carl jung – Andy White Blog

Lucky Hans.

Having served his master faithfully for seven years, Hans decided to return home and see his Mother. His master gave him his wages, a large boulder of gold. Hans struggled along with the boulder for some time until it began to cut into his shoulders. He met a rider and traded the boulder for the horse, which was much better because he was not only free of the burden but speeding along!

Only, the horse did buck him off a few times and was a bit unpredictable so he traded the horse for a cow which was a great improvement in his fortunes because there was no danger of being thrown to the ground.

The cow moved reassuringly slowly and so for some time Hans wandered home in bliss, until he went to milk the cow for a refreshing drink and got kicked in the head for his trouble. A pig herder helped him to his feet, like a godsend, and traded his unruly cow for a placid pig.

All seemed well until a goose boy warned him that just such a pig had recently been stolen and that Hans might well be mistaken for the thief.. Luckily the goose boy did him a favour and took the elicit pig off his hands in exchange for a plump goose and so now he was in the clear. Phew.

‘When I think over it properly,” said he to himself, “I have even gained by the exchange. First there is the good roast meat, then the quantity of fat which will drip from it, and which will give me dripping for my bread for a quarter of a year, and lastly the beautiful white feathers. I will have my pillow stuffed with them, and then indeed I shall go to sleep without rocking. How glad my mother will be.”

As he passed through the last village on the way home to Mother he met a Grinder sharpening knives on a grind stone whistling a merry tune and with the sound of coins jingling in his pocket. Hans told him his story of how he had gained with every exchange on his way. The Grinder was suitably impressed.

‘If only you had the sound of jingling coins in you pocket to top your successes.’

‘How will I do that?’

‘Become a Grinder, like me,’ said the Grinder reluctantly swapping his stone for the goose. Hans went off just as chuffed as can be. Soon there would be jingling coins! Though, just as he got to the edge of his village with Mother’s cottage in sight, he felt so thirsty after his long and successful day that he stopped by the well for a drink… and the grinding stone somehow fell in.

When Hans saw the stone sinking to the bottom, he jumped for joy and with tears in his eyes thanked God for having delivered him from that heavy stone which was the only thing that troubled him.

“There is no man under the sun so fortunate as I,” he cried out.

With a light heart and free from every burden he now ran on until he was with his Mother at home.

A man once went to see Carl Jung in despair having lost his job and divorced by his wife. Jung excused himself, left the room briefly, returning with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. ‘What are you doing?’ exclaimed the man. ‘Celebrating this opportunity to re-invent yourself,’ answered Jung.

How we think about success and failure is a big deal because ultimately it’s about how you get to feel about yourself. If you are not allowed to fail, then, since you must fail, you become a failure instead. Failing then becomes an on-going part of your self-structure rather than something which once helped you grow. Instead of screwing up you get to be a screw up. It becomes part of identity because you ought to have been able to avoid it but did not and so now you are guilty too. Moreover, since to try is to fail, it is with the greatest difficulty that any initiative is then possible to remedy the situation, since that too would involve trial and error, clumsiness and experimentation.

The prejudice against failing, that it is an index of weakness or inferiority, stop a body from trying, from being curious, from wanting to see what happens and so ultimately from living and engaging with the world. How differently you might feel about yourself if you found a way of failing nobly, experiencing it as part and parcel of self discovery, as a means to an end.

What constitutes success and failure rather depends on who is running your ship. It is often the case that the person who allows themselves to fail, who risks falling down or being ridiculed, who can bear the brunt of collective opinion with equanimity somehow proves to be the one who has the perseverance to finally flower in their own unique, flawsome way. Edison burnt out fifty light bulbs before he managed to make the non-exploding kind. He succeeded by repeatedly and happily failing. Every creative endeavour has phases of not knowing what the hell is going on and having to start over.

The idea that success and failure depend, like a quantum experiment, on how you look at them seems to be underpinned by Hans counter-intuitive and yet somehow zen like responses to his various situations. Besides this parable of how to live, there also seems to be one about how to die. Our story begins with Hans having served his time in the world. Returning to Mother as his source is a metaphor of the second half of life and preparation for death.

The goals of the first and second halves are very different, even opposite. The building of a strong functional and separate ego is supplanted by a process akin to downsizing, less attachment, less craving, less driven. Each creature Hans momentarily possess seems to stand for some kind of role in life. The horse presupposes a courageous rider, the cow a homesteader, the pig a man of the land. Moreover, each animal and its implied role become increasingly primal throughout the story, from the utterly domestic horse to the wild and unruly goose and eventually to the in-organic grinding stone, perhaps what the Hindu tradition might call the diamond body, Self pared away from all its manifestations. It seems as though Hans successive ‘bargains’ constitute a process of disidentification, the experience of having a personality rather than being a personality, such that he may meet ‘Mother’ without encumbrance, regret, or shame.

‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to gain the kingdom of Heaven’. Mat 19:24

The idea that Hans, despite apparent foolishness, is consciously living his being-towards-death is amplified in the song ‘Wayfaring Stranger’, who is also off home to see his Mum, in which the reference to death, crossing the Jordan, is quite explicit..

I’m going there to see my Mother,
I’m going there,
No more to roam,
I’m only go,
Going over Jordan,
I’m only go,
Going over home.

The loss of the grinding stone in the dark depths of the well seem to prefigure death and the transformation death brings which then so gladdens and animates our hero.

“These dark waters of death are however also waters of life, while death itself and its glacial embracing is just a maternal womb – similarly as the sea, which although it incepts the sun but still later on makes it be born again.” (Jung 1998, p. 282).

Whether in the face of literal death or metaphorically, in terms of the end of an old way of being, transformation involves being parted from our treasures, the sacrificial loss of all the old self’s manifold iterations. To cross the threshold one must do so alone and empty handed.

Paradoxically, this is so basic to human experience that it also constitutes a sense of empathic belonging. ‘We are all alone, together,’ as the Zen tradition reminds us. Many tribal people who still have the values of the Great Mother measure their wealth by how much they give away. An indigenous man will often blow his entire fortune on a wedding celebration and be really happy about it because, by doing so, he has woven himself into the fabric of the community with the thread of reciprocal obligation. He will not go hungry or unprotected. Somehow, we complete ourselves best and secure ourselves safest, by giving ourselves away.

The Jealous King.

There was once a king who would not allow his daughter to marry. He kept her shut up in his castle and turned all her suitors away. One fine day she asked him pretty please and since it was indeed such a fine day, if she could not walk briefly in the meadow below the castle walls? Eventually the King agreed but warned her not to go too far… lest some harm come to her.

