-knowledge, creativity, greater coherence, and well-being. If we ignore this quest for our authentic self, unfolding knowledge of our whole human nature, neurotic symptoms may arise.
Perhaps the only truth is direct experience of the self, of pure self-awareness, transcendent, unchanging part of ourselves that leaves us vitalized and enriched. With a new perspective we align with the actualization of our life-purpose, reducing internal conflict and increasing adaptability.
We only need to look into the river of our life and see how the river flows past while simultaneously all else stands still. Ideally, psychic energy is moving between the poles in a fluid, dynamic way. Awareness of the realm of myth, poetry, image, dreams, and meaning is the realization of the imaginal. In ancient times no one had decided what was 'real.' So, in primordial awareness the boundaries of real and unreal, outside and inside remain fluid, as expressed in Chan poetry:
"The Great Way is not difficult,
Just don't pick and choose.
If you cut off all likes or dislikes
Everything is clear like space.
Make the slightest distinction
And heaven and earth are set apart.
If you wish to see the truth,
Don't think for or against."
~ Faith in Mind (Xinxin Ming)
Niels Bohr, in The Art of Genius (1998) suggested how to go about this: “If you hold opposites together in your mind, you will suspend your normal thinking process and allow an intelligence beyond rational thought to create a new form.”
Many streams converge as Jung describes, "Opposites can be united only in the form of compromise, or irrationally, some new thing arising between them which, though different from both, yet has the power to take up their energies in equal measure as an expression of both and of neither. Such an expression cannot be contrived by reason, it can only be created through living." CW 6, Para 169
In The Report, Nathan Schwartz-Salant says, "change always takes place through the union of opposites because the change in internal structure is the death of the union and the acceptance of the next nigredo. Through This sequence "Coniunctio-Nigredo" the process works to create a new stable form."
In The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male shall not be male, and the female shall not be female: . . . then you will enter [the kingdom]."
The notion of paradox comes from a consciousness conditioned to think in terms of opposites, dualistic paradox. Self-referential paradox feeds back and annihilates itself. Such bivalence (binary logic: this or that; true or false; black or white) can be superseded by multivalent consciousness which perceives in terms of degrees. Multivalence more accurately reflects the complex dynamics of consciousness. As in the case of fractal generation, solutions are not found in terms of this or that, but in terms of degrees of fractional transformation, relationships.
Rooted in uniting the opposites, this is not an overly rational intellectual approach, though feeling types may react to it as lacking heart due to their own anti-intellectual bias. M-L von Franz pointed out that people get emotional when their inferior function is triggered.
The inferior function responds unconsciously to the primary function. When unprocessed, repressed, or raw content emerges the emotional charge turns negative. Shadow aspects arise that can actually be a gateway to our depths. But not so long as we remain one-sided, without deeper insight into the depths of our nature. It blocks the flow. In one-sidedness, the unconscious is alienated from the conscious.
When we cling to our conditioned social identity or mask, focus too much on sweetness and light (sugar-coated spirituality), and repress our shadow aspects, the dynamic inner flow gets stuck, and the equilibrium of libido is lost. This can result in compulsions which cause the libido to go wild, “untamed” as it “streams off to one side,” becoming more daemonic the more the situation remains unbalanced. (CW 6, ¶347)
Slivers of insight, fragments of a lively examined life, can coalesce in myriad ways. We submit ourselves again and again to the intrigue of a hall of mirrors where ideas and images bounce off one another. Divine light illuminates memory and faith stares down doubt and fear. We hear the siren songs of possibility, of creation.
Destiny is different from the reality we may be experiencing. Life's great lesson is that love and fate will lay you bare, strip you naked, and force you to surrender. We must die and surrender egoic control to love and trust it, in order to find and be transformed by our own unwanted, unclaimed, and denied aspects. Sometimes it takes surrendering our dreams and opportunities for self expression.
Destiny is larger than what goes on in the heart. Because everything is partially hidden, we start to imagine what is felt. The darkness comes to us in doubt, in our mortality. The contradictory world merges into another world, a timeless world, where desire becomes a crescendo or rising tide of emotion, integrating will and surrender. We act, but are also acted upon by transpersonal forces. We must embrace them willingly in our descent to experience the mysteries of transcending duality.
This approach is a middle way, balancing rational and emotive approaches. It doesn't hurt to spend some time in thinking, reflection, and contemplation. We have to move beyond the feel-good flow of our neurotransmitters to unite our heart, head, and soul. Bridging conceptualization and felt-sense we don't need to mystify the process any further. Then we can mine the treasures of our depths.
Raising consciousness changes thoughts and behavior, prevents our false beliefs, negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors from directing our fate. We must be careful to distinguish “self-knowledge” from knowledge of our conscious ego personalities and self-critical awareness of assumptions and biases or suffer psychic multiple system atrophy.
We need to recognize the paradox and polarity all life implies. We can move beyond cultural attitudes of intellectual arrogance accompanied by crudeness of feeling.
Jung noticed that, True, the unconscious knows more than the conscious does; but it is knowledge of a special sort, knowledge in eternity, usually without reference to the here and now, not couched in the language of the intellect. Only when we let its statements amplify themselves does it come within the range of our understanding; only then does a new aspect become perceptible to us.
"The profundity and pregnant significance of the symbol appeal just as strongly to thinking as to feeling (qq.v.), while its peculiar plastic imagery, when shaped into sensuous form, stimulates sensation as much as intuition (qq.v.). The living symbol cannot come to birth in a dull or poorly developed mind, for such a mind will be content with the already existing symbols offered by established tradition. Only the passionate yearning of a highly developed mind, for which the traditional symbol is no longer the unified expression of the rational and the irrational, of the highest and the lowest, can create a new symbol." Jung, CW 6, Para 825
Meaning is born as 'knowing' from the symbol that was pregnant with it. Myth always feels real – otherwise it would not be myth, and would have no effect. Mary Karr assures us, “A psychological self-awareness and faith in the power of truth gives you courage to reveal whatever you unearth, whether you come out looking vain, or conniving or hateful or not.”
Soul Knowledge
The value of self-knowledge has always been recognized across cultures. We have to be willing to accept radically honest personal self-examination, awareness of objective self-knowledge, and the rigorous demands of sticking with the process, long term. Knowing our dark characteristics is endless painstaking work, because the soul is without end.
Jung considered self-realization as the highest potential of human awareness. Higher knowledge emerges from intuitive processes and spiritual experiences engaging and integrating archetypal forms or images with sense perception, illuminating both the inner and outer environment. We have to engage the deep mind to amplify self-awareness to know what is right for ourselves.
We have to see past our blind-spots or complexes and the silence of others who merely indulge or flatter us. To really get an accurate reflection of ourselves we need an honest, objective mirror, which our intimates rarely are.
The unconscious mirrors us as we are, in dreams, visions, fantasies, accidents, active imagination and synchronicity. The mirror is a metaphor for our meetings with 'other' in the mirror-like nature of the reflective mind, uniting knowledge and understanding as well as other contradictory aspects, feelings, and impulses at the heart of the matter.
“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” Hillman, The Soul's Code
We need some knowledge of the unconscious and its contents or we cannot claim to know ourselves. The unconscious is the part of the personality that's forced out of mental awareness by the ego's defense and transpersonal contents never encountered. New life emerges from increased self-knowledge and expanding awareness of the Divine unfolding in the human soul. Self-knowledge changes our attitudes and lifestyle, relationships to others, and a different view of the world.
Accessible to all, Jung's approach encourages self expression, pursues self knowledge, rekindles meaning and enables us to realize our optimum destiny or what Jung called individuation. Recognizing that there is an unconscious side of our being has fundamentally altered the pursuit of self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge, the understanding of our thoughts and behaviors and their influence on our lives, will make the unconscious conscious. We cannot take it for granted that we know ourselves because the real psychic facts are for the most part hidden, because our ego only focuses on its own contents. Krishnamurti taught that it takes vulnerability to face life, not "the respectable wall of self-enclosing virtue that you cultivate" that gets you nowhere.
We seek connection with the original force of creation. We are rooted in the living reality of psyche. Numinosity [mysterious or awe-inspiring divine presence] is luminosity. Our unknowable nature is inherent. We have an affinity for substancelessness. What has been projected is re-collected. The ground of all phenomena is knowing and can be known.
Ancient mystics collected the seeds of the light of nature, scintillae or fiery sparks of the world soul, dispersed throughout the universe; this self-gathering of cosmic seeds was an increase in self-knowledge. Jung speaks of archetypes as luminosities or radiant patterns or points of light, momentary flashes of consciousness.
Seeds of unconscious fantasy become symbols and images. Archetypal images have links to instinctual life and myths that personify nature and mirror the presence of meaning. Hillman claims, "the gods are "places", and myths create a place for psychic events." Also, he thought, "each god contains shadow and projects it according to the cosmos that God gives shape to. Each God is a way in which our shadows are given to us." Transformations of consciousness are mirrored in instinctual experience. We find our lived connection with the autonomous psyche.
An accelerating frame of reference with an observer at its central focus can arise even in empty space. This is the key insight of the holographic concept of reality. Physics, metaphysics, and depth psychology place the observer at the center of this discussion.
Gathering the dispersed psychic energy together fixates the "shining white soul." Concentrating consciousness as a purely energetic manifestation is integration of split-off contents into consciousness. The inherent light of nature is the breath or subtle body, a psychophysical unity, the 'inner firmament' of our inner being, the 'undulent quiescence.'
This light is paradoxically both one and many and corresponds with the Anthropos, original Man. The wholeness of infantile cosmic consciousness is not confused with the transpersonal unity of ultimate Being.
Consciousness rests at the zero point. Luminous ground suffuses all. Virtual photons self-transform to photons and biophotons. Luminous mind, the nondual source of creations, is empty of thoughts and potential harmonic cascades.
The Pleroma is the ground of being where all opposites are united: energy/matter, living/dead, time/space, creative/destructive, good/evil, hot/cold, one/many, sun/moon, fullness/emptiness, light/dark. truth/falseness. Paradox retains the darkness in spiritual mystery and its inherent unknowableness.
In CW12, Jung cautions, “Experience of the opposites has nothing whatever to do with intellectual insight or with empathy. It is more what we would call fate.”
Kabbalah, (or Qabalah), Hermeticism, and Gnosticism claim much the same about the primacy of wisdom light emerging from Nothing and the yoking of opposites in their cosmologies. Kabbalah graphically depicts a 'consciousness map', the Tree of Life.
This symbol system is a key to understanding the natural world and our own capacity for self-realization. Symbols contain the seeds of further developments. An invisible universe exists just behind and within the known visible world. Soulful guidance suggests we are more than we appear to be and we can explore that inner terrain at different levels of existence.
Still, Jung lamented, "No one has time for self-knowledge or believes that it could serve any sensible purpose…. nobody has drawn any conclusions from the fact that Western man confronts himself as a stranger and that self-knowledge is one of the most difficult and exacting of the arts.” (CW12)
"Astonishingly enough, the alchemist conceived his imaginationes as something quasi-corporeal; a sort of “subtle body” that was half spiritual. They were, therefore, of a psychoid nature, forming an intermediate realm belonging to both matter and spirit. On account of the mysterious and manifold implications of the imaginatio, Jung called it 'perhaps the most important key to an understanding of the opus.'" ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 72
"And, finally: imagination is, therefore, not “a question of actualizing those contents of the unconscious that are outside nature, that is, not a datum of our empirical world, and therefore a priori of archetypal character. The place or the medium of realization is neither mind nor matter, but that intermediate realm of subtle reality that can be adequately expressed [only] by the symbol.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, § 394
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Body & Soul
"… the flesh is getting its own back… the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit—the two being really one—then we can understand why the striving to transcend the present level of consciousness through acceptance of the unconscious must give the body its due, and why recognition of the body cannot tolerate a philosophy that denies it in the name of the spirit…" (CW 10, ¶195)
We can remain fascinated with the self-arising phenomena of consciousness, or look at its dynamics from a top-down perspective. In contrast to the analytic reductionism of classical science, systems philosophy integrates theory and philosophy to foster reorganization of thinking and knowing perceived reality.
Rather than explaining what things are, we explore and describe how things work, integrating events and actions into meaningful patterns. The hidden language of the archetypes of nature helps us translate the dynamics of our Being and Becoming. A multidisciplinary approach can present and explore a variety of theories and models without advocating them, ideally leading toward best practice. The world of experience remains one of perceived reality and worldview.
Soul is the healing core of being human. We experience many orders of inner and outer experience. Soul, as psychological experience, is a third order of highly reflective and expressive reality, like body (sense perception) and mind (conceptualization). Our creativity always derives from an experience of seduction that coincides with the awareness of the inner world itself. We are rooted in nature.
Aldo Carotenuto says, "We can of course live solely within the collective, with the illusion of speaking a common language and of not being alone, but this deception can cost our lives. If we act according to the general rule, we are following a code that is not our own. Everyone must find his or her own tune, accepting the resulting abandonment by those who continue singing in concert. Great artists create modes of expression that are uniquely their own: they enter so deeply into their sense of life that preexisting modes no longer serve their purpose. They invent new ways of writing poetry, of painting and making music.” (Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering)
The transcendent function produces awareness of soul, converting ego energy into soul. As energy is deliberately transformed in individuation, so is consciousness. Jung suggests a union of opposites takes place in the transcendent Self when body and spirit join. When we explore the nature of self, we explore the nature of being. Primacy of psychic reality serves as the basis for creative transformation, only possible through the compelling power of inner vision.
Depth and Transpersonal psychology study human nature based on the assumption that we possess potentials that exceed the limits of our ego. We can integrate the spiritual experience within a broader understanding of the human psyche and consciousness. Self-exploration leads to a radical shift away from ego identification toward self-arising realization of inseparable union with a timeless, all-encompassing psychic reality.
Some suggest an algorithmic self-instructing consciousness. If self-informing consciousness corresponds to the capacity to integrate information, then the system should be able to generate self-revelatory consciousness to the extent of having a large repertoire of available states (information). (Scopec, Neuroquantology, 14:4)
Suspending ego's opposing, conflicted, and defended content releases its energy. New conscious content transcends the old at a higher ontological level, when polarized opposites are reintegrated. Opposing forces are held together without acting out or identifying with destructive conflict. Psychological faith is sticking with and trusting the Process.
Conscious subjective attention to objective unconscious processes transforms both. Just witnessing withdraws energy from old structures and symptoms. Instead of feeding a complex, that energy centers and grounds in the soul with a felt sense of higher meaning, living wholeness, and greater awareness of light or depth in all phenomena. Self-revealing awareness is unitive consciousness of the numinous and divine.
The key difference is that the core of Western knowledge has emerged from a dualistic understanding of mind and matter while Eastern science and philosophy is nondual. Soul harmonizes the dual-unity through self-realization. The seer can see past physical phenomena. We trust our higher spiritual form to create greater mental and emotional stability. We can learn to live vitally, intelligently, and cooperatively with our spiritual path.
We are complicated; others don't really know us and we don't know ourselves because we focus on our illusions and self-delusions. When we dig within, we find the crumbling 'truths' were simulations all along. What felt authentic, even sacred, at the time is revealed as a sham, as our own projection. We are consciously reluctant to admit the polarity of our own background.
Our change of heart correlates with the revisioning. Our belief in the sacred comes from our own attribution of divine authority, not its inherent qualities. We tend to 'worship' the dynamics of our understanding, divinize the presumed truth of a numinosum -- ontologically, metaphysically, historically, and personally. We only know what we know through epistemological metaphors.
It isn't pleasant to encounter ourselves, to know ourselves. Shadow is our repressed ego that we reject and deny -- the personal unconscious and the defensive armored aspect of the body. It is our primal cruel, sadistic, rapacious, envious impulses. So, Jung cautions, "Man should first strive to know himself, and then live in harmony with his own truth. Who is in a position to see his own shadow and to bear the knowledge has already fulfilled a small part of the task."
Conscious awareness of the unconscious emerges from the union of opposites. Individuation is the conscious journey through this "middle way." Polarity generates energy that is released in a new form when they unite, like a dream fuses the conscious and unconscious into a psychospiritual dynamic.
In Inner Work, Robert Johnson claims, “when we experience the images, we also experience the inner parts of ourselves that are clothed in the images " (p. 25). Psychic intensity can transfer among different symbols and images, channeling the energy of transformation and individual destiny.
Life plays out in the tension of opposites. Jung discovered the reality of the objective psyche, which lies beyond the inner/outer disjunction. The reality of self-presentational living language or inceptive language supersedes traditional language. Its conceptual forms, such as inner/outer, spirit/matter,subject/object, are destroyed.
The transformation of imagination to inspiration is accompanied by a transition from metaphor to personification, and from myth and symbol to transformed allegory. Psychic engagement with sacred mythic imagery characterizes this profound inner process.
We learn to accept the opposites over unrealistic polarizations. Our psyche is the microcosm containing light and dark. Conscious-unconscious, inner-outer, depth-breadth, dark-light, feeling-thinking, life-spirit, etc. unite in a paradoxical or transcendent third. For example, in a vortex, outer coexists with inner in a dimensional morphing. Criss-crossing waves of probability originate in the past-present-future.
