Posts Tagged ‘dream theory’

Carl Jung

Jung, Carl 1875-1961 Son of a pastor; his paternal grandfather and great grandfather were physicians. Took a degree in medicine at University of Basle, then specialised in psychiatry. In early papers he pioneered the use of word-association, and influenced research into the toxin hypothesis regarding schizophrenia.

Jung’s addition to modern therapeutic attitudes to dream work arose out of his difference of view with Freud regarding human life. Jung felt life is a meaningful experience, with spiritual roots. His interest in alchemy, myths and legends, added to the wealth of ideas he brought to his concept of the collective unconscious. The subject of symbols fascinated him and he devoted more work to this than any other psychologist. He saw dream symbols not as an attempt to veil or hide inner content, but an attempt to elucidate and express it. He saw dreams as a way of transformation where what was formless, non verbal and unconscious moves towards form and becoming known. In this way dreams ‘show us the unvarnished natural truth.’ By giving attention to our dreams we are throwing light upon who and what we really are – not simply who we are as a personality, but who we are as a phenomena of cosmic interactions.

Jung recommended looking at a series of ones dreams in order to develop a fuller insight into self. In this way one would see certain themes arising again and again. Out of these we can begin to see where we are not balancing the different aspects of ourselves.

Jung felt that human life is meaningful and has its roots in a transcendent reality. In this and other ways he differed from Freud who was at first a collaborative colleague. Jung did not, as Freud, see the unconscious as a storehouse only of repressed infantile and unsocialised urges. It was a place of mystery and life. It included not only the widest storehouse of personal and family experience, but it stretched beyond this, linking each of us with a collective experience of life. This ‘collective unconscious’ Jung said, holds within itself the merged experience of all that has lived.

Also from the unconscious arose what Jung called the influence of the Self. He defined the Self as the whole of the person, as distinct from the narrow focus of self we know in our daily life. For example if you could have a sense of all your memories rather than simply what is relevant to the moment, you would have a different view of all you did. Jung described this as similar to a ball with a small black circle drawn on it. The small black circle is our normal waking awareness, the ball is the Self.

From the Self – a more total awareness – arises what Jung called the ‘transforming influence’. Our sense of wholeness, however unconscious it may be, leads us toward becoming more inclusive of our total potential. Jung taught that part of our wholeness is an awareness of being an intrinsic and unseparated part of the universe. Dreams are often an expression or a reflection of the Self. As such they are self-regulatory and can lead to what Jung called individuation. This is an attainment of your own personal identity beyond the sense of self you arrive at from such things as class, role, gender, economic situation and physical appearance.

Jung was a psychiatrist working with and training a great number of people. A major emphasis of his work was on dreams. His approach was quite different to Freud. The major points are:

• The dream was seen as a source of information, not as an attempt to disguise meaning as Freud thought.

• Because he honoured the wisdom of the unconscious Jung was intent on unfolding what the drama and structure of the dream held in it. He did not lead away from the dream with associations. However he did add his own insights to what the dreamer might discover.

• Jung encouraged people to explore a dream using active imagination, a way of honouring personal fantasy. He also suggested allowing the body to fantasise. He wrote that fantasy is necessary because the conscious mind has no idea, no experience of what is held within unconsciously. Not only might you find the pain of past trauma, but also what Jung called the ‘dark possibilities’ – the unknown potential. You have to ‘let go’ of your consciously held convictions in order to let the voice and experience of the unconscious speak – to allow more of yourself to be lived.

• To help a person discover their associations with something in their dream Jung would stick with the dream setting and format, not encourage associations that led away.

• If the dreamer found difficulty in arriving at an association, Jung would ask them to describe the symbol in their own words, as if Jung knew nothing about it. Therefore, if you dreamt of a table, you might say something like, ‘It is a thing usually made of wood and having four supports. Upon these a flat surface is fixed, so that you can place objects, food, books, etc., on it at a level nearer your hands or mouth.’

• Use of the term the Self was Jung’s way of bringing the transcendent dimension into his work. This was something Freud never did. Later, in approaches like Psycho-Synthesis this approach to psychological growth and healing was extended, and is now frequently met under the name Trans-personal.
• Jung wrote that the conscious self raises prolific objections to becoming aware of unconscious experiences. It appears intent on blotting out spontaneous fantasy that might reveal something other than its own cherished defences and beliefs. It often takes firm determination to allow unconscious content. “In most cases the results of these efforts are not very encouraging at first. Moreover, the way of getting at the fantasies is individually different… oftentimes the hands alone can fantasy; they model or draw figures that are quite foreign to the conscious.” From Commentary in Secret Of The Golden Flower by Richard Wilhelm, commentary by Carl Jung. Published by Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Many thinkers and observers of dreams felt that it was not enough to say dreams could be understood through the association of ideas. This could mean that association explains the whole phenomena of dreaming. Through their work Freud and Jung showed the wealth of information and experience that can be uncovered within a dream’s imagery and drama. Henry Maudsley, the British doctor after whom the Maudsley Day Hospital and school of psychiatry in London was named, wrote – “We are dealing with … an actual constructive agency’ in dreams ‘whereby ideas are not merely brought together only, but new products are formed out of them.” He says elsewhere that he is struck by “the extraordinary creations of dreams,” and that a study of dreams would be “full of promise of abundant fruit.”

If we are going to use association in exploring dreams, it is helpful to recognise the difference between free association, and looking for associations with a dream’s contents. Jung points out that with free association the starting point can be anywhere – dreams, ink-blots, clouds, shapes of landscape, a prayer wheel or rosary. He gives the example of a colleague who described to him a long train journey in Russia. Not knowing the language he found himself wondering what the strange shapes of the Cyrillic characters meant. Relaxing he began to imagine all sorts of meanings for them. One image and feeling led to another until, to his annoyance he found that long buried memories and difficult emotions had become stirred up.

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The point Jung makes in connection with dreams is that if one took a dream image and ‘free associated’ with it, this could certainly lead to an uncovering of ones complexes or neuroses, but what one arrived at might have little or nothing to do with integral links with the dream. For instance the dream of the divinities and the bishop mentioned above, might, in free association, lead to a remembrance of a traumatic bullying at school, which had nothing to do with the feelings and links invested in the dream.

Finding ones memories and feelings associated with the dream however, leads to a clear realisation of how our own mental and emotional experience and structure have formed the dream. In one of my own dreams in which I was in my father’s shop attending to a man who had been shot in the arm, exploring the associations led me to uncover massive feelings to do with my relationship with my father. I felt for the first time in my life, how his lack of praise and support had led to an injury to my self confidence. In just the way my left arm supports the action of my creative right arm, and its injury would mean I could not be so effective with my right arm, so this lack of confidence had undermined my outward expression, something I was trying to attend to at that time. Working in this way, where the dream is honoured as something important instead of simply a starting point to lead elsewhere, was a turning point for Jung. He says he came to believe the dream ‘expressed something specific that the unconscious was trying to say.’ Therefore, after each excursion into associations, Jung would return to the dream and continue checking against its structure and content.

YOGA AS INCLUSIVE OF THE EAST IN JUNG’S THOUGHT

FOR JUNG, ‘yoga’ was a general term indicating all of Eastern thought and psychological practice. In his writings ‘yoga’ is used to designate Eastern traditions as diverse as Hinduism, Indian Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism and Chinese Taoism. For Jung, therefore, ‘yoga’ should not be confused with the narrow and technical definitions of the term which are encountered in Eastern thought itself In Indian philosophy, for example, yoga’ refers to one of the six classical schools of thought-the yoga view-point systematised by Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras. 1

Although Jung was aware of this technical usage of ‘yoga’ as early as 1921 (3, p. 196), (and based his 1939 Lectures given at the Eidgenoiissiche Technischie Hochschule, Zurich, on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras) (JUNG 6) his interest from the beginning was not with Patanjali’s technical definitions but with the spiritual development of the personality as the goal of all yoga (Ibid.). In his lectures Jung observes that in India the practice of yoga involves both psychology and philosophy. To be a philosopher in the East requires that one has undergone the spiritual development of yoga. It is in this sense that Jung sees ‘yoga’ as a general term (inclusive of psychology as well as philosophy), which is the foundation of everything spiritual, not only for India but also for Tibet, China and Japan. Consequently in writing his Tibetan commentaries (JUNG 7), Jung talks about ‘Tibetan Yoga’. In his commentary on the Taoist text, The secret of the golden flower (JUNG 5), he refers to ‘Chinese Yoga’ and in his psychology of Eastern meditation (JUNG 9) (actually a commentary on the Pure Land Buddhist Text, Amitayur-dhyana Sutra), Jung speaks of the ‘Japanese practice of yoga.

Although ‘yoga’ in Eastern thought often has a very technical meaning, it is also employed in a general way similar to Jung’s usage. Mircea Eliade, in his well-known book, Yoga: immortality and freedom, observes that yoga is one of the basic motifs of Eastern thought (ELIADE 2, p. 3). And T. H. Stcherbatsky, the Russian scholar of Buddhism, maintains that yogic trance (samadhi) and yogic courses for the training of the mind in the achievement of the goal of release from suffering (moksa, or nirvana) appear in virtually all Eastern schools of thought-be they Hindu or Buddhist (STCHERBATSKY 20, pp. 16-19). It is exactly this sense of yoga as a way to release and self-realisation that Jung has taken as the general theme of all Eastern thought and practice. However, the conception of the nature of the self-realisation to be achieved, and the proper method to follow, are points on which Jung and the East show significant differences.

II.    THE ATTITUDE (OR WORLD VIEW) WHICH JUNG BROUGHT TO YOGA

If we arc to understand Jung’s encounter with yoga, a firm grasp of the viewpoint from which Jung began is required. Although the period of Jung’s life with which we are concerned was very turbulent both personally and professionally, 2 through it all one thing remained firm in his mind-that he was an empiricist, grounded completely on observation and experience. Jung understood his whole encounter with the contents of his unconscious as a scientific experiment. In Jung’s view, the possibility of being an objective psychological observer of others required first that the observer be sufficiently informed about the nature and scope of his own personality: ‘He can, however. be sufficiently informed only when he has in a large measure freed himself from the levelling influence of collective opinions and thereby arrived at a clear conception of his own individuality’ (JUNG 3, p. 10). It is Jung’s view that as one goes farther back in his history and as one goes East, the individual is more and more swallowed up in the collectivity of the society. Only in recent times has there been sufficient individual awareness to make possible impartial observation and objective psychology (Ibid., p. 8).

From a scientific point of view, Jung’s purpose in opening himself to the contents of his unconscious was twofold. in the first place, it was necessary that he gain awareness of these contents with their warping needs and biases if he was to become an objective observer of others. Secondly, the contents of the unconscious are, for Jung, empirically real, and therefore proper objects for the scientific study of psychology. With regard to yoga, this means that Jung saw his approach as that of an objective observer who had encountered certain psychic realities in his own self-analysis, and then looked elsewhere (including to the East) for supporting evidence. This is made quite clear in Jung’s September 1935 letter to Pastor Jahn in Berlin. Jung says:

.    . . You seem to forget that I am first and foremost an empiricist, who was led to the question of Western and Eastern mysticism only for empirical reasons. For instance, I do not by any means take my stand on Tao or any yoga techniques, but I have found that Taoist philosophy as well as yoga have very many parallels with the psychic processes we can observe in Western man (JUNG 13, p. 195).

In his Memories, dreams, reflections, Jung offers two examples of how the study of yoga can provide verification or support for something already encountered in Western consciousness. The first has to do with Jung’s 1918-1920 discovery of the psychic development of the self occurring in a circular (circumambulation) rather than linear fashion. He found that this new insight could best be expressed in paintings such as his ‘Window on eternity’. Several years later Jung reports an event that provided for him confirmation of his experience of the self. He received a letter from Richard Wilhelm enclosing the Taoist treatise, The secret of the golden flower with the request that Jung write a commentary on it.

I devoured the manuscript at once, for the text gave me undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the centre. That was the first event which broke through my isolation. I became aware of an affinity; I could establish ties with something and someone (JUNG II, p. 189 (197)). 3

The second example comes out of Jung’s struggle with the contents of his unconscious. In the course of his self-analysis one of the several dream figures he encountered was Elijah (called by Jung ‘Philemon’). Psychologically, says Jung, Philemon came to represent Superior insight. He was a guide through the inner darkness (Ibid., pp. 176~7 (182-3)). Many years later, in a conversation with an Indian friend, the role of the Indian guru in the process of education was discussed. When Jung’s friend admitted that Sankara, the 8th-century philosopher-saint, had been his personal guru, Jung made the discovery that in Yoga there arc ‘spirit gurus’. Jung reports the conversation as follows:

‘You don’t mean the commentator on the Vedas who died centuries ago?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I mean him he said, to my amazement.

‘Then you are referring to a spirit?’ I asked.

‘Of course it was his spirit,’ he agreed.

At that moment I thought of Philemon.

‘There arc ghostly gurus too,’ he added. ‘Most people have living gurus. But there always some who have a spirit for teacher’ (ibid. p. 177 (184)).

To Jung this did not signify that he had experienced an Indian spirit guru.  Only that, as he put it, ‘Evidently, then, I had not plummeted right out of the human world, but had only experienced the sort of thing that could happen to others who made similar efforts’ (Ibid.). It was confirmation only in the sense of confirming that Jung’s experience of Philemon was a true human experience and not an idiosyncratic fantasy of Jung’s own mind. But the content of Jung’s Philemon remained resolutely Western, understandable not through the teachings of Eastern yoga, but through the wisdom of Western alchemy. As we shall see, this principle of finding confirmation ill form rather than content, typifies most of Jung’s contacts with yoga.

But the principle of looking for ‘confirmation in forms’ of psychic experience is too narrow. For Jung, yoga was not just an after-the-fact confirmation of his Western discoveries. Yoga often played the role of broadening and heightening one’s experience of consciousness, by stimulating one to an increased awareness. This does not mean, warns Jung, that Western science should be belittled or given up only that one must not become so encapsulated in the Western scientific approach as to claim that it is the only approach there is. In his ‘Commentary on The secret of the golden flower’, Jung says, ‘The East teaches us another broader, more profound, and higher understanding-understanding through life’ (JUNG 5, p. 7). The difficulty the typical Westerner has in experiencing this higher understanding arises from two things; his attachment to Western science as the only valid way knowing, and his difficulty in identifying with the strangeness of Eastern texts such as The Secret of the Golden Flower. This means that the Westerner approaching Eastern yoga must not give in to his first reaction which will be to quickly dispose of it by calling it ‘Eastern wisdom’, in quotation marks, or by relegating it to the obscurity of religion or superstition. Nor must he make the mistake of attempting to cope with the strangeness of Eastern ideas by becoming an uncritical imitator of yoga practices. Through a shallow imitation of yoga Practices, says Jung, Western man ‘abandons the one safe foundation of the Western mind, and loses himself in a mist of words and ideas that could never have originated in European brains, and can never be profitably grafted upon them’ (Ibid., p. 7). The increased awareness, which Jung values as a result of his contact with the East, comes not through mindless imitation. It comes, rather, as a result of critical study of the East as a parallel to our human experience in West-a parallel that reawakens Western man to aspects of his own experience that in modern times he had lost touch with, i.e. the intuitive, the spiritual.

