On Truth pt 1 - Fact, Myth, Fairy Tale, and how they relate to the Collective Unconscious
What is truth? Does it mean facts? Facts are scientifically verified - proven or at least supported by a preponderance of evidence - empirically proven. Empirical means that your evidence was gathered by observation from the physical world itself, by a process of carefully controlled experiment, and then verified by peer review. This means other scientists test and either confirm or deny your results. So essentially facts are derived from the Scientific Method - our best method for determining what is and is not factually true, with all distortion removed such as cognitive bias, opinion, political or religious bias, and just stupid wrongheaded beliefs or “common sense”. This is as rationally and accurately true as something can be.
Well, let’s stop and consider that the rational conscious mind is only part of the equation. We are a lot more than simply rational. In fact, we were irrational and driven by instinct for millions of years before we became human and developed the prefrontal cortex, which is what finally allowed us to create the scientific method. And for many aeons, without knowing anything that was empirically, scientifically accurate, we got by. How?
We had myths and stories.
Let me begin by correcting a fairly recent misunderstanding that arose in our rational materialist arrogance. Lately (I’m not sure for how long) the word Myth has been understood - by some anyway, to mean “untrue”. For instance when someone says “Oh, that’s not true - that’s just a myth.”
Well, that’s not what it always meant, and really that’s not what it means now. A myth is far from a lie, and in many ways myths are far more truthful than scientific facts. What’s more important to you, the mean temperature of the surface of Mars, or the fact that sometimes in life you need to carefully navigate between a monster on either side, and that getting too close to either one spells disaster?
That’s the myth of Scylla and Charybdis - 2 different kinds of monsters laying in wait for unwary sailors (who obviously failed to know or pay heed to important myths!) This situation obviously does happen in life - quite frequently actually, and the story of Odysseus navigating a careful path between them serves as an eternal reminder, in the mind’s native language, of one of life’s great dangers. The need for a well-planned strategy to navigate between competing monsters is very real and very important in our lives. How important in your life is the fact that water is composed of 2 hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom? Now consider a much more useful scenario - you’re a teenager and you need to navigate between your mom and your dad, and it requires a knowledge of how to appeal to each of them in just the right way. Now THAT is important stuff!
About water - far more important to us than its chemical composition (most of the time anyway) is that water in dreams often represents the Unconscious (some people say it represents emotion, which comes from - guess where?) This isn’t a scientific fact, it can’t be verified under a microscope or through controlled experiments. But if you understand what it represents, then the dreams become useful and actually present life wisdom. If all you’re concerned about is water’s chemical composition, or its surface tension or its specific gravity, then you won’t understand those dreams.
On Truth pt 2 - Myth, Story and Meaning
I promise I'm going somewhere with all this - it's all important, but I know sometimes it seems like I'm just meandering around. That's because of what Jung called Circumambulation. It's an important idea in psychology, especially Jungian Depth Psychology. It means you keep circling an idea - going all around it and describing it from different perspectives, and in that way eventually you end up building a more complete idea of your subject, which is kind of slippery and can be hard to pin down any other way. So here goes with part 2 of this essay:
On Truth - Myth, Story and Meaning
Scientific facts are important mostly to scientists or to manufacturers trying to create technology. Don’t get me wrong - I did say mostly, not only. I do think science is vitally important and necessary, and that it definitely needs to be taught in schools, along with critical thinking skills and the other cornerstones of rationality. Let’s not sink into complete irrationality! But I also think that in the 19th century rush toward pure rational materialism we lost something vital - something that makes us human. We’ve replaced religion and spirituality and myth - in other words meaning - with nothing but cold hard facts. Well, some people want to do that, though obviously the vast majority still love stories. Just check the Hollywood box office numbers to verify that fact. Even the scientists themselves love stories - just look at how Carl Sagan or Bill Nye or Neil DeGrasse Tyson make science so appealing - by telling great stories!
Yes, we still love story - it’s the way the mind communicates. Take dreams for instance. The communication between brain hemispheres as they’ve been called, though that’s sort of a myth itself - it’s only partially true. But it is a lot cooler than listing a bunch of cold hard facts about the brain and how it operates. Again, I don’t mean to denigrate science - I definitely want science to continue to explore the brain and how it operates. But for most of us, unless we’re brain scientists or work for one, or are just a science fan, we only need to know the basics and often a myth is better than all the cold hard facts, which let’s face it can be confusing and not very helpful.
