August 30, 2014 · 8:04 am

On the Religious Nature of Mid-Life

In a previous post, I discussed some dreams I experienced at mid-life; my transition from a rational, too-masculine thinking type to one who could feel the emotions designed to relate to a symbolic reality. I mentioned dreams of a religious nature that supplemented the ones which were the focus of that post.

I would like to bring the religious ones into relation with those: to show how the unconscious attempts to reconcile deeper psychic facts with the more recent ideas of Christian social development — and the modern truths of causal education. The three intertwine today, accentuating an emotional confusion which only compels us more certainly into an all-consuming collectivism.

The dream-series about dogs was interspersed with others which began to draw me to very old ideas. I’d moved into a “fixer-upper” and had some leaks repaired under the house. Afterward, I dreamed I was looking at the plumber’s bill. Below the list of repairs was a penciled illustration of Christ on the cross. I was struck by how beautifully it was drawn, and it occurred to me that I’d drawn it!

I was still in a rational mind-set, though; anti-religious — I couldn’t reconcile the contradictions of traditional belief intellectually. Even so, the dream described the spiritual nature of the psychic energy leaking out (wasted, unused) underneath consciousness: I had no real feeling-experience of the ideas the unconscious seized on to inform me where I was in life. I was being prepared emotionally for dreams which would further elaborate that initial theme: the image of a man struggling under the tension of opposites.

I soon experienced what I now call “the fall into the hands of the living God”: an emotional state so intense and frightening, I felt like I’d lost my mind; I held on tight. After a wrenching sleepless night, it took all my efforts to get through the next day. I went to bed that night exhausted from the mental tension. I was so overwhelmed, all I could think was to read the Bible! I — who was raised with it as a youngster yet compelled to dispute every word of it! “Somehow”, I found myself reading about Abraham and Sarah.

I put the Bible aside, wondering whether I would be able to sleep for the tension which still held me in its grip. As I lay there, preparing for another sleepless night, an image appeared in my mind’s eye: Arthur Ashe, the great tennis player, was playing tennis with a shadowy opponent! He was from Richmond, Va., my “hometown”. He’d died of AIDS from a tainted blood transfusion. A sudden wave of relief swept over me, the tension disappeared, and I fell asleep.

(Later reflection on the image yielded its ideas: tennis as a symbol of the back and forth exchange process with the unconscious, Ashe’s death from AIDS, a “sexually” transmitted “disease”: how I saw the “creative” process “afflicting” me; the blood transfusion, death, the transition of an old attitude and re-birth at mid-life — exactly what I was experiencing in the analogy!)

I recalled only one dream that night: a chimpanzee in a blue dress looked at me intently. “I’m Sarah.” it said. The dress was the same one a friend described a few years before, when he’d confessed to me that he wore it to bed with his wife. He’d struggled with that since he was five, too ashamed to tell anyone else. He was an engineer, a rational, thinking man whose male image had diverted vital feelings. They appeared feminine to him, just as the unconscious reflected it back through the lonely compulsion which bid him wear its image.

You remember Sarah, right? She was barren, couldn’t “conceive” (just like me). She was older, Abraham’s second wife (a reference to the second half of life). The Lord yet decreed she would have a child. I remembered the alchemical parable in which a “king had a baby in his brain.” His kingdom was dry and arid; to fructify it, the unconscious birthed a new image to re-direct his duties to it.

I related the chimpanzee’s primitive nature; I thought about Sarah and my friend’s blue dress (the color of the sky, of lofty patriarchal fantasies), the dogs who’d turned against me. It slowly dawned on me that these pictures were describing the age-old spiritual longing inside: the unconscious direction of my own soul, the psychic function meant to mediate what I thought I knew about myself but didn’t know: what my nature revealed outside my collective viewpoint.

The image of Christ is not just a faded, antique form of imitation in which an undeveloped and over-compensating ego once convinced itself that it had already accomplished our deepest intuitions. It’s a profound historical model which today describes the psychic conflicts endured by one who turns inward and sacrifices his/her personal desires for something greater than itself.

Read the story of how intellect is drawn into an exchange process with the unconscious through the gradual development of symbolic thought.

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August 15, 2014 · 8:14 am

Relations Between Conscious and Unconscious: The Exchange Process

Jung once wrote that it’s not so important to interpret dreams as it is to experience them. This is especially so at mid-life, when one may feel the need to make conscious emotions out of the educational stages which fortify ego into a separate identity — one stable enough to overcome its sensual illusions and confront an objective reality inside.

While it’s instructive (and somewhat flattering) to work a dream into a form acceptable to intellect, nature works over centuries to produce even smaller fruits of Eden ripe enough to be ingested by the conscious part. They attain the clarity to appear as associable ideas only by the added energy of attention. That (somewhat figuratively) is how Jung’s energic theory describes the exchange between conscious and unconscious.

A dream doesn’t stop working when something valuable is discovered in it. At mid-life, it’s only the beginning of a process designed to form a relationship, just as two strangers might establish common ground. But, the figures confronting you inside are vital parts of you who want attention doubly on that account.

They’re sometimes comforting, but at other times, too, are very contrary — even hostile — especially when they want you to inspect needful things that you may have been taught were of no importance by a backward (causal) and collective ego-worship.

At such a point, I dreamed of a small white poodle busily re-arranging my house. As I watched, I became incensed. The damn thing set up a fan in my kitchen to draw outside air in through the window — in the winter! I screamed at it: “This is my fucking house!” Yet it went right on, paying no attention to my ranting.

I associated the black poodle of Goethe’s, Faust: the supportive instinctual form of the creative force of Lucifer (the Light-bearer) yet to shine the light of consciousness onto darker conflicts. I awoke anxiously but fell back asleep. The dream continued: the white poodle was in my bed stimulating me sexually!

I considered the color white, a reference to consciousness — the opposite of unconscious blackness. I thought about Jung’s premise that sexuality symbolizes creative nature in its most profound sense — an instinctual function of relationship. When I became hostile and screamed, it was the reaction of an anxious and defensive ego being re-arranged to make room for creative (fucking) processes outside its perception.

It portended intimate relations (the bed and the sexual stimulation) with this feminine poodle (the unconscious), to compensate a rational, too-masculine ego. I saw myself as an action figure, as I was expected to be in the outer world; an actor, a worn-out Sylvester Stallone: an aging, faked-up hero-idol clinging to a moribund masculine image.