The Princess walks out into the meadow and there she finds a young man who is sooo handsome she immediately falls in love. He is, of course, a Prince from a neighboring kingdom. Each return to their respective fathers saying they want to get married. The Jealous King flies into a rage, closes the castle gates and challenges the young Prince to lay siege to his walls if he wishes.. which is just what he does. After a while the Prince realizes the castle is empty, everyone has escaped through underground passages. Only the King and Princess remain. The King implores his daughter’s obedience but she refuses and in a fury he casts a terrible spell upon her which turns her into three animals; a rabbit, a lion and a dragon.

The Prince searches high and low for the Princess but to no avail. Nothing but pesky and somewhat dangerous creatures. In despair he sends his troops home, continuing to search alone. In a nearby wood he comes across an Ancient Crone who tells him the secret of the King’s curse. He must return to the castle and find the animals, kissing each one three times.

At their wedding feast the Old King is included on the guest list, though further down the table than he might have liked.

This subversion of the Princess by the Jealous King can be looked at a number of different ways. One way to view this story is at face value, as an allegory for current events, a good example being the recent claim of harassment, false imprisonment and illegal gagging orders made against American virologist Dr Mikovits at the bequest of King Fauci who had other ideas about what should become of her HIV research, all of which then escalated into spell casting tsunamis of propaganda against her, millions spent on silencing something…

which could not possibly be.

Er, I thought Fauci was the good guy?

It depends on who your standing next to on the podium, can we continue?

of course..

Another way of looking at this story is to imagine that all the characters and interactions are parts of oneself. Fairy tales and myths are public dreams which, like dreams, can be seen as both describing outer events in an allegorical way but also as an emerging outcrop of consciousness from within. The problem with approaching either dream or fairy story from this subjective point of view, where all the characters and events are given the slant of an entirely inner pageant, is that you are then denied the luxury of projection upon which so much interaction and internal cohesion depend. The symbols involved can no longer be regarded as some quaint matter simply for other folk’s consideration. They not only have to do with us but act upon us.

‘The individual is then faced with the task of putting down to his own account all the iniquity, devilry, etc. which he has blandly attributed to others and about which he has been indignant all his life.” CG Jung

Given the understandable resistances involved, what might it mean that the inner king has imprisoned fair maid and cast this divisive spell? Could the metaphors involved refer to some crucial psychological dynamic within the individuation process? If so, what might that be?

The problem with growth and change is that it shakes previously sturdy self-constructs and leaves behind the familiarity of old ways of being. You have to suck at something new, trade in your old strategies and values for others as yet untested. This is why initiatory thresholds and transformations of any kind are generally difficult and unpleasant, necessitating much merrymaking to compensate the dread. They often require ritual, observance and loads of relatives to contain the transition which involves a process dubbed ‘de-integration’ by analyst Michael Fordham; you get pulled apart but not to pieces.

Not everything in the psyche is going to be happy about this. The instinct for self preservation wants to prop up the old structure, even if it does not serve the impulse to growth with which it is then bound to clash. This is why support for Trump increased at the beginning of the Corona virus outbreak in America despite his utterly incompetent handling of the situation. The Devil you know is safer than the angel you do not.

..’and so I keep down my heart and swallow the call-note of depth dark sobbing.’ R.M Rilke

The Jealous King is the ‘old outmoded dispensation’ in the psyche, the dominant function for a particular stage of life which has served its part and become redundant as a way forward, the alchemical calcinatio where the soul feels dried out and dusty, where no more marrow can be sucked from your situation.

Such circumstances provoke crisis. The wheel of life has turned but not found new expression, the tools and strategies of yesteryear no longer adequate for today’s challenges. And yet despite this we all tend to drag our feet and hang on to old structures, sabotaging potential and silencing emerging consciousness.

‘Instinctive forces does not reason. They assume from the immense experience of Nature’s ways that it will serve best to be stabilized according to initial experience, most commonly [among] those whose strong need for a maternal figure has followed them into middle age.’ J Liedloff

Fortunately, love and life find a way. The new shoot eventually manages to squeeze past the psyche’s defenses, often by virtue of a chance encounter or some seemingly insignificant event which then catalyses change, though not without bitter conflict and feeling besieged by the very flood of energy you have been hoping for.

Finally, the threatened dominant function, walled in but without the usual resources at its disposal, resorts to dissociative tactics, a spell which divides and incapacitates. For a while the new form of life seems desperately imperiled or at least at sixes and sevens.

‘The integration of contents that were unconscious and projected involves a serious lesion of the ego… a decomposition of the elements indicating dissociation and collapse of existing ego structures,.. closely analogous to schizophrenia.’ C G Jung.

Not much fun. Our story seems to be suggesting that the process of becoming more conscious involves considerable inner conflict and suffering which can decommission ‘normal’ functioning.

‘The energies and attention of the individual are often so engrossed that the power of coping with normal life may be impaired.’ R. Assagioli.

There is a real risk that emerging consciousness cannot be integrated. Fortunately, the Ancient Crone makes an appearance just at the moment of despair and tells the Prince what to do. She is Old Mother Earth, the Principle of Co-operation and Relatedness, a power deeper and more potent than that of the King. She understands not only the malady but also the cure, the fragmented potential has to be loved back to wholeness, the scary lion and the terrifying dragon along with the sweet bunny. If the Princess can be loved in her totality, warts and all, there will be transformation. The Jealous King doesn’t have to be killed, just deposed. He can even go to the wedding feast so long as he accepts a lesser place at the table.

The Pig’s Bride.

Once upon a time there was a king with three lovely daughters. One day he decided to go to market and asked what they would like him to bring them. The eldest wanted a golden dress. The middle one wanted a silver dress. The youngest, who was a bit difficult, wanted a bunch of talking grapes, a smiling apple and a jingling, tingling peach.

The king confidently set off and easily found the dresses of gold and silver but nowhere could he find the magical fruits and had to return without them. On the way back the road became so churned up with mud that his royal coach got stuck fast. He called for help and all the people turned out to lend a hand but it was to no avail. The coach would not budge.

Then a grunting pig showed up and to the king’s surprise offered to help him in exchange for the hand of the youngest Princess. Well, the king was in a bit of a pickle, after all it was already past tea time, so he agreed. When he got back he had to explain to the Princess that not only had he failed to find what she wanted but he had inadvertently and quite by mistake promised her to the pig…

who would be arriving shortly to carry her off.

The Princess was not best pleased. In fact she cried and cried. Then the king had a marvelous idea. They could dress up some other poor shmuck for the pig to have instead and a palace maid was duly sacrificed. But when the pig showed up with his wheel barrow he was having none of it regardless of the costume and jewels.

‘Oink! Send out the real Princess!’