Soul is not a 'thing' but an inherent imaginal process self-revealing the subjective meaning of life. Mythological and physiological threads are interwoven to give us the courage to live. Hillman says, "the myth is not only what is spoken with the mouth, but also what the mouth does not say: Mythos without logos."
Images are soul's native language, a deepening perspective recognizing imaginative possibilities including the potential to realize the whole universe within of the somatic and spiritual unconscious -- original source of the human spirit.
Inter-subjective Engagement
The adventure of self-discovery allows us to re-integrate and delimit the body. Our body contains the memory of every experience we've had, so we can 'read' our biography from the dynamic structure of the body and embedded tissue memory. The body-mind is realized as one reality. Associations shape the functional identity of the body -- our arousal levels, symptoms, pains, irritations, inflammations, contractions, and blocks.
The unconscious body is also the shadow, primordial, instinctual, chthonic, perverse, denied, mercurial, deadly. It is the dark and animalistic naked underbelly, the background, the peripheral, the unaccepted and yearned for. When we cast light on the previously unknown, we cast a shadow of the archaic, rebellious, and unstable upon something else. Attitudes and mental processes affect body function.
Body processes influence and determine thoughts and images, even the primitive, magical, and mad. Through self-care and self-regulation, we can modulate energy, breathing and chronic muscle tensions bringing out the emotions, thoughts, and images through expression. The cycle of energy includes movement, emotions, thoughts and images.
Each body expresses its specific individual dynamic character structure and helps us understand our personality, pain, rigidity, and conflicts. The character may change but remain present so the self-knowledge process represents the journey of a lifetime. This means we need to take responsibility for our own way of being in the world, keeping our body consciousness alive.
Rather than identify with it, we build a relationship with the body, its unconscious body language and embedded memories, and suppressed emotions. Pain is associated with unfulfilled desire, injury or humiliation, loss or frustration.
Understanding patterns in the individual parts of the body (mouth, eyes, shoulders, pelvis, feet, etc. ) is like reading words. Being able to read correctly does not in itself imply the ability to understand the meaning in the individual context.
We become desensitized and numb, including to the emotions associated with it. Blocks are expressions of suppressed emotions. The jaws, shoulders, throat, or pelvis may harbor unconscious aggression, anger, screams, or sexuality. Reconnecting with pain brings release of tensions that restores pleasure and vitality.
Consciousness grounded in soul and living wholeness reveals a depth at the center of all phenomenon. Soul and its felt-sense and psychic image are related to the transcendent spiritual archetype, but remains unconscious until self-realized. We live with myth in our lives, permeated with metaphor, spirit, self-reflection, and guidance. Psyche is numinous, luminous, and sonorous.
In The Room in the Dark, Aldo Carotenuto says, "Whoever discovers the soul discovers the impossibility of looking at life in its more superficial aspects, delivering it to its rhythm without giving it a new, dense sense of meaning. For those who do not know the soul, living is disappearing without leaving a trace. Different is the fate of those who are forced to stop their steps and put their aspirations into inner life by making the soul the space to live in."
We try to understand what ourselves and others seem to believe, what is 'core' and what is projection. Jung distinguished theological notions of soul from his psychological notions -- the living imaginal properties of human life, and the images produced by the anima/animus complex psychic function:
"I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality.” [“Definitions,” CW 6, par. 797]
Imagination moves us. Being undefinable, soul is more of a symbol than a concept. It is an ambiguous root metaphor, a reflective way of viewing things with subjective differentiation. We are encouraged by the presence of the different forms of nature. Soul animates the body in natural union, and the spirit in supernatural union.
Where religious soul is unconscious, psychological soul is conscious, a channel to see the spiritual world. Soul animates the body and world and unites the opposites by seeing and understanding. Conscious and unconscious unite through reflection, the intersection of two worlds as persistent transcendent realization.
Thomas Moore says, "We know intuitively that soul has to do with genuineness and depth, as when we say certain music has soul or a remarkable person is soulful... Soul is revealed in attachment, love, and community, as well as in retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy." (Care of the Soul, xi-xii)
In The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, "The soul answered and said, 'I saw you. You did not see me nor recognize me. I served you as a garment, and you did not know me.' When it had said this, it went away rejoicing greatly." ... "And the soul said, 'why do you judge me although I have not judged? I was bound though I have not bound. I was not recognized. But I have recognized that the All is being dissolved, both the earthly (things) and the heavenly." James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library, revised edition. HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1990.
Ours is not a purely individual existence; there is also an infinitely larger paradigm. We want to know ourselves and yet we avoid it, deny it, fictionalize and even fear it, consciously and unconsciously. It's like we have a view of infinity in the vast night sky but we rarely turn our gaze that way or wonder in amazement at that vast domain and its implications. But it remains the ground of our being, nevertheless.
The process of self-discovery is one of emerging self-knowledge. A psychological self-awareness and faith in the power of truth gives us the courage to reveal whatever we unearth to ourselves with radical honesty whether it is complimentary or not. We need to be more critical of our basic assumptions.
If we are dissociated from nature, we may also dissociate or ignore the body, rather than living in it with its shame, symptoms, and vulnerabilities. Our vulnerabilities allow us to open ourselves to our feelings of fear, sadness, loneliness, to get in touch with the same feelings we meet in the other, love, jealousy, suffering, fear of loss and all the confusing states we experience while falling in and out of love.
Our torments only have meaning within our personal experience. We can only understand the body through embodied awareness, a felt sense of subtle pulsating energies that transforms our way of being in the body. Awareness perceives through our embodiment which is the medium of the field. The images and memories themselves change to different frames of reference that give us multiple perspectives on what we have experienced.
We unconsciously hide our true face from the world with our Persona, our negativity from ourselves with our Shadow, and our vulnerability from our relationships with Anima/Animus projections when they could be our soulguides.
Marie Louise von Franz states, “If an individual has wrestled seriously and long enough with the anima (or animus)... The unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form...as an initiator, guardian, a guru/teacher, a wise old man....” The sages call this soul work, which lies beyond theories, beliefs, and mind.
It's not that we refuse to see, but when we're in it, enmeshed or identified with it, we can't see it. But, soul wants to be heard and recognized. We hide from our Adult self with the Eternal Child and from the higher Self with the false ego. The Wise Old Man and Wise Old Woman are venerable mana figures who mentor us through our dreams and insights, as wise extensions of our numinous mother and father images, ancestral rational and feeling wisdom.
In times of transition the Wise Sages, Elders, and Ancestors support us with the awareness of generations, helping us find psychic connections between past and future, our link to wholeness. They embody the self-realizing potential for spiritual development yet, they still have moral short-comings, or human flaws. In their non-dual form, they are our universal Higher Selves, knowing that comes not from thinking but from experience that knows ultimate reality.
The narrated identity as a social presentation is the self-organizing part of the soul that gives us the illusion we are in control of ourselves. Such a mask hides our real face. Shame and a narcissistic craving for attention or fame stem from the same root.
We become convinced such stories are the truth of ourselves and the world. The self-image as believed is defended as a matter of life and death to protect the naked soul in its acute sense of vulnerability from attack.
"The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual," says Jung (CW 7, Pg.305).
A defensive labyrinth of self-justifying stories is thrown up, but inflated, self-enhancing and deflated, disparaging attributions create conflict and dissonance. Jung considered primordial image of the labyrinth a symbol of the unconscious mind, and our unconscious journey through dreams. This is the labyrinth, the essentially metaphorical, paradoxical, symbolic maze we must walk for self-knowledge, the manifold essence of the inner world.
But it is a dark and dangerous place, an entangling and confusing world, where it is easy to get lost or assailed by personal and collective evil (Shadow). In crisis, we battle our mortality, evil and darkness with reason and intellect, resolve and faithfulness. Our wounds, dedication, and suffering become ways of patiently tending soul. How we feel makes the difference in essential situations.
This is the perilous journey into unknown psychic territory. If we are disoriented, solutions elude us. The center remains an empty space until inhabited by the Presence of the self, the divine life-force, opening the possibility of devotional surrender (sacrifice) to the Source or ultimate Reality.
Jung famously said, "There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." To do so we have to enter an autonomous realm of nature, to listen deeply to the voice of nature, to find the fertilizing spirit of each place.
James Hillman, in "The Pleasure of Thinking" says, Seeking the anima mundi for me means to cross the world like a tribal hunter ... a gold seeker. It means scrutinizing everything carefully and 'divining' as it is said, the specific genius loci. For this we must be sensitive to the representations of the world ... "
More than an inner entity, soul is a virtual process. Soul comes to us in our predictable life passages, inner turning points, including foundational stages and childhood's end. It includes gradual integration of dependency, socialization, rebellion, character adaptation, responsiveness, and responsibility which form the seed of devotion, the spiritual qualities of faith, love, and surrender.
The Catch-30s, Midlife (36-42), and late liminal life, often strip us bare, revealing the truth of who we are. Beginning with psycho-physical individuation, such archetypal passages are the unfolding of human potential, more modes of intuitive self-transcendence than intentional self-development.
http://jungiancenter.org/enjoying-the-afternoon-of-life-jung-on-aging/
Midlife, a developmental imperative, opens the socially conditioned beliefs, feelings, and false self to the true self, and this self is the world. The second half of life is more about maturing than growth. Naturally, they overlap one another, and are reiterated throughout life as social, personal, and spiritual responsibilities. These foundational transitions, inherently liminal states, used to be facilitated by myths, initiation ceremonies, and rites of passage.
Midlife is often a time of reexamination of self. If we have repeating patterns, it is a good time to look into our transgenerational legacies, family loyalties and dissociation, sibling position, epigenetic inheritance, marital puzzles, and more, relating our patterns to those in our family tree. It can help us unlock the blocks produced by unconscious inheritances, such as transmission of trauma. They can unwittingly affect our health, our relationships, our work success, the life of our children, and our chances of being happy in a relationship.
We return to questioning who we are and where we are going. But, we can always uncover deep, core issues and themes from our unconscious buried past that negatively influence our current life. Our psychic processes include reflections, doubts, and experiments. We can engage with the autonomous natural functions of vision and imagination. Visions are primordial forms of symbols.
Archetypal dimensions of awareness arise in us as experiential beingness. The 'imaginal' is a transformative field where we are connected and can recharge. It is simply a more expanded consciousness and reality. The unconscious is a vast ocean of many shores. We chart our course through the ebb and flow of existence. When we gaze within it is through the whole body as awareness, gazing through awareness into awareness, yoking past, present, and future together as an image.
We might concur with Jung: "But when we penetrate the depths of the soul and when we try to understand its mysterious life, we shall discern that death is not a meaningless end, the mere vanishing into nothingness—it is an accomplishment, a ripe fruit on the tree of life."
Healing Wisdom
The antidote to our stressful experience is healing wisdom, often personified as Sophia, Shekinah, or Soul, anima mumdi. In the Feminine we find the solace for life's bitterness. Gnosis is participatory knowing. Belief is a substitute for gnosis. We all believe in something that can't be proven. Freed of belief we open into direct perception, trusting our experience as it unfolds over and beyond time.
Psychologist Ralph Metzner suggests, "Comparing and integrating insights from entheogenic experiences, shamanic journeys, breathwork, hypnotherapy journeys as well as meditative experiences and dreams, we find remarkable convergences of modern findings with esoteric teachings..."
Aldous Huxley and others have described the Perennial Philosophy as the core of wisdom that draws on the common ground of the experience of Ultimate Being: primordial awareness, inherent clarity, and unbound sacred space, potential space, shared by all traditions -- fierce and beneficent Beingness. Our question remains how we can express the clarity of any wisdom we’ve realized.
The Renaissance syncretism of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola revived archaic lore, Kabbalah, Greek philosophy, and the therapeutic approach of practice and service. Giordano Bruno concluded, "it's not the matter that generates thought, it's the thought that generates matter."
Experience of the Ground is pure awareness of being without the intrusive fluctuating content of mind. Self-arising primordial awareness is Nothingness or openness or emptiness, or voidness or absolute spaciousness that Jung called the Plenum and modern physics knows as the virtual vacuum, from which manifestation unfolds.
Thus, this resting state is coequal with the formative ground of matter and psyche. We experience this boundless nature as a resonant consciousness field coextensive with mindbody. Our body of emptiness and stillness is the center of our own mandala, luminous, radiant light. Consciousness and imagination helps create the reality we experience, including luminous awareness.
When wisdom blooms in its perfection the experiential secret is revealed as wisdom light -- identification and unity with the body of light. Jung suggested "the task of man is to become aware of what is pressing from within, Unconscious, rather than being unaware or identifying with it. In both cases, it is less than its destiny, which is to create consciousness. As far as we know, the only meaning of human existence is to light a light in the darkness of pure being."
We never completely solve our most serious life problems, but perhaps learn how to carry them more gracefully. New knowledge about our true self leads us to redefine our feelings and our view of ourselves. Changes in identity come from a turn inwards and the withdrawal of projections. Joseph Campbell spoke of it, too: "the challenge of life is to become transparent to transcendence."
‘Symbolic’ here means bringing forth the invisible into visibility by ‘shining through.' The symbolic dimension is knowing directly and non-conceptually through suspension of the mind. There is a radiance to symbolic forms, personal forms, cosmic forms, iconic forms, divinity and nature become manifest.
Metaphors are found in myths that point to the transcendent, the eternal Source. Underneath the world of phenomena we can perceive an eternal source that pours its energies into our world of time, suffering, and ultimately death. Transformation is participatory spirituality, more of a way through than a way out.
Circumambulation
The Grail Quest is essentially about restoring life to that condition known as the "wasteland," which is a metaphor for an inauthentically lived life, which is role-bound, highly conditioned, collective, and therefore sterile.
The "underworld" is the primordial cosmological groundstate -- the Spirit of the Depths. Heaven is an image of the transcendent heights, the ascent of attention in spiritual flight, the fascinations of visionary experience, conceptual or utter self-transcendence. Transcendental Being, pure consciousness precedes concepts and excludes phenomena. What goes up must come down.
But before we engage in such lofty endeavors as storming heaven with zealous ascensionism we need to develop insight into our personal unconscious. Over a lifetime, the soul collects wisdom. Conscious living reveals more coherent patterns, revealing the soul-world relationship.
We seek a vital and authentic life, the bedrock of reality underneath all social masks, disguises, armor, emotional possession, defenses, inflation, and self-deception. We are informed by Nature, natural philosophy, therapeutic and expressive arts. Our entire existence is codification of the mysteries of life.
Our arguments for a cyclic circumambulation of the self can travel upwards toward spirit or dive deep into the chthonic realms. The dimensional dyad is really an archetypal circle of lived experience a symbol of becoming whole and a body that is present to being. It symbolizes that any given moment of suffering, challenge, or illness can serve as a doorway to our boundless nature and an opportunity for healing.
An integration of analytical and holistic science is related to personal and transpersonal psyche, including more complex emergent properties. Our experiential sense of identity and worldview extends beyond personal and mundane worldly events from terror-idealization, to wider aspects of humanity, psyche, and cosmos.
Psyche is a hall of mirrors of perpetually reflecting realities, metaphorically expressing the complexities of life through an extension of our subjective perception. For example, silver needs to be tended, polished to retain its innate reflective nature. It requires our attention.
Rumi wisely notes, "man is what his eye covers. He is essentially vision, and the rest is just flesh and skin. The mirror that hides facial defects to respect a person's feelings is not a mirror; it is hypocritical. As long as you can, don't look for such a mirror! You're not a body, you're the eye of the spirit. If you've contemplated the spirit, you're free from the body. Anyone who is free from ego is all ego; when he no longer loves himself he is loved by all. When a mirror is devoid of images it reaches its splendor, since then it reflects all images."
Psyche or psychological soul is a realm of experience, with a quality of psychic objectivity. We can explore our psycho-physical basis, the conscious and autonomous unconscious, through pattern recognition, depth psychology with roots in the ancient mysteries, and spiritual wisdom traditions.
Archetypes are recurrent patterns that appear in myth, fairy tales, or life stories, sometimes as gods and goddesses. “We don’t know how they began. We don’t know how the world began. And it doesn’t matter how it began as far as living goes. It makes more sense to a person’s life that what’s going on has a pattern and a meaning to it rather than it all began in a bang, or came out of a black hole or something." James Hillman, Lang 2004
The holistic context is a visionary mode, a larger vision that includes an imaginative deepening of events into meaningful experiences.. Our lives are ultimately embedded in some sort of myth-making, including personal symptoms, conflicts, and blocks. Symbolism is the normally unheard language, yet it can be a visceral process.
Death permeates our lives. Death and rebirth (the spiritual birth of Consciousness) symbolize psychological loss of conscious control, and submission to an overwhelming influx of symbolic material from the unconscious. The ego plunges into the darkness of the unconscious underworld, to experience rejuvenation.