Actually I think the ideal is to understand that there is hard science, and to have a good idea of the scientific facts, but to then encapsulate those facts as nearly as possible in a good myth that doesn’t miss the mark by too much, and that is memorable and clearly understood. The myth becomes sort of a marker - a place holder, and when necessary you can refer to the science, which has probably increased in complexity since you last looked into it anyway. But most of the time you’re better off using a myth of some sort - like the idea that dreams are the hemispheres of the brain communicating with each other - with the caveat that it isn’t really that simple held in reserve.
Really this is the way myths operate anyway. Most people have always understood that they aren’t literally true, but also that they aren’t simply lies or untruths. Myths are condensed wisdom encoded in story form in a memorable way.
When I say myths in this essay, I’m referring also to fairy tales and other examples of condensed, collective wisdom told in story form. This category also includes things like Folk Tales, Nursery Rhymes, certain kinds of jokes and songs, and those pithy little statements such as “A penny saved is a penny earned” or “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”.
There are personal stories and there are collective stories. Your own personal stories involve things you’ve experienced - people you know and places you’ve been. Or things you’ve imagined, but relating to your own life in particular. They’re your memories or stories that you’ve made up. But fairy tales and myths are different. They don’t deal with individual people or things or places - they’re not about specifics, instead they’re meant to convey universal truths - profound human truths from the collective unconscious. That’s where they really come from.
And how do they come into existence? Well, I imagine people keep telling each other stories and after some time it becomes apparent that some stories have more staying power than others - they seem to be more universal. I also imagine that elements of different people’s stories - different specific instances of the same universal idea - sort of get grafted onto each other and there’s a process of winnowing down. The more personal elements get eroded away until what’s left are the universals. For instance the idea of 2 monsters with different characteristics, and the need to navigate carefully between them. That’s just about as universal as you can get!
But you still need a character to convey the myth - a story does need a protagonist. Somebody the listener can relate to and identify with, In this case a hero, since it’s a hero myth. Odysseus was one of the quintessential Greek heroes, so it become a part of his story. It seems to me that over a long period of time the stories got shuffled around and changed little by little until they eventually found their most perfect form, and certain myths were right for a particular type of hero - in this case the Trickster hero, and that was Odysseus. Certain other ideas worked better for a different type of hero, or maybe a God or a maiden - and so they evolved with a different kind of main character, who represents the boiled-down essence of that type of character.
On Truth pt 3 - Abstraction, and the Rest of the Archetypes
So you see, what happened is that it began with personal stories, and people could see that there was something universal in them. The personal elements got gradually whittled away leaving only the universal. This is how the Collective Unconscious works. Myths and fairy tales are products of the Collective Unconscious. Now maybe you can see how the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious start with the personal and abstract the Universal from it.
That’s a very useful idea - Abstraction. The word isn’t used very much anymore, and it’s lost its original meaning unfortunately because of Abstract Art. It doesn’t just mean crazy and irrational and anything goes - not at all. Abstraction is something like extraction - to extract means to remove something from inside something else, like to extract the juice from an orange. But to abstract is slightly different - it’s more specific. It means to extract meaning from something - to condense out the essential idea of it. It was a word Aristotle used a lot when he laid out formal logic. To abstract from the specific or the personal means to arrive at the pure idea of a thing, divorced from specific iterations.
For instance if you take the set of all chairs - this is the example Aristotle used to explain it. Each chair is unique, or each type anyway, each different model of chair. And really each individual chair itself is unique - even if they were manufactured identically they all have their own unique history - mine might have some scuffs or marks that yours doesn’t. But from the set of all chairs you can abstract the idea of chair. This is how the term was originally used, and then in painting it came to be used in a different way. Well, not really - because actually what the painters were doing was abstracting out the formal elements of painting - removing any reference to actual objects or physicality, and leaving only the pure ideas - ideas like weight and balance, contrast, movement, composition, color, etc. The problem was people didn’t like it, and it got a really bad rap, so the word abstract became demonized.
