Image, Symbol, and Psychic Reality

“The unconscious attracts the conscious mind to its aims via the symbol… Jung’s empirical investigations show dream-symbols to be the means through which psychic energy is transferred to consciousness; the image is the form of that energy. Dreams often anticipate moods and feelings which may persist for a considerable time, allowing certain ideas in them to take hold and stimulate thought as it is slowly and subtly influenced toward a more symbolic reality.” — A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

I was always fascinated by Jung’s examples of synchronistic events, and many likewise share an interest in the shadow-side of our mostly artificial, conscious-bound lives. However perceived, they’re psychic facts which reveal another realm beyond our usual mundane experiences. Seldom do they conform to traditional notions of them.

They defy scientific and religious preconceptions alike — part of the irrational mystery, not only of consciousness, but of a natural reality which can’t be pinned down by logical thought. This mystery can be so unsettling to our self-images as to be a severe blow to those whose fear and insecurity is compensated by hopeful and exaggerated certainties. It nonetheless imposes itself with such persistence that only the most rational could not at least  be impressed by it.

Jung wrote that one of the main features of synchronistic events appears to be their connection to archetypal situations. By archetypal, Jung referred to those instinctual functions common to all and which correspond to the average run of human experience: death, transitional stages, and other such events as evoke heightened unconscious activity; decisive conflicts which have shaped relations to objective reality through eons.

Because of this evolutionary level of experience, Jung suggested that archetypal images operate in the animal psyche in the same way they do in us, only perhaps less consciously. Though this idea logically proceeds from established history, the nature of conscious focus often blocks our experience of it, just as animals live it in relative unconsciousness.

Unlike ‘lower’ animals, however, we may perceive it more or less consciously, retrieve memories of it at will (some, anyway), and weigh its future possibilities (sometimes) — important functions of dreams, our vivid memories of them, and our capacity to reflect on them.

Collectively, we see ourselves as having moved beyond instinctual behavior (an objective measure of our lack of self-awareness), though traditional religious and philosophical assumptions have long described our split psyches in one form or another. Even our remote ancestors, more attuned to nature than we are, reveal those self-flattering, compensating ego-fantasies in much the same way we’re possessed by them today — an artificial reality which deceives us immeasurably about our true natures.

Owing to our animal heritage, it only makes sense that instinctual life-energies express natural processes conforming to an earthly reality. This, despite religious fantasies conceiving ego as somehow co-existing in an ethereal universe beyond nature and the earth — a descriptive projection and a much different view of ourselves than conventional wisdom has conditioned us to accept. Such ideas graphically illustrate Jung’s conception of psychic reality: they’re very real to those who believe in them, even as they reveal a deeper, more symbolic nature.

They don’t presently belong to the common stock of accepted truths. For anyone who’s had ‘other-worldly’ experiences though, Jung’s concepts are an avenue by which to see them as natural events which occur among all people in all times. That they can’t be explained in terms of cause and effect is further incentive to explore our assumptions about an irrational reality beyond human logic. 

It might be productive to look at the problem the other way round and see our affinity with animals rather than how we’re distinct from them. One experience in particular helped me to recognize that affinity (apart from the entire history of our development) when I was in my late twenties:

It was a very decisive period in my life; my closest friend of many years had died in a car accident, and I felt the need to be more connected with nature than the city streets I’d become accustomed to during the previous few years. I moved to the country, got a dog, and began a new life without my old friend.

Soon, I had a dream in which I saw a great severed tree trunk next to my bed. It was very thick, about three feet high, and I touched it. I thought it was the hardest and most concrete thing I could imagine. Suddenly, it began to undulate like a a belly dancer. This trunk which was so cut-off and inert, was yet so pliable and alive, I was astounded. I felt a profound mystery as I watched it sway.

Shortly afterward, I’d cut some lumber for a home project and left ten or so small blocks of wood in the yard. The next morning, planning to gather them up, I looked out through the window…

There, in front of the house lay my dog, fast asleep. Surrounding her in a circle were five blocks of wood I’d cut the previous day. She’d carefully chosen the random blocks to lay about her and then curled up to sleep within the circle she’d made.

I didn’t have to know anything about the symbolic attributes of the number five or the circle, or even the dog, to feel the strange emotional impression of the sight of her sleeping there in the protective sphere her own dog’s imagination had arrayed. I knew intuitively it was meaningful.

Later experiences, along with Jung’s concepts, helped me understand the natural energy gravitating around this experience which drew my dog to express the archetypal symbols which prompted her through me — though emotionally, I still didn’t need any reasons for it, nor did I ever really seek any. Subsequent study of the history of symbols only reinforced its mystery and meaning to me.

The emotional impact alone was enough for me to accept it as ultimately beyond comprehension, though somehow not requiring any explanation to clarify it. The experience of them convinced me of their reality. In fact, it would almost have seemed a sacrilege to try to explain them — and I was not a religious man in my late twenties. 

I did question such things later in an attempt to understand them. But, in the end, it didn’t really matter. I never lost that awe. Is it ignorant? Unscientific? Too emotionally credulous? Or a natural reaction to the mystery of life obscured by the dull certitude of fact and knowledge and accepted opinion? 

For more background on these ideas, read the preface to my book.