A careful study of Eastern texts such as The secret of the golden flower stresses the importance of having a balance between opposites in one’s experience. When the opposites balance one another, says Jung, that is a sign of a high and stable culture. ‘One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism’ (JUNG 5, p. 9). This, in Jung’s view, is the difficulty in which the modern West finds itself After having placed great value on the spiritual and the intuitive during the Middle Ages, the intellect has come to a position of overwhelming dominance in modern man. But now there is a reaction in the West against the one-sidedness of the overstressing of intellect to the virtual exclusion of the other aspects of human experience. At this point, study of the East is helpful in presenting an approach to life which includes all of the aspects or opposites and attempts to hold them in tension-intellect balanced with intuition. The truth of the East is not in the Eastern way itself, but in the demonstrated need for a balance between intellect and intuition, between thinking and feeling. And this serves to provide parallel confirmation of the reaction in the modern West in favour of feeling and intuition as a cultural advance or ‘a widening of consciousness beyond the narrow confines of a tyrannical intellect’ (Ibid., p. 9). The wisdom of Eastern yoga for the West is that one must ‘yoke’ these extreme oscillations from intuition to intellect and now back again towards intuition, into a creative tension or balance. To be overbalanced in any one aspect of consciousness is a sign of immaturity and ‘barbarism’, to use Jung’s word for it. Consequently, it is not the case that the modern West should give up its highly developed scientific intellectually that the intuitive and feeling aspects of psychic function must achieve an equally high development in Western consciousness so that a creative balance can be achieved, and a widening of consciousness result.

While Jung openly admired the Eastern yoga principle of inclusiveness and balance between the opposing aspects of psychic function it is clear that he felt that the East had overstressed the intuitive, just as the modern West had overdeveloped the scientific. As Jung put it in his ‘Commentary on The Tibetan book of the great liberation’: ‘In the East, the inner man has always had such a firm hold on the outer man that the world had no chance of tearing him away from his inner roots; in the West, the outer man gained ascendancy to such an extent that he was alienated from his innermost being.’ (JUNG 7, pp. 492-3). Jung illustrated this contention by observing the following difference in Eastern versus Western religious practice. In the West, the spiritual is associated with something external and lifted up, thus the high and raised up place of the altar and cross in Christian Churches. In an Eastern Siva temple, however, the spiritual symbol, the lingam, is often sunk in a deep shaft several metres below ground level. To Jung this indicated that, in Eastern experience the spiritual is to be found in the inward direction, in the deepest and darkest place (JUNG 6, pp. 121-2). In his Psychology of Eastern meditation, Jung makes the same point:

The West is always seeking uplift, but the East seeks a sinking or deepening, Outer reality, with its bodiliness and weight, appears to make a much stronger and sharper impression on the European than it does on the Indian. The European seeks to raise him-self above this world, while the Indian likes to turn back into the maternal depths of Nature (JUNG 9, p. 570).

The principle of all Eastern yoga is that the pairs of opposites (dvanda) the extremes, must be transcended or held in creative tension (JUNG 3 pp. 195-8; 5). They must not exclude or devalue one another. From the East, therefore, the West needs to rediscover or resensitise itself to the interior aspects of intuition and feeling-but without letting go of its strong grip on exterior scientific consciousness. The East, on the other hand, needs the science industry and technology of the West, but not at the expense of its sensitivity to the inner man.

On both sides, ‘said Jung, a balanced, widened and inclusive consciousness needs to be achieved. But on the question of how this balancing was to be achieved, Jung was emphatic. The West must not simply attempt to copy the Eastern spiritual yoga, or the East blindly adopt Western science. Each should study the other and gain inspiration from its example, but each must pursue its own development within its own historical consciousness. As E. A. Bennett put it, ‘A race with an ancient cultural heritage, in Jung’s opinion had a collective experience not available to other races’ (BENNETT I, pp. 68-9). The modern West, says Jung, cannot graft Eastern yoga onto its scientific consciousness as so many misled individuals naively attempt to do (JUNG 4, p. 149 fn. 8, p. 171£). In his letters the question of the practice of Eastern yoga frequently arises, and Jung’s response is always emphatic and always the same. Yoga is suitable to the Eastern but not to the Western mind (cf. JUNG 13, p. 310). The occidental world should leave it alone and instead develop or rediscover its own spiritual practice. While yoga is the spiritual foundation of everything in the East, on no account is it a suitable practice for the West (JUNG 6, pp. II, 13,42). Although Jung admits to having practised yoga himself on a few occasions during his turbulent period of self-analysis, he states that his purpose was quite different from that of an Easterner.

I was frequently so wrought up that I had to do certain yoga exercises in order to hold my emotions in check. But since it was my purpose to know what was going on within myself, I would do these exercises only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious. As soon as I had the feeling that I was myself again, I abandoned this restraint upon the emotions and allowed the images and inner voices to speak afresh. The Indian, on the other hand, does yoga exercises in order to obliterate completely the multitude of psychic contents and images (JUNG II, p. 171 (177)).

This is not the place to examine critically the correctness of Jung’s analysis of the Easterner’s experience of yoga; our present concern is to understand the attitude which  Jung brought to his study of it. It is quite clear that for Jung the study of yoga served two important purposes. First, it provided confirming evidence that others had had similar experience to that of his own. Secondly, it suggested that consciousness was wider than the typical modem Western fixation on the scientific intellect. The study of Eastern yoga highlighted the intuitive side of psychic functioning, and encouraged modern Western man to redevelop his sensitivity to this aspect which had been so dominant in Western experience during the Middle Ages. For Jung personally, as we shall see, the role Eastern yoga played in the development of his thinking was brief but influential. Although Eastern ideas lingered on throughout his thinking, Jung’s main fascination with yoga occurred during the 1920s and 1930s, culminating with his journey to India in 1938. By the end of his visit, however, the focus of his interest had already returned West, so that when his boat docked at Bombay he had no desire to leave the ship to see the city. ‘Instead’, reports Jung, ‘I buried myself in my Latin alchemical texts (Ibid., p. 265 (284)). Indeed it may well be that in the development of Jung’s thinking yoga lead him on from his early fascination with Western gnosticism and then back to Western alchemy, which then remained the keystone for the rest of his life.

In. JUNG’S APPROACH TO YOGA THROUGH WESTERN GN0STICISM

In a conversation with Richard Evans a few years before his death, Jung recalled the way he had come upon the notions of archetypes’ and the collective unconscious. He noticed that in primitive groups, as well as the great religious traditions, there exist certain typical patterns of behaviour, often supported by mythological tales. In religions there are the codes of conduct as well as the examples set by the saints. In Greek mythology there are the poetic models of fine men and women. As he thought about the notion of archetypes, Jung asked himself whether anyone else in the history of the world had studied that problem. After casting his ‘scholarly net’ widely Jung first concluded that nobody had, except a peculiar spiritual movement that went together with the beginnings of Christianity, namely, Gnosticism . . .  and that, the Gnostics were concerned with the problem of archetypes’ (Jung 14, p. 350). The Christian Gnostics, who lived in the first, second and third centuries A.D., had come across structural elements in the unconscious psyche and made a philosophic system out of it. In his autobiography Jung notes that between 1918 and 1926 he seriously studied the Gnostic writers (JUNG 11, p. 192 (200)).

It is in his Psychological types, first published in 192 1, that Jung’s analysis of Gnosticism is clearly seen. Jung points out that the farther we go back into history, the less the individuality and the more of the collective we encounter. In primitive peoples, says Jung, we find no trace of the concept of the individual. Indeed, the very idea ‘individuality’ is fairly recent in the history of human thought. Jung felt that the development of the notion of ‘individuality’ went hand in hand with the differentiation of man’s psychological functioning (JUNG 3, p. 10). The Gnostics caught Jung’s eye because they were one group in classical Western literature that did differentiate between basic types of psychological functioning, and stressed the individual development of the personality even to the point of perfection (PAssMORE 17, pp. 83-8).4 As we shall see, this notion of the perfectibility of man’s nature is also found in Eastern yoga, although it is a premise which Jung never accepted. The Gnostics dual emphasis on perfectibility and the need for disciplined individual development, both of which are shared by yoga, may well have paved way for the movement in Jung’s thinking to the East.

Gnostic philosophy established three basic types: the pneumatikoi or ‘thinking type’, the psychikoi or ‘feeling type’, and the hylikoi or ‘sensation type’ (JUNG 3, p. ii). In addition to their perception, of different psychological types, the Gnostics, says Jung, lay before us man’s unconscious psychology in full flower, almost perverse in its luxuriance; it contained the very thing that most strongly resisted the regula fidei, that Promethean and creative spirit which will bow only to the individual soul and to no collective ruling. (Ibid., pp. 241-2). For Jung, therefore, the Gnostics evidenced awareness not only of different psychological types, but also the importance of individuality. In Jung’s view, such psychological knowledge set the Gnostics apart from the collective psychology characteristic of the centuries before and after them right up to the modem period. Jung expressed it in the words: ‘Although in crude form, we find in Gnosticism what was lacking the centuries that followed: a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge’ (Ibid., p. 242).

It is clear that the foundations for several of Jung’s major theoretical concepts may have originated or at least received strong support from early Christian Gnostics, i.e. the psychic functions of thinking’, ‘feeling ‘sensing’, and the ‘process of individuation’. The Gnostics were also fascinated with symbols and the question of how to release these symbols (e.g. God, Sophia and Christ) from the entrapment of the baser instincts. While all of this fascinated Jung as a parallel providing his thinking within historical support, he became increasingly frustrated by the lack of material available due to the suppression of the Gnostics by the early Christian Church. In his autobiography he summarises his Gnostic studies in the following words:

But the Gnostics were too remote for me to establish any link with them in regard to the questions that were confronting me. As far as I could see, the tradition that might have connected Gnosis with the present seemed to have been severed, and for a long time it proved impossible to find any bridge that led from Gnosticism – or neo-Platonism-to the contemporary world JUNG 11, pp. 192-3 (20 1).

That bridge from Gnosticism to the modem world Jung later discovered to be medieval alchemy. But Jung made this discovery through his study of Eastern yoga.

It is quite natural that Jung’s study of early Christian Gnosticism should have led him to the East. One of the Church Fathers who most fascinated him was Origen, and of course Origen was much influenced by Eastern thought (JUNG 3, p. 16f). In addition Jung was also reading the contemporary philosopher Schiller. Schiller was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer who championed Eastern yoga as it is presented in the Hindu scriptures, The Upanishads. It is not surprising then to find Jung putting aside Gnosticism and immersing himself in Eastern thought, beginning with the Indian Brahmanical tradition of the Upanishads.

IV.    JUNG’S ENCOUNTER WITH THE DVANDVA OR ‘PAIRS OF OPPOSITES’ OF YOGA

Jung reports, in his memoir, that very early in life he had become aware of a kind of split within his personality, as if two Opposing souls were housed in the one breast (JUNG II, p. 221 (234)). And when, as a young man, Jung read Goethe’s Faust, it awakened in him the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter, of light and darkness (Ibid., p. 222 (235)). Faust, and his shadow Mephistopheles, presented to Jung in dramatic form his own inner contradictions. ‘Later’, says Jung, ‘I consciously linked my work to what Faust had passed over: respect for the external rights of man, recognition of “the ancient”, and the continuity of culture and intellectual history’ (Ibid.). Although Jung’s search into the ‘ancient sources’ first took him to the Gnostic experience of the opposites of matter and spirit, it was in the Eastern approach to the problem that he found the first real ‘light’.

Dvandva is the Sanskrit term for the pairs of opposites in classical Indian thought. The dvandva include one’s individual experience of opposites such as hot and cold, love and hate, honour and disgrace, male and female, as well as the encounter with universal cosmic opposites such as good and evil. In Hindu thought it is by the inherent separation of the pairs of opposites from another that the universe itself is said to come in to being (RHADHAKRISHNAN & MOORE 18, p. 23). The experience of the dvandva is psychologically analysed by Jung as a tension between the opposite aspects of each archetype or a split in the deployment of psychic energy at the level of the unconscious (JUNG 3, p. 194). There is an infinite variety in the amounts of psychic energy that could be contained on either side of the split, e.g. 50/5O, 60/40, 70/3O, etc. In Jung’s view, however, an unbalanced deployment of psychic energy on one side can only go on for so long until finally the opposite tendency will reassert itself and swingthe ‘pendulum’ in the other direction. Jung said that this is exactly what is Occurring in modern Western experience: the psyche has developed in too one-sided a fashion with an overemphasis on the scientific intellect, thus robbing the intuitive function of its power. Now, the intuitive side is reasserting itself (e.g., witness the contemporary Western fascination with the East) and the movement is beginning to flow in the opposite direction. In Jung’s view any imbalance in the split of psychic energy, while it may produce the short-term gains of rigorous specialisation (e.g. modern Western technology), will, in the long run, prove detrimental.

Naturally this split is a hindrance not only in society but also in the individual. As a result, the vital optimum withdraws more and more from the opposing extremes and seeks a middle way, which must naturally be irrational and unconscious, just because the opposites are rational and conscious. Since the middle position, as a function of mediation between the opposites, possesses an irrational character and is still unconscious, it can also be projected in the form of a mediating god, a Messiah (Ibid., p. 194).

The projection of a mediating Messiah, says Jung, is indicative of the more primitive nature of Western religion-primitive because it lacks insight into the psychological balancing of the opposites that is occurring, and instead blindly accepts the whole thing as the action of God’s grace. By contrast, the East has for thousands of years known of the processes required to balance the opposites, and had made them into paths (marga) of liberation or release. 5

In his Psychological types, Jung reviews the teaching of the Vedas, Upanisads and Yoga sutra on the problem of the pairs of opposites (Ibid., pp. 195-7) and reaches the following conclusions. In Hindu or Brahmanical thought, the pairs of opposites are experienced as a continuum extending from external opposites such as heat and cold to the fluctuations of inner emotion and the conflict of ideas such as good and bad (Ibid., p. 197). The Hindu marga, or path, aims at freeing the individual completely from entanglement in the opposites, which seem inherent in human experience, so that he can experience oneness with Brahman (moksa). What is meant, says Jung, is a union of opposites in which they are cancelled out. … . Brahman is the union and dissolution of all opposites, and at the same time stands outside them as an irrational factor. It is therefore wholly beyond cognition and comprehension ( II Ibd., p. 198). The specific psychological process the yogi uses to realise this transcendence of the opposites involves the systematic withdrawing of libido or ‘attention’ from both external objects and internal psychic states-in other words, from the opposites. This eventually results in the elimination of sense perception and the disappearance of conscious contents (e.g. rational ideas), which opens the way for rising up of images from the collective unconscious. These, says Jung, are the archetypes, ‘. . . prinnordial images, which, because of their universality and immense antiquity, possess a cosmic and suprahuman character’ (Ibid., p.202).the great images of the Vedas, such as Rta (divine cosmic order) and Dharma (The universal moral law), are symbols with the power to regulate and unite the destructive tensions of the pairs of opposites.