I just want to familiarize you with the word, because it’s what the Collective Unconscious does really - it abstracts the pure meaning from a lot of personal and specific events and presents the meaning in the form of a story like a myth or a fairy tale. This is how you can recognize when a dream or a hallucination or an active imagination is Archetypal (from the Collective Unconscious) - it will have that alien sense of Otherness to it and it won’t consist of familiar things or places, but rather of universals that have been abstracted from your own personal situations. And the characters themselves will also be abstracted - possibly bits and pieces of them will look familiar, but really they’ll be universal characters - the right ones to tell that particular story. Characters like the Wise Old Man or Wise Old Woman, the Old Crone or the Evil Witch (or the Good Witch) or the Young Maiden, the Hero or the Warrior or the Villain or the Village Idiot. The King or the Queen. The Wizard or the Dragon or the Monster. The Helpful Magical Creature, the Child, the Trickster. When you start having dreams with characters like that in them, they’re coming from the Collective Unconscious, projected by your Archetypes - whichever ones are required to tell the story you need to hear.
By the way - I realized that in talking about Archetypes so far I have concentrated only on the main ones - the Shadow, the Anima and Animus, and the Self, and I’ve failed to even mention the plethora of more minor ones in the realm of the Objective Psyche. But oh yes, they’re there - it’s a vast pantheon populated by a menagerie of Gods, Demons, Angels, Spirits, and all manner of other characters, including all the ones I mentioned in the preceding paragraph plus many more. Nobody knows how many, because there’s no way to study them. They just constellate when they’re needed, and there seems to be an endless plethora of different characters that can take form when needed.
Well OK - I feel like I've circumambulated my way around something here. If it isn't totally clear, just keep reading as these posts go up - eventually it should all start to settle into place and begin to make more sense.
Jordan Peterson on Shadow Work
The Problem of the Opposites
In several of the newer books I keep running across the idea of the opposites, and the fact that they need to be reconciled or united. What does it mean?
The opposites are polarized pairs like hot and cold, dark and light, good and bad, etc. Above and below, within and without, the one and the many. Pretty obvious so far. But where it gets interesting is when you start to look at the important opposites in your own personality, or the ones that you see in the world that reflect things inside you. And the important thing to notice about them is that we tend to assign positive qualities to one in each pair, and negative qualities to the other. Up and down, dark and light - heck, positive and negative for that matter. Above and below, within and without. In each case one is considered better than the other, sometimes clearly and sometimes more subtlely.
This is important because often the one we see as negative gets repressed into our shadow. Or more properly the one you personally see as negative gets repressed. Not always, but sometimes.
For example - within and without. This can refer to many different ideas, but let’s use it in this case to refer to the psyche and the external physical world. One inside of you and one outside of you. For many people, the physical objective world - the word without - is the only one that has any reality, and they consider the inner world of the psyche imaginary or maybe they do suspect it’s real but they fear it or repress it for other reasons. On the other hand, some people believe only the inner world has any reality, and that the outer world is there but meaningless or unimportant. But of course there are also people who give nearly equal emphasis to each.
This last state - giving equal or nearly equal emphasis to each of the pairs is ideal. It’s what you want in relation to each of the pairs of opposites. What you don’t want is to have one sticking way up high and it’s opposite sunk deep into the Shadow, never to see the light of day.
For this reason, the pairs of opposites are a valuable diagnostic tool that can help you discover some of the things repressed into your shadow.
It works like this - you spend some time listing pairs of opposites, and deciding which one is positive to you and which one is negative. Then you think about the negative ones and try to figure out if it’s something you can talk about freely - without any embarrassment or denial or weird emotions. If weird things come up and you want to stop thinking about it, then that pole is repressed in your Shadow. I think there are degrees of Shadow repression - sometimes I think we just dunk things a little bit into darkness, and sometimes way down deep where the sun don’t shine, with many levels in between.
I did a little sketch demonstrating the idea. The water represents the unconscious. So in the illustration the negative pole is submerged partially, but still slightly above the surface. This means the ‘good’ pole is up pretty far above median level, which is also not really a good thing. What you really want is balance - and the way I drew it you can see it’s possible for them both to be just above the surface. I think this is the way it is for most pairs of opposites - a well balanced person can reflect without stress on both parts, until he gets to something where there is some repression going on.
The way I see it, we all have hundreds of these see-saws poised just at the upper limit of the unconscious. Each see-saw is a pair of opposites. You can just look at them and see where the good poles stick up too far - those things that maybe you value too much, and think about what would be its opposite.
