Cracking Open and Finding Help Within.

Marie-Louise von Franz presented a Romanian folktale in her book (1999) The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption (1999) The enchanted cat gives the hero a nut, which when cracked contains smaller seeds of maize, wheat, and a weed. Within the last of these magic nesting objects is a treasure of fine linen cloth. In discussing the meaning of the story, von Franz compares the nut and seeds to the process of individuation. What she said is just as true today as it was then.

“When we first approach the unconscious, it is a hard nut for us to crack. We can’t penetrate it, we don’t understand our dreams and so on; we have to bite through to understand dreams and we are repelled until we get into them and find there is a message within, something that nourishes. You often see that in analysis. People who have a heavy depression or some other problem, generally, if they have had other types of analysis before, or never had any analysis, at first are bewildered by our Jungian methods. We say, “Any dreams?” and then we begin to nut-crack dream symbols, and they wonder what that has to do with their marital problem or depression–until they discover for themselves that yes, their dreams have a life-giving message, and then they begin to realize the nourishing aspects of the unconscious. For instance, they leave the analytic hour feeling better; they came into the hour depressed and they haven’t understood much yet, but they feel better, more hopeful. They come in contact with the nourishing aspect of the unconscious, and this begins to give some vitality to consciousness, to impart some hope.” (pp. 105-6)

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Sailing the Divine

Healing comes from the Great Mystery, the Divine, the Spirit, That of which we are not conscious (the Unconscious). Healing comes on its own and when it wishes. Those of us who work with this Power must wait patiently and accompany our friends and relatives on their individual paths. We wait for a vision, a dream, a synchronous event, a message from the Great Mystery to guide us on our journey. Good counseling is helpful, but provides no cure. That must come from the depths of the soul, from what Carl Jung called the Self. There are many ways to symbolize the Self, but when we are confronted with its tremendous Power, the ocean comes to mind. It can be calm and mirror-like. It can change quickly and become menacing. A ship is the symbol for what keeps us afloat, what keeps us protected from drowning, when we are carried by water-force, the emotions and experiences evoked by the Divine.

Marie-Louise von Franz said that “any philosophy, religious teaching or cultural tradition” will function like a ship when we go into the unconscious’ realm. She claimed that Jung fashioned such a ship, “by creating certain hypotheses to which one can cling when one doesn’t know up from down. When one is in danger of drowning in the unconscious, of having a huge inflation or something of the kind, falling into a possession or being overwhelmed by an affect, then such psychological concepts as Jung’s can help. . . All teachings and traditions have some value in preventing one from complete disorientation, which is a typical effect when one touches the unconscious; one becomes disoriented and that’s the drowning.” (pp. 34-35, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption, 1999) It doesn’t matter what tradition provides the conceptual framework, so long as there is something to which the counselor and the patient can relate their experiences.

Jung drew upon all of the religious and cultural traditions available to him at the beginning of the 20th century. He was a student of Chinese, Indian, Judeao-Christian and Islamic, Alchemical, Gnostic and mythological traditions. He was looking for universal threads which are found throughout these diverse ways of establishing respectful relationship with the Divine. He came up with the best ways of characterizing the process given his (vast) understanding. Jungians have been clarifying and refining the basic foundations of analytical psychology ever since.

I have found that Jung’s insights are reflected in my study of Native American culture and religion. We use slightly different names for the same phenomena, but human nature is essentially the same. We are all brothers and sisters; all different colors of the Rainbow created by the Divine Mother/Father. Messages from the Source often come in dreams and visions. That’s why we seek visions. We want to communicate with the Divine. We use purification (sweat) lodges, fasting, ceremonial retreats into nature, medicine plants and related ceremonies of meditation to connect with the Divine, with Great Mystery, and listen. Often the imagery we experience is symbolic and requires someone with whom we can safely share our “transmission”. The good news is that such people exist and they have shared their skills, their art, with younger people so our traditions continue to thrive.