Along with other dreams, I went back to it again and again over the next two years. That was ten years ago; I couldn’t describe it symbolically then as now. But — I felt it, intuited it; able only through devotion (conscious attention) and the aid of Jung’s ideas. When I’d experienced its emotions enough to satisfy the unconscious that I was ready to move on, it changed into my black lab who’d died years before. She’d come back in my dreams!

But, her friendly form didn’t last long. Over the next year, she became threatening, snarling, biting at me. Toward the end of that dream-series, I could only ward her off on my back, with my feet (my deepest conflicts), as she attacked me viciously.

In a later dream, I explained to a shadowy figure that she’d had a psychotic episode. I had more dreams about dogs turning “psychotically” against me. Over the next year, still more dreams embraced religious ideas, and they slowly bore their core meaning into my stubborn consciousness. The dream which tipped the scale found me shouting at an old, disheveled woman in a square with a dark pond surrounded by apartments: “You’re crazy!” I screamed as she stared uncannily.

My soul, which I had accepted was of so little importance in a world of men; of power, wealth and social striving, was sick — in full rebellion of the way I treated it. I felt sick. Well, I was — but not in the way I thought…

My dreams showed me that it wasn’t she or I who was crazy; I only thought the unconscious was crazy! It reflected back to me the way I was looking at it. I saw it as crazy — which it is in the sense that it’s irrational, beyond collective judgment.

Within a year, I was writing poetry, making emotions out of the strange dreams which continue to reveal who I am — outside the ego I identified with. Three more years of intense self-analysis, guided by my dreams and Jung’s ideas, found me constructing the symbolic tale of my own inner journey. It’s as profound and insightful as the figures which lurk behind it, and though it may appear strange to the rational mindset — it is a reality.

Along with my posts, the book is one small man’s effort to shine just a little new light on its mystery. Read more about the events leading to it here, or visit Amazon.

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August 7, 2014 · 5:54 pm

Symbolic Thinking, Reflection, and Mid-Life

The value of religion and philosophy lies in their power to evoke ideas which the unconscious seizes upon to express itself. That value was semi-conscious in the past, though another factor today reveals the complement which would lead us into the next developmental stage: psychological reflection. The last fifty years have brought into stark relief how easily ego can lose touch with inner reality when its needs aren’t recognized and projected onto the material world.

When we can no longer relate to symbols, we lose the use of vital functions. We begin to feel signals from the unconscious to compensate the loss; symbolic, too, because it’s the language of psychic reality. They consist of a litany of disorders designed to re-connect us to the living Deity (not the one of wishful fantasy, but the one who makes demands, remember? like the one from the Old Testament, in league with Satan, who afflicted Job?)

You wouldn’t know why you felt such things as Job suffered, if you had no blueprint of the design. You’d see a doctor and take “medicine” for problems that were conceived materially (just like in the old story), because the doctor had no modern concept of psychic reality, either. One in ten adults takes anti-depressants (not to mention everything else we take), and that jumps to one in four among women in their forties and  fifties. Is it significant given the patriarchal mid-life myth we fancy we’ve outgrown — yet are discarding without having reflected on its meaning?

Jungians prescribe a heady brew of archetypal symbolism; it makes sense, but much of it is even further removed than the more recent symbols of our Christian heritage. Jung used alchemy to illustrate the connective stage between the medieval Christian world and the modern rational view; to show how the unconscious described the changing conditions. But, alchemical symbolism, too, is very abstruse to a modern mind in search of meaning.

I’ve recently been absorbed in James Branch Cabell’s 1920’s re-telling of two medieval folk tales: Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice and Figures of Earth. A friend who knew the peculiar workings of my mind saw a local PBS program on Cabell; we live in his hometown of Richmond, Va. Funny, how such books may fall into one’s hands! It sold poorly — until local courts declared it obscene, at which point sales soared briefly. It was Cabell’s own symbolic mid-life mystery.

Not only did the tales allow the unconscious to express itself through them, he lent conscious development to them by his reflective work. But Cabell was no psychologist; he was a writer and philosopher, a thoughtful man drawn to the ideas by the process he gave himself to. Like alchemical ideas, they described natural, creative instincts outside the dogma of conventional belief.

In the tales of Jurgen, the same exchange process as in the partriarchal story of Job takes a more modern, personal form. Jurgen’s journey began in search of his wife (!) who, upon returning from the market, was lured into a dark cave by a “black gentleman (poor fellow!)”:

Chapter 24, The Shortcomings of Prince Jurgen, describes a meeting with Queen Anaitis, “whom Jurgen found to be a nature myth of doubtful origin connected with the Moon… who furtively swayed the tides of life… It was the mission of Anaitis to divert and turn aside and deflect: in this the jealous Moon abetted her because sunlight makes for straightforwardness… These mysteries of their private relations, however, as revealed to Jurgen, are not very nicely repeatable.”

Jurgen, in conventional reverence to Sunday, had offended the Queen by not paying proper respect to Monday, to the unconscious. “But, you dishonored the Moon, Prince Jurgen, denying praise to the day of the Moon. Or so, at least, I have heard.”

But, Jurgen was a “monstrous clever fellow”: “I remember doing nothing of the sort. But I remember considering it unjust to devote one paltry day to the Moon’s majesty. For night is sacred to the Moon… night, the renewer and begetter of all life.”

“Why, indeed, there is something in that argument,” says Anaitis, dubiously.” Jurgen knows he must propitiate her power, for hers is “the werke of an High Deity.”

” ‘Something’, do you say! why, but to my way of thinking it proves the Moon is precisely seven times more honorable… It is merely, my dear, a matter of arithmetic.” Anaitis is apparently somewhat innocent of the rational, deceptive ways of men: “Was it for that reason you did not praise… Mondays…?”

“Why, to be sure,” said Jurgen glibly… Then Jurgen coughed and looked sidewise at his shadow.” This shadow followed Jurgen throughout his journeys; only in darkness could he cast off the silent reminders of its constant presence.

“Anaitis appeared relieved. “I shall report your explanation. Candidly, there were ill things in store for you, Prince Jurgen, because your language was misunderstood. But that which you now say puts quite a different complexion upon matters.