‘Symbolic’ here means translucidity, translucence, transparency. The openness of phenomena, manifesting light and energy, knowledge, and gnosis are openings of archetypal energies. Emergent manifestation is all light and energy in which the intensity of light varies from one symbol to another. We enter the dimension of symbolic function through transitional or liminal space. Archetypal dimensions and symbolic archetypes appear as manifest.
More than primitive stories explaining the unknown, mythology expresses the richness and wisdom of humanity played out in wondrous symbolical storytelling. Myths and rites of rebirth relate directly to our relationship with our own birth and death, the experience of Nothingness. Something essential has disappeared. Our own pain and shadow necessitate change.
Death Grip
The Shadow of mankind's narcissistic cultural imagination and heartless corporations have the soul in a 'death grip,' torn between left and right. This is a competitive struggle of unattainable ideals and identity politics mired in massive corruption and utter lack of compassion for one's fellow human beings on both extremes. The terror of nuclear war is a suffocating death grip that casts a pall across the entire globe.
We live in a post-traumatic, hypervigilant and vigilante society of propaganda and persuasion. Factions and fanaticism offer hollow promises of literal or symbolic relief from the pain and anxieties that plague us with fear of collapse. Meanwhile the power pendulum oscillates wildly back and forth. Catastrophe and natural disaster can strike anyone anywhere with equal fury.
Culture norms and conformity hurt and even kill people. Technological future shock has sent us spinning back emotionally 300 years. Yet clearly the beliefs of by-gone eras are failing as they failed in their own times. How can we live soulfully in our own century?
Soul can be 'lost' in a variety of ways. Distress is an ocean of suffering, grief, and loss of power. Extreme peril is enmeshed with imaginal and symbolic images, such as black holes, limbo, and utter chaos.
Symptoms are probably our most important unconscious messages. If we over-estimate and essentially lie to ourselves with denial or recriminating judgement about our state of being, we grasp things conceptually, intellectualizing but not embodying them. That includes ego inflation, narcissism, and “spiritual bypassing.” We cannot use spiritual and esoteric concepts to mystify and bypass basic psychological work on our denial, numbness, narrow social roles and blindspots.
Ego-death is a requirement for opening to the broader realm of transpersonal reality. It heralds a change in the form of consciousness. The crux of this consciousness process is reaching the creative state of undifferentiated consciousness. It is in this state that old primal self images dissolve, and from it the new ones form.
It is a death because at the deepest levels we define ourselves by this image and what it has created and frozen into our lives. It ultimately means the dismemberment of our former personality and life patterns. We are it and it is our death when it dissolves into the infinite possibilities of chaotic consciousness.
This unformed consciousness--which we often mistake for death-- is really the essence of our vitality and life force. It is the energy we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of time. It reaches our awareness through dreams and the flow of our imagination.
Yielding to ego-death leads to this consciousness, whether it comes through breakdown, therapy or a spontaneous near-death experience (N.D.E.) or a closely witnessing death. This consciousness can result from a brush with one's own death or that of another. Dissolving is a death that opens into a field of unformed consciousness with infinite creative possibilities.
Theater of the Real
Everyone is traumatized to a greater or lesser degree. The more wounded we are, the deeper the split. Unresolved physical and emotional trauma is often held in the body, in stasis. Trauma lodges in the body, in the total psyche, split-off from ego consciousness. Traumas even change our genes. Psychic dis-ease fragments split off from shock as "autonomous complexes."
Our encounters with the Real deconstruct some of our fantasies and promote others. Our mortality, complications, and failures are the very things that spur us beyond shock (overwhelming stress), trauma (physical or moral injury or damage), and obsession (stuckness; fixation). Shock dissociates us from self and disconnects us from objects and others in the world. We are seized and plummet downward into a dark, isolated, and silent place.
We attempt to deny, repress, or escape the affective nightmare. When something has been eradicated by personal or collective catastrophe, traumatic reaction is a psycho-physical encounter with the full obscenity and unnrepresentability of death and loss of self that breaches ordinary reality. Like Dante, we sense the presence of the living dead, of our ancestral voices.
Putting the danger into words is not enough to overcome the irruptive and devastating destruction. Defensiveness awakens all our archaic aggression, shame, and guilt. Trying to wipe it from memory we lose ourselves in traumatic repetition compulsions. The stupor and shame of the traumatic narrative and psychophysical dysregulation keeps happenING. The shockwave is suspended in time. We try to ward off compulsive re-enactment.
The disappearance of real body, figure, form, and rhythm have carried away our own relationship with traumatic memory. Archetypal 'death' is inconsistent with our existence. If we swallow enough darkness a new narrative memory can blossom. The body can re-enter the human world. The miracle is the restoration of of our Presence in each fresh moment.
In distress, explosions of imagery propel us toward symbolic and imaginary places, bombarding us with hyper-activated material. Disintegration is a breakdown between structural stability and life instinct. We react to formlessness or chaos with terror and amazement, provoking fantasies and myths of our own death and those of others.
For example, if our own relationship with the world crumbles, we fantasize about the eschatological 'end of the world,' a projection of global external catastrophe that mirrors our helplessness that exceeds our capacity. We are bathed in epistemological metaphors with archetypal and healing cores, if we but listen to their voices.
Where we minimize, rationalize, or cleave to the positive and light only, we need to acknowledge our dark unspiritual impulses and intentions, our grandiosity, and our dualistic polarized thinking. Hillman names "our endemic national disease: the addiction to innocence, to not knowing life's darkness, and not wanting to know, either."
Duality creates the conflict between opposites, the paradox of wisdom and paranoia. Thought has built our vanity, attachments, hopes. Sacred psychology reunites us with alienated or lost parts of ourselves, including the repressed, mythic, archetypal, and transpsychic. The quest or journey is a continuous cycling, inner/outward, upward/downward.
But, down in the morass, in the mud and rocks and blood and carnage is where the treasure lies concealed. Joseph Campbell assures us that, "One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light."
We are guided by galvanizing self-discovery: intuition, transformational experiences, tacit knowledge, and educational philosophy based on sound research, personal experience and reflection. When we cannot guide ourselves toward breakthrough, something 'other' arises within us. Getting thoughts down or expressive arts moves emotions out.
Relaxation of repression allows the upward thrust of the traumatic fixation to rise into consciousness. The more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the concepts we are capable of forming. When language falters we dive into silence, speechless and unknowing in that radiant darkness beyond intellect..
"[T]he focal point of consciousness of the observer is the bridge that connects the ultimate being of the void to the becomings of the world. The nature of life in the world can then be understood as about becoming, while the ultimate nature of death can be understood as the final transition from becoming and the differentiation of consciousness to nondifferentiation and ultimate being. This premise also tells us that death is the end of an illusion. The illusion that ultimately comes to an end is not only the illusion of life in the world, but also the illusion of separation." (James Kowall)
Psyche & Cosmos
The soul itself is “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself … ” It is, “an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence — that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego and consciousness go into eclipse.” It is “that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern.” It is “the imaginative possibility of our natures” and it has a “special relation with death.” --James Hillman (2004 Joel Lang)
The most intimate sanctum of the soul opens to primeval cosmos, the unwritten laws of nature. It is a vulnerable, naked, and open way of being in the world with honesty and passion. As seekers, we yearn for greater understanding of self and universe.
Psyche's domain is liminality, in-betweeness. Soul is an infinite power of expression that is essentially unconditioned. It joins with spirit as the prime mover. Aesthetic and visionary experiences activate the unconscious archetypal psyche which floods consciousness. Creative thinking depends on the revelatory unconscious. Every work of art embodies its creator's vision and self-expression. Our entire lives affect our artwork.
"I was thinking of a series of dreams
Where nothing comes up to the top
Everything stays down where it's wounded
And comes to a permanent stop
Wasn't thinking of anything specific
Like in a dream when someone wakes up and screams
Nothing truly very scientific
Just thinking of a series of dreams."
--"Series of Dreams" by Bob Dylan
We face a dangerous descent into the time of the impossible and we must surrender to the ordeal. To do so is to enter the realm of chaos, not as disorder, but as emptiness, as the void. It resonates metaphorically with a dark and terrifying passage into the limbo of our own vulnerability to intrinsic paradoxes and the Mystery of Life.
Myth represents a primeval reality. The myths of the past change the way we experience the present. Holistic depth work suggests a qualitative transformation emerges when all of our experiences come together. The process of becoming who we truly are deepens. Integration results in greater well-being, creativity and spiritual growth.
“Looking inward” means a metaphorical extension of an idea. Personal and spiritual development means working at an inner level. In our depths below outer consciousness is the space between the pain and the darkness of vision. The vision can finally get more transparent, less dark and opaque.
We should remember, in this paradigm of self-exploration we are creating something, not heroically fighting for or maximizing something, including defensive, ambitious, hyperactive development. There may be challenges and battles, but war is not the primary paradigm to heal frightening, painful, unresolved wounds. War is a metaphor of obsession.
We cannot compete against ourselves. Striving leads to self-blame. Nor are we seeking premature transcendental escapism. Well-being is optimization, balance. Our symptoms, struggles, creative imagination, and discernment call out for our participation.
The cosmic unconscious is inhuman nature but useless without the human mind. Natural symbols from the unconscious can be traced back to their archaic roots. They have the capacity to transform and redirect unconscious instinctual energy.
Symptoms substitute for denied and repressed impulses, wishes, and fantasies that are unwelcome, morally or aesthetically painful., or were subjected to an ethical “censorship.” Inhibition prevents them from being remembered.
"...the Indian tradition says: there is no God but the man in the process. Jung declares that the unconscious is an immense and painful effort towards consciousness. That is, as the kabbalah says: God is a wound that man must heal." (Etienne Perrot, The Road to Transformation)
There are many paths to self-discovery. Individuation means you find your own. Jung's Red Book hints, "to those who can proceed in spite of the riddles, a path opens. Submit to puzzles and to what is absolutely incomprehensible. There are bridges, suspended on the depths of perpetual depth. But you follow the riddles." (p. 308) The puzzle is the solution; the question and the answer.
The archetype is a bridge between present-day and archaic consciousness. Jung said that memory uses “the bridges of association,” but that sometimes certain memories do not reach consciousness at all ( Jung 1983, 219; 1980, 282). Memories are strongly connected to physical feeling through every cell that recalls every event impinging on us. Thus, body is the real unconscious which stores pain and fear and our attempts to avoid it.
Imagination is a subtle organ of apprehension and our spiritual creative force. We have been given part of the collective problem of our time to struggle with. We also have the potential for clarity, visionary gnosis and intuitive wholeness -- genuine responsiveness, including the many deaths of daily living by which we become more alive. Trusting life means realizing the risk of living and dying are inseparable.
The visionary experience can become something corporeal, just as trauma can become locked as memory in the structure of the physical body. We can experience psyche through sensual, embodied perception. Experience is embodied as character. Modes include embodied, relational, cyclical, chthonic, receptive, and imaginal.
"To locate a thing you need space, to place an event you need time; but the Timeless and Spaceless defies handling. It makes everything perceivable, yet itself is beyond perception. The mind cannot know what is beyond the mind, but the mind is known by what is beyond it."
(Nisargadatta Maharaj)
With a metaphoric sensibility we move beyond our own intentions to those of the deeper unconscious self with which we are ceaselessly merged. We create a sacred space that allows it to emerge into consciousness. We are linked to deep time, knowledge from the Source, and the macrocosm. Reality takes on depth from its shadow. It grips, overwhelms, and captivates us. It values and embraces paradox yet strips away our assumptions.
We descend into the netherworld of the belly of the earth with feelings too tumultuous to put into words. The enormity strikes us that the human psyche is a deep and timeless fund of archaic instincts and images. The image is a presence. French novelist, Maurice Blanchot claims, "It is the relationship with the absence that defines the image, whose main function is to represent, or to send it to something that is far away, elsewhere."
"Only at times the pupil's curtain slides up soundlessly -
An image enters then,
goes through the tensioned stillness of the limbs -
and in the heart ceases to be."
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
The bottom drops out of our vertical cosmos. Is the absolute itself this immobile impetus of desire towards an anticipated death? Is this dissociated dialectic with death the poetry and truth that emanates from the poverty-stricken flesh? Hegel thought, to name something is to annihilate its unique existence by bringing it under a concept. The negativity of death is not an attribute of the senseless dissolution of life but its ability to shape the world.
We recover what the world has denied, repressed, and forgotten in our dreams as well as indistinct and paradoxical language -- the absent voice of the unconscious and our identity as a relationship, an infinite conversation. This is the base note of our psychopoetic life song, wherein experience draws together insights.
We live most of our life unconsciously. We can bring close what has truth for us only if we love it. Jung notes, "For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the spiritual sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the world and woman, i.e., the anima projected on to the world.” (A Study in the Process of Individuation (1934) In CW 9, Part I, P. 559)
We have an invisible connection to the underworld, which is Hades himself, who hides invisibly in things. Hades is a symbol of the incredible, fathomless depths of the psyche. The true nature of all things is hidden in these depths of the unconscious.
We must penetrate this depth dimension to discover what is hidden there. The Roman Hades is Pluto, whose name means "wealth." This indicates the buried treasures existing in the depths of the psyche and experience of this underworld realm.
Instead of grasping and holding we embrace flow, letting go from moment to moment, giving ourselves to it. Meanwhile, we can make the daily inner gesture of dying in spiritual practice, often likened to 'dying while living.' Only 'dying' in its myriad forms we pass from time into the now that does not pass away, but offers the potential of being real.
Letting go can be a metaphorical death. Death is always immanent. He required no cult worship from mortals, because he already possesses the riches of the depths of experience. The final act is always his, in any event. The final purpose of every soul involves "devotion" to Hades, in a psychic sense. Whether fast or slow, ultimately it takes all our energy.
We are challenged to incorporate the awareness of death into daily living, seeing of every moment of life against the horizon of death, to incorporate that awareness of dying into every moment through which we become more fully alive.
Death confronts us by demonstrating that purpose is not enough since we live by meaning. When we can no longer manipulate and control things our life is still meaningful. Purpose is controlling and active; meaning is inherent and moves us. Giving over ourselves to whatever we experience is the gesture by which meaning flows into our lives.
Most experiences are attributed only a relative significance when they are related to the personal experience of death. Even in life, most people are obsessed with death. Hades is the unknowable goal underlying all human experience and the inherent meaning of soul. Death brings life its ability to matter.
The Line of Inquiry
Trauma gets trapped in the nervous system. Healing emerges through the mirror of the soul. "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate," says Jung. Our line of inquiry researches key terms through inherent imagery. It provides a conceptual framework that includes the shadow, the body, and the feminine, through which we can dig below our presumptions, our assumed truths and illusions.
“The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.” (Carl Jung, Aion, 1951)
Some examples of repressed thoughts, memories, emotions, impulses, traits, and actions include: Aggressive impulses, taboo mental images, shameful experiences, immoral urges, fears, irrational wishes, unacceptable sexual desires, judgmentalism, projection of flaws, abusing subordinates, power trips, playing victim, prejudice, savior complex, scapegoating,
We deal with what comes up into consciousness from the underworld. This opens us to related concepts. Purposeful artistic inquiry helps us develop a comprehensive understanding of experience which can be applied to resolving the challenges of our own frenzied world, including the imaginal aspects of reality. In "Architecture, Art, Politics," Hillman suggests, "The task of those who work with imagination is to produce genuine images again, not overly personal expressions."
Our conscious and unconscious psychological knowledge is embedded in our bodies. Individuation creates the subtle body. The subtle body of spirit and matter is the vehicle of the subtle realm, a psychic body in the imaginal world. The transcendent concept appears as the magical child, the elixir, aqua vitae, the philosopher's stone, diamond body, immortal body, glorious body, etc.
Our inquiries form a continuous and sometimes broken path. Most often we are driven by the underlying motivation of our emotional problems, including their impersonal core. They fuse into a 'drunken' path to our wholeness that echoes The Fool's journey in the tarot. While the passionate drunken path seems reckless it is guided from within. The pattern tells us that to escape our conditioning we should never to take the straight line, but always the zigzag path strewn with warning signals and signs.
This psychological awakening is a spiritual initiation that potentially restores vivid meaning to life, cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life. We are directed by the unconscious background with a fleeting awareness of that which abides behind every experience, which connects the imaginal soul realm and our mundane world, interiority and exteriority.
Transpsychic reality is beyond the collective unconscious. It underlies psychic reality, even deep perception of another's mind. Fundamental fantasies animate our lives. Spirit takes on form and body itself changes to include spirit. Space, time and cosmos are relevant to us all, defining our place in the cosmos. From the earliest times, drawing as an art has literally followed this line of inquiry, exploring the shape of the seen and unseen worlds.
Objective reality is interaction. Our line of inquiry is an investigation of images. It is an artful line of reasoning, balancing irrational and logical argument, aimed at demonstrating a truth or falsehood, opposites transcended in the imaginal. We find meaning beyond conventional morality in our spiritual connection. This kindles a light, and awakens a voice that grows through our flesh and blood as we drink at the well-spring of life.