Example, if your team winning the big game makes you really excited but if them losing makes you have a total crap week, then you’re unbalanced about that. I don’t know that this really counts as an important pair of opposites, but it definitely is a pair of opposites. I’m just using it as an example, you need to work out for yourself what your important pairs are and which ones you might be repressing. Maybe you really love attention, so much that it doesn’t matter to you if its good or bad attention, but if you can’t get it you get grouchy or depressed. Then that’s something you should take note of - you’re repressing the negative pole of it into your Shadow. You should examine it - think all around the problem. Why do you like attention so much? Is it related to something from your childhood? Is it something you should rethink? Maybe get counseling for? You could try some self-therapy - maybe try to get yourself used to not getting attention all the time. Work up to where you don’t need to be always talking to people, learn to spend some time alone reading or doing some hobbies.
Actually the Opposites represent the entire work of Individuation. All throughout, what you’re really doing is simply discovering those things that you’ve repressed into your Shadow or the things that are holding back your Anima or Animus, or that are causing a complex or a neurosis. Thinking about the opposites - making a list and thinking about which ones you can talk freely about and which ones you can’t - this is exactly what analysis is about. It’s almost a cheat - a trick to get you there faster and more efficiently. Though of course, analysis is best done with an analyst. There are some things (probably many of them really) that most people just can’t face about themselves, and that’s where an analyst comes in handy. They can see the things you will overlook or are in deep denial about.
Ok, I think that covers the idea of the opposites pretty well. It’s just a bare bones sketch of the concept, but I figure anybody who is interested will look into it deeper. That’s the way I’m approaching this, on a Word to the Wise basis.
As for the idea of the Opposites, this book goes into great detail about it:
The Archetype of the Absolute by Sanford L Drob
As I mentioned above, the idea of reconciling or uniting the opposites is in several of the books I’ve read recently (or am still working on). It shows up in many Jungian books, as it’s so important. Reconciling the opposites creates a third thing - the in-between option, the mean between the extremes. This is what Jung called the Transcendent Function, and it causes Individuation. It’s because in the unconscious, there are no opposites. It thinks holistically and sees everything in its totality - no opposites can exist there. But the conscious tends to automatically divide everything up into pairs of opposites. So in order to establish a good communion between conscious and unconscious, which is the work that creates the balanced state called Individuation, what’s required is to unite as many opposites as you can. Keep doing it - it’s the work of months if not years, and you’ll be getting frequent upgrades.
I should add - each time you pull up a repressed pole from unconscious repression, it releases the energy that's bound up with it. The psyche is what's called an energy system - energy flows through it like through an electrical device (a very complex one, with lots of circuits - like a switchboard or a computer). When something gets pushed down into the unconscious it means the energy associated with it is blocked and can no longer flow freely through the entire system the way it's supposed to. It causes a blockage. So each time you free another bit of content from the Shadow you're like a plumber unplugging a pipe. Lol ok, I know, mixed metaphor. I think you get it regardless. This unplugging or unblocking of energy is what causes the upgrades to the psyche, and when enough of it is done it causes Individuation. Like getting a tune-up for your car, or getting your computer all defragged and running fast again. What the heck - why not a few more mixed metaphors? :chuckle:
Also, this idea sets us up perfectly for my next post, about Active Imagination, and that’s where things start to get really interesting!
EDIT: Here's a well-written article - actually it's an excerpt from Darryl Sharp's Jung Lexicon - that covers the opposites: Opposites
It says many of the same things I tried to, but much better. :lol:
Supplementary material on the Transcendent Function
I've been looking more into the Transcendent Function, as it turns out to be the heart of Jung's method and of Individuation (which is saying the same thing really). I found a couple of things that add to my understanding somewhat. It's more involved than I thought it was, though I don't think what I wrote was wrong exactly - just incomplete. Apparently it's also about developing an attitude of Both/And rather than Either/Or, In other words, both this and that option can be true, maybe in different ways, but they don't have to be seen as opposites. It's a way of seeing everything in shades of grey or even in full color, rather than in simple binary black and white opposites. This is an attitude you should strive to have all the time, and when you find yourself thinking in binary terms shake yourself out of it. I also think I have a lot to learn about how to go about it. But the resources below point the way to a decent start. I think this will be the subject for my next wave of study.