Always requiring adaptation to new situations and new people, the old ways are renewed in council and ceremony. Their efficacy is very pragmatic. If they work, they are renewed, transformed to fit the new generation. If they don’t work, they die. That is the way of nature. It is our choice to continue teaching the methods which work. That is how we are co-creating the world. We pass on to the next generation what we have found useful and efficacious.

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Inception and the Unconscious

With “Inception” we enter dreams within dreams. And not only that, but group dreaming and conscious manipulation of others through entering their dream space. The viewer is in for a wild ride of suspended belief and paradoxical visual effects, mass destruction, violence, and resolution, as if waking from a dream. Judging by the audience involvement in both rural and metropolitan settings where I have experienced this film, there is great interest and resonance in the ideas presented. Is it possible to plant psychic seeds in the subconscious of unknowing and unwilling subjects? And if so, what motives justify such manipulation? Breaking up superpowers, economic empires in the name of free enterprise? Going home at last to your children and family? Warriors returning traumatized pretending it was just a dream? Inception asks us to consider questions about dreaming and the unconscious. It introduces us to the concept of “projection” in a way to which many can relate. But how accurate is this description? What is the unconscious anyway?

In her book (1998) on the work of C.G. Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz tells us, the unconscious:

“is just a modern technical expression for an inner experience which is as old as mankind, the experience which occurs when something alien and unknown overwhelms us from within, when the working of inner forces suddenly changes our lives, when we have dreams or inspirations or hunches which we know we have not “made up” but which come to us from a psychic “outside” and push their way into consciousness. In earlier times these effects of unconscious processes were ascribed to a divine fluid (mana) or to a god or demon or “spirit.” Such names gave expression to the feeling of an objective, alien and autonomous presence, as well as to a sense of something overwhelming to which the conscious ego has to submit.” (p. 7)

The dream worlds created in “Inception” certainly have most of these qualities. The dreamer’s subconscious projections are hostile to the invading images and try to destroy them. The audience gets to experience the hostile opposition of the shadow in its militaristic form, from security agents to warriors on skis. The “otherness” of these images are potentially fatal to the dreamers and regarded as both alien and objective, but are they autonomous? Not really. The agents of protection are there to prevent the extraction of secret information from the subconscious of the dreamer. This is very Freudian in nature. The hidden can become conscious when pulled into the realm of the ego. In fact the whole operation is intended to implant an idea which will rise to conscious awareness, “I need to be my own man” and create for myself (not try to be my father). That is what the entire process is pulling toward. There is the added gift of conflict resolution with the father and the son at the subconscious level, something Freud would probably have loved, like hypnotic suggestion. But as Jung noted long ago this raises the problem of authority and integrity of the benevolent healer, who puts these ideas in the psyche of his clients. Better to find a more conscious interactive healing modality where the unconscious plays a role in the healing and the healer is more of a guide than a guru. And that is precisely were Freud and Jung parted company 100 years ago. The unconscious is autonomous, a law unto itself, and that is what is missing from the screenplay of “Inception.”

The ego or consciousness of the dreamer is never confronted with the mystical experience of the “I–Thou” relationship which Martin Buber characterized. The otherness, the powerfulness, the alien nature of the unconscious, gives us the sense that we must submit to it. It can destroy us or help us, so we ought to have a respectful attitude toward it. But we don’t find that kind of respect in the story line of “Inception”. There we find the egos of the characters playing a terrifying, but successful game of psychic chess. Ariadne, the dream labyrinth’s architect, creates for herself a chess piece, which looks like the diagonally moving bishop, to anchor her reality. Like the mythological princess of the Cretan myth, she helps the hero defeat the monster in the maze and escape to tell the story. The ego is usually the hero in these stories and is transformed by letting go of attitudes, companions, and self-deception. Everyone is affected by the dream, but only the hero grows emotionally. Perhaps the others do, but we don’t know how, that is left for further development.