In Indian thought Rta acts as a principle of dynamic regulation by with-drawing energy from any imbalance existing between the pairs of opposites until a balance or ‘middle path’ is achieved. As Jung put it, ‘The optimum can be reached only through obedience to the tidal laws of the libido, by which systole alternates within diastole-laws which bring pleasure and the necessary limitations of pleasure, and also set us those individual life tasks without whose accomplishment the vital optimum can never be attained’ (Ibid., p. 213).

It is this psychological vital optimum that is symbolised in Indian concepts such as Rta. Rta and Dharma function to bring out the inherent fundamental laws of human nature which, when followed, guide the natural flow of libido into the middle path through the conflict of opposites. Although Jung finds close agreement between his own personal experience and the Indian view of the dynamic relationship between the pairs of opposites, there is one point on which he sharply differs. In a letter to his friend V. Subrahamanya Iyer, guru of the Maharaja of Mysore, and with whom Jung had searching talks during his visit to India in 1938, Jung discusses the impossibility of getting beyond the pairs of opposites in this life. Whereas to the orthodox Hindu moksa means a complete freedom or transcendence from the tensions of the pairs of opposites, Jung argued that without the dynamic tension between the opposites there is no life.

It is certainly desirable to liberate oneself from the operation of the opposites but one can only do it to a certain extent, because no sooner do you get out of the conflict than you get out of life altogether. So that liberation can only be a very partial one. It can be the construction of a consciousness just beyond the opposites. Your head may be liberated, your feet remain entangled. Complete liberation means death (JUNG 13, p. 217).

The basis of Jung’s disagreement is rooted in his typically Western view of ego. Since the experience of oneself as an individual ego is fundamentally an experience of separation of oneself from other objects and persons, and since separation is the cause of the pairs of opposites, the complete over-coming of the pairs of opposites would also imply the eradication of the ego and its sense of separation. But if there is no ego, there is no kinower and therefore no consciousness. Abolishing the ego to transcend the opposites leaves only unconsciousness. In response to Subrahamanya Iyer’s suggestion that there is, at the highest level, a consciousness without ego, Jung replies, ‘I’m afraid this supreme consciousness is at least not one we could possess. In as much as it exists, we do not exist’ (Ibd., p. 247).

In contrast to the very idealistic approach of Hindu yoga, Jung found the attitude of Chinese yoga more realistic in its perception of the problem of the pairs of opposites. Jung observed that, like Hindu Rta, the Chinese Tao is a uniting symbol for the pairs of opposites. Jung uses the fact that uniting symbols are found independently in Chinese and Indian thought as evidence for the existence of a ‘uniting’ archetype in the collective unconscious. In Jungian theory this uniting archetype comes to be known as the ‘self’. For Lao-Tsu, author of the Tao Ti’ Ching’, the Tao is hidden, nameless and yet at the same time the source of all creation. The Tao manifests the created universe by being divided in to a fundamental pair of opposites named yang and yin. All of the other pairs of opposites can be grouped under yang, on the one side, and yin on the other. Yang, for example, includes ‘warmth, light and maleness, while yin; is cold, darkness and femaleness (JUNG 6, pp. 214-1 5). The Taoist view is that psychic danger occurs when there comes to be too great a split between the opposites thus resulting in a serious imbalance. In his commentary on The secret of the golden flower, Jung says that this is exactly what has happened to the psyche of the modern West. As contemporary Western man’s conscious scientific intellect achieved more independence and power, his intuitive unconscious was thrust into the background to a corresponding degree. This made it even easier for the evolving emphasis upon consciousness to emancipate itself from the unconscious archetypal patterns. Gaining in freedom, the modern Western scientific intellect burst the bounds of mere instinctuality and reached a condition of instinct atrophy (JUNG 5, p. 2).

The overdeveloped conscious intellect of today’s Western man not only suffers from being cut off from his instinctive roots in the collective unconscious, but, due to this very ‘rootlessness’, he experiences a false sense of mastery over and – freedom from nature – to the point of proclaiming him-self God (Ibid., p. 12). Jung points to Nietzsche as an example of just such a result (JUNG 3, pp. 13646).Jung also takes up the Chinese insight that when one of the opposites reaches its greatest strength the other will begin to reassert itself Quoting from the I Ching, he says, ‘When yang has reached its greatest strength, the dark power of yin is born within its depths, for night begins at midday when yang breaks up and begins to change into yin’ (JUNG 5, p. 13). For Jung, the Dionysian eruption of Nietzsche’s unconscious, with its intuitive and instinctive qualities, was confirming evidence of the correctness of the ancient Chinese insight.

Jung also saw the split of psychic energy into varying levels of imbalance throughout the pairs of opposites as a helpful theoretical model for understanding mental breakdown. Jung makes use of a parallel between the one-sidedness of a patient’s orientation threatened with breakdown and the purely conscious orientation of modern Western man suffering from a chronic imbalance.

The Easterner, by contrast, through the practice of his various yogas has kept a better balance between the pairs of opposites and thus does not as yet suffer from the same chronic problems as his Western colleague. Here Jung again sounds his warning that the solution for the Westerner cannot be found by taking up the direct practice of Eastern yoga. Jung says the neurosis or split within consciousness would then simply be intensified (Ibid., p. 14). But what can be learned from the East is a general approach to be adopted so that the split, the imbalance between the opposites may be brought into harmony.

Although during 1918 and 1920, Jung had received from the analysis of his own unconscious a clue that the way to psychic integration was not linear but circular, it was not until his encounter with The secret of the golden flower several years later that his therapeutic concept of ‘circumambulation of the self’ was crystallised and confirmed (JUNG 11, p. 311 (I9~7)). In his commentary on The secret of the golden flower Jung points out that ‘the union of opposites on a higher level of consciousness is not a rational thing, nor is it a matter of will: it is a process of psychic development that expresses itself in symbols’ (JUNG 5, p. 21). Jung maintains that in Western as well as Eastern experience the symbols of integration that appear are chiefly of the mandala type. Afa’udala means circle, and implies a circular movement focused on the centre. It is a mental image or a ritually acted out symbol which aims at engaging all sides of one’s personality-all the positive and the negative opposites of one’s nature.

In Jungian theory the unifying psychological process of symbol formation is usually described as the raisiing or individuating of an archetype from the level of the collective unconscious to the level of conscious awareness. This may occur with varying degrees of psychic intensity from a relatively ordinary ‘insight’ experience to the most extraordinary mystical experience (e.g. Paul’s visionary experience of Christ). In conformity with much Eastern yoga, Jung admits that such a symbolic unity cannot be achieved by a determined effort of the conscious will-because the will is, by nature, biased in favour of one of the sides of the opposites, namely, the conscious side. It is necessary that the appropriate cultural image, through the psychic process of intuition, be allowed to speak to and engage the contents of the collective unconscious in a manner that defies defmitive expression.

It is the purpose of the various meditational tecimiques ofEastern yoga to make possible and promote this process. In the West this same goal of psychic unity should be pursued, not by imitatiing Eastern yoga, but by developing parallel Western practices such as the cultivation of what Jung calls ‘active imagination’. By such means the contents of deeply unconscious layers can be raised and brought into fertile contact with ego-consciousness. Human history, too, may be seen to progress and unfold by sudden moments. When this happens, a pair of opposites may, momentarily at least, be said to be in balance and harmony (JUNG 5, pp. 22-8).

V.    THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN JUNG S ENCOUNTER WITH YOGA

Jung, in the ‘Late thoughts’ section of his biography observes that religious symbols, ‘by their very nature, can so unite the opposites that these no longer diverge or clash, but mutually supplement one another and give meaningful shape to life’ (JUNG 11, p. 311 (338)). This insight, which is nowhere more necessary than in reconciling the inevitable internal contradictions in any conception of God or Absolute Reality, Jung encountered in a highly refined form in Tibetan Buddhism. While writing his Commentary on ‘The Tibetan book of the great liberation’, he notes that in the Tibetan meditations the different gods are nothing but symbolic representations of various aspects of the pairs of opposites which when taken together, constitute the whole (JUNG p. 495). In Indian and Chinese thought, too, any representation of the divine in either philosophical or artistic forms almost always includes the various aspects of the pairs of opposites. The Hindu gods, for example, are balanced and completed by their goddesses (e.g. Siva-Sakti). Indeed, this balancing and fulfilling union between the male and female aspects of the absolute Brahman is the dominant symbolism in medieval Indian art (ZIMMER 23). The same  may be found in the Tibetan yab-yum images (Obermiller, 16), the Taoist yin-yang symbol (Thompson 22, pp. 63-76) and the many different ways in which Zen art represents the finite in the infinite (Suzuki 21). This aspect of Eastern religious symbolism seems to have made a pro-found impact upon Jung. It provided a ‘bridge’ for his return to Western thought in that he discovered the same sort of symbolising of the opposites in Western alchemy (JUNG 8, p. 152f.). However, perhaps even more important, it provided him with a theoretical structure for the Christian experience of God by means of which ‘the unavoidable internal contradictions in the image of a creator-god can be reconciled in the unity and wholeness of the self as the coniunctio oppositorum of the alchemists or as a unio inystica’ (JUNG II, p. 311 (338)). It is clear that Jung’s most significant religious experience did not have to do with the reconciling of God and man, but rather with the reconciliation of the opposites within the God-image itself (Ibid.). Although Jung’s theological solution takes its content from Western alchemy, its form was largely shaped in his earlier encounter with Eastern religion. In his Commentary on ‘The secret of the golden flower’ Jung summarised the significance of this encounter as bringing God within the range of his own experience of reality. By this he did not mean that he was adopting the metaphysics of Eastern yoga, for this he explicitly rejects. By seeing God, not as an absolute beyond all human experience, but as a powerful impulse within my personality, says Jung, ‘I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important, even unpleasantly so, and can affect me in practical ways . . . ‘ (JUNG 5, p. so).

While analysing the differences he found between East and West Jung noticed that in the East the religions received great respect because they provided the paths or yogas by which entrapment in the tensions of the pairs of opposites could be overcome. By contrast, Western forms of contemplation are little developed and in general are not respected. Contemplative religious orders are often judged to be worthless because they spend their time meditating and doing nothing, rather than in helping the needy. Jung states it concisely. ‘No one has time for self-knowledge or believes that it could serve any sensible purpose . . . We believe exclusively in doing and do not ask about the doer… ‘(JUNG 10, p. 498). This leads Jung to conclude that the religious attitude of the West is extroverted while that of the East is introverted (JUNG 7, p.488). While Western religion sees God immanently at work in the events of the natural world, and acting through grace in his transcendental separation from the world (Rudolph Otto), Eastern religion finds spiritual information and guidance mainly through introspection. Here Jung would probably admit that he is overemphasising for the purpose of making his point (Ibid., p. 506). Eastern religions, such as Hinduism, do not receive spiritual information and guidance only through introspection. For the Hindu the encounter with his scriptural revelation, the Veda, which comes to him from the external world (thus given cultural environment), is essential for his eventual realisation of moksa or release. Similarly, the Western Christian, for example, has some sense of the presence of the Holy Spirit within. But the general insight Jung stated as a result of his encounter with Eastern yoga still receives credence today. Recent Western commentators such as Jacob Needleman (15) and Theodore Roszak (19) still stress the necessity. of an ‘inward turn’ exactly as Jung prescribed it some forty years ago.

Yet another aspect of Eastern religion which attracted Jung was that it was based on an experiential knowledge of man’s own consciousness, and not on the blind faith or otherworldly grace that he felt characterised much Western religion. If the Eastern approach were adopted by the West, not only would this remove religion from the realms of otherworldly superstition, it would also do away with the conflict between religion and science. As long as science is based on empirical fact, and religion on blind faith, the barrier between the two will remain and the psychic split within Western man will deepen into still more of Nietzsche’s madness. In the West both science and religion have to become less dogmatic and expand their awareness. ‘There is no conflict between religion and science in the East,’ says Jung, ‘because no science is there based upon the passion for facts, and no religion upon mere faith …’ (JUNG 7, p. 480). Of course Jung realised that he was referring here to traditional Eastern science and not to the imported brands of  Western science that one now encounters in contemporary Eastern universities.6

VI.    JUNG’S VIEW OF THE LIMITS (BENEFITS AND DANGERS) IN THE WESTERN ENCOUNTER WITH YOGA

There is little doubt that Jung’s encounter with the various Indian, Tibetan and Chinese forms of yoga had a significant and beneficial impact upon his life. But it was an impact that he found difficult to communicate to his Western readers. Jung was only too aware of the strong possibility that any such attempt would run the risk of promoting misunderstanding at many different levels-some relatively harness, others quite dangerous. He realised that because the Westerner typically does not know his own unconscious, it is quite likely that when he finds the East strange and hard to understand he will project onto it everything he fears and despises in himself Anyone who has had the experience of teaching the East to the general public of the West can confirm this insight of Jung. The other kind of typical Western reaction, and perhaps the one which Jung feared most, is to be quickly attracted to the East, to give up one’s own heritage, and, with little or no understanding of the psychic processes involved, to become a ‘surface’ imitator of Eastern yoga-in a word, to mindlessly ape the East. As Jung put it, “The usual mistake of Western man when faced with this problem   of grasping the ideas of the East is like that of the student in Faust. Misled by the devil, he contemptuously turns his back on science and, carried away into Eastern occultism, takes over yoga practices word for word and becomes a pitiable imitator’ (JUNG 5, p. 7). The reason Jung feared this so much was that he felt the direct practice of yoga by a Westerner would only serve to strengthen his will and consciousness and so further intensify the split with the unconscious. This would simply add more aggravation to the already chronic Western ailment – over-development of the will and the conscious aspect of the psyche. The outcome would be just as disastrous for the Western neurotic who suffers from the opposite problem of a lack of development of the conscious and a predominance of the unconscious. Since the thrust of yoga is inward, it would only plunge such a neurosis further into the depths (Ibid., p. 14). In addition to these considerations, Jung pointed out that if we try to snatch spiritual techniques directly from the East ‘we have merely indulged our Western acquisitiveness, confirming yet again that “everything good is outside”, whence it has to be fetched and pumped into our barren souls’ (JUNG 7, p. 483).

When the above limitations and dangers are taken seriously, Jung felt that the West could obtain substantial benefits from encounter with the East. One of the major contributions of Western contact with the various spiritual disciplines of Eastern yoga is that they serve to remind the West that some-thing similar may be found in its own cultural heritage. As examples of authentic spiritual practices, which have been forgotten by the modem West, Jung points frequently to the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, but with deepest interest to Western medieval alchemy. And in addition to helping the West recover these most valuable aspects of its own tradition, contact with the East also had the effect of directing the attention of modem Western man to the importance of his inner nature and its intuitive function. As Jung clearly demonstrates in His last essay, ‘Approaching the unconscious’, scientific as well as artistic and religious creativity may directly depend on sensitivity to the intuitive process of the unconscious (JUNG 12). Even in his own day Jung looked upon the growing interest in Eastern yoga as a sign that the West was beginning to relate to the intuitive elements within itself

Were he alive today Jung would probably judge the even greater fascination with the East in the same optimistic way. But he would surely repeat again and again his warning to the West that denial of its own historical foundations and its contemporary scientific advances would be sheer folly and the best way to bring about yet another uprooting of consciousness JUNG 5, p. 49).

You cannot he a good Christian and redeem yourself, nor can you be a Buddha and worship God. It is much better to accept the conflict we must get at Eastern values from within and not from without, seeking them in ourselves, in the unconscious… (JUNG 7, pp. 483-4).