Then the king had another marvelous idea and dressed the Princess up in rags before sending her out thinking this would put the pig off but he was ecstatic, popped her in the wheelbarrow and took her off to his sty. By now the Princess is beside herself with grief but the pig is kind and offers her his soft bed of filthy straw. She lays down, still crying. The pig comforts her with his warty trotter. She bursts into tears again. So he offers her some of his swill, with extra added corn…

which she accepts, taking the tiniest bite.

Eventually the Princess cries herself to sleep. It’s a deep, deep sleep. When she wakes up the world has changed. She is in a feather bed being attended by maids who help her dress in fine clothes. They then lead her out into the banqueting hall of the castle where she’s met by a fine young Prince. He shows her the gardens in which she finds the magical fruits growing.

‘All this is yours and I am too, if you will have me.’ He goes on to explain that he is the pig who had been bewitched, a spell only to be broken by someone, someone difficult, who wanted a talking vine and a smiling apple and a jingling, tingling peach.

This quaint Hungarian folk tale has parallels in Italy, Straparola’s ‘The Pig King’, and in Germany, Grimm’s ‘Hurleburlebutz’, which suggests common and therefore ancient roots. There is something about a Princess betrayed, an animal husband and magical trees which strikes some deep allegorical chord in us. What could it be?

At the time these stories were beginning to impress themselves on the popular imagination some six thousand years ago, the development of ego consciousness was burgeoning. The problem with teasing the individual from the collective is that s/he then has to contend with it. In deed, you can only really hope to keep yourself afloat in this new situation by the most strenuous effort.

Ego consciousness which feels it is sufficient to itself is symbolized by the old king. He believes he can find meaning in the local market place. His attitude is, ‘the psyche is what I know of it.’ The treasure hard to attain must exist within the auspices of his own personal kingdom. This leads to the stuckness of existential crisis where no amount of effort can get you out of the muddy rut you are in. One of the features of ego consciousness, despite all the bells and whistles, is that it cannot provide its own meaning. For that it has to broker a relationship with the non-rational, primordial soup from which it has emerged.

Its popular these days to think of the Unconscious as a rubbish heap you have to rake through in therapy, as though all there was to contend with in life was the stuff of childhood. But what about the figures further back than that? What about the mytho/poetic layers of the psyche beyond the continental shelf, which were there way before ego consciousness had the great idea of going its own rutted way?

‘One is inclined to think that ego consciousness is capable of assimilating the unconscious. Unfortunately the unconscious really is unconscious; in other words, it is unknown. And how can you assimilate something unknown?’ Jung CW9 p520

The appearance of the pig leaves the king in a terrible dilemma. He does not know what to do with these fascinating and possessive archetypal energies. He agrees to it’s proposal without thinking things through and in so doing omnipotently draws the pig into serving the ego’s partisan needs, getting home in time for tea.

Sometimes the primal energies of the psyche get projected onto powerful others who then positively glow with manna and into whose arms we then throw all of life’s responsibilities. Equally disastrous is it to try and employ the psyche to one’s own personal ends. It inflates the ego such that everyone else simply becomes the means to an end.

‘He gets involved in a ridiculous self deification. The mistake he makes comes from attributing to himself the contents of the collective unconscious. In this way he makes himself either god or devil. Here we see the characteristic effect of the archetype: it seizes hold of [the king] with a kind of primeval force and compels [him] to transgress the bounds of humanity.’ Jung CW7 p110

When the king strikes his bargain he renders himself inert as a container for numinous experience. His easy way out ends his relevance to the story. He is left alternately justifying his grandiosity and gnashing his teeth with regret. It is now up to the Princess to see what she can do with the pig.

The Princess has been betrayed and sold out like chattel. She is the rejected black sheep in the family, cast out for having her eyes on something other than worldly values. Her grief at her father’s bad faith, her loss of belonging, the horror of being cast down, all would lead her to believe that she has fallen into the grip of evil. Hers is a dark night of the soul.

The theme of being abducted by an animal husband has a class of its own in the ATU classification of fairy tales, (ATU 402), identified by folklorist Sara Graça da Silva as being among the earliest of proto IndoEuropean stories. It seems such stories convey an ancient truth, that to identify with emerging reason is a disaster, for with it comes either inflation or projection. To survive being caught between these opposites one must forge a narrow path full of suffering in wedlock to the irrational.

The Princess manages to do this by refusing passive acquiesce to what is happening whilst refraining from blame or trying to claw her way back to the throne.

‘The only person who escapes the grim law of [inflation/projection] is the [one] who knows how to separate themselves from the unconscious, not by repressing it—for then it simply attacks from the rear—but by putting it clearly before you as that which you are not. The patient must learn to differentiate what is ego and what is non-ego, i.e., collective psyche.’Jung CW7 p113

Most crucially the Princess accepts the swill (with added corn) offered by the pig. She allows herself to be fed by the Unconscious. The swill is generally a poorly regarded thing, like the conviction that your dreams are nothing but the brain winding down at the end of the day, the dung heap upon which the philosopher’s stone may or may not be found, meaningless daydreams. Yet the mean swill is also a communion, a sacred experience of between which then breaks the spell of separation and ultimately yields the magical fruit of selfhood.

The Princess finds a way to accommodate the pig without being caught in the trap of either rejecting or identifying with it. In so doing her circumstances are transformed, her inner world blooms and she is restored to wholeness.

The Shoemaker and the Devil.

based on a story by Anton Chekov.

Once there was a poor shoemaker who was so hard up he had to work on Christmas Eve finishing a pair of boots for a wealthy patron. He cussed and complained under his breath as he labored, taking frequent swigs from a bottle hid under the work bench. ‘Why must I slave like this whilst others are tucked up in their beds?’ he muttered. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the rich folk were destroyed! Then I could be rich and lord it over some other mean cobbler..’.

Dreaming like this he suddenly remembered his work. He grabbed the now finished boots and headed out of his shabby hovel into the freezing streets. Rich sleighs slide by, their handsome drivers all holding a ham in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other. Well dressed ladies snicker at him. An old acquaintance, now made good, mocks his ragged clothes.

Eventually he finds his patron’s large house and knocks sullenly at the door. Inside the place smells of sulfur. The patron is pounding something unspeakable in a mortar. ‘I have come to deliver your boots, my lord… Let me help you off with the old ones..’ and in so doing, he discovers not a foot but a hoof…

‘Oh, so that’s who he is… I should run, but hey, I can make this work for me…’ and so he begins to praise the Devil for being such a fine fellow. ‘Why thank you, and what can I do for you? asks the Devil. The Shoemaker begins a litany of woes.. ‘Yes, yes,.. but what do you want?’