Psyche and its metaphors of raw and cooked emotions are absolutely real to the person who experiences it. Realities have tangible effects, instantiating effects in our psychic lives. We live in multiple worlds, certain perspectives, but they are all shaped by and depend on our concepts. Instead of psychological concepts, they appear as high-impact mythological images, the "mythological unconscious" testing our ability to endure and discover integrity in depth.
Psychic events become lived experiences with which we have relationships. We make soul out of our psychological life. The path leads through the ghost-lands of the unconscious, undead aspects of personality. It illuminates the darkest layers of the inherited personality structure. The daimonic, and the archai are the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life."
Jung says: "The Nekyia is no aimless and purely destructive fall into the abyss, but a meaningful katabasis eis antron, a descent into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge"
(CW 15: 139-40, par. 213). And Friedrich Schiller says, "only the fullness leads to clarity;
And the truth is in the abyss."
Images are the language of life. Metaphors are imaginal tools. Unconscious metaphors make up our images of the world and reality -- our given cultural worldview. Conceptual metaphors map experience and expression. They shape our metaphysical concepts and interaction with the world, even the language we use to portray the tone of our story.
A product of our ability to conceptualize, metaphors are how we know what we know. Different classes of belief diseases can poison what we think and how we think. Our beliefs about belief are the deeper problem.
Thus, we conceive experiential or embodied realism as the basis of our philosophy. Metaphorical pluralism helps us define our everyday realities. We know nothing of reality, only the concept of reality through independently valid conceptual metaphors, which like words represent something that pre-exists them.
It often seems we live in utterly different subjective realities. Our projected notions establish our coherent realities. The vision quest is the heart of all true culture. The content of vision contains most unusual things.
We confront the pitiless monsters of archetypal Grief, Loss, Shock, Trauma, Cares, Diseases, Age, Dread, Hunger, Want, Death, Toil, Sleep, Disability, Catastrophe, War, and Discord. Our demons are the firewall of resistances, instinctual impulses, and unconscious activated complexes that overcome, impel, and possess us.
They include fear of dying, memories filled with emotions, curious detachments, terrifying events, overwhelming trauma, shattered beliefs, isolation, natural disaster, catastrophic disease, despondence, our stony complexes and pathologies, intimacy concerns, and even the profoundly impersonal nature of love when it starts to wake up.
Anais Nin described the autonomous power of erotic intensity: “He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.” "I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted."
Hillman claimed Buddha said there is fear in everything. Our personal suffering is commuted to collective, even transpersonal suffering. French philosopher, Camus describes it:
“In Absurdist experience suffering is individual, but from the moment that a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience, as the experience of everyone. Therefore the first step towards a mind overwhelmed by the absurdity of things is to realize that this feeling, this strangeness is shared by all men, and the entire human race suffers from a division between itself and the rest of the world.”
The middle passage, Katabasis or descent is an archetypal event, a meeting with the daimonic. If a "descent" does not come in initiatory form, it often comes as a dis-ease or ordeal -- as what the Greeks called katabasis. The mark of descent, undertaken consciously or not, is a newly arrived-at lowliness, associated with water and soul, as height is associated with spirit. There is no blacker inferno than the human mind, a paradigm to represent trauma.
The way down and out doesn't require poverty, homelessness, physical deprivation, but it requires a fall from status with emphasis on consciousness of the fall. We have to follow our intuition.
Katabasis carries the whole concept of disaster, of tragedy; we see own darkside, the dark side of those close to us, and they see ours. Long difficult repentance can be a way of descent, of admitting powerlessness. The descent is a response to the something that wants us there -- the Dark Queen.
But if we can detect footprints on the path, we might learn the stories of those who have gone before and in this way lighten the load. We reconnect with the roots of our being using our instinctual nature to dialogue with the unconscious. We may uncover the pattern that connects us to the past and to the future when the path to transcendence reverses itself in more than a regressive retreat into ancient levels of awareness. But it means sitting in the fire of our own fears and suffering while honoring soul's perspective.
The underworld of midlife depression is the ancestral realm and the mythical realm; it is the land of the dead and the land of the dream. The underworld is the psyche. Hillman argued that herculean spiritual ascent is a pathological impossibility, a phenomena of our cultural narcissism and mental state concepts. The soul isn’t monotheistic in nature, it’s full of gods. All forms of identification are essentially an ego inflation from which we eventually come down. He notes,
"...growing in the world, becoming useful to it and contributing to it, requires [us] to descend into the world that is under the world. In order to be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservator and a mentor, you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained by the dead (from the past, which have become invisible and yet continue to reinvigorate our life with their influence). The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in times of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "is", by offering a deeper knowledge and support. They have already fallen, they know the sinkhole; their extraordinary resources. They do not need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything that tends to take us down, on any occasion we do not live up to. They are the gravitational force of the psyche."
"One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power ... If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn't use it, the psychic energy turns to sheer poison. That's why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities." --Marie-Louise von Franz
"But the moment when physics touches on the 'untrodden, untreadable regions,' and
when psychology has at the same time to admit that there are other forms of psychic life
besides the acquisitions of personal consciousness...then the intermediate realm of subtle
bodies comes to life again, and the physical and the psychic are once more blended in an
indissoluble unity....We have come very near to this turning point today."
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 394
"[The Persian Sufi mystic] Suhrawardi’s otherworld was not an invisible aspect of the
world we know....was also not a spatial extension of this world....It was not an upper
world, high in the sky, as is heaven....Suhrawardi’s other world was a different
dimension or order of existence, whose mystery defied logical description and
explanation. It was spatially both within a person’s earthbound body and a distinct
region of the cosmos. It was not simply upper, or nether, or invisible. It was distinctly
other." --D. Merkur, Gnosis,p. 224
http://www.veronicagoodchild.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/SpringJournal74_Article.pdf
"Much has been said of the loneliness of wisdom, and how much the Truth seeker becomes a pilgrim wandering from star to star. To the ignorant, the wise man is lonely because he abides in distant heights of the mind. But the wise man himself does not feel lonely. Wisdom brings him nearer to life; closer to the heart of the world than the foolish man can ever be. Bookishness may lead to loneliness, and scholarship may end in a battle of beliefs, but the wise man gazing off into space sees not an emptiness, but a space full of life, truth, and law."
~Manly P. Hall
*
"Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.
Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being.
That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend.
Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots.
Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion.
But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our up-rootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.
We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness.
We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise.
We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.
The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections.
This statement could also be read as commentary on the self-referential consciousness process expressed as "Know Thyself." This Apollonian dictum is the utterance of the ancient god of logic Himself. The Jungian method of "Know Thyself" means a radical activation of imagination. It calls to us, echoing through the aeons--urging us to turn our consciousness back on itself, assessing and experiencing the relative "truth" of what we find within.
Jung's solution to this injunction is summarized by Hillman: We have already been given the clue in the instructor's manual as to how this third realm traditionally called 'soul' can be re-established--and by anyone. Jung says he treated the figures whom he met "as though they were real people." The key is that as though; the metaphorical, as-if reality, neither literally real (hallucinations or people in the street) nor irreal/unreal ('mere' fictions, projections which 'I' make up as parts of 'me', auto-suggestive illusions). In an 'as-if' consciousness they are powers with voice, body, motion, and mind, fully felt but wholly imaginary. This is psychic reality...
Hillman points out that we can remember, associating backward and downward into the forgotten and repressed. And in psychic reality we find a multiplicity of answers to all major, archetypal, sorts of questions--relative answers. Each archetypal perspective has its way of self-knowing. In alchemy the multi-state paradigm is known as multiplicatio, which touches all points of the soul, all channels of images.
According to Hillman, it is "spirit's self-knowledge in the mirror of the soul, soul's recognition of its spirits." There is no single way of knowing thyself, even though psychology has favored the method of introspection and insight. According to Hillman, "Know Thyself terminates whenever it leaves linear time and becomes an act of imagination. A partial insight, this song now, this one image; to see partly is the whole of it. Self-understanding healed by active imagination." Our unique method of knowing ourselves is through our own epistemological metaphors which reflect "how we know what we know" about ourselves. They are the result of our personal experience of archetypal experiences--our direct experience of the nature of reality, expressed as image. The non-linear co-relationship of simultaneous cause/effect means that archetypes become embodied as specific, yet dynamic, imagery.
The imperative to know ourselves challenges us to reflect on our identity, beliefs, assumed truths, interpretations, and even our archetypal experience and self-understanding. This dynamic recycling of consciousness creates/reveals the dynamic flux of holistic feedback patterns. It establishes a patterning matrix--a strange attractor--reflective of the organism's relationship to the whole, through a unique relationship of chaos and order. The whole brain approach to existence is both/and chaotic and logical--logically chaotic, chaotically logical. It is a holding of the tension of the opposites between the logical and natural mind.
Complex systems, such as human beings, manifest emergent properties which tend to be non-linear. They are sufficiently context dependent that they become unpredictable under normal circumstances. The reason has to do with the fact that sufficient context dependence leads to self-reference. That is, insofar as one part effects another part, which in turn effects the first, the first can be seen to be effecting itself through the mediation of the second. Multiply the parts and the system gets really out of control, at least as an object of modelling.
Godel proved why such self-referential systems are inherently unpredictable. Any finitely axiomatized formal system rich enough in entailment to manifest self-reference displays true theorems not deducible from the axioms. Since all mathematical modelling systems can be formalized as axiomatic systems, and since the project of such modelling is the essence of deterministic reductionism, it follows that systems capable of self-reference cannot be reduced to deterministic causality. They can be modelled, but they become descriptive of organization, rather than predictive of future states (Naser, 1993, Bridge-L).
Like a fractal, the individual embodies the whole, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the initial conditions of existence. The physical body is conditioned by physical laws. At the mesocosmic level, we either exist or we don't, we're alive or dead. But the flow of our essence within the whole is not so black and white. We remain ourselves, despite the loss of discrete body parts or faculties of perception. At the quantum level, our atomic "matter" merges with the environment and the vacuum of non-existence.
The I-Not I dichotomy breaks down in pure consciousness. Our physical constituents remain, even after death, with their own molecular and quantum perceptions, but the genetic information becomes obsolete. We all decay according to the same biological process. Free of the gravitational valley of corpo-reality, consciousness can soar unfettered. When consciousness flows into an "escape-time plot," we experience the boundary-dissolving transcendence of cosmic consciousness. An increased sense of freedom comes with liberation from the gravity of literalism. Yet we are neither exclusively biological nor psychospiritual beings. The nature of our existence is both/and--psychobiological.
"Meaninglessness inhibits the fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness.
Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perhaps everything."
~ C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
As our breathing slows, we become centered and still. Only our breath is moving at a regular pace. The ebb and flow of our breathing is like a gentle ocean with us, falling upon the stillness of our inner being. A light appears out of the darkness. We are drawn to a room filled with light in an underground chapel where an altar radiates from the center, a round stump of an ancient tree, an altar/tree. Feeling the circles of the altar/tree, we see our lives passing through time. A white robed monk speaks to us, silently through each of us, inwardly, whenever we create an atom of silence, a quiet place of peace within our life. It is our secret chapel, were we each hear our own true word.
"My inner being lies silent as the sands while the waves of my life,
the waves of my breathing rise and fall ...
Sitting in stillness
Breathing.
Breathing
At the depth of stillness,
Something stirs in me.
It draws me
Out of my stillness.
It stirs in me
And draws me on
To explore what I know not.
I rouse myself and follow it.
I go with it
Not knowing where.
The stirring within me
Leads me down dark corridors
Where there is no light.
Not seeing where I am walking,
I walk onwards.
Looking ahead
I see nothing.
There is no end in sight.
I wonder at it,
But the stirring within me
Draws me on.
I continue walking…"
~Ira Progoff, The White-robed Monk
"My inner being lies silent as the sands while the waves of my life,
the waves of my breathing rise and fall ...
Sitting in stillness
Breathing.
Breathing
At the depth of stillness,
Something stirs in me.
It draws me
Out of my stillness.
It stirs in me
And draws me on
To explore what I know not.
I rouse myself and follow it.
I go with it
Not knowing where.
The stirring within me
Leads me down dark corridors
Where there is no light.
Not seeing where I am walking,
I walk onwards.
Looking ahead
I see nothing.
There is no end in sight.
I wonder at it,
But the stirring within me
Draws me on.
I continue walking…"
~Ira Progoff, The White-robed Monk
"And you, my soul, I found again, first in images within men and then you yourself I found you where I least expected you. You climbed out of a dark shaft. You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams."
--Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 233.
"Man argues for signs. God thinks about Symbols. Man stands and is consumed in signs, transitions, and transitions. God contemplating absolute, infinitely generating Symbols and Symbols creates the Universe, making it pure Metamorphosis in the Infinity of Present Infiniti." --Lorenzo Ostuni
--Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 233.
"Man argues for signs. God thinks about Symbols. Man stands and is consumed in signs, transitions, and transitions. God contemplating absolute, infinitely generating Symbols and Symbols creates the Universe, making it pure Metamorphosis in the Infinity of Present Infiniti." --Lorenzo Ostuni
SOUL TENDING
Fuller Human Identity
Iona Miller, 2017
Consciousness is not a cause. It cannot be moved or used or in any way affected by anything. Consciousness is not the result of anything, nor does it depend on anything. It does not increase or diminish, expand, extend, contract, or change; or vary in any way. Although there are countless degrees in being conscious, there are no degrees of Consciousness: no planes, no states; no grades, divisions, or variations of any sort; it is the same everywhere, and in all things. Consciousness has no properties, no qualities, no attributes; it does not possess; it cannot be possessed.
Consciousness never began; it cannot cease to be. Consciousness IS. We participate in the life of the cosmos. The ground of our nature is entanglememt with the collective unconscious. The mystery of individualization in the cosmos is also entangled at the fundamental level. Individual consciousness arises out of the primordial complex quantum matrix. Consciousness, like anything else in the cosmos, arises with the quantum.
Consciousness is the root of intelligence. To have consciousness, a sense of separateness in the non-entangled state must exist as a precondition. Therefore, in the entangled state, there also exists a kind of collective conscious (some would say collective unconscious), which acts as a kind of reference for the rest. This then describes why things can get downright weird. This is especially true under extreme conditions.
Alan Watts portentously said, “Inability to accept the mystic experience is an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit – to the ‘conquest’ of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.”
Technology is our myth. Even though we are more connected by media, we are less connected with our own interiority. We cannot falsify nor reduce ourselves to sound-bytes, cliches, and vapid memes. McLuhan notes, "We are compelled by the quantity of available social and political facts to learn a new visual language for mastering the inner dynamics by the outer.” (New Media as Political Forms 2-3)
The return of the soul is a bridge to our feelings, relationships, and the meaning of life. The conscious mind is reconnected with the soul, to reunite with what's been lost. The quest is to recover what was lost, connection with the cosmos, nature, and to discover the divine ground of being.
Self-Interference
The great spiritual and historical drama of the battle of light and darkness is the tale of our own emergent consciousness arising from the matrix or nature, the collective and personal unconsciousness. We need to hold the light and the dark in balance, not project it as evil, or its destructive power as the will to power. Paradoxically, it arouses guilt and conflict because it splits the psyche. We fear falling back into the darkness, a vast ocean, a great maw, or the jaws of hell.
Sri Ramakrishna says of the unconscious, "It is like an infinite ocean--water everywhere, to the right, left, above, and below. Water enveloped in water. It is the Water of the Great Cause, motionless. Waves spring up when it becomes active. Its activities are creation, preservation, and destruction... A salt doll entered the ocean to measure its depth; but it did not return to tell others how deep the ocean was. It melted in the ocean itself."
We can work with nature, such as in alchemy and other visionary and contemplative practices, to help the process unfold. Maybe you sense or know that feeling when something is on a brink of consciousness, but still mostly in the unconsciousness unable to find an expression for the message it wants to deliver. If we deny or act them out in literal enactment we miss their deeper message for soul.
“To activate the unconscious means to awaken the divine, the devī, Kundalini— to begin the development of the suprapersonal within the individual in order to kindle the light of the gods.” – Jung (The Psychology of the Kundalini)
Consciousness lightens the darker realm of instinct. There are two ways of knowing -- solar and lunar. A stunning image of the ouroboric serpent that encircles the globe is our serpentine DNA. The serpent is the primary symbol of regeneration. There are approximately 125 billion miles of DNA in each human body. Our personal DNA is long enough to wrap around the earth 5 million times.
Involvement with matter becomes a way of psychological deepening. The tangible and intangible merge in psychologocial reality which nourishes the soul. We can explore areas otherwise inaccessible. When we can no longer live on the surface, we have go down into the depths for something new. Our primordial soul is the dragon of instinct. Rumi tell us, “To change, a person must Face the Dragon of his appetites with another Dragon, the life-energy of the soul.”
We can connect our views of the soul with daily living. We can be the therapists of our own soul. We can rediscover, meet, and speak with the spirit of our own depths. Transforming the soul is a philosophical goal -- Jung's notion of individuation in the underlying ground that connects matter and psyche. We experience the heartful soul as deepening encounters with psychic reality and practical experience.
