Posts Tagged ‘Life’s Sunshine and Rain’
Olives
Because of the mention in the Bible of live branch and the fruit of the olive, it has the associations of peace and immortality. Certainly with healing. So olives in a dream may represent the resolution of conflict in life.
The olive also is a symbol of wisdom, and in classical mythology and Renaissance art it was associated with the goddess Minerva.
The tree is an ancient symbol of the holy land, peace, love, and the path of healing and regeneration.
Wearing an olive crown can represent resolution to a conflict, and victory over what you face.. A burden will be lifted off you and you will come out victorious.
Because the oil can be pressed from the olive it has the meaning of healing or ease coming from pressure or trial. You might connect this with like or dislike because of your relationship with olives; or memories or associations with times and places you ate olives.
You might connect olives with like or dislike because of your relationship with olives; or memories or associations with times and places you ate olives.
Black olives: An underhanded dealing – like an oily character. Someone or something that is not good.
Olives: Pressing olives for oil, it might represent working hard to get something worthwhile or to make difficulties in love go easier.
Example: I had a dream where a man in a black sweater was putting black olives all over me while I was sleeping. I woke up and grabbed my phone and bashed him to death. I knew that he was about to kill me. When I woke up for real, I knew I had to figure out what black olives symbolized.
Olives are usually associated with healing or long life, but it seems he was going to make a meal of you – as you do with a pizza. But then you murdered him. What have you felt like murdering in yourself, or in your life? And the weapon, a means of communication. So maybe you could ask yourself what raised such a passion in you, and what have you actually killed?
Example: My wife drives into a service station. I take a plastic bottle partly full to get a new full bottle. She says that she is -b-l-a-n-k-w-a-l-l-e-d. I say for what? She says for buying black olives. I say why don’t you ask them directly why they won’t sell them to you. I am not sure they have any to sell. I wish that I had drunk some of the water I gave them. I think she means stonewalled.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Do I like or dislike olives?
What situations would I eat olives in?
When did I last eat or deal with olives?
See food – Background – Dream Action – Being the Person or Thing
Ape-man Half man Half Monster
This is a very important figure in dreams. As much as we would like to think of ourselves as civilised and refined humans, we are still governed by patterns of behaviour obvious in animals. We fight, kill, lie and cheat for the sake of sex, follow leaders and generally are obviously still animals. Part of becoming a really mature human is to meet and transform the animal in us. That does NOT mean kill or suppress it. It means allowing its enormous potential to be met and released. It means healing the internal pains and conflicts that inflict that deep level of our being. It means meeting the enormous power of fear, sex and anger, and redirecting their energy into creativity and human action. See: ape and animals.
The ape-man or half animal represent the part of us that is still partly animal, and can, if not met and transformed create a lot of emotional confusion and pain. The reason is that it is a powerful part of us and can influence us without us being aware of it in us. But when made conscious and understood can be a wonderful strength and source of insight. See the quote by Jung in antlers; and also mammal brain.
Example: Dreamt I was in a room, or storeroom, full of chimpanzees. I had to leave them. Some of them opened the door. It was not locked, and I didn’t lock it, but I went back in and asked them not to open the door, as there was a busy road nearby, and they might get run over. As I spoke, one was standing near me who was now almost as tall as myself. The features had become almost human, female. She seemed very sad, perhaps because she was only half human. I felt deep links of sympathy.
A beautiful dream showing the deep connection we have with the animals. Talking to them shows a respect and awareness of them in ones life, and it communicates and helps bring together the instinctive drives that may have been neglected and so could not adapt to the world we live in.
Example: I was saving a very young white wolf from a half man half wolf monster. Someone was with me and we were working together to save it. Finally after much struggle I coaxed it up the wooded path and it ran up the street. I went back to the monster to distract it. I glanced behind me one more time and saw the young white wolf was fully grown now. And that’s where my dream ended.
A wonderful example of accepting and helping the animal that we are to grow and mature in our life.
Useful Questions and Hints:
Am I aware of this part of my nature? See animals for more information.
What are its influences on me – they could be aggression, sex, non rational behaviour?
Read conditioned reflexes to understand how the animal in us can alter our behaviour.