Jung on the Transcendent Function
An article that seems to cover it in pretty good depth.
The Transcendent Function: Jung's Model of Psychological Growth Through Dialogue With the Unconscious by Jeffrey C. Miller
Just reading the Look Inside is very enlightening. But be warned - take a look at this customer comment: Very ambitious but a bit flawed. Pretty heavy academic reading - goes over my head, but I get the gist of it. Some stuff ain't right. :lol: I got the Kindle version anyway, and I'll be keeping this advice in mind. Hopefully the book doesn't completely mess me up! :makeitstop:
Freud vs Jung - 2 very different conceptions of the unconscious
I've started reading the book on the Transcendent Function. I like the way the author keeps comparing and contrasting the views of Freud and Jung - it really helps you understand Jung's ideas better. I want to quickly run down the main differences in their understanding of the unconscious.
Freud discovered the personal unconscious, though he thought it was the entirety of the unconscious, and this shaped his understanding of it. Therefore he thought the unconscious was a part of the mind, a sort of junkyard where you discard unwanted parts of yourself. He believed that you could reduce the size of the unconscious by bringing its contents to conscious awareness, and that you could almost reduce it to nothing this way.
Jung went deeper and discovered the Collective Unconscious beneath the personal. He also discovered that the Shadow (Freud's junkyard) is not only negative things that you want to disown, but also contains many positive aspects of yourself that are as yet undeveloped. In his conception the unconscious is essentially another mind, one that we're unaware of but that has a compensatory relation to the conscious mind. In other words it contains everything repressed from the conscious, plus a lot more, and is always trying to help you realize your potentials, acting through intuitive and mysterious channels - such as dreams, fantasies, Active Imagination, Freudian slips, and Synchronicities. And of course you can assist this by deliberately coming into a closer relation with the unconscious and constellating the archetype of the Self.
Freud's view of the unconscious was very negative, a wasteland and an embarrassment. Jung's is magnanimous and grand - a vast and powerful helpful spirit or collection of them, that always shifts to enclose and encompass the conscious Ego. Freud's unconscious is like a small corner of the mind, whereas Jung's conscious Ego is an island in the ocean of the Unconscious. Another way to say this is that Freud believed the unconscious exists within us, while Jung believed we exist within the Unconscious.
Followup thoughts about the Opposites - a few examples
This has been swirling around in my head for a while now and I've had some new thoughts on it - just a little clarification.
Of course, the important opposites aren't things like hot and cold or up and down, unless you're taking those terms metaphorically (which you certainly can, and then they do become a lot more important, as everything does when taken metaphorically). The important ones are things like political or religious affiliation, Good and Evil, or alternately Good and Bad, positive and negative, and personality traits like Openness and Conscientiousness (for those familiar with Jordan Peterson). With these really big life opposites, one tends to be conscious and one pushed down into the unconscious.
Here's an example - just a quick sketch. Order and Chaos. These opposites define a certain dialectic in our lives. Too much chaos and you don't even know what's going on anymore - your life loses all structure and meaning and you descend into confusion, depression and madness. On the other hand, too much order and things become too strict and rigid - resulting in fascism or obsessive compulsive disorder. So it's necessary to try to find a balance point somewhere near the center. However, this isn't simple to do. Like anything organic or living, social structures and people's lives are always shifting, and can shift very powerfully one way or the other from time to time without warning. You might not even notice when it happens until it's been going on for a while and you start to wonder why everything is all messed up. It could be that your psyche, or maybe your family life, or some other aspect of your life has shifted radically toward chaos, or maybe toward excessive order. By thinking in terms of opposites, you eventually realize that you've given too much emphasis to one pole of a pair opposites. So you think about it - let's say you've become swamped in too much chaos.
So you think well, what's the opposite of chaos? It's order of course. You might use similar terms, like maybe Structure and Disorder, or Form and Formlessness. They're all very close in meaning. Heck, here's another synonym - Meaning and Meaninglessness. Jung always maintained that a life, especially beginning in the early 30's, what he calls the 2nd half of life, requires meaning and purpose or it goes off the deep end into depression and existential dread - what has been dubbed The Human Condition, or the Modern Human Condition (which is really just the unhealthy end of a pair of opposites, mental health and mental disorder - the pendulum has swung strongly toward the unhealthy end since religion and spirituality have been replaced by corporate greed and reductive materialism).