Soul is found in the unresolved symptoms of biographical events, unintegrated repressed memories, the 'death' of heartbreak, the labyrinthine perils of life, the dissociated complexes of the personal unconscious, our pain and fear, and our erotic and other intimate relationships. Kabir cautions, "The labyrinthine currents of cravings and passions captivate and confuse the mind..." But we don't need to shrink because other people feel insecure. We are all meant to shine and it liberates other people.
As poet Warsan Shire aptly expresses: "Fit in here, in my palm, in my shadow. Don’t be bigger than my idea of you, don’t be more beautiful than I can accept, don’t be more human than i am willing to allow you to be and be quiet. You’re too loud, even your un-belonging is loud. Quiet your dreams, your voice, your hair, quiet your skin, quiet your displacement, quiet your longing, your color, quiet your walk, your eyes. Who said you could look at me like that? Who said you could exist without permission? Why are you even here? Why aren’t you shrinking? I think of you often. You vibrate. You walk into a room and the temperature changes. I lean in and almost recognize you as human. But, no. We can’t have that.”
The search for the soul is a link between psyche and body, between psyche and matter. Soul as psyche is not a religious but cosmic force, a psycho-spiritual universal. Archetypes are our transpersonal capacity for symbolization -- the possibility of representation embodied in the human psyche. In CW, Vol 9, Jung says, "the soul is simply 'the archetype of life," (Vol.9 T.1, p.57).
Hillman describes Jung's method of revivifying imagination as a whole new way of “knowing thyself” -- an “archetypal knowing,” where we meet a “host of psychic figures” deeper than our personal identity. We meet them “both as images in the imagination and as [...] archetypal patterns.” Our psychic lives are poetic, dramatic fictions. Jung sought a sort of dialogical equilibrium and cooperation between the unconscious and conscious awareness.
In the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino was the first with the fundamental insight to place the soul in the center of his vision, as a mediating factor in philosophy, religion, psychotherapy, and medicine. In some sense, this Renaissance is always happening. He thought all movement of the soul comes from eros. His modus vivendi works today, plumbing the heights and the depths with our devotion, vital psychological sense and body energy.
The world is full of soul in everything that exists. It is a wandering, shifting, internal movement. It roams about the body in sensations and symptoms. Soul searching is a constant and a mythology which affects everyone. Soul speaks to the heart of every individual by reanimating poetic vision, participatory awareness, and connection to nature. Sophia is of assistance along the path of soul searching.
Jung notes, "The feminine mind is pictorial and symbolic and comes close to what the ancients called Sophia." (Letters Vol. I, pg. 189) There is an ordinarily invisible power of perception in our own unconscious. In The Great Mother, Erich Neumann describes its elemental nature:
"The natural elements that are essentially connected with vessel symbolism include both earth and water. This containing water is the primordial womb of life, from which in innumerable myths life is born. It is the water "below," the water of the depths, ground water and ocean, lake, and pond. But the maternal water not only contains; it also nourishes and transforms, since all living things build up and preserve their existence with the water or milk of the earth. ...The primordial ocean is an uroboric snake encompassing the earth that is born of it, and at the end of the world taking everything born of it back into its primordial waters."
Rather than trying to control the unconscious, Jung tapped into its wisdom by opening and receiving what was revealed when it had its say. Memory is implicit in every recurring pattern and is influenced by a mixing of minds and ideas. In the embodied approach, the enactment effect enhances memory with gestures.
Instinct gives rise to ritual, connecting us to cosmos. Jung notes, "If we can understand that already in this life we have a connection with infinity, our desires change and our attitudes change."
In The Gestalt Approach, Fritz Perls says, "It is not enough simply to remember a past event. Just as talking about self is a resistance to self-experimentation, in the same way the memory of an experience - simply talking about it - leaves it isolated like a sediment of the past, lifeless as the ruins of Pompeii."
He framed phenomenological existentialism as an urge to make meaning, to construct meaning in our lives. He valued the subjective and objective aspects of experience to grasp its essence.
The River of Consciousness
At birth our awareness is fuzzy, growing toward continual internal discourse and filtered sensory perceptual intake. In primitive societies there are no individuals, only collective relationship. Collective attitudes still create an undertow of undifferentiated thinking. it hinders evaluation of different views because projection is the only way of thinking and feeling.
If the process is disturbed by dissociation, by sensory deprivation or sensory overload, the normal state of consciousness is obscured. Trance is a pre-symbolic experience. Art, dreams, myths, gesture, body language, and ritual are idiosyncratic symbolic experiences. Self-actualizing creative experiences can be communicated.
Spanish writer Maria Zambrano says, "And there is also the word within the dream itself, the word dreamed, the word that passes, as it has escaped from somewhere where the word rarely flows, from that remote silence, bottom, horizon, ocean of silence, from where words come to freedom, sun, as without a master, words that only make a visit." "There is no time in dreams, while we dream we have no time. It is on the awakening that time is being restored."
The subconscious receives a mixed input of stimulus, memory, and libido that percolate through the symbolic level into conscious thought. If rejected there, it may still find expression through representation as a presentational sign or a lower outlet through symptom formation. Letting go is necessary for the creative fantasy of the unconscious to express itself. The unconscious reacts with the solution of consciousness.
The images and words of the unconscious gradually titrate or permeate consciousness. They may come as a 'lover' or as an feel like an invasion. As in alchemy, titration is the slow addition of one solution of a known concentration to a known volume of another solution of unknown concentration until the reaction reaches neutralization, which is often indicated by a color change.
Reading, imagining, seeing, and doing are connective. More deeply elaborated information is remembered better. We are shaped by our thoughts. Archetypes shape matter (nature) and mind, or psyche. We can interpret the world through archetypes without being aware of their existence.
Evolutionary, instinctual, and ancestral history still have psychophysical effects on our lives, as does prenatal experience. This knowledge, that simultaneously lures and repels us, helps us embody more and more of who we are with our biological, biographical, and mythical roots. Only a subjective and non-subjective view gives a full representation of deeper meaning.
Performed actions engaging the motor system have richer elaborative representations than mere verbal phrases. When learning and memory embody complex associations visually and kinesthetically, ideas communicated in parallel with actions or gestures are remembered better. It recalls the enactment of conscious and unconscious rites and expressive therapies and arts.
Such works reveal previously unforeseen neural pathways, elusive links to subjective states. Each brain center for form, motion, and color responds dramatically to strong, clear representations. Connecting things in seemingly unrelated ways, metaphorical linkage is fundamental to artistic expression. Art allows the externalization of inner, subjective life in tangible images -- “meta-phorms.”
Our story is told through images -- ceremony and ritual, music and dance, sight and sound, science and religion. Written with living light, it fosters a reunion with the sacred, the Divine, the Other. Its church is in the temples -- the left and right temporal lobes. Its bell is the ringing radiance of the 'A-ha! moment'. It is fueled by energized enthusiasm. Its altar is the Temple of Living Light, millions upon millions of screens, including our visionary inner “screens.”
It hardly matters whether these technologies emerge from disciplines such as shamanism (inner journeys), hypnotherapy (neuralfeedback, frequency-following response), psychology (process work), psychiatry (neuropsychology), neurology (TMS; Persinger's 'Relaxit'; Murphy's 'Shakti', shock-ti; Dr. Gilula’s Alpha-Stim), mysticism (Tantra; meditation; trance dance), or anthropology (biogenetic structuralism).
The pursuit of self-knowledge is the motif of the archetypal quest. Self-knowledge, self-research and understanding are the core of our method. The ends are often the same whether the aim is explicitly artistic, mystical, spiritual, psychosexual, or psychotherapeutic. The brain, or rather mindbody, is actively and intentionally driven toward the experiential creative edge and changed by the process.
All technologies begin to alter consciousness with a variety of traditional shamanic techniques, and then proceed through an experiential journey, again in the shamanic tradition. The commonality among the artistic processes, therapies, and electronic multimedia is facilitation and exploitation of natural process in the stream of consciousness, the 'waking dream,' or REM (rapid eye movement) state.
Erich Neumann said, "the creative process takes place not under the rays of the sun, but in the cold reflection of the moon, when great is the darkness of the unconscious: the night and not the day is the time of procreation. To it belongs the darkness and silence, the secret, the silence and the veiled." The creation and creative process are incubated in the world where the soul lives. We are the artists of our soul that informs and crafts us.
"The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment." -C.G. Jung
The reality is that life is anxious, life is ambivalent, life is ambiguous -- not just good or bad, black or white. The more we try to solve or resolve that or split it off, the more we're going to fall into a fundamentalism of some kind—military, political, theological, economic, psychological.
The greater the light, the greater the shadow, which repulses us with shame for its primal reptilian instincts, lack of emotion and morality, violence, and cold-blooded territorial greed. Whatever awareness appears as cold-blooded is far from consciousness. There is a Promethean guilt that goes with knowledge as if it robs the unconscious of its treasures and subordinates them to consciousness. Our limbic system regulates our relationships.
In this way we discover and face the nature of ourselves alone, as initiates in the mysteries have done for centuries, affirming with our own participation what has been considered the greatest good by humanity since the beginning. Death, bit transcendental idealism, keeps us aware of the cosmic meaning of life and what is important in living.
We feel the unity of our human being as lived experience. We are endowed with a density that is lived or felt as the stratum of our existence, subject to accident, suffering, and death. It is neither objectively objective or subjective, yet mysterious and intimate. The body is our physical environment and vehicle of our openness. Genealogy can inform you that there are things within you different than you already thought.
We can identify with or dissociate from the body, an existential fact and vulnerability reality. Yet, inherently mysterious soul-body unity is an indivisible whole with no gap between it and ourselves. We have a sense of being a presence to our own selves, a critical availability belonging to the world yet possessed by the body, a concrete self that is not the full extent of our humanity. Incarnation is our appearance as this particular body, our expressed structural and dynamic memory.
It is irrelevant to 'believe' God exists, if we simply behave 'as if' God exists. "Thought and mind are the root of fear." Krishnamurti suggests we create God. The mind creates God and then worships the idea. This is to create the image (out of fear and insecurity) and worship oneself and call it 'God'. We all notice a part of ourselves in the light and the shadows. Rather than literal interpretations, the 'as if' symbolic life leads to authentic self.
Wiliam James notes, "One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impressions of its truth has ever remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the finest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness quite different... No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded..."
A protean vision can inform an entire life of deeper discovery playing out over years, a descent into mythopoetic imagination, giving experience expressive form. An encounter with 'God' is an encounter with fullness of Being, unitary wholeness. The voice of the depths speaks in symbols -- sensate living images of inner experiences., the manifold essence of the inner and outer world.
As Manly P. Hall suggested, "Symbolism is the language of the Mysteries. By symbols men have ever sought to communicate to each other those thoughts which transcend the limitations of language."
Fuller Human Identity
Iona Miller, 2017
Consciousness is not a cause. It cannot be moved or used or in any way affected by anything. Consciousness is not the result of anything, nor does it depend on anything. It does not increase or diminish, expand, extend, contract, or change; or vary in any way. Although there are countless degrees in being conscious, there are no degrees of Consciousness: no planes, no states; no grades, divisions, or variations of any sort; it is the same everywhere, and in all things. Consciousness has no properties, no qualities, no attributes; it does not possess; it cannot be possessed.
Consciousness never began; it cannot cease to be. Consciousness IS. We participate in the life of the cosmos. The ground of our nature is entanglememt with the collective unconscious. The mystery of individualization in the cosmos is also entangled at the fundamental level. Individual consciousness arises out of the primordial complex quantum matrix. Consciousness, like anything else in the cosmos, arises with the quantum.
Consciousness is the root of intelligence. To have consciousness, a sense of separateness in the non-entangled state must exist as a precondition. Therefore, in the entangled state, there also exists a kind of collective conscious (some would say collective unconscious), which acts as a kind of reference for the rest. This then describes why things can get downright weird. This is especially true under extreme conditions.
Alan Watts portentously said, “Inability to accept the mystic experience is an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit – to the ‘conquest’ of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.”
Technology is our myth. Even though we are more connected by media, we are less connected with our own interiority. We cannot falsify nor reduce ourselves to sound-bytes, cliches, and vapid memes. McLuhan notes, "We are compelled by the quantity of available social and political facts to learn a new visual language for mastering the inner dynamics by the outer.” (New Media as Political Forms 2-3)
The return of the soul is a bridge to our feelings, relationships, and the meaning of life. The conscious mind is reconnected with the soul, to reunite with what's been lost. The quest is to recover what was lost, connection with the cosmos, nature, and to discover the divine ground of being.
Self-Interference
The great spiritual and historical drama of the battle of light and darkness is the tale of our own emergent consciousness arising from the matrix or nature, the collective and personal unconsciousness. We need to hold the light and the dark in balance, not project it as evil, or its destructive power as the will to power. Paradoxically, it arouses guilt and conflict because it splits the psyche. We fear falling back into the darkness, a vast ocean, a great maw, or the jaws of hell.
Sri Ramakrishna says of the unconscious, "It is like an infinite ocean--water everywhere, to the right, left, above, and below. Water enveloped in water. It is the Water of the Great Cause, motionless. Waves spring up when it becomes active. Its activities are creation, preservation, and destruction... A salt doll entered the ocean to measure its depth; but it did not return to tell others how deep the ocean was. It melted in the ocean itself."
We can work with nature, such as in alchemy and other visionary and contemplative practices, to help the process unfold. Maybe you sense or know that feeling when something is on a brink of consciousness, but still mostly in the unconsciousness unable to find an expression for the message it wants to deliver. If we deny or act them out in literal enactment we miss their deeper message for soul.
“To activate the unconscious means to awaken the divine, the devī, Kundalini— to begin the development of the suprapersonal within the individual in order to kindle the light of the gods.” – Jung (The Psychology of the Kundalini)
Consciousness lightens the darker realm of instinct. There are two ways of knowing -- solar and lunar. A stunning image of the ouroboric serpent that encircles the globe is our serpentine DNA. The serpent is the primary symbol of regeneration. There are approximately 125 billion miles of DNA in each human body. Our personal DNA is long enough to wrap around the earth 5 million times.
Involvement with matter becomes a way of psychological deepening. The tangible and intangible merge in psychologocial reality which nourishes the soul. We can explore areas otherwise inaccessible. When we can no longer live on the surface, we have go down into the depths for something new. Our primordial soul is the dragon of instinct. Rumi tell us, “To change, a person must Face the Dragon of his appetites with another Dragon, the life-energy of the soul.”
We can connect our views of the soul with daily living. We can be the therapists of our own soul. We can rediscover, meet, and speak with the spirit of our own depths. Transforming the soul is a philosophical goal -- Jung's notion of individuation in the underlying ground that connects matter and psyche. We experience the heartful soul as deepening encounters with psychic reality and practical experience.
Soul is found in the unresolved symptoms of biographical events, unintegrated repressed memories, the 'death' of heartbreak, the labyrinthine perils of life, the dissociated complexes of the personal unconscious, our pain and fear, and our erotic and other intimate relationships. Kabir cautions, "The labyrinthine currents of cravings and passions captivate and confuse the mind..." But we don't need to shrink because other people feel insecure. We are all meant to shine and it liberates other people.
As poet Warsan Shire aptly expresses: "Fit in here, in my palm, in my shadow. Don’t be bigger than my idea of you, don’t be more beautiful than I can accept, don’t be more human than i am willing to allow you to be and be quiet. You’re too loud, even your un-belonging is loud. Quiet your dreams, your voice, your hair, quiet your skin, quiet your displacement, quiet your longing, your color, quiet your walk, your eyes. Who said you could look at me like that? Who said you could exist without permission? Why are you even here? Why aren’t you shrinking? I think of you often. You vibrate. You walk into a room and the temperature changes. I lean in and almost recognize you as human. But, no. We can’t have that.”
The search for the soul is a link between psyche and body, between psyche and matter. Soul as psyche is not a religious but cosmic force, a psycho-spiritual universal. Archetypes are our transpersonal capacity for symbolization -- the possibility of representation embodied in the human psyche. In CW, Vol 9, Jung says, "the soul is simply 'the archetype of life," (Vol.9 T.1, p.57).
Hillman describes Jung's method of revivifying imagination as a whole new way of “knowing thyself” -- an “archetypal knowing,” where we meet a “host of psychic figures” deeper than our personal identity. We meet them “both as images in the imagination and as [...] archetypal patterns.” Our psychic lives are poetic, dramatic fictions. Jung sought a sort of dialogical equilibrium and cooperation between the unconscious and conscious awareness.
In the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino was the first with the fundamental insight to place the soul in the center of his vision, as a mediating factor in philosophy, religion, psychotherapy, and medicine. In some sense, this Renaissance is always happening. He thought all movement of the soul comes from eros. His modus vivendi works today, plumbing the heights and the depths with our devotion, vital psychological sense and body energy.