See Street Wisdom; Levels of the Brain – Programmed – Being the Person or Thing – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams
Dream Incubation
To incubate a dream means to seek earnestly for a dream that responds to a special need or question. This way of approaching the best in yourself for help has been practised widely in many cultures. Some evidence suggests it was first used as a means of curing sterility, and was wide-spread enough to be used by Australian aborigines as well as Chinese and North Africans. It evolved into a much wider application, and in more recent history its various uses range from young women seeking to dream about their future husband, to Amerindian youths fasting in lonely vigil to receive a dream about their inmost character and destiny. Many such approaches, as those used in Ancient Greece in the healing temples of Aesculapius[i], were felt to be sacred. Individuals were helped to take on a feeling of approaching the divine and humbly seeking help from the highest wisdom. The effectiveness of this is to be found in many historical records.
In today’s world we have no dream incubation temples, and our culture does not often encourage us to take a cleansing fast and vigil to incubate a dream. We may not have learned the humility and joy felt in approaching the sacred. But we can still as individuals recognise that the forces behind nature and our own existence are special and potent. The great cycles of birth and death, or mating and reproduction are to be seen everywhere, and spring from eternal powers. To approach the fount of these with reverence is not irrational. To seek deeper understanding of your own life situation, your health, or your relationship with the whole, can still bring wonderful blessings and change.
To apply this yourself, the first step is to recognise that the unconscious processes of your own mind and body, of your transcendent self, are not like a machine into which you can drop a coin or press a button and out pops a can of coke. The unconscious can be helpfully likened to a person. It is intelligent, responsive, is moved by meaningful communication and relatedness. To gain the help of this potent power in yourself, you need its co-operation.
The second step is to remember your dreams and see if they are already dealing with the subject you want information on. It may be your unconscious has other things that need attention first. So think around the question you want answered. Recognise the feelings surrounding the question. A frivolous question that does not connect with the important issues of your life will not easily get the attention of your unconscious. The more important the question is either for your own welfare or work, the more likely it is your unconscious will explore the issue and present a response in a dream.
When you have a reasonable respect for what you are approaching, define your question. Write it carefully as a letter to your unconscious and place it under your pillow. Expect a reply as you would expect a response from a good friend. Your unconscious is your best and loving friend. It knows you intimately as no one else does. When you wake, pause and let any dream flow into awareness. Record it immediately in some way. Then explore it as suggested in the sections above in The Dream Interview and Be Your Own Dream Detective. If you do not get a response the first time try again.
See Dreams – Practical Techniques to explore their meaning – Being the Person or Thing – Opening to Life
[i] One of the most beautiful of surviving shrines to Aesculapius is at Epidaurus. It was built in the fifth century BC. Such centres were often of great size, and the one at Epidaurus took about 150 years to complete.
Acting On Your Dream
A dream image is, in many ways, like an icon on your computer desktop. It just sits there, you can think about it till you are red in the face, but it doesn’t come alive until you click on it. A dream is a product of the miracle we do not understand – LIFE. As such each dream image is alive with intelligence and information, and links not simply with ideas we read in a book or website, but with the workings and wonders of our body, the depths of our mind and even beyond.
Remember that dreams occur in animals, and have been a feature of living creatures long before humans arose. So dreams come from a part of us prior to the arrival of human language. Therefore it might be useless to think about dreams. My poor attempts to communicate this in words as a dictionary are at the best useful – it is best if you actually explore your dreams as explained below. You can then ‘click’ on your dream images using the following ways in.
Below are different tool or approaches you can use – click on to quickly go to them – Peer Dream Work – Talking as the character or thing – Walk On Part – This Is How It Was – Being the Person or Thing – Stand in the Role of Character or Object – Key Words
The Dream Image
A quick way of understanding your dream is to realise that the images in our dreams are just emotions, thoughts, fears. traumas, ideas and feeling projecting out of you and appearing as images, people or scenes outside you on the screen of your mind. If you take away the images of the dream, or draw them back to be a part of you that they really are, you might then discover what they represent about you. This is so simple that many people fail to try it, and instead try ‘thinking’ about their dream’. This may be because many people do not like to meet or deal with their real feelings and emotions. So please take time with it.