What I want to illustrate is that balance is not a simple matter of finding the precise center. There's no such thing except in abstractions like math. When you're dealing with living things such as human beings or human society, things are always in opposition and this opposition is always dynamic. I think I mentioned somewhere on this long and winding thread a ways back the idea of a juggler or circus performer balancing things - like spinning plates on long rods, or a chair on his chin. He can't just find a perfect balance point and then just keep things there - everything is always in motion one way or the other. So he has to keep constantly making minute adjustments, or sometimes much bigger and more sudden adjustments, as everything tends toward chaos until you act to bring order back.
So we're like jugglers - always leaning this way and that to compensate for things that are falling over. When something has shifted pretty far in one direction you need to overcompensate - imagine carrying a long pole across your shoulders with a heavy bucket of water hanging on each end of it. And let's say you had to make a right turn as you're walking under this burden. Momentum will keep it turning when you're ready to stop, you can't just make it stop on a dime. So you have to start slowing the turn down early, and you'll probably overshoot a bit and then have to very strongly resist to bring it back the other way. Overcompensation to find equilibrium. This is how the opposites often work.
Example - if chaos has got a strong hold on you - maybe you've been living wrong, smoking all kinds of things and gambling and just living as if nothing really matters - you're going to have to make a really strong effort for a good long time before things start to swing the opposite way. And then once you get it moving you can let off the pressure and let momentum take over until things are getting nearly balanced out again, and then you might have to exert a little pressure again to bring them to a halt where you want them.
Alright, I guess that's what I was wanting to explain. See ya next time...
Lucid Dreaming for Shadow Work / Individuation
Here's a book that's not only relevant to this thread, but also relevant to Dreamviews in general, because it's about using Lucid Dreaming to do Shadow work and achieve Individuation, also known as Spiritual Awakening or Ascension:
Dreaming Through Darkness: Shine Light into the Shadow to Live the Life of Your Dreams
This is also very similar to the posts I'm still getting ready to create, about Active Imagination, only it can be done while you're sleeping. I'm not quite ready to start posting about that just yet - need to read a little farther into the book first. But coming soon.
Active Imagination - laying the groundwork
Just starting to set the stage for a few posts on Active Imagination. I’ve read the book Jung on Active Imagination, though that was maybe 7 or 8 months ago, and I’m starting in on Jung and the Alchemical Imagination now by Jeffrey Raff.
A lot of alchemists, if not all of them, were also gnostics. I’m specifically talking here about those alchemists who understood that they were not literally trying to transmute lead into gold, but that it was a metaphor for an internal process - to change the dross of the unawakened human spirit into the gold of the constellated Self. Though I don’t think most of them realized it was actually internal - without an understanding of the unconscious they were projecting it out onto matter, onto the metals and chemicals in the alembic, and into the transforming fire of the furnace. It would take Jung, centuries later, to really understand what was going on, but they did lay the groundwork and develop much if not all of the process of Individuation, though that isn’t what they called it of course. They called it creating the Philosopher’s Stone - a symbol of the Self.
Quote:
They made a strong and clear distinction between 2 different modes of imaginal activity:
- Fantasy, which is shallow escapism and fails to connect with anything deep in the psyche or in external reality.
- Imagination, which runs deep and forges a strong connectedness between the inner and outer worlds.
This is the terminology Jeffrey Raff is using in his book, and that the Alchemists themselves used - at least some of them. I’m sure the words are different from place to place, from Alchemist to Alchemist. They were a loose group of rugged individualists, forged through the fires of Individuation, so they weren’t really joiners and didn’t form collectives and fall into alignment with a group identification.
Fantasy comes from the Ego, and therefore is disconnected from that vast well of creative energy and connectedness known as the unconscious.
The Ego likes to believe it is the whole being, but it’s wrong, and so it lives in shallow fantasy of its own making and believes its own lies. That is its nature. The awakening (Individuation) is really just the realization that the Ego is not the center of the whole being - that there’s a Self which is far greater and is in fact the real source of creative and transformative energy. That Self is like a giant or a God that has been dismembered and the parts scattered all throughout the diffuse realms of the undifferentiated Unconscious. It needs to be reassembled and revivified - and this is accomplished through the process of Active Imagination.