“Jurgen laughed, not understanding the mystery, but confident he could always say what was required of him.” Jurgen “… found that unknowingly he had in due and proper form espoused Queen Anaitis, by participating in the Breaking of the Veil, which is the marriage ceremony… His earlier relations with Dame Lisa [his wife] had, of course, no legal standing in Cocaigne, where the Church is not Christian…”

Jung discovered a language by which symbols may be more clearly understood by the rational viewpoint today, but they require reflection. Read here about a symbolic mid-life tale in more modern form.

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August 1, 2014 · 10:24 am

The Value of Religious Ideas

“And they relate that while… Manuel sat cosily… and noted how the snow was drifting by the windows, the ghost of Niafer went restlessly about green fields… in the paradise of the pagans. When the kindly, great-browed warders asked her what it was she was seeking, the troubled spirit could not tell them, for Niafer had tasted Lethe, and had forgotten Dom Manuel. Only her love for him had not been forgotten, because that love had become a part of her, and so lived on as a blind longing and as a desire which did not know its aim.” — Figures of Earth, James Branch Cabell.

This quote poignantly expresses a modern problem which is yet as old as humanity. It came into being with consciousness: you know, the mysterious complex of associations by which nature evolved a sense of personal identity for each individual of our species. (It grows out of your childhood, its foundation too dark and ancient for memory or knowledge.) Its greater purposes can only be surmised, though we know much about its immediate advantages.

The capacity to think, to learn and anticipate causal effects in the environment, along with the evolution of social instincts, were unique in nature. A basic quality of personal identity was its conflict with its inborn social structure, and the tension between them yielded creative energies which excelled other beasts. The conscious/unconscious exchange between individual and group was a catalyst for development so sweeping, it changed the face of the earth.

(Over your own centuries, it changes your face, too, often in ways unknown to you; for, the partial complex also has hidden liabilities. You can’t see them; they impose an invisible fence around everything we do…)

The fear, uncertainty, and confusion caused by its inner conflicts produced unconscious defense-reactions which compelled it to cling to the security of an illusory present as long as it could. Only the tension of creative conflicts endured by certain individuals pushed it forward into an irreversible future (the nature of time perception).

(You may remember the psychic distress which sparked awarenesses of yourself in your own primitive history — or they may return only as fleeting images and feelings at night, when the “old brain” recalls them in its own strange way to sketch out your tomorrows.)

The unconscious energy intended for its development naturally guided it toward solutions for relieving it. Beyond the demands of physical survival, a kind of psychic devotion slowly differentiated itself. It was the “excess” energy reserved for inflicting the painful tension of conflicts meant to guide the beast toward its still-evolving human potential.

(You actually resembled this beast psychically when you were in grade school, preparing you for the medieval stages of puberty and young adulthood.)

The battle for survival shifted more and more onto a psychic plane, and “the unbearable surfeit of energy” (as Jung called it) — the reserve intended for development — presented existential religious and philosophical problems as a means of stimulating self-discovery. They were so fundamental to human nature, they were innate in it as a blind longing, a need, which could only be filled through devotion to it.

(You were probably beginning to think about ideas of God, spirits, ghosts, even your dreams at that time, weighing your feelings against what you’d been taught — if your attention wasn’t constantly diverted by electronic devices. In any event, you would be soon to fall headlong for a very attractive image which would entice your development further — its conflicts and compromises, too. This is where the love factors in.)

Though the tensions steadily evolved into ever higher aims, the silent anxiety and clinging to the security of the known convinced the general consciousness that it had attained to its final stage at every temporary signpost. Only when very grave conditions threatened it through the unintended consequences of its repression and its hostile projection onto others was it slowly driven to change its notions of inner reality.

New ideas circulated through mythic messengers, creative individuals, designed to make the partial complex reflect on itself, to re-orient it — to guide it out of the grave conditions it had half-created…

(This was when your philosophical and religious education had long since ceased and mass illusions of ego/intellect and the certainty of rational thought stopped up your ability to observe what was happening inside you; you were carried along in the collective frenzy, never thought about where you were; you were seized by vague desires that couldn’t be repressed or satisfied; you got depressed, had obsessive thoughts, felt compulsive urges, misplaced hostilities, became moody and sensitive, took “medicine” to relieve stress or help you sleep.)

So nature decreed. For a split consciousness with limited, personal notions of time, however, spiritual ideas required centuries of upheaval to take root. Only when enough individuals had reflected on the need for them were the rest drawn to participate in the task of lifting humanity out of the heavy burden of its primitive heritage — and its flighty rejection of it. Nature also decrees that each is bidden to confront it anew on a higher level with every generation.

If you’ve never experienced such things, I leave you with this statement by Cabell from the same book quoted above:

“But of living persons, I dare assert that you will find King Helmas appreciably freed from a thousand general delusions by his one delusion about himself.”

Read more about this inner confrontation with psychic reality here.

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July 23, 2014 · 1:46 pm

A Reason for Religion: Subjective Views in an Objective World of Illusion

After watching a program on Caligula, I found myself thinking about a quote from Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, in which he set out his theory of psychic energy. Historians have written volumes on the decline of cultures, the reasons, parallels with modern ones, etc. But, historians aren’t psychologists, and few psychologists are historians. Jung’s historical studies are what distinguished his work:

St. Augustine described the fate of Alypus in his, Confessions, in 398 A.D.: “But at Carthage the maelstrom of ill morals — and especially the passion for idle spectacles — had sucked him in, his special madness being for gladiatorial shows… As a result of what he had heard me say, he wrenched himself out of the deep pit in which he had chosen to be plunged and in the darkness of whose pleasures he had been so woefully blinded. He braced his mind and shook it till all the filth of the Games fell away from it and he went no more…”

Augustine told how Alypus went to Rome to study law, turned from the games, and detested his former passion:  “But it happened one day that he met some friends… coming from dinner: and though he flatly refused and vigorously resisted, they used friendly violence and forced him along with them to the amphitheatre on a day of these cruel and murderous Games. He protested: “Even if you drag my body to the place, can you force me to turn my mind and my eyes on the show? Though there, I shall not be there, and so I shall defeat both you and it.”