‘I want to be rich, your honor Satan Ivanitch!’ pleads the Shoemaker and in a trice he found himself seated at a huge table groaning with fine food and expensive vodka, all served by deferential footmen in smart uniforms. During the feast he summons the old acquaintance he had met in the street and abuses him with mockery and blows. After dinner the Devil appears to make sure he has had all his needs satisfied but the Shoemaker is too uncomfortably bloated to answer or acknowledge the buxom wife the Devil has brought with him. That night he cannot sleep or embrace his wife for the thought of thieves breaking in.

On Christmas morning the Shoemaker went to church. As he sat praying the same prayer he used to pray when he was poor, he realized that there was little to distinguish the bowed heads around about. The same sins plagued them all; death awaited him as before, the same black earth would cover him, the same hell fires would burn and so he ran out for fresh air clawing at his collar, too distracted to pray for worrying about his money..

and his ruined soul…

He thought he would cheer himself up with a song but a watchman silenced him saying it was not done for a rich man to sing in the street. He bought a concertina to play instead but met with the same rebuke. On the way home beggars call out for bread and alms.. ‘Away, you filthy scum.!’ When he gets home the Shoemaker tries to cuddle up to his wife but she rebuffs him…. and as he begins to realize he is actually more miserable than before the Devil arrives and drags him kicking and screaming to Hell.

Just as he was about to be tumbled into the Infernal Pit, the Shoemaker woke up at his bench with such a start he sent everything flying. There was a pounding at the door. It was the patron, come to collect his boots. As he sewed the last stitches the shoemaker asked, ‘If I may, your honor, what is your occupation?’ ‘ Well, if you must know, I am a pyrotechnician,’ replied the sulfurous one, who then paid the cobbler and left in a puff of burnt chicken feathers and pink smoke.

Our hero stumbles out into the street, wondering at the clean white snow, the crisp air, the beautiful people, the wonderful sights and smells around him. Everyone, he realized, was the same. Some rode in carriages and some played concertinas but the same choice to live right in life, the same grave in death, awaited them all. They were all in it together.

The Shoemaker’s presenting problem was not his poverty but his dividedness. He had an unacknowledged part of himself which despised him irrespective of his station in life, which then lent itself to misery in a way that rags alone cannot induce or convey. The Others he encounters in his dream notice and respond to this, embodying the contempt he secretly feels for himself.

His poverty was one of spirit, brought on by the hateful split between his envious loathing of the have’s and his scornful disparagement for the have not’s. No-one could get it right for him, nor could he accept himself, irrespective of his station in life, for as long as this internal schism existed, for as long as he abdicated his own authorship in favor of the shifting sands of collective opinion.

Without a sense of Self, without his own life to live and his own death to die, the Shoemaker is like chaff in the wind, eternally disgruntled, forever dissatisfied and at the mercy of others. His dream is a compensatory response from the unconscious doing its best to draw his attention to the vain hypocrisy of his neurotic conflict, perhaps hoping that some humility might come from going more deeply into it.

‘Whether the patient is rich or poor, has family and social position or not, alters nothing, for outer circumstances are far from giving his life a meaning. It is much more a question of his quite irrational need for what we call a spiritual life. The patient’s unconscious comes to the aid of this vital need by producing dreams whose content is essentially religious.’ C. G. Jung. CW8 p686

In previous posts about Grimm’s stories of encounters with the Devil, I showed that the shadow can serve as an initiatory figure into greater consciousness depending upon the protagonist’s attitude. Chekov’s story seems to support this idea. Where, you might wonder, has the Shoemaker’s diabolical dream come from? Though it has been encrusted with two millenia of moral overtones, the origin of the word ‘diabolical’ comes from the Greek, Dia, meaning ‘through’ and Ballos, meaning ‘with the aid of..’ The diabolical dream is unwanted and resisted yet it may well be what you need to get through personal entrenchment with the aid of a salutary kick in the pants.

The Devil gives the Shoemaker what he asked for knowing pretty well that it will thrust him up against his own divisiveness faster than any wagging ecclesiastical finger. He also gives him the chance to recant, to have a change of heart and learn from his error by way of what amounts to a dry run.

The Devil is sometimes known as the ‘Adversary’. He is the source of adversity, which can become necessary to jolt a person out of the rut worn for themselves once conventional attempts at educating the personality have failed.

You could say that evil is simply all the shit in life you’d rather didn’t happen, that which confronts or negates conscious intention. Yet it is subtly more than that. Satan is also the Accuser, the merciless and infernal/ underground light thrown on the ego’s double standards in claiming to want growth and change whilst clinging to inauthentic or childlike constructs about how life has to be..

The shoemaker’s wishes are all self centered, childlike, orally fixated, a 19th century version of wanting to win the lottery. Be careful what you ask for, goes the saying… you might just get it.

Fortunately, the Devil is not just out to get the Shoemaker. He lets him learn from the dream. It is not the shadow’s intent to snuff consciousness out. It gets active when consciousness is too narrow or divided against itself. The Devil is quite happy to bow out when the Shoemaker learns his lesson just as Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s ‘Faust’, agrees to a back seat once the sinful hero heals the divide with those he has betrayed despite the small print in his contract.

By means of the Shadow’s cruel intervention, the Shoemaker experiences a moment of enlightenment, different from and transcendent to both the inferior and superior parts of himself. He had latterly just alternated between them, unconsciously swinging between the opposites without realizing what was happening. So he really does get a fresh perspective on life, even if his re-birth means having to be dragged to the edge of the abyss.

The Pig King.

Once upon a time there was a King who looked just like a pig. His skin was rough and thick like a pig. He smelled like a pig, he grunted like a pig and he ate like a pig.

When the time came for the Pig King to marry it wasn’t easy to find suitable brides. Eventually a mother of three girls came forward and suggested a match with her eldest. The king was ecstatic and when his bride arrived he leapt up and down and nuzzled her and got some really good swill on her expensive dress. She was so offended she shoved him off and that night the Pig King overheard her plotting to get rid of him..

‘What am to do with this foul beast? This very night, when he lies in his first sleep, I will kill him’…

and so the Pig King did her in with his sharp trotters.

The second daughter fares the same. The third daughter is different. When the king approaches her and makes her clothes all dirty she responds with affection and humor. In fact she spreads her robe on the ground inviting the Pig King to lie on it. She doesn’t care about the mud and so she is still alive by morning.