The world is full of soul in everything that exists. It is a wandering, shifting, internal movement. It roams about the body in sensations and symptoms. Soul searching is a constant and a mythology which affects everyone. Soul speaks to the heart of every individual by reanimating poetic vision, participatory awareness, and connection to nature. Sophia is of assistance along the path of soul searching.
Jung notes, "The feminine mind is pictorial and symbolic and comes close to what the ancients called Sophia." (Letters Vol. I, pg. 189) There is an ordinarily invisible power of perception in our own unconscious. In The Great Mother, Erich Neumann describes its elemental nature:
"The natural elements that are essentially connected with vessel symbolism include both earth and water. This containing water is the primordial womb of life, from which in innumerable myths life is born. It is the water "below," the water of the depths, ground water and ocean, lake, and pond. But the maternal water not only contains; it also nourishes and transforms, since all living things build up and preserve their existence with the water or milk of the earth. ...The primordial ocean is an uroboric snake encompassing the earth that is born of it, and at the end of the world taking everything born of it back into its primordial waters."
Rather than trying to control the unconscious, Jung tapped into its wisdom by opening and receiving what was revealed when it had its say. Memory is implicit in every recurring pattern and is influenced by a mixing of minds and ideas. In the embodied approach, the enactment effect enhances memory with gestures.
Instinct gives rise to ritual, connecting us to cosmos. Jung notes, "If we can understand that already in this life we have a connection with infinity, our desires change and our attitudes change."
In The Gestalt Approach, Fritz Perls says, "It is not enough simply to remember a past event. Just as talking about self is a resistance to self-experimentation, in the same way the memory of an experience - simply talking about it - leaves it isolated like a sediment of the past, lifeless as the ruins of Pompeii."
He framed phenomenological existentialism as an urge to make meaning, to construct meaning in our lives. He valued the subjective and objective aspects of experience to grasp its essence.
The River of Consciousness
At birth our awareness is fuzzy, growing toward continual internal discourse and filtered sensory perceptual intake. In primitive societies there are no individuals, only collective relationship. Collective attitudes still create an undertow of undifferentiated thinking. it hinders evaluation of different views because projection is the only way of thinking and feeling.
If the process is disturbed by dissociation, by sensory deprivation or sensory overload, the normal state of consciousness is obscured. Trance is a pre-symbolic experience. Art, dreams, myths, gesture, body language, and ritual are idiosyncratic symbolic experiences. Self-actualizing creative experiences can be communicated.
Spanish writer Maria Zambrano says, "And there is also the word within the dream itself, the word dreamed, the word that passes, as it has escaped from somewhere where the word rarely flows, from that remote silence, bottom, horizon, ocean of silence, from where words come to freedom, sun, as without a master, words that only make a visit." "There is no time in dreams, while we dream we have no time. It is on the awakening that time is being restored."
The subconscious receives a mixed input of stimulus, memory, and libido that percolate through the symbolic level into conscious thought. If rejected there, it may still find expression through representation as a presentational sign or a lower outlet through symptom formation. Letting go is necessary for the creative fantasy of the unconscious to express itself. The unconscious reacts with the solution of consciousness.
The images and words of the unconscious gradually titrate or permeate consciousness. They may come as a 'lover' or as an feel like an invasion. As in alchemy, titration is the slow addition of one solution of a known concentration to a known volume of another solution of unknown concentration until the reaction reaches neutralization, which is often indicated by a color change.
Reading, imagining, seeing, and doing are connective. More deeply elaborated information is remembered better. We are shaped by our thoughts. Archetypes shape matter (nature) and mind, or psyche. We can interpret the world through archetypes without being aware of their existence.
Evolutionary, instinctual, and ancestral history still have psychophysical effects on our lives, as does prenatal experience. This knowledge, that simultaneously lures and repels us, helps us embody more and more of who we are with our biological, biographical, and mythical roots. Only a subjective and non-subjective view gives a full representation of deeper meaning.
Performed actions engaging the motor system have richer elaborative representations than mere verbal phrases. When learning and memory embody complex associations visually and kinesthetically, ideas communicated in parallel with actions or gestures are remembered better. It recalls the enactment of conscious and unconscious rites and expressive therapies and arts.
Such works reveal previously unforeseen neural pathways, elusive links to subjective states. Each brain center for form, motion, and color responds dramatically to strong, clear representations. Connecting things in seemingly unrelated ways, metaphorical linkage is fundamental to artistic expression. Art allows the externalization of inner, subjective life in tangible images -- “meta-phorms.”
Our story is told through images -- ceremony and ritual, music and dance, sight and sound, science and religion. Written with living light, it fosters a reunion with the sacred, the Divine, the Other. Its church is in the temples -- the left and right temporal lobes. Its bell is the ringing radiance of the 'A-ha! moment'. It is fueled by energized enthusiasm. Its altar is the Temple of Living Light, millions upon millions of screens, including our visionary inner “screens.”
It hardly matters whether these technologies emerge from disciplines such as shamanism (inner journeys), hypnotherapy (neuralfeedback, frequency-following response), psychology (process work), psychiatry (neuropsychology), neurology (TMS; Persinger's 'Relaxit'; Murphy's 'Shakti', shock-ti; Dr. Gilula’s Alpha-Stim), mysticism (Tantra; meditation; trance dance), or anthropology (biogenetic structuralism).
The pursuit of self-knowledge is the motif of the archetypal quest. Self-knowledge, self-research and understanding are the core of our method. The ends are often the same whether the aim is explicitly artistic, mystical, spiritual, psychosexual, or psychotherapeutic. The brain, or rather mindbody, is actively and intentionally driven toward the experiential creative edge and changed by the process.
All technologies begin to alter consciousness with a variety of traditional shamanic techniques, and then proceed through an experiential journey, again in the shamanic tradition. The commonality among the artistic processes, therapies, and electronic multimedia is facilitation and exploitation of natural process in the stream of consciousness, the 'waking dream,' or REM (rapid eye movement) state.
Erich Neumann said, "the creative process takes place not under the rays of the sun, but in the cold reflection of the moon, when great is the darkness of the unconscious: the night and not the day is the time of procreation. To it belongs the darkness and silence, the secret, the silence and the veiled." The creation and creative process are incubated in the world where the soul lives. We are the artists of our soul that informs and crafts us.
"The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment." -C.G. Jung
The reality is that life is anxious, life is ambivalent, life is ambiguous -- not just good or bad, black or white. The more we try to solve or resolve that or split it off, the more we're going to fall into a fundamentalism of some kind—military, political, theological, economic, psychological.
The greater the light, the greater the shadow, which repulses us with shame for its primal reptilian instincts, lack of emotion and morality, violence, and cold-blooded territorial greed. Whatever awareness appears as cold-blooded is far from consciousness. There is a Promethean guilt that goes with knowledge as if it robs the unconscious of its treasures and subordinates them to consciousness. Our limbic system regulates our relationships.
In this way we discover and face the nature of ourselves alone, as initiates in the mysteries have done for centuries, affirming with our own participation what has been considered the greatest good by humanity since the beginning. Death, bit transcendental idealism, keeps us aware of the cosmic meaning of life and what is important in living.
We feel the unity of our human being as lived experience. We are endowed with a density that is lived or felt as the stratum of our existence, subject to accident, suffering, and death. It is neither objectively objective or subjective, yet mysterious and intimate. The body is our physical environment and vehicle of our openness. Genealogy can inform you that there are things within you different than you already thought.
We can identify with or dissociate from the body, an existential fact and vulnerability reality. Yet, inherently mysterious soul-body unity is an indivisible whole with no gap between it and ourselves. We have a sense of being a presence to our own selves, a critical availability belonging to the world yet possessed by the body, a concrete self that is not the full extent of our humanity. Incarnation is our appearance as this particular body, our expressed structural and dynamic memory.
It is irrelevant to 'believe' God exists, if we simply behave 'as if' God exists. "Thought and mind are the root of fear." Krishnamurti suggests we create God. The mind creates God and then worships the idea. This is to create the image (out of fear and insecurity) and worship oneself and call it 'God'. We all notice a part of ourselves in the light and the shadows. Rather than literal interpretations, the 'as if' symbolic life leads to authentic self.
Wiliam James notes, "One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impressions of its truth has ever remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the finest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness quite different... No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded..."
A protean vision can inform an entire life of deeper discovery playing out over years, a descent into mythopoetic imagination, giving experience expressive form. An encounter with 'God' is an encounter with fullness of Being, unitary wholeness. The voice of the depths speaks in symbols -- sensate living images of inner experiences., the manifold essence of the inner and outer world.
As Manly P. Hall suggested, "Symbolism is the language of the Mysteries. By symbols men have ever sought to communicate to each other those thoughts which transcend the limitations of language."
"We should realize the tremendous importance of everything that is now. ... the unique characteristic of this moment. Whatever takes its origin in this moment carries the mark of this moment for ever."
C.G. Jung, Dream Seminars, p.420-21
"There is a civil courage, a moral, physical and intellectual courage, and so also a courage of the soul to meet itself ." --James Hillman
C.G. Jung, Dream Seminars, p.420-21
"There is a civil courage, a moral, physical and intellectual courage, and so also a courage of the soul to meet itself ." --James Hillman
self-exploration
Our Search for Soul
"The last stage is reached when, in the highest tension and concentration, beholding in silence and utter forgetfulness of all things, it [the soul] is able as it were to lose itself. Then it may see God, the fountain of life, the source of being, the origin of all good, the root of the soul. In that moment it enjoys the highest indescribable bliss; it is as it were swallowed up of divinity, bathed in the light of eternity." –Plotinus
We are the vehicle. Collective development lags behind individual development
Following the Footsteps of Nature
Consciousness mediates between chaos and order
and generates experience. The Holy Grail of consciousness is the search for the ground of cosmological existence and the discovery of transcendence.
Literal falseness, but metaphorical truth frames myth, religious, or spiritual thought -- erroneous in detail, but right in pattern. But what is metaphorically true is not necessarily morally right, and might be morally reprehensible adaptations to past events in the domain of chaos and order.
Incomplete wisdom cannot address modern problems. An active force that generates those stories through time is still alive. The past is alive enough that we update the solutions for our own times and manifest them in ourselves.
Living systems continually create themselves from within and distinguish themselves from their background. Cosmos is self-referencing. We create ourselves by continually providing information about ourselves to ourselves through self-referential feedback loops (autopoiesis). It enables us to retain our inner and outer identity. Our problems and suffering help us find and love our soul to nurture that rapport.
When we approach self-knowledge and self-exploration, we must consider the context in which that process takes place as well as some of its defining qualities. “Rubric” is a document that articulates the expectations for an assignment by listing the criteria, or what counts, and describing levels of quality from excellent to poor.
The truth of who we are and our unlived potential pulses in our depths awaiting recognition and inter-relationship. Physics, art, depth psychology, literature, and hermetics are frameworks and languages we can use to amplify our self-understanding.
In Hermetic writing connections are open and revealing multiple conceptual metaphors and multiple realities, not closed up. It suggests four types of reality: sensory, mythic, transpsychic, and unitive reality. The self can focus and direct transpersonal energy in "transpsychic reality."
The contents of our unconscious are manifesting themselves when we encounter the unknown. To cope, we project our fantasies onto what we don't understand. We re-discover the autonomous archetypes that guide human beings by investigating the structure of our imaginations and staying open to the process itself, rather than seeking results.
The quest for self-knowledge is a cosmological pursuit, rooted today in depth psychology and the science-art of hermeneutics, an interpretive approach to our phenomenological experience. Consciousness is about connectivity and interface and the primacy of gesture, sacred space, and the esoteric, occult or hidden variables -- transcending conceptual assumptions. Who we are is as much about how we define ourselves as our psychobiology.
In depth psychology, hermeneutics is a research paradigm that concerns judging psychological accuracy from inaccuracy. Accurate beliefs deliver long-term satisfactions by distinguishing between accurate and inaccurate readings of situations and qualitative frameworks by contextualizing and comparing them.
Paracelsus tells us that "where there is no love there is no art." The ancient and modern premise is that the nature of mankind mirrors the nature of the cosmos in a direct link with the infinite world, the organic universe, which we can perceive directly.
David Bohm, the famous physicist, tells us, “Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy.”
Carl Jung echoes ancient teachings when he reflects that, “Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.”
The self that we know is a fragment of our potential. Soul is the vehicle of transformation and transformation means sacrifice that begins with the false ego.. Unconscious limitations, trauma, and loss keep us from our true nature.
"When viewed through a mythological lens, trauma is perceived as a descent of the soul, a dropping or falling down. It is sometimes experienced as a sudden violent attack in which one is pulled down or an agonizing loss of soul too overwhelming for consciousness to contain...It calls for an enlargement of consciousness, which is a potentially transformative psychological and spiritual experience, although it comes at a high price. As Jung wrote to Victor White, 'I wanted the proof of a living Spirit and I got it. Don't ask me at what price.'" (Ursula Wirtz, Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation, p. 117)
The tensions in spacetime are emergent phenomena of a much deeper unified, a conscious innately informed universe. A hologram is a fully interrelated reflective entity where the whole and the pixilations reflect each other.
We confound and compound conviction and emotion. This is hypnotic, or hyperempiria, suggestion-enhanced experience. Our only guide is the Mystery of the unseen depths. Sort of a focused alert trance-state, hyperempiria is a hyperacuity or heightened sensory experience, sensory extension. Guided intensified imaginative involvement bypasses the critical factor of the conscious mind through formal and informal ritual induction procedures.
This mystery defies religious elaboration and mocks any presumption of absolute truth. We must retrieve from the unconscious what we need for wholeness. Images are our guides -- a sudden memory, an old song, dreams, daydreams, symptoms, struggles, love, and awe can open the depths to meaning. We may feel anger, or even hatred for the ignorance of knowing who we are. The God of our youths may haunt guilty or desperate moments.
Jung links psyche or soul with our spiritual instincts and describes how answering the call to the age-old quest for self-knowledge deepens and enlivens our experience. Jung had to learn how to translate his visions into concrete words and images for his Red Book to plant them in reality.
" If the Angel comes, it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears, but by your humble resolve to always be a beginner." --Rainer Maria Rilke
“Recognize the call as a prime fact of human existence; (b) align life with it; (c) find the common sense to realize that accidents, including the heartache and the natural shocks the flesh is heir to, belong to the pattern of the image, are necessary to it, and help fulfill it. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.” (James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling)
"Outer world and God are the two primordial experiences and the one is as great as the other, and both have a thousand names, which one and all do not alter the facts. The roots of both are unknown. The psyche mirrors both. It is perhaps the point where they touch." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 5.)
Our universe is a profound symphony of the forces of nature that govern its unfolding. Throughout history, mythic and imaginal descriptions of the forces of nature preceded more scientific models of reality. But myth is not fiction: it consists of observable facts that are continually repeated over and over again. It is something that happens to us, and we have mythical fates as much as our ancestors.
Even such scientific models retain their metaphorical nature and applications which enrich our perceptions of our place in the Universe, and the unbroken and eternal cycle of life and death at all scales. Corollary concepts bridge the soul and the material universe. Thus, in our quest for self-knowledge, we follow nature's footprints in service to a higher purpose.
“...put it my way, what we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality, which is
nothing but...the poetic imagination going on day and night.” --James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse, p. 62
Culture can be defined as the work of soul-making. Returning soul to the world not only attends to the world, it offers more opportunity to engage in the work of soul ourselves, which often arises in particular evolutionary moments, suffering or inertia.
Introspection does not provide full self-knowledge. We want to understand our presuppositions, pivotal experiences and abilities on which our knowledge-claims are based. We seek understanding rather than explanations. Self-aware people know that they have blind spots. Self-aware people know they have unconscious baggage that is hard to notice or overcome.
Verification procedures are both internal and relative to the particular kinds of perspectives. We develop systems of meaning and justification to make sense out of the world, understanding perennial aspects of the lived experience of meaning. We should welcome critical and radical fearless thinking in ourselves.
Relational hermeneutics is a full-bodied, soul-engaged, heart-transforming encounter
that involves the subjective worldview of the interpreter as much as the process of interpretation. Theories of embodiment are grounded in a phenomenological comprehension of the lived-body, including knowledge embedded within our physical form.
The hermeneutic tradition values and explores the meanings of human experiences as they are lived. Such meanings are lived in cultural, sub-cultural, linguistic, religious, and gendered contexts. Sociocultural perspectives on psychological phenomena require careful attention. Not merely inner experience, lived experience recognizes the historical dimension in the psychological.
Hermeneutic philosophy sketches a more balanced and credible approach to finding a genuine alternative to modern individualism and postmodernist relativism. What is the power of interpretation? What can we get at through interpreting? Can we get at Essences of things? Like the difference between symbol and image, hermeneutics subordinates the universal to the particular.
Whatever is conscious exists along with psychological meanings in relation to present, past and future relationships between people -- and in relation to the relationship that people have with themselves. The ways of making sense of people in all situations is inextricably tied up with emotions and working out what exists for them and about them.