When they found their seats, “… the whole place was in a frenzy of hideous delight. He closed up the door of his eyes and forbade his mind to pay attention to things so evil. If only he could have stopped his ears too! For at a certain critical point in the fight, the vast roar of the whole audience beat upon him. His curiosity got the better of him, and thinking he would be able to treat the sight with scorn… he opened his eyes, and was stricken with a deeper wound in the soul than the man he had opened his eyes to see suffered in the body.”

He wrote that Alypus’ weakness was his self-reliance (the illusions of collective ego) when he should have trusted only in God (the unconscious urge for unity and wholeness in the symbol). “Seeing the blood he drank deep of the savagery. He did not turn away but fixed his gaze upon the sight. He drank in all the frenzy with no thought of what had happened to him, revelled in the wickedness of the contest, and was drunk with lust for blood. He was no longer the man who had come there but one of the crowd to which he had come, a fit companion for those who had brought him.”

To end the passage, Jung wrote: “One can take it as certain that man’s domestication cost him the heaviest sacrifices. An age which created the Stoic ideal must doubtless have known why and against what it was set up.” He compared the age of Nero four and a half centuries earlier with a quote from Seneca’s forty-first letter to Lucilius: “We push one another into vice. And how can a man be recalled to salvation, when he has none to restrain him, and all mankind to urge him on?”

Jung saw Christianity as a deep need for “… the founding of a community united by an idea, in the name of which they could love one another… a mediator in whose name new ways of love could be opened, became a fact, and with that human society took an immense stride forward. This was not the result of any speculative, sophisticated philosophy, but of an elementary need in the great masses of humanity vegetating in spiritual darkness… evidently driven to it by the profoundest inner necessities, for humanity does not thrive in a state of licentiousness.”

In the West, the age of sacrifice for anything much more than our biological natures is fading, though a frenzied new mass greed finds us still with just enough self-knowledge to keep us above a tide of unconscious emotion which can ignite as surely as history dictates who we are. Today, over thirty wars are being fought worldwide, and whole cultures are drawn into the frenzy of the spectacle just as in Augustine’s day.

Consciousness is changing quickly, but a deep part of the new mass individual remains stuck in an era already in decline before it developed. What happens when the ideas constituting humanity’s “immense stride forward” sink into oblivion, no longer visible through its illusions of objectivity; when the deeper image, too, is repressed by an ego which cannot of itself relent in its unconscious efforts to destroy its own hubris with its own creations?

The beast of historical regression rages openly in the Middle East; the mass mind compelled into its global implications. It’s what religious ideas were meant to counter: to develop the animal lurking beneath ego-ideals. To confront it requires an inward struggle — to keep the twenty-first century from becoming an immense stride backward.

Read more about the symbolic entanglements which would turn the confrontation with ourselves into an image of the individual beyond the illusions created by the modern greed of mass media, diversion, and deception.

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July 16, 2014 · 2:14 pm

Mid-Life and Psychic Regression

I ended my last post with broad references to Christian ideals, our animal heritage, intellect, the urge to wholeness, and how they relate to mid-life. They were vague to anyone not familiar with depth psychology; I’m aware that rational viewpoints dismiss as nonsense anything that doesn’t logically follow their reasoning. Images and symbols weave through our lives as fleeting dreams which dissipate upon waking, leaving only traces of ideas and emotions soon forgotten in the frenzied rush of contemporary life.

To the youthful mind, they’re of little importance — the first half of life is designed to strengthen and consolidate consciousness. Over its course, however, those same fleeting, soon-forgotten emotions gain energy and themselves begin to coalesce and consolidate to reveal a greater perspective.

They form complexes of ideas revolving around philosophical questions and religious uncertainties clamoring to be resolved. When they attain a certain degree of unconscious development, and we can’t relate consciously to the ideas informing us of where we are, they appear to doctors as mental disorders.

These are symbols of transition, and they can only apparently be repressed. To medically oriented psychologies, when they’ve attained enough energy (value and purpose) to openly oppose conscious intent, they require drugs to further repress. Causes are usually hypothesized around unalterable conditions: genes, inherited traits, past trauma, even the body’s chemistry.

The intended soul development remains trapped in the body, in the unconscious, where the stress and tension eventually disrupt its natural rhythm. The unrelieved tension, the reinforcement of the biological viewpoint, and the treatments themselves all conspire to effect real physical problems which then prompt this reassuring statement from the physician/therapist: you’ll probably have this condition for the rest of your life (indeed)  — but there are treatments which can alleviate the symptoms (but not the cause).

My step-father was a very intelligent, rational man. He confided once when I was a mid-teen that he didn’t dream any more. In the Freudian haze of his wishful assessment, he thought he’d mastered the “subconscious” and was living fully consciously. Ten years younger than my mom, he was thirty at that time. Five years later, he and my mom divorced, he married his high school sweetheart, and I never saw him again.

However — my younger sister lived with them while attending college, and she later described those years. He only drank two or three times a year when I lived with him and my mom — on festive occasions, maybe a Christmas party or a visit from an old college friend. My sister was adopted after I’d gone to live with my father, but we established a close friendship through family visits which we still maintain.

Because of her reserved nature, we didn’t fully discuss those years until he died at fifty-eight from a heart attack. She’d left after her undergraduate work, and procured loans for her graduate studies, visiting him only sporadically over the years, trying to forget the things she revealed after he died. She was so angry at the end, she didn’t want to attend his funeral — though she did.

He and his high school sweetheart bickered constantly and got shit-faced every night. Later, when my sister took her fiancee to meet them, he passed out at the dinner table and his face just plopped down in his plate, drunk. He had to be picked up, cleaned off, and taken to bed like a baby.

I didn’t have to be there to know what people said after he died. “He was a drunk, an alcoholic… his father was an alcoholic… he had the gene… he should’ve gone to rehab…” Yet, he’d been a vital and productive man, however closed off in himself, before the unconscious repression of mid-life consigned him to his slow demise. Because he had no concept of the regression of psychic energy and its purposes, he was stuck confronting his own soul concretely through the projected adversary he both loved and hated in his “real” life.

His is not my only experience of the repression of mid-life psychology which sometimes begins the slow unraveling (or constriction and stiffening) of an ego which has no concept of what’s happening to it — and nowhere to turn when it takes hold. Fortunately, mid-life doesn’t always end in the catastrophes I’ve seen in my admittedly limited personal experience.