If it is difficult to get rid of the image, then take the image into you again – after all it was projected out of you, so taking it back into you introduces you to whatever caused it. Imagine yourself becoming the image. For more information about doing this see Being the Person or Thing
Whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind.
So after you take the image away and feel the feeling underneath it, ask yourself, “When have I felt this before – even years ago? What is the feeling about and what part does it play in my life?”
Talking as the character or thing
This is a technique I have used myself and with groups of people. People arrive at understanding very quickly. But for some people this takes a little practice because instead of – if we dream of a dog – saying, “The dog is only a puppy and is adorable” you need to talk as if you are the dog, person or place. So say “I am a little puppy and the person thinks I am adorable”.
The idea is to really describe in detail what it is you are dealing with, and also what you are feeling as the dream object. The more you use this the richer the experience gets and you allow yourself to really be the dream object or person – and do not make the mistake if it is a person you know by describing them as an outside person. Stick with them exactly as they are in the dream. But it is not something you can rush, because the dream comes from deep within you and has to gather information and transform into our conscious thought life – remember dreams are a VERY old process. The originated at a time before human language and thought. To understand this please read How it Flows
Here is an example: I dreamt I arrived at a railway station, but instead of a platform it was at the top of an old castle keep. I had to walk down through the castle and then out to a street.
So I said: “I am an old castle keep. In the past I was used as a defence, but now people are easily passing through and allowing people to enter me and leave.” As soon as I said that I could see what it meant. I had suffered a lot of shyness and was defended not allowing people near me. I had built impregnable emotional walls to keep people away. Now I was finding it easier to let people come and go.
Here is another example: I dreamt I entered my living room and things had been thrown everywhere. It was a mess. I realised that it was my wife who had done it.
This is a tricky one because the wife was not in the dream, so if he sticks with the dream and not his actual wife here is what was said. “I am an invisible presence in my husband life, a presence he feels tears his living space to bits. Yet I am invisible and so could not have done this. But I am a feeling in his life that assures him that I am an awful intrusion. You see, I am just a feeling he has, and that makes him irritated with me.” The dreamer admitted that it wasn’t his wife that was messing up his ‘living space’ but his own feelings about her.
So try it and see what you find. But take time with yourself and ask the person, castle wall, dog, or object questions to clear things up. If you say whatever comes to mind you will be amazed how well it works.
Walk On Part
This is the simplest of the methods. It requires you to play with your imagination a little and go along with a fantasy, the sort of talent we all develop as children. If you have a sympathetic audience it helps, but only if you feel okay in front of others. It is fine alone as well. Stand with your eyes closed in the middle of enough space to move around. About two or three square metres is usually plenty.
Imagine you are standing on the edge of your dream, like a film set, and you are going to walk into it. Before you actually step into your dream be aware of what you are feeling in your body and emotions. Your body and feelings are a screen upon which subtle changes and shifts will occur. It is this screen of body and emotions that will act as your monitor showing what responses your dream produces.
Now step into your dream. Literally step forward. Walk about in the ‘film set’ of your dream, watching what you feel, what memories come and what your fantasies are. Talk with the characters, even step into their body and register what feelings and intuitions they produce on your screen of body and feelings. This also includes objects such a car, tree, or animals. Literally get into their shape. This is important because all the images we use in dreams are like the icons on computer screens. The front object is only a small indication of what lies hidden underneath.
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Speak what you feel and find to your helpers or to a tape recorder. You can enter into anything in this way, whether it is an animal, a tree, the sea or a house. As you explore your dream in this way you can ask questions and your intuition will play its responses on the monitor of your body and emotions. The possibilities are that you enter the dream and explore its different places and people, or you relive the dream by acting it out. |
In many dreams you the dreamer or one of the characters expresses something dramatic or ordinary that can be used as a doorway to insight. As an example ‘Kelly’ had the following dream:
I am in an exotic foreign shop and the owner doesn’t understand me. Then he speaks English and I laugh and start jumping around saying, ‘You can understand me’.