Jung believed that the science of modern psychology would provide the necessary means for the contemporary West to seek within successfully Jung 5, p. 43)

VII. SUMMARY

Jung does not use the term ‘yoga’ in a narrow technical way as is the case, for example, in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. In his writings Jung applies ‘yoga’ in a general way to encompass all of his encounters with Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist systems of thought. Following upon His 1912-1918 confrontation with the unconscious, Jung’s encounter with yoga served two important purposes. First, it provided him with confirming evidence that others had had similar experiences to his own. Second, it gave further substance to the Gnostic suggestion that consciousness was wider than modem man’s fixation upon the scientific intellect seemed to allow. Indeed it appears that in the development of Jung’s thinking, yoga led him on from his early fascination with gnosticism to a decade or so of sojourn to the East, and then back to Western alchemy.

The fundamental importance of the pairs of Opposites (dvandva) in Eastern thought provided Jung with powerful cross-cultural confirmation of his personal experience of the psychic tension within the personality. Jung observed that Hindu concepts such as Rta and Dharma highlight the inherent laws of human nature which, when followed, guide the natural flow of libido into the middle path through the conflict of opposites. The overcoming of the conflict of opposites within the personality is the goal of the various margas or psychological disciplines of Eastern yoga. Modern Western man has overweighted the conscious orientation of the psyche and thus suffers from a condition of chronic imbalance. The Easterner, by contrast, through the practice of his various yogas has kept a better balance between the pairs of opposites and thus does not as yet suffer from the same chronic problems as Western man. Jung repeatedly warns, however, that the solution for the Westerner cannot be found in taking up the direct practice of Eastern yoga-this would only serve to intensify the existing neurosis or split within consciousness. But Jung felt that knowledge of Eastern yoga could play an effective role in sensitising one to techniques or disciplines present within Western thought, which when adopted, could correct the imbalance of the modern psyche. Jung’s study of yoga focused his interest on the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, and particularly upon the practices of medieval alchemy. However, in the end it was the pathway of individuation through active imagination that, in Jung’s view, was the appropriate ‘yoga’ for modern Western man.

Perhaps the most important result of this study is the observance of a basic divergence between Jung and most traditional Eastern yoga. Although Jung finds close agreement between his personal experience and the Eastern view of the dynamic tension between the pairs of opposites, Jung firmly believed that it was impossible to get beyond this tension. To most orthodox Hindus, for example, moksa means a complete freedom or transcendence from the tensions of the pairs of opposites. Jung, however, argued that without such dynamic tension there is no life. The basis of Jung’s disagreement is rooted in his typically Western view of ego. Since experience of oneself as an individual ego is fundamentally an experience of separation from other objects and persons, and since separation is the cause of the pairs of opposites, the complete overcoming of the pairs of opposites implies the eradication of the ego. But if there is no ego, there is no knower and therefore no consciousness. In Jung’s view abolishing the ego to transcend the opposites leaves Only the unconscious – an outcome which simply will not square with the Western experience of philosophy, religion, and modern science.

REFERENCES

I.    BENNETT, E. A. (I 966). What Jung really said. London, Macdonald.

2.    Eliade, M. (1958). Yoga: immortality and freedom. Princeton University Press.

F    3. JUNG, C. G. (1921). Psychological types. Coil. wks., 7.

4.    (1928). ‘The relations between the ego and the unconscious’. Coil. wks., 7.

From Man and His Symbols

Jung’s thinking has coloured the world of modern psychology more than many of those with casual knowledge realise. Such familiar terms, for instance, as “extrovert,” “introvert,” and “archetype” are all Jungian concepts-borrowed and sometimes misused by others. But his overwhelming contribution to psychological understanding is his concept of the unconscious-not (like the “subconscious” of Freud) merely a sort of glory-hole of repressed desires, but a world that is just as much a vital and real part of the life of an individual as the conscious, “cogitating” world of the ego, and infinitely wider and richer.  The language and the “people” of the unconscious are symbols, and the means of communications dreams.

Thus an examination of Man and his Symbols is in effect an examination of man’s relation to his own unconscious. And since in Jung’s view the unconscious is the great guide, friend, and adviser of the conscious, this book is related in the most direct terms to the study of human beings and their

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spiritual problems. We know the unconscious and communicate with it (a two-way service) principally by dreams; and all through this book (above all in Jung’s own chapter) you will find a quite remarkable emphasis placed on the importance of dreaming in the life of the individual.

It would be an impertinence on my part to attempt to interpret Jung’s work to readers, many of whom will surely be far better qualified to understand it than I am. My role, remember, was merely to serve as a sort of “intelligibility filter” and by no means as an interpreter. Nevertheless, I venture to offer two general points that seem important to me as a layman and that may possibly be helpful to other non-experts. The first is about dreams. To Jungians the dream is not a kind of standardised cryptogram that can be decoded by a glossary of symbol meanings. It is an integral, important, and personal expression of the individual unconscious. It is just as “real” as any other phenomenon attaching to the individual. The dreamer’s individual unconscious is communicating with the dreamer alone and is selecting symbols for its purpose that have meaning to the dreamer and to nobody else. Thus the interpretation of dreams, whether by the analyst or by the dreamer himself, is for the Jungian psychologist an entirely personal and individual business (and sometimes an experimental and very lengthy one as well) that can by no means be undertaken by rule of thumb.

The converse of this is that the communications of the unconscious are of the highest importance to the dreamer-naturally so, since the unconscious is at least half of his total being-and frequently offer him advice or guidance that could be obtained from no other source. Thus, when I described Jung’s dream about addressing the multitude, I was not describing a piece of magic or suggesting that Jung dabbled in fortune telling. I was recounting in the simple terms of daily experience how Jung was “advised” by his own unconscious to reconsider an inadequate judgement he had made with the conscious part of his mind.

Now it follows from this that the dreaming of dreams is not a matter that the well-adjusted Jungian can regard as simply a matter of chance. On the contrary, the ability to establish communication with the unconscious is a part of the whole man, and Jungians “teach” themselves (I can think of no better term) to be receptive to dreams. When, therefore, Jung himself was faced with the critical decision whether or not to write this book, he was able to draw on the resources of both his conscious and his unconscious in making up his mind. And all through this book you will find the dream treated as a direct, personal, and meaningful communication to the dreamer-a communication that uses the symbols common to all mankind, but that uses them on every occasion in an entirely individual way that can be interpreted only by an entirely individual “key.”

The second point I wish to make is about a particular characteristic of argumentative method that is common to all the writers of this book-perhaps of all Jungians. Those who have limited themselves to living entirely in the world of the conscious and who reject communication with the unconscious bind themselves by the laws of conscious, formal life. With the infallible (but often meaningless) logic of the algebraic equation, they argue from assumed premises to incontestably deduced conclusions. Jung and his colleagues seem to me (whether they know it or not) to reject the limitations of this method of argument. It is not that they ignore logic, but they appear all the time to be arguing to the unconscious as well as to the conscious. Their dialectical method is itself symbolic and often devious. They convince not by means of the narrowly focused spotlight of the syllogism, but by skirting, by repetition, by presenting a recurring view of the same subject seen each time from a slightly different angle-until suddenly the reader who has never been aware of a single, conclusive moment of proof finds that he has unknowingly embraced and taken into himself some wider truth.

Jung’s arguments (and those of his colleagues) spiral upward over his subject like a bird circling a tree. At first, near the ground, it sees only a confusion of leaves and branches. Gradually, as it circles higher and higher, the recurring aspects of the tree form a wholeness and relate to their surroundings. Some readers may find this “spiralling” method of argument obscure or even confusing for a few pages-but not, I think, for long. It is characteristic of Jung’s method, and very soon the reader will find it carrying him with it on a persuasive and profoundly absorbing journey.

The different sections of this book speak for themselves and require little introduction from me. Jung’s own chapter introduces the reader to the unconscious, to the archetypes and symbols that form its language and to the dreams by which it communicates. Dr. Henderson in the following chapter illustrates the appearance of several archetypal patterns in ancient mythology, folk legend, and primitive ritual. Dr. von Franz, in the chapter entitled “The Process of Individuation,” describes the process by which the conscious and the unconscious within an individual learn to know, respect, and accommodate one another. In a certain sense this chapter contains not only the crux of the whole book, but perhaps the essence of Jung’s philosophy of life: Man becomes whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when (and only when) the process of individuation is complete, when the conscious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and to complement one another. Mrs. Jaffe’, like Dr. Henderson, is concerned with demonstrating, in the familiar fabric of the conscious, man’s recurring interest in-almost obsession with-the symbols of the unconscious. They have for him a profoundly significant, almost a nourishing and sustaining, inner attraction-whether they occur in the myths and fairy tales that Dr. Henderson analyses or in the visual arts, which, as Mrs. Jaffe’ shows, satisfy and delight us by a constant appeal to the unconscious.

Finally I must say a brief word about Dr. Jacobi’s chapter, which is somewhat separate from the rest of the book. It is in fact an abbreviated case history of one interesting and successful analysis. The value of such a chapter in a book like this is obvious; but two words of warning are nevertheless necessary. First, as Dr. von Franz points out, there is no such thing as a typical Jungian analysis. There can’t be, because every dream is a private and individual communication, and no two dreams use the symbols of the unconscious in the same way. So every Jungian analysis is unique-and it is misleading to consider this one, taken from Dr. Jacobi’s clinical files (or any other one there has ever been), as “representative” or “typical.” All one can say of the case of Henry and his sometimes lurid dreams is that they form one true example of the way in which the Jungian method may be applied to a particular case. Secondly, the full history of even a comparatively uncomplicated case would take a whole book to recount. Inevitably, the story of Henry’s analysis suffers a little in compression. The references, for instance, to the I Ching have been somewhat obscured and lent an unnatural (and to me unsatisfactory) flavour of the occult by being presented out of their full context. Nevertheless, we concluded-and I am sure the reader will agree-that, with the warnings duly given, the clarity, to say nothing of the human interest, of Henry’s analysis greatly enriches this book.

I began by describing how Jung came to write Man and his Symbols. I end by reminding the reader of what a remarkable-perhaps unique-publication this is. Carl Gustav Jung was one of the great doctors of all time and one of the great thinkers of this century. His object always was to help men and women to know themselves, so that by self-knowledge and thoughtful self-use they could lead full, rich, and happy lives. At the very end of his own life, which was as full, rich, and happy as any I have ever encountered, he decided to use the strength that was left to him to address his message to a wider public than he had ever tried to reach before. He completed his task and his life in the same month. This book is his legacy to the broad reading public.

Example 11 – Descriptions of Enlightenment

A person trying to describe their experience of wider awareness

Now it seemed as if my awareness went beyond the frontier. This was a very visual experience. I was seeing a vast desert and I knew this represented immense periods of time, perhaps what we call eternity. So it could be called the Desert of Eternity. Here and there in the desert were huge rock formations, a little bit like what one sees in Monument Valley in Arizona. But these rock formations were not plain or slightly coloured rock. Also they were immense. They had the appearance of massive mosaics – brightly coloured mosaics. But the mosaics did not form illustrations or patterns. However, some pieces of the mosaics were larger than others. And each piece might be in itself multicoloured and a sort of miniature pictograph.

As I looked at these massive formations I understood that they had been carved or created through events in the passage of time. Each mosaic, each part of the overall mosaic, had been formed by enormous creative acts, or by long-standing actions. So these latter were like ideograms or archetypes. So, for instance, mother creatures have cared for, fought for, died for their young. This pattern of behaviour has been so enormously potent and perhaps we can use the word successful, that it has created, shaped aspects of eternity. It has left its pattern, its artwork, on time itself. Thus eternity honours that pattern by giving it a place in the very structure of itself. No one being created such a mosaic in the formations. Such a mosaic was large and had in it the essence of all the lives that formed it.

So the rock formations and the mosaics on them represented influences that will flow into the future. They were sources of power or influence that shaped the phenomenal world. They were the body under the coat so to speak.

 

Afloat in the Ocean of Sentience

While snorkelling off Atsitsa Bay on the Greek Island of Skyros, I was cruising along in crystal clear water about four or five meters deep. The water was warm and there were plenty of fish to watch. As I reached the tip of the island I suddenly swam over the edge of an underwater precipice. The water was so incredibly clear I could see into an immense depth, with thousands of fish adding dimension to the abyss. The sudden depth scared me, so I scrambled back to shallow water to gain confidence before once more floating over the abyss. It was an extraordinary experience, swimming in shafts of light, floating in enormous space in the midst of thousands of living creatures.

This describes a little of how it feels when we become aware of the immense web of life in which we exist. The analogy can be taken further, because one way of explaining how synchronous events work in our life is to say that we all float in an ocean of sentience.

Experience of War

As I lay there on the floor, torn from the depths of sleep, I felt such extremity of fear as I had never known. From the waist downward I shook in an uncontrollable trembling, horrible to experience. In the same fraction of time, the upper part of me reached out instinctively, with a deep gasping breath, to something beyond my knowledge.

I had the experience of being caught, as neatly and cleanly as a good fielder catches a ball. A sense of indescribable relief flowed through my whole being. I knew with a certainty, such as no other certainty could be, that I was secure. There was no assur­ance that I should not be blown to pieces in the next instant. I expected to be. But I knew that, though such might be my fate, it was not of great account. There was something in me that was indestructible. The trembling ceased and I was completely col­lected and calm. Another shell came and burst, but it had lost its terror.

An overview of Life

To quote J. B. Priestly from his book Rain Upon Godshill: ‘Just before I went to America, during the exhausting weeks when I was busy with my Time Plays, I had such a dream, and I think it left a greater impression on my mind than any experience I had ever known before, awake or in dreams, and said more to me about this life than any book I have ever read. The setting of the dream was quite simple, and owed something to the fact that not long before my wife had visited the lighthouse here at St Catherine’s to do some bird ringing. I dreamt I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds all flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek, and then, in a flash bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless effort?

As I stared down, seeming to see every creature’s ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us, had been born, if the struggle ceased for ever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again, and the time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; and as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of being. Birds, men and creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were of no account except so far as this flame of life travelled though them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought was tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never before felt such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds.’

Extending Further

This has happened to me several times, and each time is similar. It is as though I have grown used to living in a room in a house. It is all I have ever known, so I take it that this is all there is of me. Then suddenly it feels as if the walls of that room melt away, or a door opens, and there I am stretching away forever. My mind, and what I can know, has no boundaries. If I think about a question, whatever it is, I have the most amazing response and insight, as if I have lived throughout all history. I feel as If I am part of a huge and unlimited sea of mind or consciousness. In it is all that has ever existed, merged and yet distinct. Every human talent and thought is in it alive and vital. At those times I know with an unshakeable surety that we cannot help but be a part of this immense life. Yet at the same time we can be at odds with it, be unsympathetic to it. This causes a condition of stress within us, and within our relationship with it. But I feel that if we completely accept our place in this being, even though one is a minute and seemingly insignificant part of it, then we are aligned with its huge universal life and purpose. Then we become revivified in some way.