Still, as I studied Jung and became conscious of my own catastrophe, I began to see their effects in most everyone I knew. Few, in fact, were spared these trials of Job, and most who navigated them were probably lucky not to have had the money or inclination to seek professional help.

Over the years, they yielded to the inner demand to confront themselves at least on some level. It was the unconscious which guided them through the confusion and distress, though they had little concept of it other than “just getting older”.

How much more meaningful could our development be if we actually had conscious knowledge of the emotional twists and turns this process takes in its natural course? Actually participated in it with some conscious sense of its profound importance in our lives? Jung outlined it for those would be aware of it, and we need those ideas to relate to ourselves. My step-father needed them desperately and never knew it.

You may read an example of the ideas and emotions provoked by the mid-life process and how it can become conscious through the value of Jung’s work in my book, A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious.

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July 9, 2014 · 4:08 pm

Mid-Life: Psychic Evolution

Scan some of the online literature about mid-life, and you’ll be impressed by the volume and variety of signs and symptoms associated with it. Such mild regressions as chasing the gray away, face-lifts and tummy-tucks, sports cars and younger lovers, however, are only surface reflections of what’s happening unconsciously.

One thing is gaining recognition: transitional changes begin in the body but also have profound psychological effects, as mind and body are not separate by nature. Instincts once conceived as physiological for lack of a psychological perspective were euphemized as “drives” by ego-based psychologies unable to deny them — this, despite the sweeping psychic changes attending puberty and young adulthood. It was as if ego’s current state of knowledge relieved any further development save the rote learning of facts.

But, instinctive needs are generated by emotions portending more than just biological imperatives. I know I was raised with the fearful need for security — especially by staid adults whose knowledge and authority masked a deeper uncertainty —  in a world that is as relentlessly irrational and ever-changing internally as it is externally.

Mid-life is a profound test for a consciousness that would know everything but its own nature, and it’s usually repressed to whatever extent possible to mature while still nursing a youthful pose. The mystery of nature requires an increasingly complex organ of perception to manifest itself, and the urge to wholeness will never be fully comprehended by a partial consciousness. Psychic changes merge with physical ones on the smallest scale, however imperceptible to an ego fascinated by its own image.

The processes symbolized in these images, though, must already have attained a high degree of energy-intensity (value and purpose) and complexity to register consciously. How symbols originate and how we perceive them are a great mystery, but the greater confusion may be due to an older, more literal form of perception.

Since Jung began outlining his psychology over a hundred years ago, the mystery of symbols and their effects have been struck a heavy blow by material science. Yet, we’ve been driven by symbols, inspired by them, and instructed by them from time immemorial. This newer knowledge of the profound role they play in our psychology would, with reflection, allow an opportunity to re-connect with them on a more conscious level than the older metaphysical interpretations of who we once thought we were.

Depth psychology is acquainted with the focus and direction of consciousness as against the diffuse and irrational demands of the unconscious. Though the difference between the two ways of perceiving are naturally at odds, they’re also intended as complements.

They attract and repel at the same time, and only the weight of nature’s purposes decides which will prevail. Jung wrote that a very powerful attraction is needed to overcome the often hostile opposition between the sexes. The same is true for the mid-life transition — only here, consciousness is pushed to assume a greater responsibility on a higher level for its inner relations, just as couples adjust psychologically long after the unconscious attraction has initiated the still-sleeping urge to wholeness.

The greater problem of adjusting to the inner opposite certainly has its origin in the dual forces compelling the union of the sexes. Their profound demands for reconciliation find us making concessions we never conceived in our youth. Religious symbols have always drawn upon those analogies to describe their purposes.

Marriage is revered as a religious symbol for that reason, yet how many cling to the old ideal today for unconscious reasons they would rather not concede? We’re being pushed to make concessions to newer values, broader ways of seeing than the conventional, one-sided interpretations of the past. It’s not by choice or accident that old values are losing the efficacy they once had.

Though many contend that our religious heritage has only made for rivers of destruction (as it undeniably has, looked at only through that lens), our history must refer more to our interpretations of ourselves and our ideals than to anything inherent in the values themselves. One need only reflect to see that their intent is far distant from what we’ve achieved. The problem doesn’t lie with values or principles.

Aside from our rational ability to focus on the most minute details (science) to the exclusion of a broader picture (life), there is another factor which exaggerates the rift between the real and the ideal. The tendency of ego to see anything outside its own interests as suspicious and dangerous is an even older part of our natures than the relatively recent Christian precepts of love and acceptance which at least set us a definable task through the latest stages of our evolution.

As I interpret Jung’s efforts, this task is not dissolving as much as it’s changing form due to the growing complexity of consciousness — and an expanding intellect fastened onto images of objectivity unimagined by the emotional cast of previous generations. Yet, this new sense of objectivity must remain compulsively tied to the material world to divert the fear and uncertainty which defines psychic development.

The new intellect is would further refute the primitive animal who lives beneath it. We can see in our history how the religious ideal failed to significantly change it except in our minds: the very illusions which compel its rebellion. Who today would know the spiritual side of this billion year old Leviathan?

This primitive side of our natures is in need of development for us to contend with its destructive power. But, we need examples to learn how to do it. Read more about the process here.

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June 11, 2014 · 10:57 am

Individuation and the Conflict of Opposites II

A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

Up to this point, ego has been turning in circles in its efforts to relieve the tension created by new contents pushing into consciousness. Page 88 continues this roundabout process which now leads to the first real attempt to establish a dialogue with the unconscious; the religious function has reached a pressure and intensity that can no longer be repressed. As the story of Job illustrates, this conflict is not resolved through external relations or collective forms. 

 
THE DARK PRINCE.  
 It’s not a flight of fancy — it’s a real opposition;
His individuality prepared its recognition.
He’s stumbled on the purpose of internal tension:
To redefine and separate his thinking from the herd.
The individual is grounded in its reinvention                         
          Of the rigid values the collective has incurred.
It’s the burden of the past and the future it creates;
It puts a man at odds with what his soul relates.
Though by its own design it will ultimately lead
This man to re-evaluate the nature of his need.
          But his conflict must be further etched into relief
Before he can examine it in more detail.
He must court relations with the god beneath his grief
For any chance to see the man behind the veil.
 