The new Queen continues to tolerate the Pig King’s behavior, even inquiring into his majesty’s health and wanting to have conversation. One night, once the Pig King trusts her, he tells her that he has a secret. When she asks him what it is, the pigskin suddenly falls to the floor and a handsome man steps out…

The transformative power of sympathy is something you find over and again in fairy tales. Sympathy is from the Greek, meaning literally ‘feeling-with’, succinctly put by the Buddhist expression, ‘we are all alone, together,’ a paradox of me and not-me which evokes new possibilities and unforseen transitions.

Sympathy is different from empathy. Empathy is a willingness to see the world from someone else’s point of view without taking on their feelings. Sympathy throws itself in, participating in the experience like the alchemist who knows he is part of his own experiment. This shared reality of allowing oneself to be affected by another is a prerequisite of transformation. The Queen has to value the Pig King for what he is and when she does so he recovers his humanity.

In ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the Beast is transformed when Beauty mourns the prospect of his death. In ‘The Frog Prince’, the frog wants a kiss from the Princess in exchange for returning her golden ball. At first she is reluctant, until she hears his story. She is so moved that she sheds a tear and gives him a spontaneous kiss which removes the spell. In ‘The Twelve Swans’, the princess must weave stinging nettles by hand to make jackets which will restore her swan brothers to their human form. The affliction is redeemed by the willingness of another to suffer with their situation.

In his commentary on ‘Inner Truth’, hexagram 61 of the ‘I Ching’, or ‘Book of Changes’, Wilhelm writes..

”In dealing with persons as intractable as a pig or a fish the whole secret of success depends on finding the right way of approach. One must first rid oneself of all prejudice and, so to speak, let the psyche of the other person act upon you without restraint. Then you will succeed.” R. Wilhelm.

Sympathy is something we normally think of as happening between people but sympathy for others is predicated on the capacity to be comfortable with your own foibles, which is why we feel reassured by people who can laugh at themselves and give face to their own shortcomings. They are bound to be as lenient with you too.

Outwardly, transformation of intractable relationships occurs by proactively being willing to walk a mile in an other’s shoes and suffering not only the blisters involved but also the deprivation of your own comforting prejudices. Inwardly, sympathy for shadow aspects of oneself, willingness to listen and be affected, transforms these contents into allies. Without sympathy for them, there is no growth. The third bride of the Pig King transforms her situation by accepting her husband’s eternal breaches of etiquette, which is just a fancy word for ways-of-doing-things-I-take-for-granted. She allows herself to be invaded, dirtied and muzzled. She can do this without being shamed because she knows being a pig is what pigs do. She has the generosity of spirit to let him be what he is. Perhaps the best love you can have is to be accepted warts and all.

‘If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water. ” ~C.G. Jung, CW 10, p. 163

We all have difficult and clumsy aspects of ourselves. How we address them will determine whether they develop, like the Pig King’s growing trust for his third bride, or whether they will undermine and attack the ego in retaliation for being rejected. The Pig King’s two former wives are both killed for trying to get rid of him. When we combat ‘negativity,’ it has this same quality of plotting against the Pig King with similar consequences, blood on the carpet by morning.

The wish to be free of the problem is the problem. Being angry at the Pig King for his gauche behavior constitutes a conditional way of relating to the world and justifies the provisional life you are bound to lead whilst waiting for the Universe to get its act together and furnish you with the life you feel you are supposed to have.

This refusal to co-exist with the dark and clumsy reflects a regressive conviction that some mistake must have been made with the life you were issued, all of which will be rectified as soon as God pulls his finger out and double checks His paper work.

Such a belief is rooted in narcissistic omnipotence. It entrenches inner conflict. Maybe anxiety is what you get when a gap opens up between what you are and the ideal you are trying to panel beat yourself into, the kind of anxiety anyone might feel in the presence of someone who wants company but fakes what they are bringing to the encounter.

Much New Age political correctness is run through with this anxiety. People are trying so hard to be nice their shadows get thick as ink. Often their niceness feels layered on or synthetic, the spiritual values espoused are like a tinkling brook which may slake your thirst for a bit but doesn’t comfort the soul.

Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

If you are to address the fascist menace in politics, the growing collective movement towards autocracy defined by it’s intolerance of others, then you’d do well to begin at home with the prejudices held against the undeveloped or shamed figures of your inner world, which show their faces when you show them yours.

Its not an easy process. The Queen has to endure a great deal of being discomfited by the Pig King who effectively robs her of all her usual points of reference and compels her from the ease of how-life-aught-to-be into the chaotic moment. She accepts this and reaps its rewards by having the right attitude. When the Queen mother asks her how she manages to cope with the Pig King she replies, ‘with three wisdoms. One, it is folly to search for what cannot be found. Two, discover from your own experience and not what you have been told. Three, hold fast to enduring value.’

Western culture is run through with searching for what cannot be found. It cannot be found because it is not out there. What we are all secretly searching for is ‘in-between’, a certain quality of ‘I-Thou’ relatedness which facilitates change and growth by finding value in people and situations as they are. This involves sacrificing the privilege of knowing what to think from turning to your neighbor, symbolized by the new Queen offering up her expensive cape to be muddied. She relies on her own instincts and finds meaning in the antics of the uncouth Pig King, like a zen master coaxing potential from others by valuing what is authentic over what is supposedly proper or ‘good’.

Gestures of Becoming.

In Africa, where I was raised, it can be a bit awkward bumping into folk you don’t know in the middle of the bush. Spirits frequent such lonely places and people can be affected by them, so you’d do well giving everyone a wide berth. Just in case. Who knows what medicine they might be concocting?

Which is just quaint superstition, right?

‘Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.’ CG Jung

There’s a lonely country lane I take between isolated villages in rural Devon where I now live. Along the way is a farm complex converted into holiday lets. Within striding distance of these buildings, I encounter this archaic man on a regular basis, not as an individual but as a species; members of which doubtless lived in very different parts of the country and have no knowledge of one another, yet behave as if enacting the secret rites of some esoteric society.

Had you simply been driving by, you’d hardly notice the sight of a lone man taking an early morning stroll in the country. It wouldn’t be in the least bit remarkable. People go for walks all the time, especially holiday makers for whom the country stroll is obligatory fare.

But if you saw a thousand men, a different one every day, all along the same ecological niche, wearing the same anxious yet expectant faces, you’d begin to notice the patterns and subtleties, just as you would variants of Raven’s call if you hang out with him long enough.

Each man could have no inkling of the one preceding him, nor of the one who would be trudging the same route next week as farm guests came and went. Yet they were like peas in a pod, these men-of-a-certain-age, straddling that uncomfortable hiatus between keeping fit and staying active.

Wordsworth said of his endless questing across the Yorkshire moors that no man does such a thing without being in search of something. These men seemed to have come to this lonesome spot for the same reason. They were intently looking for something, even if it could not be articulated, searching for some quality of spirit to inform and give meaning to anemic lives bled dry of communion with Nature.