Kelly could take up the posture she had in the dream and act it by saying out aloud, “You don’t understand me!” This would need to be repeated a few times with as much of the feeling of frustration or attitudes connected with being misunderstood as appeared in or were suggested by the dream. What this can do is to involve more of yourself in expression than you usually do. This brings to the surface feelings that may be difficult to be aware of otherwise. Once felt they can be recognised for what they are. Often what happens is that the acting out carries on from the dream and may even involve some life situation you have been in. In other words you act or feel something more than was in the dream. Kelly could also try ‘jumping around’ shouting “You can understand me!”
The aim is to dramatise what the dream is expressing to see if we can find what part of your history or emotions it is depicting. This often ‘hooks’ memories or feelings that would otherwise not be discovered.
Being the Person or Thing
All the images, people, animals, places we see in our dreams, are simply your own feelings, fears, hopes and wonder projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind as images. So, it makes sense to take the image of your dream person, thing or animal back into you and own it. In that way, you are actually meeting and dealing with the things about yourself you are not owning or conscious of. That is why dreams are often difficult to understand, because we are hiding things from ourselves.
One of the most important things about actually understanding your dream rather that interpreting it is to become the dream person or object – to actually completely identify with it. This needs to be practiced as most people feel the dream person or object is something other than themselves and are often hesitant to become it. For instance the Devil in a dream is simply your own emotions and fears given an exterior image. Also a teacher or Mentor is in a dream the highest wisdom in us. In doing this you can step beyond the imagery of the dream into direct experience of yourself in all its variety and wonder.
So to do this the dreamer next chooses one of the characters, images or objects in the dream to explore. The character can be themselves as they appear in the dream, or any of the other people or things. It is important to realise that it does not matter if the character is someone known or not, or whether they are young or old. The character needs to be treated as an aspect of their dream, and not as if they were the living person exterior to the dream. So do not attempt to describe them an outside person, but the dream character.
In choosing an image to work with, such as a person, a tree, cat, place, or an environment like the street in the example dream above, it must again be treated as it appears in the dream, not as it may appear in real life. One can take any image from the dream to work with. But do not start thinking about the person or thing, imagine yourself as them or it – step into their body. Then wait for any feelings to arise and describe them, avoid trying to understand it by thinking about it – dreams arise from a level that preexists thinking.
Below is an example of how this can work.
Example: I dreamt I arrived at a railway station, but instead of a platform it was at the top of an old castle keep. I had to walk down through the castle and then out to a street.
In being the castle I felt a change of feeling, instead of feeling that I needed to defend myself I described myself and the castle by saying, “I am an old castle keep. In the past I was used as a defence, but now people are easily passing through and allowing people to enter me and leave.” As soon as I said that I could see what it meant. I had suffered a lot of shyness and was defended, not allowing people near me. I had built impregnable emotional walls to keep people away. Now I was finding it easier to let people come and go.
Example: I dreamt I entered my living room and things had been thrown everywhere. It was a mess. I realised that it was my wife who had done it.
This is a tricky one because the wife was not in the dream, so if he sticks with the dream character and not his actual wife here is what he felt when being his wife. “I feel I am invisible presence in my husband life, a presence he feels tears his living space to bits. Yet I am invisible and so could not have done this. So I am a feeling in his life that assures him that I am an awful intrusion. You see, I am just a feeling he has, and that makes him irritated with me.” The dreamer admitted that it wasn’t his wife that was messing up his ‘living space’ but his own feelings about her.
Example: And then one day we discovered our “selves.” We had been talking about vulnerability and Hal suggested that I (Sidra) move over to another part of the room and become the vulnerable child instead of talking about it. I trusted Hal and so I left the couch I’d been sitting on, sat on the floor next to the coffee table, put my head down on it and suddenly everything changed. I became absolutely quiet and experienced the world around me differently. Sounds, colors and feelings were more intense than before.
The sophisticated, rational, articulate woman with all the answers was gone and in her place was a very young child. I was extremely quiet and very sensitive to everything in my surroundings. I responded to energies rather than thoughts. I felt things I had not felt in decades, and knew things that were not known by my everyday mind. I knew, without question, the realities of my soul. After about an hour, Hal asked me to move to my original seat on the couch and I returned to my previous way of being in the world… but my little girl was still with me and I would never lose her completely again. Quoted from http://delos-inc.com/articles/Voice_Dialogue-_Discovering_Our_Selves.htm
A psychiatrist writes that, “The very small child runs round the room saying: “I am a lion.” He or she does not clearly distinguish between the fact that he is a child and the feeling that he or she is a lion. The older child can make such a distinction, unless it is emotionally disturbed, but it will still play fantasy games “let’s pretend.” The adult has not wholly lost this quality, but by the time adolescence is over his personality has struck a balance between reality and fantasy between his outer and his inner environment”. We all have this ability to enter more fully into our inner dream life – but we need to be a little more childlike.
Stand in the Role of Character or Object
The dreamer stands in the role of the character or image they are using. So if they chose to be a person they would close their eyes, imagine themselves as stepping into the body of the dream character and describe him or herself as the person they now are – from the feelings not thoughts. Dreams arise from the processes of life in us. Life is very ancient and was active long before words – associations with sounds – arrived, and dreams uses an older method than thinking with words, and uses feelings and associations we may with everything we see. See Associations–Working With
To do this it usually changes the way your body or feelings are experienced. As this is done notice any changes in how you feel as that person – or object – speak as them in the first person. Do not say, “I feel as if this person is …” but say, “I feel I am and am doing ..” As this happens watch any realisations or insights that arise and explore the person or thing. Ask question of this dream character or thing until you feel you have realised what is is of you that is being revealed.
I know it is difficult for some people to say ‘I’ instead of talking as if the dream character is someone else. But if you start claiming the dream image as your own in this way by saying such things as, “I am a tree” you will quickly realise you are talking about yourself. Seeing that all images of our dreams are productions of our self, in being an object or person we are tuning into aspects of oneself usually unconscious.
Example: It was something like a semi detached and sited on a slope. I was outdoors and I think felt or knew that we had just taken over this house. But I felt uneasy as if something from the past was linked with it.
Then I was at the back of the house, on the part sloping down from the back wall of the house. I noticed things covering what turned out to be a big hole dug against the back wall, deep into the soil. This was where I felt most ill at ease about the place. The hole had been covered with bits of board and other odd pieces of junk. I lifted these at the left of the hole and looked in. Sticking out from the side of the hole, about three feet down was the dead body of a young man. I could see the back of his skull had been smashed in. But although he had obviously been under the soil for some time, and had now been uncovered, the body was still in good condition, being slightly dried out or mummified.
I felt really guilty and connected with the body, as if I had been part of his murder, and was wondering frantically what I could do to hide or get rid of the body. Part of the problem was that pulling it out risked being seen with it.
In ‘being’ the body in the dream the man said, “But it wasn’t until I got into the role of the dead body that any depth of feelings emerged. Almost as soon as I was in the role of the dead body I began to think about and feel things connected with the way I had killed my sexuality as a teenager. Gradually these feelings deepened and I was describing my feeling hatred in regard to sexuality and how the masses were pulled along by their genitals into some sort of conformity and performance. I felt anger and loathing for what I felt at the time were the cattle human beings were.
I despised and hated them. I also felt repugnance at the way people talked about sex or appeared to enjoy it. It has to be understood that in that period in history in the UK, most of sex was depicted in terms of smut, dirt, animal desire, hidden pornography, or loveless fucking. I wept deeply, at times hardly able to breathe, with the pain of seeing what I had done to myself. I said sorry over and over. I saw that I need not have killed my love and sexuality, but could have expressed it in a tender and loving way. Some of this I expressed to a friend when I wrote to her about the experience. Below is the content of the email.
I explored it and met the pain of killing my sexuality utterly, as well as all the attendant feelings about the common herd who are dragged by their genitals into ‘fucking’ and loveless relationships – exactly what I was dragged into by the fact I had utterly killed all genital sensation for all those years. I was able to follow the tracks back – once again – to my own actions, killing any contact with my mother. But then being treated like an alien in my own home town, and seeing my peers treat incoming refuges from the war in Europe like shit. As an ‘Iti’ I identified with them and felt ‘different’. Apart from which I seemed to be carrying this desire never to be like the ‘herd’ from the long past.
The body in the hole was that of the me I would have grown into if I had not murdered that beautiful part of me. In the UK at the time, and in my youth, sex was nearly always about dirt, smut, a quick fuck, and hidden but rampant pornography and homosexuality. I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted nothing to do with the manipulation via sexual desire that was going on around me. But of course, it need not have been like that, but I had no other role model at the time, so I did a terrible thing to myself. Also I lost all respect for my elders as in none of them could I see that gentleness of love. My schoolteachers were thrashing children with rods. The world was killing each other in tens of thousands. My mother had castrated me, and my father hardly ever even spoke to me. So I divorced the world, and of course lost that wonderful quality of compassion for the human struggle. In the process I threw myself into the volcano of fighting the forces of life itself. I fought God and won, but was mortally wounded in the combat.
Here I stand, a wiser and hopefully gentler man.
Key Words
The most immediate way to gain insight into your dream is to take the keywords and fill in the gaps.
To illustrate this we can use the following dream:
I meet an acquaintance who tells me she is sick. I suggest ways that might help her. As I speak I become aware that others are listening and coming nearer. I apologise and say that I appear to be preaching, but they say, ‘Please go on we want to listen.’ As I continue I find that a rostrum has formed and lifted me two steps higher.
To use the technique of ‘keywords’ on this dream you would need to write down the most important words in the dream. Doing this you might arrive at the words – meet – acquaintance – sick – help – speak – listening – apologise – preaching – rostrum.
For the next step you ask yourself what you have recently met with in yourself or in life? It is something you are acquainted with, and that has to do with not feeling well, whole or satisfied with your life. So you would ask yourself what you are acquainted with to do with not feeling at your best?
The word ‘help’ suggests you have information that will be useful. What is it?
You apologise for yourself, suggesting degrading what you know. How are you doing that in your life?
Preaching comes next. Have you been giving advice? If so, what is it, and is it relevant to you too?
And lastly, can you listen to your own advice given from a rostrum – higher level of viewpoint?
Having arrived at some associations with the major words in the dream, you next put them together in a way that explains some of the insights or ideas you arrived at. Filling in the gaps between the words you might therefore arrive at something like this:
I have lately become aware of the feeling that I am ill at ease with myself. This connects with my lack of confidence about how I feel when talking with other people. The strange thing is that I know how to help myself with this. I was talking with a friend the other day, and the advice I gave them about something similar really applies to me. What I need to do is to stop apologising for myself and positively use what I know will help. I can see from the dream that I have a lot to share with other people, so I don’t need to feel I am preaching.
What you arrive at using this keyword method will give you an excellent overview of your dream. It will take some practice, but persist and you will get very useful results.
Other examples are in Talking As
Dealing with Anger and great Emotions
Being the person who is angry, or being yourself being angry is one of the safest ways of allowing and healing the causes of anger. Anger is a natural feeling, and when we repress it, as we are usually taught to do in our society, it becomes pressurised and sick or dangerous.
You can do this by standing in the role, and sometimes it can help to act out anger by hitting cushions or an armchair with a rolled up newspaper. Acting it our can often lead to a real release and then you can see where it all started.
What Posture or Movement?
Another approach is to take up the posture or movement in the dream. I was a helper once with Dave who dreamt of a cop sitting astride a powerful motorbike. Dave had failed to understand this part of the dream using other methods. So we built a pile of cushions for him to sit astride. He sat there for a while and when we asked how he felt he said, “Powerful.” Dave had been feeling a lack of power to do things or to accomplish anything. As he acted out the posture and feeling of being on the bike he could feel the power in his body and the confidence in himself to do what he wanted. It wasn’t simply the dream confidence, it was Dave’s own strength that he could now experience.
As is suggested with Dave, this acting out can be a group action. Non of us actually got in on the act with Dave, but sometimes it helps to get other people involved in the drama, as when you want someone to resist, or someone to hold. A memorable example was with Olive. A dream scene in which she was sitting opposite a woman in a café puzzled her. Latent in the scene was something to do with love, but Olive couldn’t ‘get it’. So I imagined myself in her dream and felt something, and suggested to Olive that she sit opposite Hy, a woman partner, and I asked Olive to repeatedly say to Hy, “Please love me”. The effect was enormous. All the feelings Olive had buried about wanting love from her mother surfaced and were felt. It was a very healing experience for Olive.
And Then What?
A technique that is occasionally very helpful is to carry the dream forward. As it is so useful a bit more information will be given about it.