THE ODDLY SHAPED MAN.  
 How will I get to know you?  What depth must I reach?
What fearful things will I do?  What laws must I breach?
You sit in darkness hid beneath the very thought
The light of knowledge fancied it could make appear.
Indirect emotions that but half-imagined brought
Your half-imagined purposes so faintly near
Are suddenly redoubled in a flood of dark concern
For the power you’ve awakened through the strange veneer
Of images my thought can only half-discern.
Old unfathomed riddles lie before me still
Staring starkly at the weakness I disdain;
Mocking the illusion of my conscious will
As I yet pretend to master what I can’t explain.
In fitful ways your mystery is living through me;
No wiser for it I am much less wise against it.
Are self-disdain and misery the light you’ve given to me
To illumine my fantasies had I but sensed it?
To cast a glow on shadow-worlds that hide your grace
From a man-child’s half-perception of reality?
Who only made himself unfit for your embrace
By clinging to a make-believe morality?
All your ways frighten me I cower and evade
Yet time and again misery exceeds my fear;
And the little light in me that once a heaven made
Again must suffer its bright world to disappear.             
You seemed insane though it was I who didn’t understand;
I fear I’m failing still and you will lose your patience.
There seems no let in all the crazy things you’ve planned
          To symbolize the sickness of my aberrations.
You’re only guiding me I know this in my brain —
Yet what a gaping wound now bleeds within in my heart!
Though I know it’s not your guidance filling me with pain
But my own desire sundering my life apart.
I can’t know your purpose through the fantasies I’m seeing;
Your piercing admonitions are my only light.
If somehow I could peer inside the deep well of being
I’d surely see the marvel of my own pretentious sight.
Your monstrous grace and its privilege I must entreat
For the only useful product it creates in me;        
Otherwise obscured by the harlequin of self-deceit
Ever stealing round the walls of thought’s credulity.
          Can I touch you in time?  In mind’s distant sphere?
When you tear these lovely veils of pretense from my eyes?
Will you be there?  Or only darkness circumscribe my fear
And my thinking then replace you with another form of lies?
I felt you once around the corpse of my dearest friend
And somehow through my agony you gave relief;
Though just enough for me to grimly apprehend
A wondrous thing beneath my agony and grief.
I know not how these enigmatic things occur —
Your living paradox is safe from modern thought.
As stupid and unwitting as my own intentions were
I then was only following what I was taught.
I’m sorry for it now — it was the only way I knew;
I feel its wrongness secreted within my soul.
But, for all the mystery in everything you do
I fear my misery’s the only thing I know.
 
THE DARK PRINCE.  
Through Time and effort he will soon begin to see:
What draws this image to the surface is his misery.
But he must step outside the circle of his Christian past
And resist his childish notions of the Devil;
For the psychic chains they represent now bind him fast
And prohibit him from searching on a deeper level.
Though he long ago pronounced such things a fairytale
They still form the basis of his valuations.
This defines the very point where intellect will fail:
          The Christian myth describes emotional foundations.
 
A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious 
 

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May 31, 2014 · 7:19 am

Individuation and the Conflict of Opposites

This piece from, A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious, picks up on page 78 with the Oddly Shaped Man (the conscious standpoint) struggling under the tension of opposites. Along with repressed emotions, the pressures of new, creative contents from the unconscious increase the momentum of the individuation process, now perceived as an “alien will” as ego is openly confronted with the demand for wholeness…

My head circles wildly as I strain with all my might;
All around me lay the pieces of the ghosts I fight.
I’ve forced apart the gates of my own humanity
Staggered weary to the furthest reach of sanity;                     
My own heart I’ve writhed and cried and suffered inside out —
Yet unappeased still labor on uncertainty and doubt.
 
THE DARK PRINCE.  
          Hemmed in by God on all sides like Job he struggles;
          And his pursuit means other things pursue him too.
          Relentlessly the feeling-world his thinking juggles
          Brings him closer to the conflict of his conscious view.
          The torment thrust upon him from this dark abyss
Is Nature’s dispatch to a partial consciousness:
She strives now to inform him of her wants and needs
And give him strength to follow on the path she leads.
How a man must carry on when he is forced to see
That the life he once conceived is not Reality!
He may feel his little world is being torn apart
But in fact it’s being put together quite unseen;
And he’s further than he knows from the inside of his heart
Or his notions of insanity and what they mean. 
 
THE UNKNOWN WOMAN.  
He’s not the victim of an angry god’s invective
Sending wrathful thunderbolts of punishment and pain.
He must remind himself the process is objective;
To think outside his merely personal domain.
But how else can his trembling thought be made to see:
His life is subject to a fate he can’t control?
That beneath his thinking is a greater force than he
Seeking to reveal to him the nature of his soul?
This obscure moral process must depend on more
Than simply choosing to obey a god’s command.
Which god will he obey?  Which one will he implore?
When two crossed gods of equal strength before him stand?
One is right the other wrong according to his view:         
The great deception of the life he knew before;
Yet however he perceives it there is little he can do
For his former life is gone and Nature’s closed that door.
The one she opens now brings the opposites to light
Unveiling secret truths beyond his preconception
To temper with a new sight the views of wrong and right
Which form the basis of his modern self-perception.
It will expose the partial attitude of consciousness
Flitting round its fantasies in airy self-pursuit
In the highest branches of the tree of righteousness
Thinking it had planted all the seeds of Love and Truth —
Though half-acknowledged grew to be a thing of wretchedness
And in the end bore little more than ignorance as fruit.
 
THE DARK PRINCE.  
The cheap facade he financed with the treasure in his soul
Is quickly running out of credit with the man below.
The life he once invested in is out of his control
For the loan’s conditions call for more than he could know.
The debt accruing from his youthful self-deception
Must be fully rendered from the life he leaves behind
Until it is depleted of his half-perception
And he accepts the humble place his misery assigned.
This task has led him down inside the knotted sphere     
Concealing images his thinking long repressed.
How he perceives the inner man is hidden here
Whose image only surfaces when he’s depressed.
But repression and depression are in fact related
To form the tension aiming at a new direction.
He must fight them both for how his thinking has created
This upside-down collision with his own reflection… 
 

                                Mental Health as a Social Concept

The conflict of opposites deeply affects consciousness as it begins to withdraw its projections from the external world and accept its struggle internally, fostering the recognition of a higher spiritual authority. The more frightening, rejected aspects of the personality then begin to impress themselves as living values with a vital meaning for the individual. The fear and anxiety of losing control is tempered by reflection. Jung once wrote that no one who ever had any wits is in danger of losing them in this process; however, there are many who never knew until then what their wits were for. 