Remembering

About 10 years ago I was what you would call awakened, enlightened, I would say living on the next spiritual plane. In a state of being where you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror expecting your eyes to have turned into deep, unending pools, encompassing all space, time and knowledge. All of life looked to me like a giant, glistening, shining web, and I lived at the centre of that web, and everyone else lived at the centre of their own web, and all of the webs were interlinked. Like a spider I could feel every tremor in the web; everything that happened in the world, every footfall, every mind waking up and going to sleep… I felt it and knew of it all…

I lived outside of time. The past, present and future were all one, and I always knew what was coming next. I saw how all of our yesterdays and tomorrows affected our now’s and next year’s… I lived in the pure present, and yet my consciousness spanned across all of time…

(Wow, what a great feeling to suddenly remember all of this again!)

I lived this way for some time but ultimately I did not know where to go next – I did not know what the next stage was. So I spent all my time frantically trying to enlighten others, and eventually I burned out. I came back to earth with a crash and sank into a deep depression. As a result, I have been a little afraid of going back there. But everything I have learned since then has suddenly come together and I know that it is safe to attempt to reach that state of being once more. I knew straight away that this dream I had was a calling back to that realm, a catalyst.

Every truth I have searched for, every book I have read, every conversation I’ve had, and every thought I have formed since then, has been an endless search for knowledge of where we go next once we have achieved that state of being, of how to live in that dimension. I have not been able to access that realm until now, because I could not go there again without knowledge of what to do once I am there, and without some surety that I will not come back to earth with such a bump this time. The new discoveries in quantum physics and neuroscience are a big part of this new understanding. If anyone had told me 10 years ago that science would bring some coherence to my spirituality, I would have doubted it. But for some time now I have had the surety that science and spirituality would one day come together, and I have devoted my time to both equally for the last 8 years, looking for some sign that this would come to pass. It seems that time is here.

 

The Bubble

I needed to go to the toilet to urinate. It was a great pleasure to do this, and to watch the falling water splash into the pool creating many bubbles. But something caught my attention, for it seemed that each small bubble was an eye looking up at me. Wondering what this could mean I looked more closely, to see not eyes, but I’s. Each bubble had a tiny reflection of myself in it. Because my senses were amplified the ability of our waking consciousness to receive information from the unconscious was heightened, I was led to see each of the tiny replicas of myself as having separate identity. The suggestion behind this was that I, and everybody else, with our personal identity, are like bubbles. We are all in our own sphere of skin, apparently separated, and yet at the same time, all part of the same substance. As this interesting line of experience developed, I saw that each of the separate bubbles, although they each were different in size, occupied a different space, and therefore had a different identity, only had awareness out of my own consciousness. They were all unknowingly reflections of me.[i]

Suddenly, and with some fear, I realised the meaning of this interesting fantasy. I am a bubble. My personal awareness, although it seems distinct and separate, is in fact the reflection of one great consciousness pervading the universe. So who am I when my bubble bursts, as it must, and I return to my source? The fear I first felt has long melted. It has been replaced by joy as I have explored what it means to burst and return home.

Touching the Centre

In the dream I looked over at a plain wall in the room. It was light green. To my amazement a huge living and wondrous circle appeared on the wall. It was full of movement, everything dancing in time to music. At the very centre of the circle was emptiness, nothing, a void. Yet out of this nothingness all things emerged. There were plants, animals, people, hills, rivers and mountains all coming to birth. They danced out in their own individual movement, yet each unknowing was part of the whole wonderful and intricate dance which made a great pattern and movement in the body of the circle. All danced to the periphery and there turned and moved, still in their ballet, back to the centre. At that centre they plunged into its oblivion again. But at that very moment new life sprang from it to dance once more.

To touch that centre, to be renewed by it, you may need to surrender to it, to let things happen. You need to hold it as an image and drop into the centre with as much trust as you can. By doing so you are opening to the primal essence in you for renewal, for guidance – a guide in the dance. You may be out of step even with yourself. That is your sickness.

A View of Eternity

Before I went to sleep that night I focused on the question -Who am I, really?

The dream was vivid, and still gives me shivers to this day. I dreamed that I looked up and there was this incredible star that was emanating points of light in the sky. It got brighter and brighter and the bottom-most point reached down to where I was and transported me up to the star. The points of light came out from the centre in all directions, and I found myself on the end of one of the horizontal points.

A wonderful (female) voice spoke to me and said this is who you are, and I had the strong sense of being located at the end of the horizontal light bar. Then she said and this is who you are and carried (transported in some way) me to the next bar of light, where I saw another version (incarnation?) of myself (in a different time and place, although I knew that the essence of this version of me was really me). She continued transporting me from bar to bar where I experienced myself in many different versions in the past, present, and future. I had different skills and interests that were the focal point of each version of myself–a musician in one, a farmer in another.

Some of the versions were females, although I experienced the same sense of self in all of them. Then she returned me to the horizontal bar of my current self and said to me that all of this is who I am, but that now she was going to show me who I really am. Then she drew me into the centre of the star (light, energy source) where I merged with her and could see each of the emanating points of light as manifestations of a single source or spirit. It was one of the most incredible feelings of being integrated and whole that I’ve ever experienced, and I basked in the feeling for a while just absorbing and soaking it in. Then she returned me to myself (with a cosmic wink) and I slept peacefully for the rest of the night. Ever since then I haven’t felt the need to ask who or what I am, and I’ve seen my various abilities and struggles in life in a totally new way. C.A.

 

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[i] ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ Genesis 1:26.

Angling

This shows you creating a receptive state of consciousness that allows the deep insights or processes within you to become known. You are literally dipping into your unconscious levels of awareness to bring insights and intuitions to the surface. So you are trying to find spiritual nourishment, ‘fishing’ for ideas or information. You might even be fishing for compliments. See: fish and sea creatures.

When we fish in a dream or usually represents us creating a receptive state of consciousness which allows the us to find things that are usually difficult to ‘catch’ with our normal mind. So it is like trying to bring things up from our memory that we have either forgotten or perhaps never ever realised before. So it is like trying to find spiritual nourishment. It might in some dream show us ‘fishing’ for ideas, compliments or information; seeking intuition.

Fishing rod: Male sexuality; personal power, or feelings of impotence.

Getting a new fishing rod: In a man’s dream might mean feeling anxious about his ability to ‘hook’ a woman. For a woman it could mean a desire to ‘catch’ a new man. In general the rod suggests the means of pulling something out of the unknown of life or your mind. So it could suggest intuition or skill in acquiring creative ideas, or something that nourishes.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What are your trying to catch, a partner, inner wisdom, something to deal with hunger?

Have I been looking within myself lately for creative ideas or understanding?

Has anything been caught, and if so what do I feel about it?

What do the events and environment of the dream add to my understanding?

Did you catch anything, and if so what did it make you feel?

Where you trying to hook objects –  if what memories do they link with?

Try talking as to define your dreams meaning.

Twin

There are several possibilities when you dream of a twin or twins.

The first one is that it is part of you that has got split off from your main development. So they can be one of the many polar opposites or splits in our being – the split between waking consciousness and sleep or the unconscious; the split between what we want in our deepest desires, and what we can allow ourselves socially; the split caused by infant trauma; the split between our sense of eternity and the facts of physical mortality; introversion and extroversion; something of self which has got split off, or perhaps even ‘died at birth’, leaving us feeling only half a person; the lack of balance in our being.

Twins can also represent duality, conflict, or two sides of an issue, but also the emergence of something new, something that was denied, that you were born with, but never acknowledged as part of yourself. It can also be your unconscious relationship with another person, such as occurs in a telepathic link. In some cases though it is about separation, and the feelings you have about that, or about the denied or unrealised part of yourself.

But if you were a twin at birth and you twin died it could be a reference to them and your continued link with them. To quote from http://www.twinlesstwins.org/GRIEF/ProfessionalResearch/TwinBereavement.aspx –

“When we lose a twin, it feels for many of us like the literal end of our lives. That is true, in that it is the end of life as we have known it since the moment of our conception. As one twin explained to me: ‘The day my twin died, the lights went out.’ Another twin said to me, ‘After Daphne died, it was as if I couldn’t breathe. I’d never in my life thought about breathing. I just took it for granted that Daphne and my breath were part of being alive.’ When our twin dies, we must begin to breathe again; we must begin again with our lives, starting with what truly feels like the end.”

“Twins begin their identify formation in the womb. Whether fraternal or identical, they receive different stimuli and resources in the womb environment and, therefore, have different experiences that affect their fetal development. But from their cellular origins, they are ushered into the womb in relationship, both to their mother and to each other. And early on, they begin to show distinct, individual, and also interactive patterns of behavior and temperament, which have been observed and documented by researchers with the use of ultra-sonography. These patterns are often repeated after birth.”

But here is another possibility, explained by man who was trying to find himself.

There is a part of me that he has never actually involved in this present life. It has never been expressed. It has never been incarnated. It is almost as if it was not born with me. It has never expressed through the body. It hasn’t made itself real through the body. So it is almost as if it has been a spiritual or invisible twin, a ghost, a spirit guide. It is influencing his life – God, what a story – and yet is so frustrated. Frustrated all the time because it can’t live its life. It is pushing and pushing me toward what it wants to do, yet it is not felt as wholly me. It is not something I have built into my life and trusts, and so I do not live it in the same way as he lives the other areas of my life. When I look at this question though, I see there is a problem which is a part of my nature. It has created this division. When I was born there was a struggle about incarnation. I didn’t want to be born. I didn’t want to face again the experience of the world. So, a very large part of me was cut off from involvement and expression. It was pulled back or held back. It did not directly build the body or build the experience it might have done otherwise. See Meeting My Baby Self

An amazing conception happened after two eggs were fertilised at the same time in the womb. Both Kylie and her partner Remi Horder, pictured below, are of mixed race. Their mothers are both white and their fathers are black. According to the Multiple Births Foundation, baby Kian must have inherited the black genes from both sides of the family, whilst Remee inherited the white ones. The odds against of a mixed race couple having twins of dramatically different colour are a million to one.

A mixed-race British couple has defied the odds — twice — by producing two sets of twins in which one sibling appears to be black and the other white.

Alive

In some dreams there is a great feeling of extraordinary aliveness, or there is a particular emphasis on the difference between being alive and dead. This usually refers to the dreamers potential of positive feelings and energy. The dream might even compare the two.

Example: I was alone in a house and asleep in bed. Something materialised or landed on the foot of the bed. It woke me a little and I felt afraid. I had the feeling it was some sort of entity materialising and coming for me in some way. It moved up the bed a little. I felt paralysed, partly by fear but also as if the ‘thing’ was influencing me. This made me more afraid of it. Then it moved up higher, not on my body but on the bed. I was very afraid and struggling against the paralysing influence. I managed to shout at it – “I will destroy you. I will destroy you”. As I shouted I pushed at it with my hand. This felt to me as if I were going to will its destruction and use my hand to smash it. I still felt a little uncertain of the outcome but I was very determined to fight it. At this point I woke up or was awakened by my wife. She asked me what I had been dreaming. Apparently I had been pushing her and shouting that I would destroy her. David P.

David explored his dream in depth and describes his insights as follows –

I started by considering the recent nightmare of the ‘thing’ at the foot of my bed. Gradually I began to feel tense throughout my body, with difficulty in breathing. The ‘thing’ seemed at first to be a woman’s vagina. There was a little feeling in this but not much. Then it slowly grew in intensity and I realised the ‘thing’ was death. Recently it is obvious from the mirror that my body is going through another period of rapid ageing. The dream was a dramatic representation of my feelings about this. Death was gradually creeping up on me, gradually overwhelming me and I was fighting it. As the session deepened I saw that in my feelings I felt that death had put its finger on me. The touch of death was like a disease though. Once touched the disease was incurable and gradually took over one’s body. I could hardly breathe as I experienced this, and I understood the sort of emotions that might lie beneath asthma attacks. This struggle with death went on for some time. It was not terrible but was felt strongly. I also recognised that my wife. Deb, has similar feelings about her ageing, and is communicating to me that her body is dying and unclean, especially her genitals, and this is off-putting. I see that when I shout I ‘I will destroy you!’ in a way it is my fear of being destroyed that is behind the emotion.

I began to wonder what to do about the situation. The feeling was that death was claiming me. So, I wanted to face the truth about death, whatever it was. I wanted to walk right up to it and look it in the face and know whether death meant a final end. If it did I would rather know. As I approached death like this by imaging walking toward the THING, my feelings went through an amazing transformation. All the tension left me. I felt good, positive, easy to breathe and with a sense of hope about life and death. This was so surprising and sudden I wondered what had produced it. I needed to be aware of how this change had occurred. So, I retraced my steps to look at death and try to understand why it had lost its power of fear.

At first I saw that my tension and sense of death being or giving a disease was due to a view I had of it. When we look at the world only through our senses, death is obviously a terminal sickness that claims everyone. Someone said on TV the other day – Life is a sexually transmitted disease that produces a 100% mortality. Seen in this way death is the rotting corpse, the skeleton. The path to it is disease or breakdown. But in looking it in the face I saw another view of it. I saw the dead body, the corpse, the skeleton, as a form left behind by the process of life. When I looked at myself to see what ‘David’ is – I cannot separate myself from the process of life. That process leaves behind shells, bodies, tree trunks, but it goes on creating other forms. I am Life.

Useful Questions and Hints:

In the dream what attitude allows or creates this feeling of aliveness?

Do I diminish the feeling in any way, and if so how?

In what ways does this differ from my daily sense of myself, and what can I learn from that?

See Talking with the Dead; Near Death Experiences; Life and Death.

 

Teenage Male Dreams

Adolescence is the time of your greatest sexual growth, and development of new ranges of emotion, intellect, and sensitivity. So any adolescent in your dream often points to yourself at that age, and the things you faced – or if you are not yet a teenager, then the things you feel about moving toward adolescence.

During adolescence we move from youth to becoming a mature adult. This means learning to become more independent of the work energy, the money and time given by parents. It means making your own decisions, moving toward earning your own keep and establishing yourself in the community and the world. Sometimes the break from parents is made by establishing a relationship with someone. However the shift needs a level of heroism in many ways, and if you succeed the difficulties change and deepen you.

At such a time you may unconsciously use certain strategies to become independent. One is to become angry, defensive or down right obnoxious. What this does is to give strength to break away – even if it means feeling your parents are a heap of shit.

Another way is to become a mothers boy and cling – but this doesn’t mean you become independent emotionally, but it might make you feel safe.

On one site about teenage behavior it list sucht things as:

Does your child often:

• lose his temper
• argue with adults
• refuse to comply with rules and requests
• deliberately annoy people
• blame others for his mistakes and misbehavior

=> Is your child often:

• touchy and easily annoyed by others
• angry and resentful
• spiteful and vindictive

These are all ways to become yourself. After all, all your life you have had to be dependent on parents or carers. And it is quite something to emerge from it. But if you understand what happening it can become an easier journey.

The dream world of the adolescent shows very big shifts from that of the child. One of the major themes here is illustrated in this dream from Natalie, a thirteen year old:

I have this recurring nightmare. I see my mother standing by my bedroom door, blocking it as if I am being trapped and stopped from getting out. I often call to her, “Let me out Mum” but she just stands there staring with no expression on her face at all. I end up getting out of bed and switching my bedroom light on and then she disappears. Sometimes I will see her standing by my wardrobe. It seems as if she is always standing by a door and trying to trap me.

