In my last post, I discussed the black dot, or circle, and the role it played in mathematician John Nash’s psychosis, along with Hippolytus’ description of the Gnostic idea of the indivisible point. For those who may be interested, I’d like to share my personal experience of it:
Around age three, I dreamed I was tucked up inside the head of an adult body, peering out through the eyes. The little me watched as the body walked by itself, away from town. At the outskirts, my eyes were drawn to a vacant lot on the left, the last sign of civilization before a wild and forbidding mountainous terrain stretched out before me. It had no man-made structure on it but was filled with a great mound of excrement, and flies began gravitating to it.
More flies swarmed, covering it completely. Their cumulative buzzing created a deep, reverberating hum (scroll the comments to Sue Dreamwalker) which fixed my vision on the horizon. Suspended like a distant planet just above it hung a small black dot, barely visible through the trees. I was mesmerized by it as the hum pulsed in me.
Suddenly, it was right before me, blanketing my vision. Frightening, paradoxical feelings about time and eternity, life and death, and the incomprehensible nature of existence seized me. I was struck by how small it was at first and how large and overwhelming it suddenly became.
Jung called it a complexio oppositorum: it contained the opposites within it. For years, I was almost too afraid to think about it for the dread it evoked. Like a cautious animal, afraid yet curious, I circled around it in my mind, drawn to its ineffable mystery. Its dizzying complexity scared me, filled me with awe; but beyond its stark paradox, I was unable to discern any personal meaning in it.
It hung there through the years; not only on the horizon of my childhood but on the horizon of my future as well. After a divorce at thirty-five, I sank into a profound depth as black and unconscious as my dream prescribed in the dawn of my awareness…
Years of evasion found me with other men lost in the same transition. We drank together, commiserated, carped, and criticized; none of us any more aware of a mid-life change than the so-called “crisis” of aging men trying to retrieve a lost youth via sports cars and younger women.
The deeper psychological purpose of mid-life regression, though, is a symbolic journey through history: an unconscious description of the psychic reality beneath the social one which governs the first half of life. Fantasies of death and finality swept over me in a sea of emotion. Like my youthful dream, I felt trapped inside my head, isolated and alone. My adult body was walking itself away from town.
One night, a voice in my head whispered to me as I was dozing off, “You’re going down.” Suddenly, the black dot was upon me. Its irresistible force pinned me to the bed. Such a tension gripped me that it took all my might to remember where I was and observe what was happening in me. That state persisted through the night and into the next day, and I went to work driven by an exhausted attempt to release myself from it.
For weeks, the image of the black dot persisted. I knew intuitively that my efforts hinged on the few Jung books I’d puzzled over years before and had begun to read again. Slowly, I set about studying what was going on inside me.
I read of an alchemist in the sixteenth century whose dream depicted that same black dot hanging above the horizon, just as I’d seen it in mine: the black sun of alchemy, the dark core of inner illumination. I read as many ideas as I could find from those driven to record the mysteries of the same process I was in.
The Hebrew conception of Adam as the Original Man, the Gnostic idea of the indivisible point, Democritus’ atom, the alchemists’ soul-spark, the big bang, black holes: all contain historical reference points that establish the archetypal context of psychic experience.
It was Jung’s work that precipitated a spiritual experience beyond any collective god-concept. That is the archetype: its conscious insignificance makes it smaller than small, even as its unconscious influence makes it greater than great. To Jung, I will always be grateful for the opportunity he provided in my confusion.
Goethe said it eloquently in Faust: Mephistopheles (Faust’s shadow) discovers Wagner (his intellect) in his laboratory busily working to create life in a tube (!). He succeeds, but the little homunculus in the retort flies out and hovers illuminated above them. Mephistopheles makes plans with it for a great journey; but Wagner is excluded. “And I?” he asks. The little life he thought was his own creation responds:
“Well, you /Will stay at home, most weighty work to do, /Open the parchment-sheets, collect/Life-elements as the recipes direct./With caution, fitting each to other. Ponder/ The What — to solve the How still harder try;/While through a little piece of world I wander/To find the dot to put upon the i.”