To that end special new trainers were required, preferably bright enough to rival Hermes’ winged sandals, all violent oranges and powder blue, but with traditional Barbours and flat caps or shooting hats to present their country credentials, done without swagger, competence having lost its novelty, omnipotence renounced, the socket still raw from bloody extraction.

These were men who had thrown out their old gods, to quote Nietzsche, but ‘had no new ones in swaddling clothes’, men all making the same primal gesture, embracing some measure of life’s solitude so as to cross one of her more obscure thresholds.

Each one had stolen from their bed at daybreak, bid their other half a muffled something and slipped out into the dawn with all the quiet excitement of being upon the trail of some sacred treasure.

And so, to a man, there was no roadside bonhomie. They were all in ritual space, shielded from the world by some invisible veil, acknowledgement limited to a raised hand without eye contact intruding into sacred precepts.

The gestural significance of such an existential mile is easy to dismiss. It’s just a walk down the lane, right? But when you see there is a particular contemplative gait that goes with it, a whole bunch of guidelines for dress code, special rules for interaction and the pervasive aura of rapt attention with each and every one, you begin to understand something words can scarcely approach; they were no less marvelous in their display than birds of paradise, no less mysterious than the cracking of chrysalis.

For some reason such gestures are like Heineken, they refresh the parts words cannot reach. We think of gesture as being a kind of adjunct to language but actually it’s the other way around. Words are garnish. You can have a whole plate full and still feel hungry. You can spend half a lifetime trying to figure it all out with words before discovering that the transformation is in the tone, the gesture, the lonesome yet heartfelt unknowing of an existential mile.

When I first came to Devon I would joke that the locals might accept you on the face of it but would ship your bones to the border once you died. Then I realized I was just as prejudiced myself. I regarded them as uneducated peasants compared to whom I was infinitely superior. So I felt stuck for years because my direction lay not in becoming more refined but in accepting my own unvarnished, salty self.

Of course, words matter. The truth of this is currently being tested with the question of whether Trump’s admission to NBC’s Lester Holt, that he fired Comey over the Russia investigation, will have political consequences for him.

But where being together really gets tested is in our actual demeanor to one another, who you are before you open your mouth, shown to me recently by my mechanic who I’d asked about somewhere to get a hot cup of something whilst I waited for him to fix my truck.

Oh yes, he nodded, and while his accent was so thick I couldn’t get a word of it, he indicated with his circled hands, thumbs and fingertips barely able to touch one another in their efforts to contain the sumptuous pudding cake I was sure to find down in the village, even tipping his hands towards me to better admire the imagined feast that would surely be mine before long.

If you ask an indigenous African for directions and he likes the look of you, your destination will always be gestured as close by, just around the corner or over the hill, a symbolic equation being made between his regard for you and the subsequent ease of passage evoked on your behalf with a laconic wave of the hand. If he doesn’t like you, it will be ‘kutchana‘, far away, hand and arm arching waaay over the horizon, even if your goal is within plain sight.

My mechanic and I were no different, the delicious treat I would soon enjoy was his own warm regard; and it was not simply that pretense can be dropped without tragic consequences but that the space then be filled with something more fundamental, something which just wells up by itself once you’ve gotten sufficiently out of the way. Strangely, it seems you have not to know what you are looking for to find it and stranger still, learn how to be with others by treading your own existential mile.

Beyond Conflict.

One of the best ways of getting to sleep is to ask yourself a really profound question. The deeper the better. Dropping such a stone into the Well of Night is a torment to already reluctant Goblins who down tools in protest at all this pre-frontal cortex overtime which is a great help in nodding off. Turn your profundity over in your hand as if it were The Precious, next thing you know it’s morning and you need to pee.

Last night’s was the charm. ‘What is the most significant thing anyone ever said to me?’ A few pretenders threw their hats into the ring but I was suddenly way too tired to pay them any mind.

To have the desired effect you need fresh questions on a regular basis, otherwise the Goblins keep working and you’ll be up all night. Sometimes you can’t think of a good one, a nice juicy one to provoke the Goblin’s strike, but these musings work just as well and many a peaceful night’s sleep may be entered into on the magic carpet of wondering hard about what to wonder hard about.

Next morning though, it came to me. The most significant thing that any one ever said to me was after a session with my analyst, Chuck, who was also a gifted potter. He was seeing me to the door. In the hallway there was a magnificent example of his work. I asked him quite casually how he managed the inevitable desires to become rich and famous which must ride in on the back of such craftsmanship. His answer rang in me like a bell. ‘I tip my hat to them.’

The Zen quality of Chuck’s attitude towards the shadowy, grasping aspect of human nature seems to me the encapsulation of enlightened action. He really had found a mid way between the extremes, being neither enamored nor repelled by wealth and fame.

Non-attachment isn’t about separating yourself from the world, about getting rid of or overcoming anything. Unfortunately much popular psychology is steeped in the notion that people have to be fixed, made better, panel beaten back into normality. Ironically, inner conflict is bound to result from such partisan affiliation, from identifying with some narrow band of the psyche at the expense of all the others.

”You can have it any color you like so long as its black.” H. Ford.

When life’s other hues are relegated to the Underworld out of the need to present a particular face to Others, you visit a world of hurt upon yourself. The consistent view, the tried and true, the default position; none of these chime well with immediate life, the fresh possibility striving to outgrow yesterday’s mold.

”There is as much suffering derived from our resistance to circumstance as from the circumstances themselves.” M. Israel.

Though we are largely free from the tyrannical hold Church had over the hearts and minds of it’s Flock in times past, we still seem to be in the business of trying to divide Good from Evil and fighting the good fight. Today’s demons are Anxiety and Depression which we combat no less than Knights of Old, wielding Prosac and Chlorpromazine in place of sword and lance.

But change never occurs on the back of such a combative attitude. In fact it makes it worse, entrenching inner conflict for which some new medication will soon become necessary….

‘What you resist, persists.’ S. Freud.

If you want to grow, you have to lower your weapon. People tend to think of their demons as the problem, but its the desire to be rid of them which actually causes the greater part of suffering because their strategy is rooted in rejection of experience and internal division. This then lends said demons with sharper horns and pointier tails.

The fears we have about entertaining our own alienated self is poetically expressed by the issues surrounding the US southern border wall. There is a strong feeling that unless there is an impenetrable barrier then there will simply be chaos, civilization as we know it will end, overrun by murderers and rapists.

The reality on the ground is very different as is often the case when the axe you are busy grinding can be put aside for a moment.