The dream shows how a teenager is trying to find a way out of her dependence on mother. The dependence is felt as if it is the power of the mother over the child, a sort of restrictive force. This theme of moving toward independence physically and psychologically is a huge step to take, and many dreams in this period explore how this can be achieved, and the various paths one could take to attain it.

Example: Back with my lover I felt, still young, inexperienced and a bit clumsy, but laughing and happy, the flow of pleasure to my lover, leading to a kiss. The deep internal pleasure of kissing gradually widened until it led to genital feeling. I realised so many things as this lovely gentle growth of feeling and flowing occurred. I realised that I and most teenagers have too much technical sex instruction, so it is portrayed as an erect penis entering the vagina.

But I was seeing it wasn’t like that at all. First of all came the gradual relationship with my lover. As that deepened it led to touching, being happy together and kissing. The kiss, oral pleasure, was our first area of loving with our mother. From that original centre of pleasure, it grows into anal and genital pleasure. This was what was happening. Then gently the body began to move. But there was still no erection. The movement was the forerunner of the inner pleasurable urge to thrust and penetrate. So there was a slow and internal growth through escalating feelings, and not an outwardly ordained set of movements that led to “sex”!  

The following dream shows a particular facet of this. It is from Eric Fromm’s book on dreams, The Forgotten Language. The dreamer was a young man, an only child, who had been cosseted by over protective parents, and was finding it difficult to face life without their support.

He dreamed that he was about five or six years old and was faced by a river he must cross. He looked for a bridge but found none. He thought of swimming but then realized he could not swim. (In the waking state he actually could swim). He then sees a tall, dark man who indicates he will carry him across the river in his arms. He is greatly relieved and allows the stranger to pick him up and begin. But then he is seized with panic. He suddenly realizes that if he does not escape from this man he will die!

They are already in the river, he in the man’s arms, when he gathers his courage and makes a desperate leap into the river. He is sure he will drown but suddenly finds that he can swim and soon reaches the other side. The frightening man disappears.

How do I leave home?

Dr. Fromm describes crossing the river as the need, and the difficulty, of moving from childhood toward adult independence. The man represents all the support he gets from parents and other people such as teachers and friends – excellent while he was a child, but something he must learn to do without if he is to develop his own innate strengths. When the dreamer takes the risk of daring the river, he finds he has the ability to survive.

In many teenage dreams a darker note arises as the emerging independence starts to make a dramatic break with parental authority and with the dependence upon the succouring received. Because the break is difficult it sometimes needs anger or a form of violence. This is not because the parents are necessarily holding on to the child, but because the need of the child is so strong, that to cut those ties a form of violence is used. We then find a dream such as the following:

I dreamed I dared not move from home as I had murdered my father and hid the body in the rubbish tip at the end of the garden.

If it is not murder, then the dreamer sees the parent or parents die. In either case, the child still faces life without them, and this seems to be the point of such dreams. In waking life there may at such times also be some anger or aggressiveness toward the parents – once again a means of making the break. After all, how could you move away if you were still tied emotionally? The next dream illustrates the quieter form of getting rid of a parent.

For the past year I have had recurring dreams about fairground rides. Occasionally members of my family, including my father have died on the rides. When I’m on the ride I’ve survived, but I can sense danger all around me. This dream is beginning to bother me. I am 15 years old.

Sexual development is of course of prime importance at this time.  So dreams explore the facets of this in a variety of ways.

Example: As I considered teenage I had a series of wonderful scenes occur. They were so lovely I laughed with pleasure. I felt the explosion of energy which occurs in adolescence, and I saw teenagers, running, dancing, loving, fighting, and exploring relationships. They were life exploding into the new, into experiment, into growth. If we held them back too firmly it would be like my stuck record, and my vision of the cosmos had shown me life never repeats itself, never stops. It always moves on, changes, dances.

Many things we face while young are never resolved, or remain as potentials, and are frequently confronted later in life. So the dream teenager can depict these unresolved issues or potential still to discover and work through them by keeping in touch with their dreams and attempting to understand them.

Useful questions:

What did I face as a teenager that is still a factor in my life?

What am I exploring about being a teenager, and what can I learn from this?

What is the character of this adolescent and how does that relate to me at the moment?

What theme or actions surround the teenager, and do they give clues my present situation?

What things are happening in the relationship with this adolescent and do they throw light on a present relationship?

Sex and Identity

Many dreams show how we gain much of our identity out of our sexual attractiveness, relationship, or lack of it. Men and women often feel they are inadequate or lacking in personal worth if they are not in a relationship where their partner is fascinated by them sexually. Our sense of personal value and positive existence, may be built on many things, but can ultimately become less dependent upon particulars such as physical attractiveness or sexual partnership.

Example: Here one must come to terms with the androgenous psychic nature of man. The anxieties of every human being who ever doubted his own sexuality are true; they point at a wrinkle of the mind which cannot be smoothed away. And therapists who try to calm patients’ fears with reassurances are whistling down the wind. Reassurances will never obliterate the doubt in every man’s mind that he’s not quite all male, or the parallel doubt in woman’s mind, simply because the doubt is psychically valid. Of course, objectively it’s not true at all. Although scientists have pointed out a certain overlapping between the sexes in vestigial organs and hormones, most men are obviously men and women are women. This knowledge of biological similarities hardly prepares men and women for the subjective experience of bisexuality, which can only be explained by the plasticity of the imagination and the sense of identity. In every man’s mind are areas of consciousness that proclaim, in effect, “I am a woman!” In every woman’s psyche occurs the reverse. This is not a matter of observation and analysis but a conviction at the very seat of consciousness.

Sex has it mystery in the depths of our being, in the sperm and egg, and these although they may not be easily reached by our conscious personality, are found in dreams, in visions and deep human experience. Psychically man will, man must return to his beginnings. If he denies sexuality he will return mystically. If he accepts sexuality he will seek to return by any means. For deep within the psyche reigns the mother and beyond her the edges of an instinctive infinity which is still herself. To this heaven man must never lose the path; to this heaven he will return at last.

It is the lack of recognition of this out of phase difference that keeps us seeking sex of one sort or another. It is also the cause of much of the misery the sexes create between them. Wholeness comes not by acting out or even physically trying to be the opposite sex, but by diving into oneself finding the wholeness that we all are. See Archetype of the Anima – Archetype of the Animus

What is a Dream?

Do You Dream

Tony Crisp

Chapter Two

From the earliest ages in mankind’s shrouded history, dreams have been a source of wonder and speculation, inspiration and fear. This chapter deals with some of the explanations men have given for why and how one dreams. It must be understood, however, that these various accounts are put here, not because they are necessarily correct accounts of dreaming, but simply to give a ‘background’ of information on the dream.

The most ancient peoples, whether separated by seas, geographical barriers, or culture, usually had in common an enormous respect for dreams. Many early societies had a very dualistic philosophy regarding life. That is, they believed that their life was divided into two distinct aspects. One aspect was their everyday physical world, the world of the body. The other was the world of sleep, dreams, visions and death. In sleep, early man believed that one’s soul, or consciousness left one’s body, and travelled the sleep world, the world of dreams. This dream world was very real to them, so real in fact that many felt that the dream world was more real than the physical world. For instance, if a man dreamt that his wife had slept with another man, it was not simply shrugged off as ‘only a dream’ but was taken very seriously.

J. A. Hadfield, in his book Dreams and Nightmares humorously says the ‘modern instance is that of a young wife who dreamt that her husband was making love to a blonde and was furious. Being reminded that it was only a dream, she replied, “Yes! But if he does that sort of thing in my dream, what will he do in his own?”‘

In the dream world of early man, it was stated that one’s soul could travel to distant places in the real world, could experience or know one’s innermost feelings, could contact and converse with the dead, or meet the gods and spirits, or see God. We cannot simply dismiss these beliefs as valueless, because modern research and investigation is now concerning itself with a serious inquiry into all these possibilities.

In these early societies, where such beliefs were a part of life itself, youths of both sexes were helped to establish their maturity by initiations which often used or sought dreams. At such times, the young girl or boy would go to some lonely spot where they would fast and await a sign, by dream or vision (i.e. waking dream) that gave them a clue to their direction in life. To give an actual case, written down by Father Lalemant, a Jesuit:

At the age of about sixteen, a youth went alone to a place where he fasted for sixteen days. At the end of this time he suddenly heard a voice in the sky saying, ‘Take care of this man, and let him end his fast.’ Then he saw an old man of great beauty come down from the sky. The old man came to him, looking at him kindly, and said, ‘Have courage, I will take care of thy life. It is a fortunate thing for thee to have taken me for thy master. None of the demons who haunt these countries will have any power to harm thee. One day thou wilt see thine hair as white as mine. Thou wilt have four children, the first two and last will be males, and the third will be a girl, after that thy wife will hold the relation of a sister to thee.’ As he finished speaking the old man offered him a raw piece of human flesh to eat. When the boy turned his head away in horror, the old man then offered him a piece of bear’s fat, saying, ‘Eat this then.’ After eating it, the old man disappeared, but came again at crucial periods in the person’s life. At manhood he did have four children, as described. After the fourth, ‘a certain infirmity compelled him to continence. He also lived to an old age, thus having white hair, and as the eating of bear fat symbolised, became a gifted hunter with a second sight for finding game.

The man himself felt that had he eaten the human flesh in the vision, he would have been a warrior instead.

So we see that such initiatory dreams fulfilled many functions. Not only did they affirm the dreamer of a ‘spirit’ protector, giving him confidence to leave the physical protection of his mother and father, but also gave his most fitting employment as hunter, and the main events of his life. With such knowledge, he could approach life more confidently.

An even more complete idea of how early societies related to their dreams is given by M. L. von Franz in her article The Process of Individuation in the book Man and His Symbols, by Carl G. . Writing about the ‘self’ as the inner centre to all our experience, she says:

‘This inner centre is realised in exceptionally pure unspoiled form by the Naskapi Indians, who still exist in the forests of the Labrador peninsula. These simple people are hunters who live in isolated family groups, so far from one another that they have not been able to evolve tribal customs or collective religious beliefs and ceremonies. In his lifelong solitude the Naskapi hunter has to rely on his own inner voices and unconscious revelations; he has no religious teachers who tell him what he should believe, no rituals, festivals or customs to help him along. In his basic view of life, the soul of man is simply an ‘Inner companion’, whom he calls ‘My friend’ or ‘Mista peo’, meaning ‘Great Man’. Mista peo dwells in the heart and is immortal; in the moment of death, or just before, he leaves the individual, and later reincarnates himself in another being.

‘Those Naskapi who pay attention to their dreams and who try to find their meaning and test their truth can enter into a greater connection with the Great Man. He favours such people and sends them more and better dreams. Thus the major obligation of an individual Naskapi is to follow the instructions given by his dreams, and then to give permanent form to their contents in art. Lies and dishonesty drive the Great Man away from one’s inner realm, whereas generosity and love of one’s neighbours and of animals attract him and give him life. Dreams give the Naskapi complete ability to find his way in life, not only in the inner world but also in the outer world of nature. They help him to foretell the weather and give him invaluable guidance in his hunting, upon which his life depends…. Just as the Naskapi have noticed that a person who is receptive to the Great Man gets better and more helpful dreams, we could add that the inborn Great Man becomes more real within the receptive person than in those who neglect him. Such a person also becomes a more complete human being.”

Although possibly not as unspoilt as the Naskapi beliefs, those of the Seneca Indians are worthy of note. The Jesuits began preaching to these Indians in 1668. Father Fremin wrote much about their ideas, although in a slightly critical vein, saying, ‘The Iroquois have, properly speaking, only a single Divinity – the dream. … The Tsonnontonens (Seneca) are more attached to this superstition than to any other.’

Father Ragueneau, in 1649, described the beliefs behind their so called superstition as follows. ‘In addition to the desires which we generally have that are free, or at least voluntary in us, and which arise from a previous knowledge of some goodness that we imagine to exist in the thing desired, the Hurons believe that our souls have other desires, which are, as it were, inborn and concealed. These, they say, come from the depths of the soul, not through any knowledge.

‘Now they believe that our soul makes these desires known by means of dreams, which are its language. Accordingly, when these desires are accomplished, it is satisfied; but, on the contrary, if it be not granted what it desires, it becomes angry … often it revolts against the body, causing various diseases, and even death….’

The Indian tribes mentioned often had a sort of social psychiatry in which dreamers were allowed to live out their hidden (unconscious) desires that were threatening health and well being. Thus a dreamer would be allowed sexual freedoms with others; unlawful actions; objects desired; or feasts, etc.; although these peoples as a society were usually modest and shy, and chastity and marital fidelity were public ideals.

Thus we see in the beliefs of the ‘backward’ Indians, ideas that took our civilised societies three hundred years longer to arrive at. Admittedly, our psychiatrist’s couch and enormous mental institutions take the place of the more public ‘acting out’ of hidden desires. Nevertheless, mentally or emotionally induced illnesses were recognised and treated. So we see that early man recognised conscious and unconscious parts of self. They realised that dreams expressed these ‘hidden’ desires, often in a symbolic form, enabling us to deal with them before they produced sickness.

Turning to more recent sources of dream beliefs, it is distressing to see how less, instead of more, understanding is expressed. Most of the ancient world, including the Far East, believed that dreams were sent by gods or spirits, but do not seem to have worked out such a clear conception as the North American Indians, and later became very intellectually speculative. Aristotle, for instance, writes on the idea that dreams arise from movements in the body, saying, ‘The conclusion to be drawn from all these facts is that the dream is a sort of image and that it is produced during sleep, for the appearances manifest themselves when our senses are free. But not every image that manifests itself in sleep is a dream. For, sometimes, certain persons perceive in a certain manner in their sleep both sounds and light, both savours and contacts, but faintly and as if from afar. In fact, people who have seen in their sleep what was, according to them, the light of a lamp, realised immediately after waking that it was the light of a lamp; and people who have heard cocks crowing, or dogs barking, have recognised them clearly on waking. … But the images that come from the movement of sensible impressions, when one is sound asleep, that is a dream.’

In the Aesculapius dream temples, the dreams were said to be invoked by the god, whose symbol was also a serpent. Thus a childless woman, going to the temple to secure fertility, dreamt that the god approached her followed by a snake. The snake then entered her sexually. After the dream, and within the year, she had two sons. Sometimes the person would dream that they had been made well and would awake to find the dream accomplished. The rooms in which patients slept were occupied by snakes of a harmless variety also. This, along with the necessary rites and purifications, set the patient in the right frame of mind and emotion, to receive a healing dream.

Such dream induction by a particular setting and rites is very similar to the more ancient practices of fasting and waiting for the initiating dream, Similar, that is, in the sense of seeking a particular type of dream at a particular time and place.

Islamic traditions also have a rite called Istiqara, where the participant repeats a particular prayer, said to have been given by Mohammed, enabling one to dream the answer to a problem. This was used in recent years by Dr. Mossadegh. The resulting dream was of a being who told Dr Mossadegh to make all haste in efforts to nationalise Iranian Oil. As Dr Mossadegh was convalescing from illness, this was difficult. Also the political climate at that time regarding the nationalisation of oil seemed hopeless. Some months later, however, due to Dr Mossadegh’s continued efforts, Iranian Oil was in fact nationalised.