Jung’s gift to us is still to be appreciated. The unconscious is “the autonomous creative matrix of normal psychic life (p.6).” It is the author is our dreams, visions, and hallucinations. It can interact with us through the use of indigenous medicines and ceremonies. It has a life and power of its own. It works through and with us humans. If we have a respectful appreciation for it and submit to its directive force, we can have miraculous healings and magical experiences in our lives. If we resist the Dream Maker (in our ego’s self-importance and resultant inflation), we will likely suffer for it, as did Icarus, when he refused to listen to his father’s warning and flew too close to the sun god whose heat melted the matrix which was holding him in the air. Daedalus, creator of the Cretan labyrinth, lost his son, through free will. We, like Icarus, must learn these ways for ourselves. Sometimes we crash into the sea of the unconscious, to be reborn or dissolve. As parent of ourselves we watch the process, like Daedalus, and accept the consequences of our choices.

Jung rediscovered many of the ways to actively engage the unconscious. He learned the language and paradoxical techniques of the ancient alchemists and translated them for us to use. He traced psychology back through alchemy, gnosticism, and the mystery schools (East and West), to the shamanic roots of human experience. He reconnected us with the symbolic language of the Creator and made an individual relationship with the “Thou” definitive of human nature, regardless of culture and religious environment. Like Daedalus, he watches from the spirit world where dreams are made, observing his students teach the old ways of magic and transformation of the soul into the diamond body. That’s not exactly the approach in the movie “Inception”, it is more like showing us how our seeds are planted within ourselves by the unconscious. I suppose you could call us God’s garden experiment. We have freedom to heal or destroy the garden, but we need the humility of understanding our situation as children of God.

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Death as my Advisor

I recently found a book published in 1982 called Dreambody: The Body’s Role in Revealing the Self by Arnold Mindell. The introduction is by my “Godmother” Auntie Maude of the Dream World. I say that because of several dreams in which I am in my Auntie Maude’s home and there is a picture of her on the mantle. She is always too busy to meet with me in the dream, but she allows my visiting her home and study any time I wish. I am often visiting with my friends and colleagues. Auntie Maude and I share the same birthday, January 4th, the day sacred to Hermes. Who is she in this reality and why do I never meet her? Why am I so often in her study filled with books? Because she is the principle author on the work of Carl Jung whose books I have read with great relish over the past 40 years, Marie Louise von Franz. When I first saw the picture of her taken in 1997, before her death, I recognized her as the dream Auntie. It was a way the Dream World acknowledged my relatedness to von Franz, I carry on her work like a nephew in our tradition. I shared one of her books with my nephew Warren. It built a psychic bridge between us so that we could share dreams and more intense synchronous experiences. My study is like the dream world. I teach Dream Interpretation and Psychology here.

And what did Mindell have to say? In his work with terminally ill clients he noticed the therapist is often aligned with the conscious attitudes of science and modern medicine. The doctor is in the business of healing and can easily feel self-importance about nursing and loving people in order to heal them. In the fairy tale “Godfather Death”, the young doctor has Death as his healing ally and godfather. If Death appears at the head of the bed, the patient will die. If at the foot, the patient will recover. The doctor tricks Death by rotating the bed of the King (the conscious attitude and collective values) and later the Princess (the feelings associated with care for the poor, helping those in need, being social). As Asklepios discovered long ago, you can’t cheat Hades of his rightful place by bringing people back from the dead. Like Hades in the classical Greek myth, Death takes the doctor because of his disrespectful attitude towards his godfather.  Mindell said:

“The king may live–that is, the doctor’s professional identity as a healer may continue–but the princess must die. He has to drop his feelings about the importance of healing. The princess symbolizes the feeling of self-importance and the acts of nursing and loving people in order to heal them. The reason Death calls these feelings and acts into question is that the unconscious is not necessarily loving toward the sick attitudes of ailing people. If the doctor nurses the sick attitudes of his patients instead of telling them to change, then the doctor becomes identified with the patient. Then both have unreal and false feelings.
The present fairy tale speaks about collective processes, about the death of the king and princess of medicine. It may be shocking to present-day healers to hear that the principles behind their often undebated behavior must die or change. The collective is interested in healing and holds the healing principle high above everything else.
Within the field of psychology alone new treatments and tricks are developing almost as fast as the number of diseases themselves. Modern medicine is becoming increasingly important and is being aided by the uncritical application of ancient techniques such as yoga, acupuncture and shamanistic healing.
But there is something wrong in the uncritical tendency to heal. It neglects the messages of Death and tries at all costs to dull the intensity of body signals in order to reduce suffering. Death is not listened to but marched over in an effort to overcome time itself. The healing attitude has contributed to the population explosion. But the most immediate result of the ailing healing attitude is that it suffocates potential consciousness and development. Many body messages expound violent existential warnings about the necessity for instantaneous change. If these messages are consistently blurred with pain killers, relaxants and surgery, psychological death results. The human beings are turned into robots directed by the frail so-called scientific consciousness of others. (pp. 89-90)

Mindell saw Death as the “self-governing body energy that first emerges in the form of symptoms and diseases. But illness is only the superficial manifestation of body energy. Beneath the surface of the earth the spirit of disease appears as the spirit and meaning behind life. This spirit creates energy for given tasks. When the energy for these tasks disappears, Death is calling the methods and meaning of the tasks into question. Either a change in attitude and a transformation of compulsive “doing” is required, or the task should be left up to fate and the body. In the former case, amplifying body symptoms will create the necessary change in attitude and simultaneously reduce compulsion. In the latter case, if energy for the task is consistently missing, then the work must be dropped. If one continues in spite of all indications, consciousness will be obliterated as the dreambody extinguishes personal life.” (pp. 90-91)

Sounds heavy, but it squares with my experience. When he talks of amplification above he is using a Jungian term for expanding the meaning of the symbol. This could be asking the body to speak. What would your intestinal tract say if it could speak? Often the patient can allow the unconscious to speak in such a setting and the patient’s hearing himself speak produces a change in attitude naturally. Granted the facilitator might have to help the process in this case, but the emphasis is not on healing, but rather on allowing the body to speak.

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The Search for the Grail

The Cup of Life,  the symbol of the Grail, as a container of the feminine/maternal energies has great power.  The search for the Grail was taking place during the troubadour songs and stories following the Crusades in Europe and the Middle East.  It was a time of polarization and awareness of differences, especially the Christian and Islamic worlds.  The feminine was emerging as the teacher of the stories of life, teaching warriors how to love and become gentle men.  An era of courtly love was changing the consciousness of the nobility throughout Europe.
Several years ago my family watched a PBS special where Joseph Campbell retold and discussed the Parzival legend as recorded in the twelfth century during the troubadour period following the Crusades.  The story is an heroic quest set in  the period of King Arthur’s Round Table.  Parzival, the innocent, adolescent wild child of the forest, kills the Red Knight, learns not to ask questions during his training to become a Knight, and meets the Fisher King.  The fisherman is the Grail King, who injured himself when he confused lust with love, and was wounded in the groin by a rival Knight.  Because he can no longer walk, the Grail King spends his time fishing and that is what he is doing when Parzival rides up.  When the young Knight asks if there is a place to cross the water, he is told that there is a castle up the road where he could get food and a bath.  When Parzival arrives at the castle and joins the knights and ladies in the Great Hall, he discovers his host, the Lord of the Castle, is none other than the fisherman.  Because of his training the young Knight doesn’t ask the question which would break the enchantment.  In the morning everyone has vanished and Parzival barely escapes before the Castle itself disappears.  The Castle is none other than the Grail Castle and the Fisher King is the guardian of the Grail.  When Parzival’s sword breaks later in the adventure, he discovers his opponent, a Moslem knight has compassion.  He refuses to kill an unarmed man, thus sparing Parzival’s [Christian] life.  When they talk, they discover they have the same father and together are given an opportunity to enter the mysterious Grail Castle.

This story of treating women (and men) with respect and consideration has been retold in several forms.  Athena Bizakis Melville, wrote a script for young actors and directed several performances of her version of the story based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s tale.  This tale has been an important foreshadowing of our family’s journey.  Like Parzival, I left my wife and family, symbolically searching for my mother, who unbeknownst to the hero,  died when the hero followed the knights to Arthur’s Court at the beginning of the story.