First a bit of etymology - the root word of both Magic and Imagination is Image. And as I discussed over a few posts recently, image is what the unconscious deals in. Symbols to be precise, which are a very specific kind of image - they represent very real processes in the psyche and allow for - even create transformation. So it’s clear to see why these images around which you build active imagination need to be honest and deep - otherwise they can’t strike into the heart of the psyche and reveal deep truths.
The difference between fantasy and imagination is like the difference between literature and formulaic genre fiction. The genre fiction uses well-worn tropes to actually avoid any deep connectedness, and to keep things light and avoid activating any strong negative emotions or making people think. But when you read literature - assuming it’s a type that appeals to you - it allows you to see through the surface veils and into the depths of reality and the human soul. It doesn’t shy away from the things that might frighten some people, and this is the source of its power. It’s exactly this unflinching courage to face harsh truths that allows transformation in the first place. Fear is what prevents it.
Individuation is really the Hero’s Journey, which necessitates a sojourn through the Land of the Dead — of the Spirits or the Ancestors - aka Hell. It requires unflinching courage and determination, and a willingness to face risk and sacrifice. It carries with it the always present risk of neurosis or psychosis. And as I’ve said several times on this thread and elsewhere, Individuation is also the process of growing up from immaturity. It’s like an initiation ritual, designed to forge tough and truth-facing people, not dependents who need protection. So it really isn’t for everyone.
It goes without saying that active imagination is very close to lucid dreaming. In the next post I’ll get into some specifics about how it’s done, and why I believe it sometimes actually is or becomes lucid dreaming. But all that remains for this post is a brief discussion about fantasy and imagination as they apply to lucid dreaming and active imagination.
The fantasy type of lucid dreaming is where you use lots of dream control or tricks to avoid letting things get too real. This is one of the dangers of getting really good at lucid dreaming - you develop these tricks and then you always have a way out whenever something a little scary or unnerving comes up. So rather than deal with it honesty and bravely, you teleport the monster into the sun or transform it into something silly and innocuous. Or you wake yourself up or change the entire dream into something different. There are many more ways of avoiding honesty and vulnerability in dreams, and of course there are many shades of meaning to this. Sometimes depending on how you use them, the same tricks can be used to face reality and deal with problems rather than avoiding them. There’s no really simple way to define which is which. It comes down to this — do you flee from facing something important, or do you face it and try to deal with it honestly? It would take a lot of writing to break this down and try to explain it completely - I’m going to leave it at this. The people who are ready to deal squarely with reality will already understand. If you find yourself getting angry or uncomfortable about what I’m writing, chances are you’re not ready for this yet.
I’ll also repeat something I’ve said elsewhere on the board that’s closely related - being too aggressive, passive or defensive - these are cop-outs from facing reality. What’s called for in terms of spiritual development and growth is vulnerability and openness. In other words, it’s like in waking life - it’s always best to engage in honest dialogue rather than the avoidance tactics of fight or flight, freeze or fawn. These are extreme reactions - fear driven and used to put off really dealing with an issue. They’re primitive defensive tactics. What’s called for in a more mature person is the ability to listen and respond intelligently and without seeing the other as just an adversary, but trying to honesty understand whatever point they’re trying to make. This requires vulnerability and openness rather than a hard charging, guns blasting approach or running and hiding desperately - negotiation rather than warfare. You should try to aim for dialogue rather than attack, though I think sometimes a fight is inevitable, and some figures might be too powerful and too aggressive to dialogue with at first and you might need to work your way through several encounters and whittle them down by trying to be understanding. In an active imagination session you can always and easily end it when things start to get too intense.
I should also say that this kind of work is for people in midlife - usually beginning somewhere in the 30’s. Below this age range, fantasy is perfectly fine and natural, but in midlife people start to require meaning and purpose in their lives, and this is when it becomes important to use dreaming and active imagination for self development.
Some of your contents, especially if they represent complexes or neuroses or trauma, will undoubtedly come at you guns blazing or in full attack mode. It’s probably best - well I won’t even conjecture at this point - I’m outside of my competence range now. Some people who have what’s known as weak Ego boundaries should not practice active imagination, as the flood of released unconscious material may be too overwhelming and cause serious mental issues. This is just a commonsense warning. The same is true for life itself - it can damage those with a weak Ego or other psychological problems. In other words, just like lucid dreaming itself (and life), the byword is proceed with caution and at your own risk.