In the Bible, there are many references to dreams. The history changing dreams of Pharaoh about the fat and thin kine, along with New Testament dreams, are taken to be given by God, or angels. In the dream of Peter, where the unclean animals are let down in a sheet, and Pharaoh’s dream, we see clearly symbolic dreams, the meaning of which is arrived at through interpretation.

At other places, we find mention of God’s intervention in our dream life. Thus in Genesis 20:3, we read, ‘But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman which thou hast taken; for she is a man’s wife.’ Later, in Job 33: IS, it says, ‘In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed, then he (God) openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, that he may withdraw a man from his purpose, and hide pride from man.

In the Indian Yoga teachings, they mention four states of consciousness, that is, waking – dreaming – dreamless sleep – superconsciousness. Although, as in Patanjali’s Aphorism’s mention is made of dreams as a subject for meditation, Yoga practitioners seek to become aware at the dreamless and superconscious levels. That is, they seek to get behind the images of dreams to that which is conscious of them, i.e. the Self, the basic part of our being. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead one sees a detailed commentary on how to become liberated from inner images analogous to dreams. This too, we must consider as one of the aims of a modern dream investigator.

Turning to more modern concepts of dreams and dreaming, one finds, largely, a slide into a materialistic attitude. For instance there was for long the opinion that dreams were caused by a late, heavy meal, or eating highly stimulating foods. One could call this the ‘indigestion’ theory.

Some experimentation was also undertaken in the realm of dreams produced by outside influences. Thus, a number of people have slept and been exposed to drops of water, ticking, sounds, scents, bells, electrical brain stimuli and even hypnotic suggestion. All of these produced dreams in some way explain the stimulus. For instance, Alexandre Arnoux writes how, when in a rest camp, he dreamt that the Germans had sent over a poisonous gas smelling of quinces. He awoke gasping for breath, only to see that his friend had just entered the room eating a quince. Another writer, Massey, on having water dropped on his face, dreamt he was in Italy, drinking wine and perspiring heavily. In the case of the electrical probe to the brain, particular memories were evoked, clear and distinct.

Another popular theory is that dreams are the uncontrolled wanderings of the sleeping mind. This theory sees the images of dreams as occurring due to the natural psychological law of association of ideas. Thus, as we drift into sleep, we may be entertaining the idea of a bicycle. The idea bicycle associates with journey, journey with someone we wish to see, this with fear of their not being there to welcome us, which links with our walking alone, etc.

J. A. Hadfield, in his excellent book Dreams and Nightmares, lists all these ideas and more. He points out that each of these ideas is true as far as it goes, but none of them explain all factors about dreams. Recent experiments have shown that even outside stimulus does not produce the dream, it merely enters into its images. Nor is a dream merely past memories, as a dream often uses images in unique formation, and we have to ask ourselves what has reshaped the images of our memory. In the dream of Arnoux, for instance, the smell of quince definitely enters into the dream, but if we are honest, we have to admit that an interior fear and terror is also expressive in the dream, and can thus be used as a means of self analysis.

The internally produced dream theory of Aristotle has proved itself, however, at least partially true. Observations of dreams has shown a number of times how a person may dream of a particular part of his body due to sickness in that area. Armaud de Villeneuve, for instance, dreamt that a dog bit his leg. A few days later a cancerous growth became visible on the same spot. A Swiss poet, Gessner, dreamt that a snake bit him in the left side, and shortly afterwards developed a malignant tumour there, The great many experiences of this nature are explained on the grounds that during sleep we are more sensitive to inner disturbances than in waking. As with dreams woven around outside stimuli, the inner irritations of developing sickness can announce themselves in the images of our dreams. However, due to the claims of mystics, and the present tentative findings of parapsychology concerning the possibility that human consciousness exists outside of the body, or for one person to know or receive the thoughts and feelings of another, it seems likely that it is not only subtle sensations in the body that may stimulate dream images. We can therefore say that some of the causes may be physical sensations from within or outside the body-moods, fears, desires or pressures, etc., existing in the personality of the sleeper, such as unconscious realisation of ideas, levels of being and new states of mind, and stimuli from other minds.

Before we progress to the great dream authorities of the twentieth century it will be illuminating to quickly look at the ideas expressed by an American of the nineteenth century. I use the word illuminating, as here is a man who expressed the idea of evolution to the world some years before Darwin published his works. This man was Dr Andrew Jackson Davis, born in 1826. In 1850 (nine years before Darwin’s work) he wrote and published The Great Harmonia, in which we read:

The progressive development of the animal kingdom up to man may be traced from its very beginnings, when – as the result of a marriage between the highest forms and essences in the vegetable kingdom – there arose the first form of animal life – the inferior order of radiata. At a later era the pisces was followed by that of the birds. The marsupial was next, and then the mammalian. The primary change from this last into inferior types of human organism is so easy that the anatomical and physiological transformation is scarcely perceptible. (Not that evolution is unique to our culture. Jalaludin Rumi, a thirteenth century mystic, clearly wrote of it.)

Excuse my enthusiasm in quoting something that seemingly has nothing to do with dreams. I feel, however, that ‘dream historians’ have overlooked a great mind in A. J. Davis, and the quote is a reference to his qualifications, this being felt necessary as his source of information is psychic rather than scientific. That is, through his unique ability, he was able to explore the interior of his own being consciously. So his remarks on evolution arose from information he obtained from what might be called a dream state. Davis called it ‘The Superior Condition’. However, here are his remarks and theory on sleep and dreams.

“Sleep is that mode by which the fatigued soul withdraws partially from the physical organism and gathers inwardly for purposes of recuperation. At the same time it remains sufficiently within them to inspire the involuntary systems with constant motion, that they may fulfil their respective functions. The place into which it (soul-consciousness) retires is the most interior portions of the viscera and the deepest recesses of the sensorium. The superior brain or cerebrum yields up its powers to the cerebellum and this resigns in turn to the medulla spinalis. During the period of natural rest the cerebellum never sleeps, and in the waking hours the cerebrum is in constant activity, guiding and controlling the organisation.

“The spirit (energising principle), when (we are) asleep, moves with the greatest precision through the whole organic domain, but especially the inner chambers the sensorium and the ganglionic and lymphatic batteries of the visceral system.

“The phenomena of dreams are controlled by established laws which may be applied to education and the development of mind. Properly speaking there is no such condition as absolute suspension of consciousness, only of external powers of memory. When the mind passes into a coma, the spirit * takes up the thread of previous interior experiences. The mind has two memories, one of the body and the world without, the other a more inward scroll, on the deepest folds of which are registered those experiences which the soul has obtained from the world within. The significance of dreams depends upon their nature and derivation…. Even in prophetic warnings, the soul does its own work almost invariably, by extending its sensiferous faculties towards the future, and thus perceiving those events which laws of cause and effect are certain to develop.

” … Owing to wrong living and intemperance (in amount and quality of food), no one enjoys perfect slumber except for exceedingly brief periods; but when experienced in its fullness, and when the soul is resigned to the will of God through recognition of Nature’s laws, the individual is then on the confines of the other life. True sleep is a temporary death of the body and a rest of the soul. It is distinguished from imperfect slumber by the absence of all ordinary dreaming.”

Davis also gives very practical hints, although general, in understanding dreams.

“It follows that dreaming deserves investigation as a precursor and accompaniment of disease. Lively dreams are in general a sign of attenuated excitement of the nervous system. Soft or vapourish dreams denote slight cerebral irritation, or alternatively, a favourable crisis in nervous fevers. Frightful dreams betoken a determination of arterial blood to the head. Dreams about blood and red objects, houses and ships on fire, imps, demons, etc., indicate an inflammatory condition of the semi-intellectual and perceptive faculties of the cerebrum. Dreams about water, rain, floods, deluges often characterise diseased mucous membranes and dropsy. Dreams in which a person sees any portion of his own body, especially in a suffering state, point to disturbances in that area. So also dreams of food, feasts and so forth are usually traceable to impaired digestive functions. This explanation of a certain class of dream does not pose as a solution of all such mental phenomena.”

He goes on to say that such interpretation is only dealing with physical relationships. His main theme, however, is how to obtain ‘great’ or ‘spiritual’ dreams.

“In those (dreams) which emanate from the world of spirits, it is a fact that spiritual dreams only occur in a state of perfect slumber. The will and faculties of thought must be in a state of complete quiescence. … Such influences cannot enter when the front brain (intellect, will) is at all positive. Perfect slumber is nigh unto death. The higher departments of mind are not occupied by thought, the holy elements of feeling are stilled; the front brain or cerebrum is a tranquil domain; there is no sentinel at the gate of the brain but the vigilant cerebellum. The mind is then ready for a high order of dream.”

Leaving the Poughkeepsie Seer, as Davis was called, we turn to another more recent seer, Edgar Cayce of Virginia Beach. As early as 1925 Edgar Cayce was already interpreting dreams from a viewpoint free of fixed sexual or intellectually psychological attitudes. He must rate, along with leaders of this more open attitude such as J. A. Hadfield, and Leslie Weatherhead, as one of those who brought the dream ‘home’ to the public. Some of his pupils would like to claim him as the beginner of such attitudes, but J. A. Hadfield, from the point of psychology, and Weatherhead from a Christian viewpoint, had already given long years of public service before 1925. Nevertheless, the work of Cayce has directed the attention of thousands to their dream life. The groups organised to work on their dreams, in their collective numbers, probably outweigh the work of the others.

Possibly Cayce’s attitude to dreams may be summed up by this statement he made from a deep sleep state:

“These (dreams), as we see, may be used to the edification of the entity into that of how spiritual laws are manifested in the physical world.”

All such statements about dreams, and the countless other subjects he mentioned, were spoken from a trance or sleep state similar to that of Davis. This is rather like listening in to what the unconscious mind says about itself. In another such statement, he says that through a study of dreams, a person, may gain the more perfect understanding and knowledge of those forces that go to make up the real existence – the underlying meaning of life – and what it’s good for – if the entity would but comprehend the conditions being manifested.

Cayce taught, like others, that dreams reflect activities in the body, in the emotions, mind and general attitudes of a person. But his main point was that the dream helps the individual understand his relationship with the whole, with Life or God. He said, in 1923:

“Forget not that it has been said correctly that the Creator, the Gods and the God of the Universe, speak to man through his individual self. Man approaches the more intimate conditions of that field of the inner self when the conscious self is at rest in sleep or slumber, at which time more of the inner forces are taken into consideration and studied by the individual, not someone else. It is each individual’s job, if he will study to show himself approved by God, to understand his individual condition, his individual position in relation to others, his individual manifestation, through his individual receiving of messages from the higher forces themselves, through dreams.”

Shane Miller in his article ‘Working With Dreams as Recommended by the Cayce Readings’, says:

“The Cayce premise states in effect that anyone, whether psychically gifted or not, who will record his dreams in an attitude of prayerful persistence can, in time, bring about a complete restoration of the dream faculty. (The dream faculty at present seems to be the remains of a long disused and discredited function of the higher mind.) … any dream which has a certain story content or mood, particularly if it is in colour, should be studied; and that is the complete premise which, if faithfully followed can bring about a new dimension into the experience of anyone who will keep everlastingly at it!”

In this sense a dream can be a message from the Highest, expressed in the symbolic language of the unconscious. So in looking at a dream, we may be reading a letter from God. That is, a correspondence between the universal forces that have formed us, and the individual that in being formed calls itself ‘I’. A conversation then, between God and I.

Obviously, the word ‘God’ for many has repugnant religious undertones from which they shy away. They may therefore miss some of the important ideas Cayce has presented. Possibly this other theory, which is a synthesis of several liberal ideas on dreams will be more attractive.

“Consciousness is the result of various energies combining as our being. Yet consciousness, if studied carefully does not, in a peculiar way, rely upon the factors that give it expression. For instance, we are shown in modern brain operations, that only when the small area of the brain, the thalamus, is removed, does one lose consciousness. The other large areas can be cut off or damaged without the person ‘losing’ consciousness. This seems to suggest that consciousness is due to the thalamus, allied to the body. But from the information in other experiments, this seems to give a false idea. It would be better to say that the thalamus enables consciousness to express. In the same way, an electric fire allows electricity to express some of its potential. If one removes the thalamus, or the fire from the circuit, it has not removed consciousness or electricity, merely takes away their vehicle of expression.”

From this viewpoint we can think of consciousness as always existing, but not necessarily expressing all of its potential. This would give us an entirely new concept of sleep. For sleep would be the partial withdrawing of consciousness from the organs of its expression, and a sinking into its most basic levels of existence. Thus the individual, in sleep, would sink into the primordial level of being that existed even prior to his or her birth. For if consciousness is what I think it is, it, like the electricity, is a principle of nature, and pre-exists the apparatus through which it realises itself in the physical world. Thus, a dream may well be the reaction expressed in images, of the conscious aspect of self meeting its primordial and eternal aspect in nature. The dream would then remind us of the spark between two electrical charges of different potential as they touch and become balanced. A dream would express the ‘difference’ between the individual and his source. From it one may understand how he relates to the whole.

The words of Nietzsche add yet another dimension to this attitude. In Human, all too Human, he wrote:

“I hold that as man now still reasons in dreams, so men reasoned also when awake through thousands of years. … This ancient element in human nature still manifests itself in our dreams, for it is the foundation upon which the higher reason has developed and still develops in every individual; the dream carries us back into remote conditions of human culture, and provides a ready means of understanding them.”

As already mentioned, J. A. Hadfield has done much through his life work and books, to bring understanding of inner experience to the ordinary person. His own view on dreams is summed up as follows:

“According to what we shall call the Biological Theory of dreams, the function of dreams is that by means of reproducing the unsolved experiences of life, they work towards a solution of these problems.”

Firstly – Dreams stand in the place of experience. Thus by making us relive the experiences and difficulties of the day in imagination they relieve us of the necessity of going through the actual experience by trial and error and thus save us many a disaster. … It is obvious, therefore, that dreams serve the same purpose as ideational processes, much as we exercise in normal thought in waking life.

Also – Every individual has potentialities in his nature, all of which are not merely seeking their own individual ends, but each and all of which subserve the functions of the personality as a whole. But in the course of life many of these potentialities become repressed. In analytic treatment we attempt to release these repressed emotions, and direct them to the uses of life for which they were intended, and so make the personality whole. But dreams were attempting the same thing long before analytic treatment was thought of, and therefore dreams also, by releasing repressed experiences and emotions, are striving to solve these problems and to restore the personality to efficient functioning as a whole.

Turning at last to Freud and Jung, an attempt will be made to synthesise their particular standpoint regarding dreams. Starting with Freud, we cannot properly understand his statements without an understanding of Libido. To take an image from an earlier statement, we can think of libido as the energy behind our living process. If we think of the body as an efficient machine, then perhaps libido could be thought of as the electricity or power that works the machine. Not only does this energy emerge as motion and function, but it also lies behind our instincts, emotions, sexual drive, desire for social standing and recognition, our intellectual curiosity, and all the other aspects of life. Thinking of libido as a stream of energy, flowing out via our sexual, intellectual, emotional and other activities, we see, in the full expression of this energy, psychological health. However, if some of this energy, on entering our sexual activity is not released, it causes inner pressures we call neuroses, or a complex. (For the energy may be expressed morbidly or in an unacceptable manner as in homosexuality.)

For Freud, the dream is a wish fulfillment of these hidden desires which he maintained were usually of a sexual nature. The dream in this sense, is a method of making conscious unacceptable desires. Thus, if one wished to be rid of one’s father, or to sleep with one’s mother, but could not express either of these even in speech, because of the forbiddeness of such, one could do so in a dream. However, due to the fact that such desires arouse deep guilt feelings, we may not wish to openly express them even in a dream. Thus the dream both expresses and disguises the desires all at once. For instance, Freud considered that to dream of having sexual intercourse with an old woman, was a disguised dream concerning one’s mother. Or putting a key in a lock symbolises sexual intercourse.

So far we see that the Seneca Indians held much the same views. Similarly they believed dreams had a latent and manifest content; that is, a hidden, or difficult to understand meaning behind the obvious events in the dream. Also, Freud maintained that all dreams are potentially understandable. They all arise from some cause, and if understood this cause becomes revealed. That is not to say, of course, that all dreams are understood.

Originally, Freud maintained that dreams were all wish fulfilments of hidden urges relating to our sexual nature. Later this was widened to include wish fulfilments of repressed aggressiveness.

Jung, following upon Freud and Adler’s work, maintained that the ‘dream shows in what direction the unconscious is leading’ the dreamer. Also, he says, ‘In dream interpretation we ask what conscious attitude does the dream compensate.’ Thus, dreams for Jung, point to the fact that the processes in man’s consciousness that he is unaware of, attempt to fulfil or realise themselves in a particular direction. A plant for instance, has hidden within it the possibility of stem, leaves, flower and seeds. These it attempts to produce. Similarly, a man has the possibility of further extensions of consciousness, of realisation, of abilities and desires which may be held back by conscious attitudes. For instance, a man may have latent artistic abilities which are held back from ‘flowering’ due to his conscious insistence on purely logical and money-making activities.

In this case, the dream may portray the man doing irrational things, because it compensates for his ‘Oh so logical’ conscious attitude. Also Jung began the direction of looking to dreams as a search for one’s wholeness – not only sexually, but in all functions. Our sexual drives, our urge for power and social position, our intellectual curiosity, our innate desire to understand ourselves, and relate harmoniously to others and life around us, are all dealt with in dreams.

In Man and His Symbols, Jung talks of God in a way not found in other branches of psychiatry.

“Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions I always think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days while nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: ‘Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.'”

This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of the unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not yet his total psyche (self).

Perhaps in the end, we can see that none of these views need be discarded. As one writer has remarked, several men all looking at the same landscape may all describe, and even ‘sense’ it differently. A geologist would see it differently to an artist, who in turn would feel about it differently to a farmer, and so on. In sleep, we may approach some inner landscape that represents our wholeness – the latent qualities of our own being. The wonderful thing is that our dream is our own. It uses our own symbols, our own emotions, our own understanding, our own possibilities. With these it paints a truly personal wonder we call a dream. Surely this is worth understanding?

Link To Chapters – Link to Chapter Three

The Dream Mystery Explained

Do You Dream

Tony Crisp

Chapter Five

The method of interpretation dealt with in the last chapter is basic to all dream analysis as currently known. It can be summed up as remembering the dream; recording of dream; listing of symbols; and association of ideas. It was also seen that symbols must be interpreted in their right context, or can even be understood because of that context; which is rather like arriving at the meaning of an unknown word because of the way it is used in a sentence. Several other things were mentioned or hinted at while the dreams were being analysed. Some of these are so important or helpful, that they will now be further explained.

Main Phases Of The Dream

If we look at the structure of the last dream analysed, we see that it can be split into four main phases. These are (1) episode with the dwarf, (2) being saved by the couple and directed to London, (3) wandering, (4) the search for refreshment. In any long and difficult dream, especially where little or no associations or information have been forthcoming, it is worth breaking the dream into its phases. When this has been done, instead of associating ideas with the symbols, see whether the phases have any meaning. In the case of the last dream, we would have something like this:

(1) Episode with Dwarf I am captured and stripped. Do I feel imprisoned or restrained by anything? What has frightened me or uncovered phases of my life I wasn’t aware of or had kept covered or hidden before?

(2) Being saved by the couple and directed to London If I can find any sense of being imprisoned or captured, how did I deal with it? How did I ‘save’ myself from it? Having dealt with my restraint, what did the ideas or emotions I had used indicate I should do?

(3) Wandering Presumably, I could not accept this direction, and was left in a quandary, fearful of a possible blackness – depression. Is there any indication of this? Has there been a wandering or dithering over some decision?

(4) Search for Refreshment This suggests a need for some refreshing experience. A thirst for something – a hunger – but a doubt about the cost in effort. Has there been a desire for a ‘refreshing’ change – a hunger for something to satisfy my feelings? Is there a doubt about what we will have to sacrifice or give up in exchange?

It can be seen that dealing with the dream in this way is an enormous help in asking oneself the right questions. As previously suggested, when dealing with our own dreams, we have to be both patient and analyst. But not all dreams are as easily broken into the different parts. Some dreams cannot be segmented in this way, while others have far less phases. The next dream is an example of the latter.

‘I had gone to Sheila’s and Uncle Frank’s house at Spearing Road. They had promised I could have a room there, but I found all the rooms occupied and people were sleeping on the floor instead of in beds. Seeing there was no room I turned away and the next thing I knew I was in a train; it had rather luxurious blue leather seats but again was almost full. It contained, as far as I could see, all ladies, and I explained to them that I had been promised sleeping accommodation. Even while I was explaining this and expecting to occupy a length of three seats, I could see they had as much right there as I, and I took the single seat offered still protesting that we were promised sleeping room.

This dream can only be broken into two, or at the most, three parts. That is, the house, the train and possibly, accepting the seat. If this is set out as was the previous dream, we have a clearer idea what the dream is about.

The House – Searching for living space in a childhood setting. Found ‘no room’ – What have I been looking for in childhood attitudes? Was the ‘promise’ of childhood unfulfilled?

The Train – Exorbitant expectations, annoyance at the fact that these high expectations cannot be fulfilled. This in a setting of getting somewhere-train. Have my expectations in getting somewhere not been as great as hoped for?

The Single Seat – Grudging acceptance of practical offer. Can I see anything of this in real life?

The whole idea of using this method is to take the general events, implications and settings of a dream, and use these as a reference for asking oneself questions.

THE DREAM SEQUENCE

One of the things that is often overlooked in dreams is what we might call the ‘because’ factor. This factor is fairly noticeable when once pointed out, but difficult to see until much dream interpretation has been done. The because factor also applies in our everyday life, and can be seen when we say, ‘I was waiting for a bus and began to talk to a stranger who was also waiting. Our conversation became so interesting, that after a few minutes we went and sat in a restaurant, letting the bus go, because we had so much in common. Before he went he gave me his card because he wanted me to contact him again. I could see from what we had spoken about, that he was thinking of offering me a job in his firm. But I never followed it up because I didn’t think I could fill the post.’

If we look into this, we see that important events occur, directions followed, decisions taken, all because. The word ‘because’ in fact hides all our background, our feelings, our predisposing urges and thoughts. The word ‘disposition’ can in fact be used to sum up what lurks behind the because factor. A little thought will show that history is made up of this ‘disposition’, acting through the because factor.

I hope this doesn’t sound mysterious or complicated. This is such an important thing to understand. Our whole life, the events and outcome of it, rest upon it. Our life is what it is because of what we are – our disposition. We take an offer or reject it because of this. We succeed or fail in life because of the same factor – ourselves. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars/But in ourselves, that we be underlings.’ When understood, we can see that every move we make in life is conditioned by subtle feelings of fear or pleasure, pride or love. At every decision we are directed by intangible hopes, despairs, conflicts and ideals. So, dreams also, arise out of the because factor.

Two dreams illustrate this. ‘I was waiting for a visitor. Suddenly the man I had been expecting came round to the back window and peeped in. I didn’t see him clearly, but took an immediate aversion to him and refused to let him in.’

Here we see that something ‘waited’ for by the dreamer, when it actually arrives, is not admitted due to feelings of aversion. It is not admitted because of aversion.

A clearer example is this. ‘I was surrounded by a thick wall of briars, beyond which were wild animals. I was trapped and couldn’t get out. I wondered what to do. Suddenly I noticed a hole in the ground. I looked in and saw it was a tunnel. I was just about to explore it as a way of escape, when I saw a dirty animal-like man looking up at me. I drew back from the tunnel in disgust and woke up.

Here we see that the dreamer is trapped by his own tangle of problems, and destructive instinctive urges. A possible way out is shown in the tunnel of unconscious exploration (i.e. discovering one’s hidden contents), but the dreamer, on looking within, sees an undeveloped and repulsive part of himself which disgusts him. It is because of this disgust that he cannot get out through the tunnel. The whole dream revolves around that point. It is also because of this inability to explore further due to disgust, that the dream ends. The dream is showing that it is the feelings of disgust that are keeping him trapped in his unpromising situation. In real life, he is stuck in the middle of painful experiences because of his own feelings of disgust about a part of his nature. Thus, the because factor in dreams is very important, and is the central point in numerous dreams.

DREAM SERIES

If we fail to understand an individual dream, light can often be thrown upon its meaning by looking at the dreams that precede and follow it. In this way one sees that the symbols are used in a gradually evolving manner. A dream series of evolving symbols is also one of the most striking proofs that dreams are not mere nonsense. The dreams that follow were all dreamt within about a month.

(1) ‘Visit to M. Very nice house, high on the cliffs overlooking the sea. M. and others their usual welcoming selves. Met other pleasant friendly people, but we had to go down the hill to meet them and then some of them pointed out another way up the hill to another beautiful view, and came along to show us the way, which M. actually knew, but didn’t want to spoil their pleasure in showing me. A few of those in M.’s house were not quite as nice as I had believed from M.’s description, but I liked them anyway.

Here we start off with a house overlooking the sea – a state of looking over one’s hidden contents, one’s unconscious. Or we might – say the dreamer is ‘overlooking’ certain things about herself. These things she has overlooked begin to become known in the people, -parts of herself, that were not quite as nice as she had believed.

(2) ‘Met uncle George. Then he and I and a few relatives and friends went on to a small boat and began a journey. I didn’t know where we were going but others did, and it was such a new and pleasant experience for me that I didn’t bother to ask. As it grew dusk a strange but pleasant and friendly woman, who was obviously familiar with the boat, came and closed the curtains and put the light on, so that we could be comfortable during the night.’

Just previous to dream number one, the dreamer had begun, with the help of a friend who knew a little about interpretation, to analyse her own dreams. So we see that from ‘overlooking’ the sea she has quickly gone on a sea voyage. The dream sums up her situation wonderfully, ‘I didn’t know where we were going, but – others did.’ She didn’t at the time realise where the interpretations and dreams would lead her. Also, the sea is now much closer, and night is coming. That is, darkness and the unconscious are already making themselves felt, for the night sea journey is a classical dream of the exploration of one’s unconscious contents, as with Jonah and the whale.

(3) ‘Found myself in a place where I could go swimming every morning.’

Already she is beginning to enter the water, or her inner life.

(4) ‘Went into a church with someone who pointed out that I was facing the wrong way. I turned round and saw a bigger and lighter altar at the other end.’

Having begun to contact her inner life via swimming, immersing in it, she sees that her attitude to religion or her own innermost feelings had been wrong. This she corrects.

(5) ‘I was involved in a revolution. Everything around was collapsing, but I don’t remember being frightened.’

All her old ideas are being either revolutionised, or are collapsing.

(6) ‘I found myself being led in a particular direction by friendly pleasant people, who yet knew that on arrival I was to be executed. I had an immature woman of about twenty-five with me, and the same fate awaited her. I took her hand and tried to convey love and courage and to protect her from all her fears by behaving in a light-hearted manner.

As her old ideas collapse, her old self is to die. Also the immature twenty-five year-old part that still lives on in her is to die.

(7) ‘I found myself entering a tunnel where I encountered a rather frightening little animal, but we passed each other as he went out and I went in. Then I met a larger animal with the same results. Later I met a third, a real monster, rather like a 60ft caterpillar with a lion’s head and fore feet. I did not like the encounter as I continued to walk on the left side of the tunnel, into ever deepening darkness, and he passed me on the way out. Somehow I felt that Doctor (a friend and adviser) would not have been in the least afraid, and I borrowed his courage, and woke about half-way along this monster.’

Having been ready to die to her old way of life, she can begin the descent into her unconscious contents in earnest. The two frightening animals are two fears that come up and out. The third one is too big a fear to completely pass by at this time; and its shape shows its possible sexual nature.

Here, in just seven dreams, with very inadequate comments, can be seen how the symbols evolve as the dreamer discovers her real inner nature. The ‘overlooked’ sea becomes travelled upon. The coming darkness on the boat develops into the ‘deepening darkness’ of the tunnel; while each dream shows a development on the inward journey the dreamer was undertaking. Such a series need not be about the inward journey, however, but about commercial undertakings, health, ambitions, or even answers to intellectual queries.

These seven dreams were taken from about twice that many, dreamed during the period. The selection being based on how one can understand past dreams by seeing them in context with others occurring. The important point being that one might dream of looking at the sea for years, but never enter it. Then, with a change of ‘disposition’, a series of swimming and diving dreams take place. In interpreting our dreams in this way, we have to watch for similar symbols in changed conditions. The sea and darkness are obvious in the series. Also the crowd of people leading her, representative of her own desires to understand herself. The interpretation is arrived at by analysing the situations the dreamer finds herself in, and how the symbols change. Thus a seed seen in one dream, and a plant just growing in another suggest growth and development. A person scorned in one dream, and loved in another, would be a change of attitude and relationship.

These three methods, the Main Phase – the Because Factor, and the Series method, all help us to see the underlying meaning of the dream through looking at the dream as a whole. Particular symbols are not worked on in the same way as in the associated ideas method. It is the relationships the dream suggests that arouse questions. In turn, these questions themselves clarify the dream for us, and help us analyse our experience to see if the dream explains or explores it. As we advance in ability to deal with our dreams, these various methods are called upon and used as required.

Link To Chapters – Link to Chapter Six

Your Dream Interpreter



Your Dream Interpreter

In dreams you are freed from the usual restrictions of mind and body, of social rules and personal limitations. But beside meeting your wonderful creativity, you may also meet and transform the shadows of your fears and negative attitudes.

Your Dream Interpreter is available at Amazon USA and Amazon UK.

Sections Include

THE DREAMERS’ WORKBOOK INTRODUCTION – What are dreams? The Amazing experience of dreaming. Recording Your Dreams Where Do Dreams Come From? To Imagine is to Create Mapping Your Dream World Dream Healing: Resolving Conflicts in Dreams Sleep on a Problem Dealing With Nightmares Understanding and Controlling Recurring Dreams Understanding Dreams of Family Understanding Dreams of Love and Romance Relationship Growth Sexuality Understanding School Dreams Understanding Your Work Dreams Looking Into the Future THE DREAM DICTIONARY – An A to Z of Dreams INDEX OF DREAM THEMES AND OBJECTS BIBLIOGRAPHY Publishing History