My psychotherapist Carol Kohli helped me remember things which were too painful to remember during childhood, things I stored “off line” out of the way, so that they need not be felt consciously.  She introduced me to many hidden parts of my psyche as they emerged over the six years we spent in relationship.  She was the “good enough” mother who helped me continue the quest for the Grail.
Over the past ten years I have discovered the multi-dimensioned symbol of the Grail.  It is associated with good food and friends.  French origins suggest a large platter in which delicious food was served.  German writer von Eschenbach described a stone, the philosopher’s stone of ancient alchemists, being carried.  Others describe it as a basin, or a chalice bearing the blood of Christ, and hence a symbol of death, rebirth and transformation.  It is in any case a profound symbol of the Middle Ages.  In The Grail Legend (1986 2nd ed.) by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, the Grail is a feminine container which suggests a hidden treasure of psychic importance.  The authors discuss the feminine and the Self as follows:

“Incestuous images or situations, which appear to confirm Freud’s view, do in fact sometimes appear in dreams.  But Jung has explained in Symbols of Transformation that the “longing for the mother” can also be understood in another way.  He sees it not only as an infantile neurotic-regressive craving but points to the abundance of symbolic material which indicates a concealed urge to rebirth and transformation of the personality.

This leads us to a consideration of the transpersonal significance of the mother.  From this angle she is not so much a particular person as she is the absolutely universal giver and preserver of life, and as such she may be compared to the unconscious which is the source and origin of all psychic life.
Like the personal, the transpersonal mother-image also has a negative aspect which expresses a desire to hold the child back.  In myths and fairy-tales this is often depicted as the killing or devouring of the child.  Jung therefore speaks of the “terrible or devouring mother”.  In mythology this figure is portrayed as a gruesome and destructive goddess, the Indian Kali for instance, and in fairy-tales as the cruel stepmother or the witch, expressing the death-aspect of mother nature who kills her offspring from time to time and takes them back into herself.  The unconscious exerts a corresponding influence in that it sets up a definite opposition to the development of consciousness or else it threatens to dim or even to extinguish the painfully achieved consciousness.
Actually, the archetypal images are already present in the psyche as structural forms of the instinct before any individual consciousness arises.  For this reason the child’s world consists more of archetypal forms and images than of ordinary people and objects.  The child lives in a fairy-tale world.  This is understandable when one reflects that the archetype is defined as an inborn pattern or form of perception and behaviour.  It may therefore be assumed that there are entelechies existent in the psyche which serve as models for the correct understanding of, and behaviour in, the outer world.  Any kind of situation can animate such a typos, that is to say, it will be immediately and automatically understood or related to accordingly.  It associates and assimilates the a priori pattern with a present situation, whereby the innate inner image appears outside in the given object.  The next step in the process of becoming conscious consists in learning to differentiate between the outer, so-called “real” world, with its real people and solid objects, and the primordial world of the archetypes into which man is born, so to speak.  The archetypal world exercises an uncanny fascination, indeed it has a numinous effect.  It is a world full of wonders; it not only shelters terrible mothers and other monstrosities but is also, like the Celtic “Land of the Living” or Paradise, an abode of bliss.  The necessity for giving up this world of wonder often excites the most violent resistance, for that which will be received in exchange is mostly far less attractive.  The magic of this world is one of the reasons why the state of childhood is greatly loved and worth striving for and why the step into “life” and reality is so difficult.  For the same reason so many myths tell of the origin of human existence in Paradise, or of a golden age that was lost and replaced by a far less perfect world.
The yearning for the mother can therefore also be understood, in non-mythological language, as the attraction exerted by the unconscious, a constant occurrence that is comparable to the effect of the law of gravity.  The development and preservation of ego consciousness is, for that very reason, often represented by the hero myth, for it is an achievement that can be compared to a fight with an overwhelming monster and which calls for almost superhuman strength.
Consciousness is an accomplishment which requires energy.  It can only maintain itself for limited periods, after which a state of unconsciousness—sleep—is again necessary in order to renew the used-up energy.” (The Grail Legend, pp. 41-43)