Active imagination is a combining of conscious and unconscious using imagery (symbols), and it results in a third thing that appears, a symbol created by the unconscious, which unites the two. In other words, it’s the Transcendent Function. This is the whole purpose of active imagination, and it is intended to result in Individuation, also known as the constellation of the Self from the previously disorganized and scattered unconscious.
Dealing with Neuroses and Complexes
I’ve mentioned many times that neuroses and complexes are a problem - this is true in life as well as in Individuation. Here's how to deal with them - it's a good idea to do this before embarking on Individuation.
I’ve just recently put together a few of Jung’s statements concerning neuroses and how he managed to cure himself of his at an early age - and I can recommend a book to help learn about and deal with complexes.
Neuroses:
I’ll just be brief and blunt about neuroses - Jung said that what they are essentially is a way of getting out of doing things you don’t want to do.
And as for how he healed his own - as a boy he developed a neurosis of fainting every time he needed to go to school or do homework. Then one day he overheard his father talking to someone about it, and he became very embarrassed at his own immaturity and the problems he was causing the family - he wasn’t really aware of that and had been very self-centered about it.
So he simply forced himself to do those things he had been avoiding. In a very real way, the neurosis was just an excuse - a way of getting out of going to school or doing school work. He had allowed himself to get in the very bad habit of fainting in order to avoid it. At first when he would sit down and try to do his schoolwork, or start off to go to school again (they had taken him out for a time) he would begin to feel faint again, but at that point he would close the book or stop walking toward the school until it passed, and then when he was able, he would make himself get right back to it - even if only a single problem or a few steps at a time. In a very short time he was completely over it.
This is what was known in those days as the 'self-bullying cure’ - simply forcing yourself to do it, but easing off when strong symptoms start to develop. You need to find that sweet spot - find your limit and go right up to it but not beyond. In this way you get your mind used to the fact that it can’t take the easy way out anymore, and the resistance will ease off and disappear.
Complexes:
There’s a very good book about it from a Jungian perspective called The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego by Erel Shalit. Sorry, I don’t know any books about dealing with Neuroses or I would list those as well. I’ll just quickly explain the basic concept of how to deal with complexes - but if you’re interested you should definitely read the book. Much of it is done through dream work, and so could obviously be dealt with through Active Imagination or Lucid Dreaming.
Basically you need to first discover what complex or complexes you have. You can doubtless learn about the most well-known ones online - the book also lists many of them.
A complex becomes a problem mainly when it sinks into the unconscious, where it becomes inflexible and can’t be transformed through dream work or symbolism. But simply by learning what it is and opening yourself up to acceptance of it you bring it into the conscious mind where it can then be worked with.
The nice thing is - a complex is actually trying to help you work your way toward healing - it’s just that rather than pay attention to them and learn the lesson they’re trying to teach, many people push them down into the unconscious and ignore them. It takes openness, honesty and a certain kind of courage to face them and accept them as your own. I’m talking about the courage to not ignore or put off the truth even if it hurts or makes you feel ashamed or insignificant or helpless. It’s the courage of acceptance and vulnerability, rather than the courage of sheer determination or willful ignorance.
So as you can see, this is that same kind of courage needed to do Active Imagination and Lucid Shadow work - the same kind needed for psychoanalysis or therapy of any kind. Many of us learned the other kind of courage when we were young - the courage to ignore any problems and just soldier on, consequences be damned. That will work for a time, but later in life it causes problems and the other kind of courage, as well as education about the unconscious and how to deal with it, are needed.
After discovering and accepting your complex(es), you can then do dream work or Active Imagination - bring about the Transcendent Function and the resulting transformative symbols that will heal you. I would recommend doing this for any neuroses and complexes you’re aware of before getting in very deep with Individuation. The complexes and neuroses are flaws that become weak points, and the pressure of bringing up intense unconscious contents can cause you to break at the weak points - this is what causes the psychoses or neuroses I keep warning about. I know, it sounds weird - heal your neuroses so you don’t get more or make them worse, but if you think about it it does make sense.
Ok, next I'll pick up where I left off about Active Imagination, this time with a how-to. The fun stuff begins... :chuckle:
