“The hero is a hero just because he sees resistance to the forbidden goal in all life’s difficulties and yet fights that resistance with the whole-hearted yearning that strives towards the treasure hard to attain, and perhaps unattainable – a yearning that paralyzes and kills the ordinary man.” ~ Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, par 510
As Jung says elsewhere the hero and the demon are the two symbols that cut the figure of man. Both emanate as archetypes of the collective unconscious, and as such, they can both be destructive if the individual unconsciously identifies with them.
The energy of the hero can blindly propel one to attempt physical, intellectual, and spiritual feats beyond ones capability leading to broken bones, families, relationships, and yes, even death. The energy of the demon can blind one to the horrors of manipulation, violence, cruelty and deceit. Indeed, unconscious identification with any of the archetypes can open up a path to ruin.
Yet these energies are us, and our lives are shaped by how we relate to them. What is the ego to do, adrift both in the world and upon the vast ocean of energy that sustains it? I sense that this is a question each needs to answer for him or herself. In as much as you are able formulate an answer that has some level of efficacy, creating some movement in your life, you have consciously begun to walk down your path of individuation.
“…if a primitive tribe shows even the smallest traces of culture, we find that creative fantasy is continually engaged in producing analogies to instinctual processes in order to free the libido from sheer instinctuality by guiding it toward analogical ideas.” Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, par. 337
It was an interesting day of walking back in time as we visited NYC. We began by visiting the Met, drilling back through the age of the knights, through Greece and Rome and then to Egypt. Crossing Central Park, we then visited the Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History. What’s distinct in our line is not the tools, other humanoid predecessors had those. It’s the symbols.
Such intricate bone carvings were displayed from France dating back 16,000 years. And the images from the caves, so powerful and pointing to a sense of ritual. But it’s those little four inch statuettes of the Venus’ extending right back to that moment, that emergence 25,000 years ago, from which point we have are pretty much remained the same genetically.
Jung defines this uniquely human process as the transmission of instinctual energy to analogical ideas. After my walk through the origins, I think he underestimated the primitives he was referring to. I think this feature of symbolic transfer goes all the way back to our origins and every human ever has generated symbols in this way. No amount of tribal culture was needed before it could occur. It’s just what we, meaning all 25,000 years of us, do.
Sometimes you just need to take a stand on a hunch.
It’s never funny when anybody hurts themselves…right? Well, then again I’ve seen those funniest video shows on TV which seemed inundated with folks having the most horrendous accidents. And poor Wiley Coyote took slapstick humor to outrageous heights of pain and misery in his Sisyphus like pursuit of the Roadrunner.
So I doubt I was alone yesterday witnessing the irony of Dick Cheney’s bad back, apparently caused by moving his junk back into his home. Mr. Cheney cut quite the figure for himself over the last eight years, seemingly driving the nation from the passenger seat, shooting a friend in the back on a hunting trip, and this final image of being unable to walk out in the procession on his two feet. Instead he sat off in the corner in a wheel chair.
We all hit these unfortunate accidents along our road of life. The question to pose: what is the symbolic message in the incident? How does the unconscious use the “accidents” as lessons to our unresponsive egos? For instance, the broken toe, sprained ankle or injury to the hand, all of these are ripe mythological motifs that can be grouped together as “the wounded extremity.” Often these injuries seem to call the hero or character to recognize that the ego is but an extremity or appendage to the broader forces of the Self.
The broken back has a different tone to it. When we think of a figure needing more back bone, is it not that he or she needs to find conviction, or a sense of will power. So this image of our former Vice President with a bad back which seemingly gave out on his last day in office reveals the humor of the Unconscious is not all that subtle in the staging of unfortunate “accidents.”
[I requested that y'all (as a young friend of mine from Louisiana would say) submit post topics on Twitter last night and decided to start responding to this one from @tastememory.]
Dream symbolism is a difficult subject, mainly because of a widespread tendency to explain away the living content, the actual message of a dream, by relying on dream and symbol dictionaries to provide ready made answers. Dream analysis is an art that relies on all of the ego’s capabilities: discernment through feeling and thinking, intuition and sensation. An accurate assessment of a specific symbol in any given dream does not ensure an accurate analysis of the dream itself.
Jung taught a process of amplification, whereby the symbolic contents of a dream gets explored first through the dreamers personal associations, and then through cultural deposits of meaning found in myth, science, religion and art. Through the process of amplification, the conscious mind is able to focus attention and energy toward the dream contents, thereby reveling both the depth and the force that the dream carries. It’s important to mention that for Jung, amplification is not free association which tends to run off in its own direction leading away from the dream. In amplification, symbolic elements are explored, but always with the aim of linking back to the original dream content; for the dream itself, and not the amplification, is the bearer of the message.
In The Symbols of Transformation (par. 344), Jung writes of the psyche’s development of symbols:
The symbols it creates are always grounded in the unconscious archetype, but their manifest forms are moulded by the ideas acquired by the conscious mind. The archetypes are the numinous, structural elements of the psyche and possess a certain autonomy and specific energy which enables them to attract, out of the conscious mind, those contents which are best suited to themselves.”
In the end, while the language of dreams is symbolic, each dream attempts to transmit a specific message. It is the context of the symbol, both in relationship to the unfolding drama of the dream and the unfolding drama of the dreamers life, that reveals the given meaning. None the less, by the process of amplification, we can flesh out the meaning of a given dream symbol, much as a playwright attempts to render his characters for the stage.
(Image via Wikipedia)
The Role of the Artist
Boy having a seizure
Lifestream Digest for December 27th
The Point, Perhaps the Ocean