It is particularly relevant when the end of the dream is not satisfying or does not resolve the feelings or issue expressed in the dream. The method is simple. Imagine yourself in the dream and continue it as a fantasy or daydream. You can alter the dream in any way you want. Continue the plot forward to some sort of conclusion or resolve. But it is important to watch your feelings to see whether what you do is actually satisfying and feels right. It might be a defensive change you make instead of a creative one. Be aware if there is any anger or hostility in the dream that is not fully expressed. If so, let yourself imagine a full expression of the anger. Look for the feeling of satisfaction. Satisfaction occurs only as you learn to acknowledge and integrate resistances and anxieties regarding what you express. It will not arise if you fail to face your fears or deal with the feelings that are trying to resolve in the dream.
This is a very important method. Moving the dream forward like this changes habits that trap you in lack of satisfaction, poor creativity or inability to resolve problems. Using it you can turn to face the things you have been running from. You can get hold of the elusive dream lover who has always before eluded you. You can catch that train, open that door, get to the top of the stairs, and do all the things that anxiety, habit or low self esteem were holding you back from. This can change your life. But to achieve it you must face, feel and admit what has been holding you back.
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.
[i] ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ Genesis 1:26.
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?
Introduction to the I Ching
Apart from being a book of wisdom in the ancient Chinese tradition, the I Ching was also consulted on questions of state, warfare and personal decision making. It is this aspect of it which is dealt with here. Consulting the I Ching does not present us with statements of what will happen as a fated future. The wisdom behind the book does not see the future as unalterably fixed, but rather like a constantly shifting flux similar to the seasons, with which we can interact. What we receive in a consultation is like a conversation with a wise and experienced friend, who through their experience might point out that if we take our present course within the situation as it stands, the results might be in a direction we do not wish – but if we take another attitude circumstances could change, then we can act more forcefully and effectively.
The I Ching intrigued me, not so much because it is a very ancient book, the culmination of many great minds and a great culture, but because it was largely couched in symbols. My work with dreams and the way people use imagery in thinking and expression, made me want to tackle the I Ching. I wanted to see if I could put into clearer English what is usually said in rather poetic and indefinite prose. Below you can access two working examples of people consulting the I Ching. The text is from my interpretation – originally written for New Zealand Teletext as phone in scripts but never used by them. If you are unacquainted with the I Ching there is also a brief explanation of its principles.
“Your I Ching interpretation(s) are, ultimately, the best I have seen. DEEP BOW. – Sara”
The Hexagrams
| U | P | P | E | R | |||||
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1 | 34 | 5 | 26 | 11 | 9 | 14 | 43 | |
| L |  |
25 | 51 | 3 | 27 | 24 | 42 | 21 | 17 |
| O |  |
6 | 40 | 29 | 4 | 7 | 59 | 64 | 47 |
| W |  |
33 | 62 | 39 | 52 | 15 | 53 | 56 | 31 |
| E |  |
12 | 16 | 8 | 23 | 2 | 20 | 35 | 45 |
| R |  |
44 | 32 | 48 | 18 | 46 | 57 | 50 | 28 |
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13 | 55 | 63 | 22 | 36 | 37 | 30 | 49 | |
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10 | 54 | 60 | 41 | 19 | 61 | 38 | 58 |
The Monster
I am telling you son,
There are monsters about.
And I am not saying this
To give you bad dreams at night.
You need to know, so that,
If you suddenly meet one
You will understand what to do.
You are my son,
And I am trying to
Give you the best I can.
But I have to tell you
That I only know
What I have experienced.
As far as I can see,
A monster builds up slowly
Over the years of your life.
I am not sure, but I think
They start as germs
That feed on pains you feel.
You don’t know they exist
Until one day, a person,
Someone you have let
Get really close to you,
Suddenly stabs you
Where all the years of pain
Have slowly congealed.
It is such a shock you
Reel back, bleeding and raging.
And there in front of you
Stands the monster,
Unclothed of its human form,
Leaving you confused and wounded.
The awful thing is
It changes back into
The friendly human form again.
So in the years that follow
You are forever wary,
Wondering in what person
The monster now lurks.
Copyright ©2008 Tony Crisp