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The Self

My friend, the Celtic Raven, reported the dark lords of the Internet are using a linguistic trolling program to see what people are frightened by and excited about.  Interestingly the only positive interest is in The Self.  Evidently there is a growing tendency toward awakening.   If  The Matrix is interested in human consciousness and the Self or the God Image, then they should get the information direct from our grandmothers and aunties. Here’s what these elders had to say many years ago in the 1950s.
The Grail Legend (1986 2nd ed.) by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz. Boston: Sigo Press.

“Psychologically the term “Self” denotes the psychic totality of the human being which transcends consciousness and underlies the process of individuation and which gradually becomes conscious in the course of this process. The psychic totality which comprises the conscious and unconscious parts of the personality is naturally present, as an entelechy of the individual, from the very beginning. In the course of the process of maturation, however, the various aspects of totality enter the field of consciousness, thus leading to a widening of the continually changing horizon of awareness. Beyond this there is often a numinous experience of this inner psychic wholeness. This experience is usually accompanied by a profound emotion which the ego senses as an epiphany of the divine. For this reason it is practically impossible to differentiate between an experience of God and an experience of the Self. The manifestations of the Self, arising from the unconscious, coincide with the god-image of most religions and, when not personified, are distinguished by circular and square forms and very often (statistically considered) by quaternary formations. Jung, making use of an Eastern term, has called these structures mandalas.” (pp.98-99)

Referring to the Self we read, “In the dreams and fantasy pictures of modern man this hidden, invisible something is occasionally depicted as a meaningful and numinous void. There is one picture in which an egg-shaped void, from which rays stream forth, forms the center of a world or of a mandala with an empty center. . . .A nothingness, a void, is therefore the inescapable condition for the emergence of the Self. The Self is not already present from the beginning in a comprehensible form, but manifests itself only through the outer and inner realizations of a life lived to its end. For this reason Jung has likened it to the crystal lattice present as a potential form in a solution but which first becomes visible in the process of crystallization, although crystallization does not necessarily take place. The Self is therefore not complete, but is present in us as a potentiality which can become manifest only in the course of a specific process. Certainly, the Self is not invariably realized through the unfolding of the natural biological life processes. There appear to be many lives where this does not come to pass.
Then how and by what means can the Self become manifest? It is realized to that extent in which it is lived in the experience of daily life. It is not achieved, however, when it appears in symbolic form in dreams and inner images, nor is it when consciousness acquires a specific degree of clarity, nor yet when a psychological function has attained a high degree of differentiation. Important as consciousness undoubtedly is—and rightly utilized consciousness is an invaluable means of help for the realization of the Self—it is not by itself the determining factor. For it does not depend so very greatly on knowledge and ability or upon some degree of intelligence, but rather upon the use which is made of these attributes and above all, on the psychic attitude a person adopts in the face of the various circumstances of his life and fate. As the threads of fabric are woven into a pattern, so the Self as the living garment of divinity is woven out of the many decisions and crises, in themselves possibly insignificant, by which we are affected in the course of our lives. Such occasions present themselves at every level of life and intelligence and in every milieu. Whether or not they lead to a manifestation of the Self depends solely on our own response. Many of us have observed that children, even small children, when faced with some difficulty, possess an attitude which many adults could only envy. That “something,” the lack of which we experience as soullessness, is a “someone” who takes a position, who is accountable and who feels committed. Where this higher, responsible ego is lacking there can be no Self. Ethos and the Self are therefore mutually interdependent.
From the foregoing we can see that a fascination can emanate from something empty. It longs for completion like an invisible form which calls out for substance; the individual is conscious of the existence of this summons and of the growth of this attraction, but without knowing what it is that calls to him. The influence emanating from the hidden Grail could be likened to such a summons.”
(pp.133-134)

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