A depth approach addresses the feelings, significant dreams, and imagery that are naturally aroused in the self-discovery process, and describes the nature of synchronous events. Crises become opportunities for psycho-physical healing, emotional transformation, and connection with source. Grounded theory has a particular conceptual and methodological foundation that doesn't reduce what it means to be human, embodied or incorporeal.
We need to separate our constructions from a delusory interpretation of the facts of reality, as available to experience. How can we integrate different theories relating to the basis of reality? Jung distinguishes: "Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights; they are habitual modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving that experience has proved appropriate and useful." (CW 9ii, para 50). No shortage of comparisons and correlations between spiritual notions, metaphysical ideas, and scientific theories have been made.
Jung suggests we must internalize a locus of authority and not look without to anyone outside ourselves to authorize our own lives, or seek external guidance to navigate through this interval of change and turmoil. Jung clearly stated that living under the power of a guru or charismatic personality is not how individuation is achieved.
Phenomenology indicates a way to research where we can be open to the phenomenon and to allow it to show itself in its fullness and complexity through our own direct involvement and understanding. Understanding arises directly from our personal sensibility and awareness. Direct contact creates an intimacy with the phenomenon through prolonged, firsthand exposure and immersion.
We meet the phenomenon in as free and as unprejudiced a way as possible so that it can present itself and be accurately described and understood. The hopeful result is moments of deeper clarity in which we see the phenomenon in a radically fresh and fuller way.
Bootstrapping from Joseph Campbell's famous quote, Hillman says, "You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss." "Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path... this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am." Jung said, ""I do not create myself, but rather I go to myself." (Psychology and Religion, Works, Vol.11, p.249)
Phenomenological intuiting requires discipline, patience, effort and care. It requires utter concentration on the object intuited without being absorbed in it to the point of no longer looking critically or falling into blind spots.
Through intuiting, we hope to experience a moment of insight in which we see the phenomenon in a clearer light. Phenomenological disclosure is "the aha! experience," "revelatory seeing," or "pristine encounter." Through phenomenological disclosure, we hope to see the thing in its own terms and to feel confident that this seeing is reasonably correct.
"The psyche is therefore all-important; it is the all-pervading Breath, the Buddha-essence; it is the Buddha-Mind, the One, the Dharmakāya. All existence emanates from it, and all separate forms dissolve back into it." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 771.
Consciousness, Behavior & Experience
Our personal efforts, experiences, and insights are the central means for examining the phenomenon and arriving at moments of disclosure so the phenomenon reveals something about itself in a new or fuller way. Generally, phenomenological intuiting involves a series of smaller and larger disclosures that slowly coalesce into a fuller apprehension of the phenomenon.
In this sense, intuiting is rarely a single moment of revelation in which understanding comes in one full swoop. Instead, intuiting is gradual and unpredictable. Through our wish, effort, and practice, we see the phenomenon in smaller and larger ways. Patterns, relationships, and subtleties gradually arise that we never noticed before. Phenomenological intuiting is a flow and spiral, with unpredictability and serendipity.
We must begin somewhere and intend to end somewhere. Thus there is a movement, a progression, and eventually, an arrival. But, this movement isn’t a straight, sequential process. We see it more in terms of a flow, or of a cycling and spiraling motion. We can’t say where this flow begins. The first idea of trying to make sense of something may evolve over the course of our research activity.
The phenomenon is an uncharted territory that we attempt to explore, flexibly adapting to the nature and circumstances of the phenomenon. We must assume that we do not know the phenomenon but wish to, so we approach it as a beginner. We may know what we do not know, but need to consider that we may not know what we don’t know. We have no clear sense of what we will find or how discoveries will arise fluidly and unfold in a rich, unstructured, multidimensional way. A certain uncertainty and spontaneity must be accepted and creatively transformed into possibility and pattern.
We can use an existential and hermeneutic, as well as first-person approach, drawing on our realm of experience ‑- our own lived situation, setting aside preconceptions and biases. We examine specific characteristics and qualities and may become immersed in the process, its revelations and clarity. We become more perceptive, thus better able to articulate our experience. Emergent meaning arises from description and interpretation.
Creative outpouring is the entrance to self-actualization. It is heuristic, preparing us for deeper understanding. In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, learned or hard-coded by evolutionary processes. Like archetypes, they help us function without constantly stopping to think about the next course of action.
Beliefs are our default heuristics, ways of interpreting the world and our experience -- cognitive bias and assumptions. Beliefs act as filters on communication. Mistaken beliefs are errors due to ignorance - lack of knowledge, trauma, or lack of critical thinking. Discernment in self-reality belief systems is a conceptual art.
Jung went so far to declare, "Psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time, and of causality. This explains the possibility of magic." (J.E.T., Page 62). ,,"the magic practice is this: what is not understood is made understandable in an incomprehensible manner." (Red Book) We find or discover things by experience and experiment. It stimulates interest in further investigation.
As a problem-solving strategy, the heuristic method allows us to discover something for ourselves, to discover answers on our own and learn more about ourselves on our own. We know ourselves beyond content when we transcend or experience ourselves outside of temporal constraints in the domain of the universal.
A psychophysical approach is the secret behind the aesthetic experience. The ancestors feed the aesthetic formation of our living form. Aesthetic knowledge enables the psychological phenomena to link the body to the world.
Creativity points the way to the numinous, a high-voltage elemental force. Incubation brings new insights into ourselves and the ancestors. In our initial attempts to encounter the numinous with the emotions instead of with the body, we must expect indirect, rather than direct knowledge, and therefore be satisfied with intimations, allegory, implications, and transformations.
Psychic tensions accumulate and stimulate our imaginations to form images embodying their emotional essence. This process is the dynamic agency behind both individual fantasies and forms of cultural expression. Our instincts, emotions, and habits manifest as images to which we collectively attribute power and meaning; our ancestors called them gods.
"Emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light, or from inertia to movement, without emotion." --C. G. Jung
Our aesthetic response, a psychic sensuality and sensitivity, to phenomena is the source of the immediate apprehension that Hillman describes as 'soul-making,' subjective interrelation. Reflection makes consciousness, but only love makes soul. Soul is a quality of human existence, including vitality, depth, individuality, good humor, and familiarity with life and death.
It means leaving our solid footing and carrying every question into deeper waters, rather than dragging 'the invisibles' out of the underworld and back into the daylight world. They may 'come up' spontaneously if we have no desire to control the outcome.
Eliphas Levi describes how,"Imagination is actually as the eye of the soul, and it is therein that forms are delineated and preserved, by its means we behold the reflections of the invisible world. It is the mirror of vision and the apparatus of magical life...for the sage, to imagine is to see, as for the magician to speak, is to create."
Poiesis, as creative act, is the death and re-birth of the soul. We constantly to re-form ourselves with 'soul-making.' Poiesis is integrative affirmation always emerging into form. The naturally therapeutic process evokes the emotions and experiences that give life a deeper meaning. “A psychological self-awareness and faith in the power of truth gives you courage to reveal whatever you unearth, whether you come out looking vain, or conniving or hateful or not.” (Mary Karr)
We open to the aesthetic depths of the world, in addition to the physical, social, linguistic, and transpersonal modes. Just because something is collective or non-rational does not mean it is transpersonal. Magic and myth are collective pre-personal (magic and mythic) structures. There are also collective personal structures (rational and existential), and collective transpersonal structures (psychic and subtle).
Collective simply means that the structure is universally present. Gods and goddesses are not transpersonal modes of awareness, or genuinely mystical luminosities, but simply a collection of typical, everyday self-images and self-roles available to us. They are self-concepts and self-roles. To go beyond into formlessness is therefore characterized as the bornless.
Spiritual here is a concept with a voice independent of formal religious structures with essential mystery underscoring its meaning, It has a deep resonance with key elements of religious practice.
The Shadow is a malignant perspective that sucks away our potential for life like a vampire. Collective development lags behind individual development and can pull it back toward primitive instincts and regressive mob action to the brink of the abyss.
This is possession by evil and collective disintegration of standards. Fundamental truths degenerate into extremist fundamentalism, creating more suffering and loss. Such syndromes are handed down through the generations with the arrogance of rigid beliefs.
Denial struggles against its own radically honest self-recognition. In many ways we weave our own noose and strangle our humanity, a desperate attempt at venile self-reassurance that is really an expression of loss of soul and a preference for our own lies to ourselves over the well-being of others. Shadow possession is a conscious rejection of the humane that alienates us from ourselves and cosmos.
Toxic behavior and materialism masquerade as spiritual values -- a pernicious emotional response. Evil can make us literally ill with greed and lust. The way we tell ourselves what is going on is a gross distortion, a irrational fantasy of nature, others, and world. Strident rhetoric that seeks to persuade becomes ridicule, brutish bullying or murderous rage. Thus, we play and replay the tragedies of the past.
Denying the negative undermines the collective value system and undermines integration. We need conscious relationship with both our light and dark primitive sides, not one-sided self-righteousness, scapegoating, and projection. We need to know which dynamics are directly relevant to our current state. Soul requires our attention for acknowledgement, recognition, memory, reverence, respect, and awareness.
What is denied, cut-off, and disowned in self-indulgence of hatred and self-interest is projected as inferior, as the villain or enemy; it is a polarized and adversarial way of life. It is expressed as self-delusional absoluteness, zealotry and fanaticism. Sometimes this goes on under the twisted democratic precept of 'being true to oneself' but really it is an over-valuation of oneself. We need to avoid both mental and superstitious literalisms.
We have to deal with all of our nature, including the reactionary. Despite our self-adulation, we are not only 'good.' Individually and collectively what is dark and malevolent tries to mask itself as the good with its divisive self-delusions and outmoded idealisms. Uncontrolled it is immensely dangerous, leading to war, overkill, and catastrophe. We all know the driving forces behind conflict, which is a symptom of internal chaos and immaturity which is like a pernicious systemic disease.
Wickedness is banal not glamorous, through destructive -- the vanity of over-identification with one-sidedness and profound unconsciousness. Evil is a central problem, individually and collectively. That includes pretexts, complacency and lack of compassion and personal integrity. No one is immune from annihilation by evil. Opposing forces have always existed.
One-sided self-righteous spiritual perfectionism and ideologies are myths told to the self by an inflated ego -- a hubris. Shadow recognition means acknowledgement and integration. Rejected humaneness turns destructive and inhumane -- annoyance, belligerent tones, baiting, evil, paranoid rage, prejudice, and murderous mass violence.
Naked aggression is just that -- usually not for self-preservation but compensating internal issues, shortcomings, and divides in the malevolent threat actor. Evil is something that needs to be caught and made known. We mislabel what is pernicious and malignant narcissism as a false heroism and embolden the worst of us. We reward ourselves for our false beliefs of superiority and self-aggrandizement.
We create toxic myths out of facts, truth, and science that are merely rationalizations and justifications for childish self-indulgence of the worst in our humanity. We make up lies to justify ourselves and blame others, or deny it with wishful thinking rather than practical corrective work and service to humankind. We rarely exemplify our own principles and may even try to systematically bend our laws toward our own defenses and resistances.
Evil can infect us all as history shows. It is as easy as minimizing the effects of suffering, exploiting or not lifting a finger for the unfortunate or oppressed. The inclusive ethic recognizes collective evil brings revitalization, dealing with rather than inventing problems. We need reasonable knowledge of the role of self-deceptive mechanisms and other psychological factors that operate throughout our lifespan. An inflationary overvaluation of oneself is “evil”.
Shared awareness heightens clarity and awareness of real problems and abuses. The unconscious, its brutality, and preconceptions have to be confronted with penetrating insight and creative processes. The vigilant injunction to know thyself is one of the few antidotes we have. The transpersonal perspective allows us to transcend megalomaniacal denial, defenses, transference, projections, and deluded beliefs. We need to reorient our distortions and gratifications.
As noted in Depth Psychology & a New Ethic: "The modern world has witnessed a dramatic breakthrough of the dark, negative forces of human nature. The "old ethic," which pursued an illusory perfection by repressing the dark side, has lost its power to deal with contemporary problems. Erich Neumann was convinced that the deadliest peril now confronting humanity lay in the "scapegoat" psychology associated with the old ethic. We are in the grip of this psychology when we project our own dark shadow onto an individual or group identified as our "enemy," failing to see it in ourselves. The only effective alternative to this dangerous shadow projection is shadow recognition, acknowledgement, and integration into the totality of the self. Wholeness, not perfection, is the goal of the new ethic."
As Buddha says in the Kalamas Sutras, "Do not believe in what you have heard. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down many generations. Do not believe anything because it is rumored and spoken of by many; do not believe merely because the written statement of some old sage is produced; do not believe in conjectures; do not believe merely in the authority of your teachers and elders. After observation and analysis, when it agrees with reason and it is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it, and live up to it."
'God' is simply being itself. Paul Tillich describes the God as "the ground of being, but not “one being among others.” Logical objectification is shown in three ways: Prophetic religion makes God a subject who has self-knowledge. Mysticism tries to erase the subject-object distinction in an ecstatic union of the two. [173] When God is understood as a conditioned thing. The structure of reality is neither derived from objective things, nor from subjective being. Ontology must maintain the self-world polarity within which all things and persons participate (in varying degrees). Subjectivity and objectivity are always in polar relation." [173-174] http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/tillich/stguide/stguide2.htm
Following the Footsteps of Nature
Consciousness mediates between chaos and order
and generates experience. The Holy Grail of consciousness is the search for the ground of cosmological existence and the discovery of transcendence.
Literal falseness, but metaphorical truth frames myth, religious, or spiritual thought -- erroneous in detail, but right in pattern. But what is metaphorically true is not necessarily morally right, and might be morally reprehensible adaptations to past events in the domain of chaos and order.
Incomplete wisdom cannot address modern problems. An active force that generates those stories through time is still alive. The past is alive enough that we update the solutions for our own times and manifest them in ourselves.
Living systems continually create themselves from within and distinguish themselves from their background. Cosmos is self-referencing. We create ourselves by continually providing information about ourselves to ourselves through self-referential feedback loops (autopoiesis). It enables us to retain our inner and outer identity. Our problems and suffering help us find and love our soul to nurture that rapport.
When we approach self-knowledge and self-exploration, we must consider the context in which that process takes place as well as some of its defining qualities. “Rubric” is a document that articulates the expectations for an assignment by listing the criteria, or what counts, and describing levels of quality from excellent to poor.
The truth of who we are and our unlived potential pulses in our depths awaiting recognition and inter-relationship. Physics, art, depth psychology, literature, and hermetics are frameworks and languages we can use to amplify our self-understanding.
In Hermetic writing connections are open and revealing multiple conceptual metaphors and multiple realities, not closed up. It suggests four types of reality: sensory, mythic, transpsychic, and unitive reality. The self can focus and direct transpersonal energy in "transpsychic reality."
The contents of our unconscious are manifesting themselves when we encounter the unknown. To cope, we project our fantasies onto what we don't understand. We re-discover the autonomous archetypes that guide human beings by investigating the structure of our imaginations and staying open to the process itself, rather than seeking results.
The quest for self-knowledge is a cosmological pursuit, rooted today in depth psychology and the science-art of hermeneutics, an interpretive approach to our phenomenological experience. Consciousness is about connectivity and interface and the primacy of gesture, sacred space, and the esoteric, occult or hidden variables -- transcending conceptual assumptions. Who we are is as much about how we define ourselves as our psychobiology.
In depth psychology, hermeneutics is a research paradigm that concerns judging psychological accuracy from inaccuracy. Accurate beliefs deliver long-term satisfactions by distinguishing between accurate and inaccurate readings of situations and qualitative frameworks by contextualizing and comparing them.
Paracelsus tells us that "where there is no love there is no art." The ancient and modern premise is that the nature of mankind mirrors the nature of the cosmos in a direct link with the infinite world, the organic universe, which we can perceive directly.
David Bohm, the famous physicist, tells us, “Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy.”
Carl Jung echoes ancient teachings when he reflects that, “Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.”
The self that we know is a fragment of our potential. Soul is the vehicle of transformation and transformation means sacrifice that begins with the false ego.. Unconscious limitations, trauma, and loss keep us from our true nature.
"When viewed through a mythological lens, trauma is perceived as a descent of the soul, a dropping or falling down. It is sometimes experienced as a sudden violent attack in which one is pulled down or an agonizing loss of soul too overwhelming for consciousness to contain...It calls for an enlargement of consciousness, which is a potentially transformative psychological and spiritual experience, although it comes at a high price. As Jung wrote to Victor White, 'I wanted the proof of a living Spirit and I got it. Don't ask me at what price.'" (Ursula Wirtz, Trauma and Beyond: The Mystery of Transformation, p. 117)
The tensions in spacetime are emergent phenomena of a much deeper unified, a conscious innately informed universe. A hologram is a fully interrelated reflective entity where the whole and the pixilations reflect each other.