THE ANCIENT KING.
          The concept of one’s mental health is relative indeed;
Primarily a social one for cultures to assess
The useful products of the citizens they breed
To work within the sanction of the values they profess.
But a culture has no conscious point of reference:
No place outside itself to judge its valuations;
Its health or sickness no criterion for deference             
To its own psychology or that of other nations.
Every man appears to suffer likewise from this fate
Though facts do not support this from a natural perspective:
The psyche functions in a way itself to regulate
And beyond his preconceptions lives its own corrective…
 
 More info here: A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

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May 22, 2014 · 3:20 pm

Re-Thinking Mid-Life

I recently came across an article by Dr. John Grohol on the Psych Central website: Three Things You Didn’t Know About About Carl Jung’s Psychosis. I appreciated it because it brings into relief certain misconceptions about Jung’s psychology; about unconscious life in general and mid-life in particular.

Depth psychology refers to Jung’s ideas of the unconscious and individuation, because he most clearly conceptualized them. But, these facts of experience are common properties of humanity. It was only (!) Jung who arranged them into an empirical picture.

He outlined the spiritual nature of the mid-life process, and the urge to wholeness implicit in it can be a severe test for a partial ego. The unconscious has a disintegrating and devouring quality which can frighten and overwhelm. It’s a reality so foreign to consciousness that nobody chooses it. Nonetheless, it’s the fate of many to try to come to terms with it.

However suddenly, subtly, or eventually the unconscious may directly insinuate itself into some lives, its indirect influence on consciousness forms humanity’s deepest contradictions. Few in an outer-directed culture see such effects as anything as fantastic as a demand for inner development (or the repression of it), and many have no need to see it. Symptoms mean disease, and the need to live according to our natures remains an idea we can’t conceive until we’re confronted with the experience.

One’s sensitivity to it is a matter of degree, which even in the extreme is less pathological than simply human. “Pathological” and “psychotic” may evoke images of lunatic asylums, yet entire cultures exhibit symptoms so widespread as to be normal from their own perspectives. Another vantage-point could as well view them as crazy. Who sees war as a mass psychotic outbreak or racial hatred, a collective form of schizophrenic paranoia?

Not only does Dr. Grohol’s article serve up on a plate mainstream psychology’s misunderstanding of the causes and purposes of mental “disease”, it exposes the fear and anxiety inherent in the direct experience of its demands. Science can only rationalize the effects of emotional processes it can neither experience nor evaluate. A century ago, however interpreted, spirit was a living reality. The mystery it once circumscribed no longer speaks to the new intellect. It sinks back into the unconscious and, as in a dream, re-emerges in strange forms.

Though extremes exist at either end of the spectrum of how mental health is defined, there’s no real dividing line between normal and pathological, conscious and unconscious — even you and me, if we have some working concept of the projections entangling subject and object; more so if the object is as abstract as the idea of psychosis in a subject as certain of it as a doctor.

A thing is what we think it is until we learn more about it, and there are some things we don’t want to learn more about. It would seem that the direct experience of the unconscious might qualify as such a thing — a psychosis according to popular psychology. At least, Dr. Grohol thinks it is. It was the crux of Jung’s psychology. He discovered that consciousness is subject to (and relative to) unconscious functions which seek their own destiny. The more ego opposes them, the more problems it experiences.

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” This intuitive truth, revered for millennia by those who felt it, were in fear and awe of the mystery it alluded to, has now re-emerged in psychological parlance as a “psychosis.” The fear of God is rationalized; Job’s suffering, a moot point.

I give Dr. Grohol credit for the reserve in his third premise: “Jung’s unconscious journey probably wasn’t the same as the unwanted psychosis people experience today.” Well, it was Jung’s — but he didn’t want it any more than anyone wants it. It happened to him. It was an unconscious need born in a mind destined to reveal a new way of looking at ourselves. But, does that mean it didn’t spring from the same well — and for the same purposes?

Dr. Grohol said that while “Jung described his visions as a type [my italics] of “psychosis” or “schizophrenia,” those terms meant something different a hundred years ago than they do today.” Indeed. The way Jung saw them is even more relevant because of that. The problem is that it required volumes to define them.

Outside the limitations of “pop” psychology, they’re not really definable except through a kind of philosophy grounded on empirical fact: an understanding through experience. “Today,” wrote Dr. Grohol, “the terms describe a specific constellation of symptoms, one of which is the meaningful and significant interruption the disorder makes upon a person’s ordinary, daily life.”

But — that’s the purpose of mid-life: “the meaningful and significant interruption the disorder makes upon a person’s ordinary, daily life.” It has all the symptoms of compulsion, obsession, depression, even a “type of psychosis or schizophrenia.” How else could we be shaken to the core from ego’s illusion enough to feel the mystery drawing it to a fate beyond its comprehension?

For an exploration of the unconscious which goes beyond traditional ideas of pathological/normal in search of a more natural truth, see: A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious.

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April 10, 2014 · 3:34 pm

A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations with the Unconscious

A Subjective Study of Science, Religion, and Consciouness

A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

For those interested in new interpretations of old ideas, this post describes a very different kind of book, many years in its development. If you choose to read it, if you’re interested in the relations between conscious and unconscious, between man and nature, science and religion, it will be among the most original books you’ll ever read. It will likely upset your ideas of what your mind is for, just as it upset mine when I was forced by my own illusions (and those I inherited) to come to terms in some way with the unconscious.

It’s well known that new and original ways of looking at things take time to sink in, at least for those revolving around the self-flattering notions of who we think we are — or should or would be. Centuries-old religious ideals convince us even today that we can be who we “should” or would be, simply by believing it. This is the age-old way of ego, and most will remain convinced of its illusion as a defense against the unconscious — or, if you prefer, a God who makes demands on us and not just a comforting image of wishful thinking in times of despair.