In the apocryphal Essene Gospel of Peace the Master says to the afflicted,

‘ Satan torments you thus because you do not pay to him his tribute. You torment him with hunger and so in his agony he torments you.’

What this means is that resolving inner conflict entails having a position slightly outside it, one that refrains from overly taking sides so that identity is not entirely wrapped up in it, just as a child may develop a relationship with Daddy without it having to cost him his relationship with Mummy.

‘The greatest and most important problems of life can never be solved, but only outgrown.” C. G. Jung

‘Trying-to-resolve’ is actually a form of throwing yourself back in the fray. It’s the wish to fix so that the issue will go away. It’s wanting to grow whilst sedimenting self construct and most destructively, identifying with the conflict itself.

But you are curious, you want answers; yet if the quest for knowledge is tinged with wanting dominion over it, wanting to feel secure, wanting to be free of the tension, then the spirituality used to counter materialism becomes yet another form of obsessive nut-gathering and covert inner warfare.

‘To solve a problem is to kill it.’ E.F. Schumacher

An old Jewish fable attributed to Rabbi Haim of Romshishok tells the story of the difference between Heaven and Hell. They are actually the same place but in Hell the long spoons at the dining table mean that no-one can get the food to their mouths and so all are wailing and moaning. In Heaven the people are feeding Each Other.

The difference is Relatedness, which seems to be in such short supply these days that the British even have a Minister of Loneliness, Tracey Crouch, who has given teary eyed speeches vowing ‘to tackle the scourge of isolation’, using the same vanquishing language of conflict that creates isolation in the first place, rather than examining the ways in which we refuse to feed one another.

Generally this must involve a confession of some kind. Not the pill box variety, just the heart felt ‘bloody hell’ of realizing just how much you with-hold from yourself and others which then exacerbates conflict and its symptom, isolation.

Of course it takes a long time to get so poised that you can tip your hat to the devil with the confidence that such a gesture immunizes you from the worst of his effects. There are bound to be more clumsy efforts. But you have to start somewhere.

So next time you find something lurking in the lower corridors of the Psyche, refrain from running it through with your mighty weapon. Try tipping your hat and introduce yourself nicely. Ask after its name. Make it a cup of tea. Find out where it comes from and where it is headed. Swop baby pictures, take some selfies. You’ll part on better terms.

The Spirit in Matter.

Animism, the belief that Nature is sentient and that material things contains spirits, is mostly considered a quaint footnote of Anthropology by Church and Science alike. Something our foolish ancestors and merely primitive people believe in. Little might any inter galactic tourist imagine the extent to which such beliefs pervade modern life and among the very people who consider themselves to have evolved beyond such apparent nonsense.

As a student I was invited not to return to lectures by a Great Professor whose scoffing at the Hunter-gather’s totemic world drew my attention to the Gucci suit he was wearing and the Mercedes key fob in clear view atop his mighty desk. I made the grievous error of asking if these were not also totems whose meaning, unlike our ancestors, we fail to recognize or have simply forgotten…

Despite pretensions to the contrary, modernity contains just the same degree of magical thinking as it ever did. Evolution builds on what went before. Previous adaptations are the basement of Being. You can’t discard them any more than you could tear out the foundations of a building or heroically leave your childhood behind.

One of the defining characteristics of our age, difficult as it is to see the wood for the trees, is a disdaining identification with the top most levels of the Psyche. We’ve made a cult of Veneer. Which means that the innate propensity for magical thinking, the conflation of spirit and matter, slips its leash and happens without you noticing, making a deity of Bling instead.

The hold that money has over our imaginations is perhaps the most generic and pervasive example of the way in which we create symbolic equations between spirit and matter. We do more than expect money to make us happy. We stake our worth and meaning on it, pursuing it as if it were a holy Grail containing the promise of redemption and do so with all the anxiety of one who has indeed just lodged their essence in something beyond influence.

The deBeers Diamond Company made a fortune out of our hidden but all to human animistic soul. Some bright spark in marketing came up with the idea that if diamonds could be symbolically equated with eternal love and made a fixture of a sacred marital vow then everyone would have to buy their stuff.

Prior to the 1930’s diamonds were a strictly luxury item whose inflated price could only be maintained by holding back reserves that might otherwise flood the market. Ad men N.W. Ayer and Son found a market for the stones de Beers couldn’t sell. Their aggressive campaign took advantage of the one thing designed to put a diamond into every household whilst maintaining its mystery and the myth of its rarity, they equated it with Eternity, wherein all anxiety of separation and death is laid to rest.

Stuff as Symbol is an important part of growing up. The transitional objects of bear and doll in early childhood are necessary to manage separation anxiety and signals the development of symbol formation, part of whose function is to manage change whilst preserving a sense of object constancy..

Thereafter the capacity of things to embody and represent other things helps us to cross life’s thresholds. When my son was making the transition into his teens he spent hours whittling precious lumps of wood with which he decorated the hearth. He spent hours carving and smoothing. These sacred bits of wood were deeply significant to him, like aboriginal soul stones, which gave him belonging, gravitas, space.

The equation between spirit and matter is not only common, it can assume some very specific and intricate meanings. My favorite example is the mythology surrounding pirate ear-rings, which, to those in the know, signified much more than ornament.

The tradition was that the gold ring in your ear would pay the price of your funeral. The fact that this so rarely occurred, pirates generally dying either at sea or upon the gallows, invites closer inspection.

What the gold hoop says is that I have mates who I can trust and will do right by me. Its a mark of Belonging, of collective identity, which also serves not just as payment in the event of death but as a defense against death itself, useful in the piratical business. The ring is a statement of confidence that you will not be lost at sea and that you’ll die sufficiently in one piece to be buried at all; that it will somehow be quiet and dignified with both the wood and the time for coffin making, that you will be neither sluiced from the quater-deck nor tossed over the side..

a sentiment somewhat betrayed by the brief eulogy traditionally afforded piratical demise..

‘One and the body, the body I say. Two, shall be cast, shall be cast away. Three.. and into the sea, the sea, into the sea goes he..’

Such projections into matter are not merely defensive. The psyche often discovers the incipient stirrings of nascent consciousness in the worldly garb of either fascination or disgust, which, with time, may be realized as having more to do with oneself than circumstance suggests.

This is the meaning behind alchemical gold. The old alchemists understood that the ancient Sanskrit maxim, ‘Tat twam Asi, (‘thou art that’) meant the outer physical events they were exploring were reflections of inner processes. The base elements they sought to transform were elements of their own psyche. They knew their work was symbolic and in pursuit of inner treasure.

‘Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi.’ (Our gold is not the ordinary kind.)