We confound and compound conviction and emotion. This is hypnotic, or hyperempiria, suggestion-enhanced experience. Our only guide is the Mystery of the unseen depths. Sort of a focused alert trance-state, hyperempiria is a hyperacuity or heightened sensory experience, sensory extension. Guided intensified imaginative involvement bypasses the critical factor of the conscious mind through formal and informal ritual induction procedures.
This mystery defies religious elaboration and mocks any presumption of absolute truth. We must retrieve from the unconscious what we need for wholeness. Images are our guides -- a sudden memory, an old song, dreams, daydreams, symptoms, struggles, love, and awe can open the depths to meaning. We may feel anger, or even hatred for the ignorance of knowing who we are. The God of our youths may haunt guilty or desperate moments.
Jung links psyche or soul with our spiritual instincts and describes how answering the call to the age-old quest for self-knowledge deepens and enlivens our experience. Jung had to learn how to translate his visions into concrete words and images for his Red Book to plant them in reality.
" If the Angel comes, it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears, but by your humble resolve to always be a beginner." --Rainer Maria Rilke
“Recognize the call as a prime fact of human existence; (b) align life with it; (c) find the common sense to realize that accidents, including the heartache and the natural shocks the flesh is heir to, belong to the pattern of the image, are necessary to it, and help fulfill it. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.” (James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling)
"Outer world and God are the two primordial experiences and the one is as great as the other, and both have a thousand names, which one and all do not alter the facts. The roots of both are unknown. The psyche mirrors both. It is perhaps the point where they touch." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 5.)
Our universe is a profound symphony of the forces of nature that govern its unfolding. Throughout history, mythic and imaginal descriptions of the forces of nature preceded more scientific models of reality. But myth is not fiction: it consists of observable facts that are continually repeated over and over again. It is something that happens to us, and we have mythical fates as much as our ancestors.
Even such scientific models retain their metaphorical nature and applications which enrich our perceptions of our place in the Universe, and the unbroken and eternal cycle of life and death at all scales. Corollary concepts bridge the soul and the material universe. Thus, in our quest for self-knowledge, we follow nature's footprints in service to a higher purpose.
“...put it my way, what we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality, which is
nothing but...the poetic imagination going on day and night.” --James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse, p. 62
Culture can be defined as the work of soul-making. Returning soul to the world not only attends to the world, it offers more opportunity to engage in the work of soul ourselves, which often arises in particular evolutionary moments, suffering or inertia.
Introspection does not provide full self-knowledge. We want to understand our presuppositions, pivotal experiences and abilities on which our knowledge-claims are based. We seek understanding rather than explanations. Self-aware people know that they have blind spots. Self-aware people know they have unconscious baggage that is hard to notice or overcome.
Verification procedures are both internal and relative to the particular kinds of perspectives. We develop systems of meaning and justification to make sense out of the world, understanding perennial aspects of the lived experience of meaning. We should welcome critical and radical fearless thinking in ourselves.
Relational hermeneutics is a full-bodied, soul-engaged, heart-transforming encounter
that involves the subjective worldview of the interpreter as much as the process of interpretation. Theories of embodiment are grounded in a phenomenological comprehension of the lived-body, including knowledge embedded within our physical form.
The hermeneutic tradition values and explores the meanings of human experiences as they are lived. Such meanings are lived in cultural, sub-cultural, linguistic, religious, and gendered contexts. Sociocultural perspectives on psychological phenomena require careful attention. Not merely inner experience, lived experience recognizes the historical dimension in the psychological.
Hermeneutic philosophy sketches a more balanced and credible approach to finding a genuine alternative to modern individualism and postmodernist relativism. What is the power of interpretation? What can we get at through interpreting? Can we get at Essences of things? Like the difference between symbol and image, hermeneutics subordinates the universal to the particular.
Whatever is conscious exists along with psychological meanings in relation to present, past and future relationships between people -- and in relation to the relationship that people have with themselves. The ways of making sense of people in all situations is inextricably tied up with emotions and working out what exists for them and about them.
A depth approach addresses the feelings, significant dreams, and imagery that are naturally aroused in the self-discovery process, and describes the nature of synchronous events. Crises become opportunities for psycho-physical healing, emotional transformation, and connection with source. Grounded theory has a particular conceptual and methodological foundation that doesn't reduce what it means to be human, embodied or incorporeal.
We need to separate our constructions from a delusory interpretation of the facts of reality, as available to experience. How can we integrate different theories relating to the basis of reality? Jung distinguishes: "Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights; they are habitual modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving that experience has proved appropriate and useful." (CW 9ii, para 50). No shortage of comparisons and correlations between spiritual notions, metaphysical ideas, and scientific theories have been made.
Jung suggests we must internalize a locus of authority and not look without to anyone outside ourselves to authorize our own lives, or seek external guidance to navigate through this interval of change and turmoil. Jung clearly stated that living under the power of a guru or charismatic personality is not how individuation is achieved.
Phenomenology indicates a way to research where we can be open to the phenomenon and to allow it to show itself in its fullness and complexity through our own direct involvement and understanding. Understanding arises directly from our personal sensibility and awareness. Direct contact creates an intimacy with the phenomenon through prolonged, firsthand exposure and immersion.
We meet the phenomenon in as free and as unprejudiced a way as possible so that it can present itself and be accurately described and understood. The hopeful result is moments of deeper clarity in which we see the phenomenon in a radically fresh and fuller way.
Bootstrapping from Joseph Campbell's famous quote, Hillman says, "You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss." "Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path... this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am." Jung said, ""I do not create myself, but rather I go to myself." (Psychology and Religion, Works, Vol.11, p.249)
Phenomenological intuiting requires discipline, patience, effort and care. It requires utter concentration on the object intuited without being absorbed in it to the point of no longer looking critically or falling into blind spots.
Through intuiting, we hope to experience a moment of insight in which we see the phenomenon in a clearer light. Phenomenological disclosure is "the aha! experience," "revelatory seeing," or "pristine encounter." Through phenomenological disclosure, we hope to see the thing in its own terms and to feel confident that this seeing is reasonably correct.
"The psyche is therefore all-important; it is the all-pervading Breath, the Buddha-essence; it is the Buddha-Mind, the One, the Dharmakāya. All existence emanates from it, and all separate forms dissolve back into it." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 771.
Consciousness, Behavior & Experience
Our personal efforts, experiences, and insights are the central means for examining the phenomenon and arriving at moments of disclosure so the phenomenon reveals something about itself in a new or fuller way. Generally, phenomenological intuiting involves a series of smaller and larger disclosures that slowly coalesce into a fuller apprehension of the phenomenon.
In this sense, intuiting is rarely a single moment of revelation in which understanding comes in one full swoop. Instead, intuiting is gradual and unpredictable. Through our wish, effort, and practice, we see the phenomenon in smaller and larger ways. Patterns, relationships, and subtleties gradually arise that we never noticed before. Phenomenological intuiting is a flow and spiral, with unpredictability and serendipity.
We must begin somewhere and intend to end somewhere. Thus there is a movement, a progression, and eventually, an arrival. But, this movement isn’t a straight, sequential process. We see it more in terms of a flow, or of a cycling and spiraling motion. We can’t say where this flow begins. The first idea of trying to make sense of something may evolve over the course of our research activity.
The phenomenon is an uncharted territory that we attempt to explore, flexibly adapting to the nature and circumstances of the phenomenon. We must assume that we do not know the phenomenon but wish to, so we approach it as a beginner. We may know what we do not know, but need to consider that we may not know what we don’t know. We have no clear sense of what we will find or how discoveries will arise fluidly and unfold in a rich, unstructured, multidimensional way. A certain uncertainty and spontaneity must be accepted and creatively transformed into possibility and pattern.
We can use an existential and hermeneutic, as well as first-person approach, drawing on our realm of experience ‑- our own lived situation, setting aside preconceptions and biases. We examine specific characteristics and qualities and may become immersed in the process, its revelations and clarity. We become more perceptive, thus better able to articulate our experience. Emergent meaning arises from description and interpretation.
Creative outpouring is the entrance to self-actualization. It is heuristic, preparing us for deeper understanding. In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, learned or hard-coded by evolutionary processes. Like archetypes, they help us function without constantly stopping to think about the next course of action.
Beliefs are our default heuristics, ways of interpreting the world and our experience -- cognitive bias and assumptions. Beliefs act as filters on communication. Mistaken beliefs are errors due to ignorance - lack of knowledge, trauma, or lack of critical thinking. Discernment in self-reality belief systems is a conceptual art.
Jung went so far to declare, "Psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time, and of causality. This explains the possibility of magic." (J.E.T., Page 62). ,,"the magic practice is this: what is not understood is made understandable in an incomprehensible manner." (Red Book) We find or discover things by experience and experiment. It stimulates interest in further investigation.
As a problem-solving strategy, the heuristic method allows us to discover something for ourselves, to discover answers on our own and learn more about ourselves on our own. We know ourselves beyond content when we transcend or experience ourselves outside of temporal constraints in the domain of the universal.
A psychophysical approach is the secret behind the aesthetic experience. The ancestors feed the aesthetic formation of our living form. Aesthetic knowledge enables the psychological phenomena to link the body to the world.
Creativity points the way to the numinous, a high-voltage elemental force. Incubation brings new insights into ourselves and the ancestors. In our initial attempts to encounter the numinous with the emotions instead of with the body, we must expect indirect, rather than direct knowledge, and therefore be satisfied with intimations, allegory, implications, and transformations.
Psychic tensions accumulate and stimulate our imaginations to form images embodying their emotional essence. This process is the dynamic agency behind both individual fantasies and forms of cultural expression. Our instincts, emotions, and habits manifest as images to which we collectively attribute power and meaning; our ancestors called them gods.
"Emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light, or from inertia to movement, without emotion." --C. G. Jung
Our aesthetic response, a psychic sensuality and sensitivity, to phenomena is the source of the immediate apprehension that Hillman describes as 'soul-making,' subjective interrelation. Reflection makes consciousness, but only love makes soul. Soul is a quality of human existence, including vitality, depth, individuality, good humor, and familiarity with life and death.
It means leaving our solid footing and carrying every question into deeper waters, rather than dragging 'the invisibles' out of the underworld and back into the daylight world. They may 'come up' spontaneously if we have no desire to control the outcome.
Eliphas Levi describes how,"Imagination is actually as the eye of the soul, and it is therein that forms are delineated and preserved, by its means we behold the reflections of the invisible world. It is the mirror of vision and the apparatus of magical life...for the sage, to imagine is to see, as for the magician to speak, is to create."
Poiesis, as creative act, is the death and re-birth of the soul. We constantly to re-form ourselves with 'soul-making.' Poiesis is integrative affirmation always emerging into form. The naturally therapeutic process evokes the emotions and experiences that give life a deeper meaning. “A psychological self-awareness and faith in the power of truth gives you courage to reveal whatever you unearth, whether you come out looking vain, or conniving or hateful or not.” (Mary Karr)
We open to the aesthetic depths of the world, in addition to the physical, social, linguistic, and transpersonal modes. Just because something is collective or non-rational does not mean it is transpersonal. Magic and myth are collective pre-personal (magic and mythic) structures. There are also collective personal structures (rational and existential), and collective transpersonal structures (psychic and subtle).
Collective simply means that the structure is universally present. Gods and goddesses are not transpersonal modes of awareness, or genuinely mystical luminosities, but simply a collection of typical, everyday self-images and self-roles available to us. They are self-concepts and self-roles. To go beyond into formlessness is therefore characterized as the bornless.
Spiritual here is a concept with a voice independent of formal religious structures with essential mystery underscoring its meaning, It has a deep resonance with key elements of religious practice.
The Shadow is a malignant perspective that sucks away our potential for life like a vampire. Collective development lags behind individual development and can pull it back toward primitive instincts and regressive mob action to the brink of the abyss.
This is possession by evil and collective disintegration of standards. Fundamental truths degenerate into extremist fundamentalism, creating more suffering and loss. Such syndromes are handed down through the generations with the arrogance of rigid beliefs.
Denial struggles against its own radically honest self-recognition. In many ways we weave our own noose and strangle our humanity, a desperate attempt at venile self-reassurance that is really an expression of loss of soul and a preference for our own lies to ourselves over the well-being of others. Shadow possession is a conscious rejection of the humane that alienates us from ourselves and cosmos.
Toxic behavior and materialism masquerade as spiritual values -- a pernicious emotional response. Evil can make us literally ill with greed and lust. The way we tell ourselves what is going on is a gross distortion, a irrational fantasy of nature, others, and world. Strident rhetoric that seeks to persuade becomes ridicule, brutish bullying or murderous rage. Thus, we play and replay the tragedies of the past.
Denying the negative undermines the collective value system and undermines integration. We need conscious relationship with both our light and dark primitive sides, not one-sided self-righteousness, scapegoating, and projection. We need to know which dynamics are directly relevant to our current state. Soul requires our attention for acknowledgement, recognition, memory, reverence, respect, and awareness.
What is denied, cut-off, and disowned in self-indulgence of hatred and self-interest is projected as inferior, as the villain or enemy; it is a polarized and adversarial way of life. It is expressed as self-delusional absoluteness, zealotry and fanaticism. Sometimes this goes on under the twisted democratic precept of 'being true to oneself' but really it is an over-valuation of oneself. We need to avoid both mental and superstitious literalisms.
We have to deal with all of our nature, including the reactionary. Despite our self-adulation, we are not only 'good.' Individually and collectively what is dark and malevolent tries to mask itself as the good with its divisive self-delusions and outmoded idealisms. Uncontrolled it is immensely dangerous, leading to war, overkill, and catastrophe. We all know the driving forces behind conflict, which is a symptom of internal chaos and immaturity which is like a pernicious systemic disease.
Wickedness is banal not glamorous, through destructive -- the vanity of over-identification with one-sidedness and profound unconsciousness. Evil is a central problem, individually and collectively. That includes pretexts, complacency and lack of compassion and personal integrity. No one is immune from annihilation by evil. Opposing forces have always existed.
One-sided self-righteous spiritual perfectionism and ideologies are myths told to the self by an inflated ego -- a hubris. Shadow recognition means acknowledgement and integration. Rejected humaneness turns destructive and inhumane -- annoyance, belligerent tones, baiting, evil, paranoid rage, prejudice, and murderous mass violence.
Naked aggression is just that -- usually not for self-preservation but compensating internal issues, shortcomings, and divides in the malevolent threat actor. Evil is something that needs to be caught and made known. We mislabel what is pernicious and malignant narcissism as a false heroism and embolden the worst of us. We reward ourselves for our false beliefs of superiority and self-aggrandizement.
We create toxic myths out of facts, truth, and science that are merely rationalizations and justifications for childish self-indulgence of the worst in our humanity. We make up lies to justify ourselves and blame others, or deny it with wishful thinking rather than practical corrective work and service to humankind. We rarely exemplify our own principles and may even try to systematically bend our laws toward our own defenses and resistances.
Evil can infect us all as history shows. It is as easy as minimizing the effects of suffering, exploiting or not lifting a finger for the unfortunate or oppressed. The inclusive ethic recognizes collective evil brings revitalization, dealing with rather than inventing problems. We need reasonable knowledge of the role of self-deceptive mechanisms and other psychological factors that operate throughout our lifespan. An inflationary overvaluation of oneself is “evil”.
Shared awareness heightens clarity and awareness of real problems and abuses. The unconscious, its brutality, and preconceptions have to be confronted with penetrating insight and creative processes. The vigilant injunction to know thyself is one of the few antidotes we have. The transpersonal perspective allows us to transcend megalomaniacal denial, defenses, transference, projections, and deluded beliefs. We need to reorient our distortions and gratifications.
As noted in Depth Psychology & a New Ethic: "The modern world has witnessed a dramatic breakthrough of the dark, negative forces of human nature. The "old ethic," which pursued an illusory perfection by repressing the dark side, has lost its power to deal with contemporary problems. Erich Neumann was convinced that the deadliest peril now confronting humanity lay in the "scapegoat" psychology associated with the old ethic. We are in the grip of this psychology when we project our own dark shadow onto an individual or group identified as our "enemy," failing to see it in ourselves. The only effective alternative to this dangerous shadow projection is shadow recognition, acknowledgement, and integration into the totality of the self. Wholeness, not perfection, is the goal of the new ethic."
As Buddha says in the Kalamas Sutras, "Do not believe in what you have heard. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down many generations. Do not believe anything because it is rumored and spoken of by many; do not believe merely because the written statement of some old sage is produced; do not believe in conjectures; do not believe merely in the authority of your teachers and elders. After observation and analysis, when it agrees with reason and it is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it, and live up to it."
'God' is simply being itself. Paul Tillich describes the God as "the ground of being, but not “one being among others.” Logical objectification is shown in three ways: Prophetic religion makes God a subject who has self-knowledge. Mysticism tries to erase the subject-object distinction in an ecstatic union of the two. [173] When God is understood as a conditioned thing. The structure of reality is neither derived from objective things, nor from subjective being. Ontology must maintain the self-world polarity within which all things and persons participate (in varying degrees). Subjectivity and objectivity are always in polar relation." [173-174] http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/tillich/stguide/stguide2.htm