The scientific view is equally convinced of this same illusion, having inherited it as duly as one is born with eyes and ears. Though, with no conception of a Deity but only an unconscious will to power, it seeks to “conquer” an external nature without taking serious note that she also works within; and dangerously so, for the double-sided hubris of humanity has been recorded since biblical times. The artificial reality we’ve spent millennia to achieve has become so toxic today, however, the current form of education will not much longer support it…

Based on the psychology of C. G. Jung and inspired by Goethe’s Faust, this book is a poetic description of the change in perspective prompted by the mid-life transition. For many, it will be only an odd curiosity. But for those who are deeply moved by this process, to confront the strange, symbolic figures which lead into the collective unconscious, this book will serve as a living example of the ideas and emotions encountered when an exchange, a dialogue, is entered into with the other side.

The subtitle, A Subjective Study of Science, Religion, and Consciousness, reflects the spiritual character of the philosophical depths to which these figures point; for as Jung wrote: because the unconscious consists of a living history of our mental functioning, any serious inquiry into it leads straight into the religious problem.

This problem is grounded in the opposites, and old religious ideas of good and evil still form the foundations of our world-views, whether we accept them consciously or not. They’re how we secretly see ourselves; how we relate to a greater whole both within and without, formed over centuries of intense concentration on the puzzling contradictions of subjective thought.

A major shift in values marks today’s fascination with science and technology, and the spiritual/emotional functions it ignores and represses only multiply the unforeseen consequences they create. The wisdom required to comprehend them is not accessible to the blind quest for rational facts — as if they alone would reconcile the inner division which is our fate.

Lacking an orientation to the inner counter-pole of the unconscious, we can only relate to it through the old concepts. But, these no longer suffice the complexity, the subtlety and diversity, the relativity of the changes taking place today. Without serious re-examination of our repressive view of nature and the psyche, we are only led deeper into the hidden snares which threaten from the dark shadows of an unconscious earthly reality.

Today, information and knowledge have become compensations for wisdom. The paradox is that the wisdom we need is secreted away in the knowledge we’ve repressed: the undeveloped soul of a human animal who yet sees nature as an antagonist and cannot accept the double laws of her demands. As a return for that, we’ve become our own greatest problem — and nature’s as well.

This book isn’t a remedy for this problem. It’s a way to identify and accept it; to find new ways to confront it; to enter a new psychological stage in nature’s ceaseless urge for development.

See Amazon.

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November 7, 2013 · 11:05 am

Jung’s Theory of Complexes

The idea of complexes is so well established today, it’s a common figure of speech. Alfred Adler long ago introduced the idea of an inferiority complex, and most of us know what is meant by it. It works together with its opposite, and an over-compensating facade of superiority conceals it.

An unconscious complex describes one of those curious blind-spots in our personalities that only others may see. Those who know us may have to tip-toe around them, because we’re unconsciously sensitive to them. They evoke defensive reactions when triggered and often result in the anger that masks our fear of them — the surest sign of a weak spot, that we’re not in control.

Along with many of Jung’s concepts, his theory of complexes seems only half-acknowledged as a fundamental building block in understanding how our minds work. Psychology fancies having gone beyond those basics, even as it never really understood their implications. His ideas seem to have been dismissed by an attitude peculiarly suggestive of misunderstanding and denial.

Jung’s discovery that we connect with our deepest natures through religious and philosophical ideas is more and more obscured by a science focused on the material world. Psychology moves only further away from the psyche through a technological faddism blinded by the glare of disparate tid-bits of statistical and technical knowledge. The science charged to make sense of an immaterial mind is unable to see through the concreteness of data, measurement, precision instruments, and all the rest of the bandwagon of rational thought.

Part of the problem is the lack of an empirical concept of the unconscious. That there could even be psychologies today which don’t acknowledge it is itself a study in complexes. We can’t see it directly as one would view molecules under microscopes or brains through electronic scans; but there are objective ways to infer its heavy influence on how we think and feel.

Jung’s study of complexes began with his association tests.  A subject’s one-word response to a stimulus word was timed and recorded. Delays in responses to certain words, lack of memory of them, and other disturbances of what would normally be a simple exercise in word-association prompted him to look closer. Inappropriate responses (those against instruction), facial expressions, body movements, stammering, habitual repetition of the same words — all these reactions were beyond control of the will.

The emotional roots of the disturbances could gradually be identified by honing in on the stimulus words and their patterns. The ones causing the disturbances revolved around certain general ideas that hung together in a meaningful way. Over the course of a hundred words or so, a picture emerged to a skilled observer. The more knowledge of the subject and the more targeted the trigger words, the more information was revealed.

All pointed toward concealed, semi-conscious, repressed, and/or completely unconscious contents which revolved around decisive issues in the subject’s life. Jung wrote in The Symbolic Life:

“A complex is an agglomeration of associations — a sort of picture of… a psychological nature — sometimes of traumatic character, sometimes simply of a painful and highly toned character. Everything that is highly toned is rather difficult to handle… It is simply an important affair, and whatever has an intense feeling-tone is difficult to handle because such contents are associated with physiological reactions, with the processes of the heart, the tonus of the blood vessels, the condition of the intestines, the breathing, and the innervation of the skin… it is just as if that particular complex had a body of its own, as if it were localized in my body to a certain extent…“

The implications of these processes go far beyond mere Freudian slips. Who would need a clearer picture of the mutual effects of mind and body? That the psyche would send forth signals through the body, symbols, of its own life through its own ideas in an unconscious effort to translate to consciousness what it was feeling, what had been repressed? Jung:

“… a complex with its given tension or energy has the tendency to form a little personality of itself. It has a sort of body, a certain amount of its own physiology. It can upset the stomach. It upsets the breathing, it disturbs the heart — in short, it behaves like a partial personality. For instance, when you want to say or do something and… a complex interferes with this intention… your best intention gets upset by the complex, exactly as if you had been interfered with by a human being or by circumstances outside.“

Regardless of how consciousness interprets itself, its “own” ideas, or its will, there are psychic facts which appear as outer circumstances and events  — but which are not. It would seem that psychology today is interested more in how it can relieve the symptoms of being human — of hiding from the mystery of life rather than trying to understand it:

“All this is explained by the fact that the so-called unity of consciousness is an illusion. It is really a wish-dream.  We like to think that we are one; but we are not, most decidedly not. We are not really masters in our house. We like to believe in our will-power and in our energy and in what we can do; but when it comes to a real show-down we find that we can do it only to a certain extent…“

The real show-down is now. What will we do?

 

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