I had a supervisee who was berating himself for being lost with his client. He described it as the shame of being adrift on a village pond in a row boat.. I had to point out to him that it was not his navigational skills, but his under-estimation of the body of water concerned that was the problem.
He was at sea.
As are we all when negotiating the vastness of the Unconscious.
An old tale tells the story of a sea monster that had been terrorizing the people. So the king thought he’d buy the monster off with a mighty offering. He summoned the people and charged them to bring every scrap of food they had to the main pier of their great maritime capital where it was all piled up for the monster to collect. He appeared, ate it all in one bite and asked what more there was for him and all his deep sea mates.
The dragon hunting hero in us all doesn’t like such stories. I recall the leg kicking howl of frustration and rage from my 12 year old son who was playing a video game and had spent three days descending into the bowels of the Earth in search of some magic scroll. He had arrived, finally, at the bottom where there was a cupboard within which he was sure to find it. But it was not a cupboard at all. It was a whole new world that he still had to find his way across.
The world should not be so big but it is. And so is the Unconscious, the deeper levels of which are made up of the Great Mother Herself.
When She was cut out of our Pantheon, we did more than circumscribe Olympus. We also severed our connection to the Unconscious, the lived experience of our own depth.
Just gimme the frikkin scroll.
There is a tendency amongst psychologists, even the ones that are seemingly ok with the Collective Unconscious, to talk about the loss of the Goddess at the hands of Yahweh….
with him cult of bling
..as though it was a necessary price to pay for the growth of consciousness.
…as though dividing up the sacred feminine into virgins-to-be-saved and monsters-to-be-killed were a sensible thing to do.
….as though having a culture rooted in millenial warfare with the dark brother was…. sophisticated.
…as though the collective delusion that having a say in the ‘below-stairs’ staffing of government were equivalent to freedom….
The terrible dragon mother has to be defeated for ego consciousness to evolve!!
No, it doesn’t. Ego strength in a child develops when they are nourished enough. The regressive urge to stay fused with mother..
which might require surgical intervention of the pointy variety…
is only necessary if attachment has been precarious to begin with. The ties that bind are tendrils of unmet need. We do not struggle to leave the table unless we have not had our fill.
So this dragon is not just pissed of at the arrangment whereby it can be deposed by a pretender dressed up in a tin can, masquerading as ego consciousness, and being allowed to get away with whatever it likes by Yahweh so long as it remembers which side its bread is buttered on, but is also the suppression of the unmet child protesting its emptiness.
Hindu tradition says the Gods show us the face we turn to them. Whether Kali is devouring or giving birth depends on your relationship with her. If we collude with Yahweh and attack the sacred feminine, then Dragon is what you will get.
Its the kind of family constellation where the child’s love for mother is experienced as a personal attack on him by father. Father is paranoid and creates split realities in the children who then have to partition up their inner worlds and renounce all knowledge of what they have had to do in order to contain the contradiction of limits being placed on love in the name of…love.
And so, I can no longer talk to me.
A great symbol of liberation!
Marvellous PR, but please note the thin golden thread on which the ‘maiden in distress’ holds the dragon, as if on a leash… So now what does it all mean…? And how grateful will she be once the hero puts his penis/lance away?
And they all lived happily ever after?
I don’t think so.