Often this confusion of inner and outer is most keenly felt in relationships. We confuse lovers with angels, spouses with parents, opponents with the devil, migrants with inner impoverishment. We attribute public figures with the power to redeem our lives. Irvin Yalom even gave that one a name.. ‘the fantasy of the ultimate rescuer’. Someone, somewhere has the power to save me from my situation.

Such projections are useful despite the mess they can get us into because they afford us a glimpse into the inner world otherwise hidden from view. Nature abhors a vacuum..

‘ It is as if the investigator’s own psychic background were mirrored in the darkness. What he sees in matter are qualities and potential meanings which are chiefly the data of his own unconscious.’ C. G. Jung.

Modern psychotherapy makes use of this phenomenon, taking the raw elements of experience and fantasy, the ‘massa confusa’ and giving them context so that transformation can take place. My analyst used to describe paranoia, of which I had plenty, as a feeling searching for its home.

So projection doesn’t deserve such poor press. It can be useful. Sometimes it’s the way ‘in’. Marie Louise von Franz went so far as to say that the projection of ‘healer’ onto another can often yield results even whilst the projection is in place. You know from your own experience how everything in life feels resolved when you are in love, that you suddenly have more vitality and drive. You ‘glow’ with life, even though the beloved is condensed into a flawed and all too human vessel which can only temporarily contain it..

We encounter ourselves in the world, in other people, in concrete situations and sometimes just in concrete. We do this as a prelude to the disruptive experience of ushering emergent aspects of Self across the threshold of our inner caucus where they can be more consciously at home. Far from being an aspect of a bygone era we would do well to re-discover the conflation of spirit and matter in our own experience so they may be sources of meaning rather than the drivers of a cruel fate.

The Sado-Masochistic Self.

Sado-Masochism has much in common with the elusive, lesser spotted Venus Fly Trap Warbler. They both have fancy names and are so well camouflaged that even the ardent enthusiast rarely gets a peek. Danish philosopher and leading contender for the Worst-luck-in-love Competition, Soren Kierkegaard, who also had a fancy name, tells the following cautionary tale ….

There was once a poor peasant who was so down on his luck he did not even have a pair of shoes to wear.

One day, he miraculously came into some money. He walked all the way into town and bought the finest pair of shoes he could find. There was even some money left over. So he bought a jug of wine and drank it on the way home.

Before he could return, the wine got the better of him. He fell into a ditch where he passed out. In the small hours of the morning a coach came by. The coachman sees the peasant’s legs dangling out of the ditch across the road and he calls out loudly lest they be run over. The peasant raises a bleary eye, looks carefully at his newly shod feet and shouts back, ‘they’re not my legs, drive on!’

Since S/M is about what happens between people it would be better to say that it is a perversion of the Principle of Relatedness, of which sexual relatedness is only a part. The flamboyant/erotic end of the spectrum may well catch our attention but many S/M enactments are of the common or garden varieties and don’t make for interesting TV.

Nor is it enough to then say that S/M is rooted in dominance and subordination. These are expressions of and adaptations to something more fundamental which is still worth naming.

The child of any epoch or culture instinctively maintains the conditions in which it has learned to be at home. If disconnection and split realities are the world we are born into then even these…

”will be maintained indiscriminately as part of development.” Jean Liedloff

This relational dysfunction is much bigger than the sexual issues they might later encompass.

Narcissistic sadism has, as its prime objective, the eradication of the other’s subjective reality. Its means to that end is depersonalization, humiliation, witholding and the refusal to value or accommodate. His doing-unto-others denies and projects a fragile core. I wound therefore I am…

not my wound.

Empathic masochism dovetails this with low self worth, poor boundaries and subliminal victim mentality that colludes with and allows the sadist’s ‘bad behavior’. Power and responsibility are abdicated so Identity can take root in being done to.

”They are not my legs, ride on!”

The problem for the poor peasant is that if his poverty constitutes a nucleus of identity, a core self-construct, then the resolution of it will precipitate existential crisis. He won’t know who he is anymore. Resolving ‘the problem’, is therefor out of the frying pan…

and into the fire.

”Once you have identified with some form of negativity you do not want to let it go and on a deeply unconscious level, do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard done-by person. Eckhart Tolle.

So we resist what we want most because it costs us what we know of ourselves to have it.

”For someone who’s natural habitat is the brink of disaster, a giant step into security is as intolerable as the realization of all he fears most.” Jean Liedloff.

Our peasant’s new shoes threaten his whole view of life. He cannot afford to identify with his own good fortune. Having his legs run over would reacquaint him with his familiar bad luck upon which identity has long been constructed.

Moreover, the miracle of his wild adventure into town has the quality of a hero’s quest, part of which is invariably death/rebirth. If this is not realized in the inner world it will be enacted in the outer.

”Creativity… expresses itself in the ambivalent experience of rebirth through death (or) in sado-masochistic fantasies.” Erich Neumann.

The process of self-realization involves some painful processes over and above the unearthing of childhood trauma because it involves an end to the notion that we are masters of our own houses. This tends to lead either to a positive inflation in which ego identifies with the Self and becomes cruel, inconsiderate and puffed up with power, or a negative inflation in which we feel lower than a worm and deserving of nothing.

Its easier to act this out in our relationships than it is to contain the violent forces that can swing us back and forth between such extremes.

The alchemical tradition, which offers us a metaphor for the process of individuation, is full of grisly symbolism. The ‘mortificatio’ and ‘putrefacto’ are stages of the journey in which the old sense of identity dies and rots as a result of the encounter with the Self. These ‘torments’ are described as…

”cutting up the limbs, dividing them into smaller and smaller pieces and mortifying the parts.” Rosarium.

This painful process is amplified in Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’, in which the difficult encounter between bride and bridegroom represent the clash of opposites often described between ego and Self.

”The coniunctio is both desired and dreaded. From a distance it is the source of all yearning, but knocking at our door it is an object of terror.” E. Edinger.

In Solomon’s Song the bridegroom is wounded..

”You ravish my heart with a single one of your glances…”

This acknowledgement between self and ego….

”has a wounding or violating effect.” Edinger.

In Christian iconography this is represented by Jesus on the cross.

‘thou didst wound my heart with one of thine eyes when, hanging upon the cross, I was wounded for love of thee that I might make thee my bride.” ibid

In the Bahavad Gita, Arjuna asks to see Krishna’s true form and quickly regrets it.

”when I see you touching the sky, blazing with many colours, with mouths open wide, with large fiery eyes, my heart trembles in fear and I find neither courage nor peace. Devouring all the worlds on every side, you lick your lips. I implore you, as a lover to the beloved, show me a gentler form.”

The wish for mother confounded by the need to separate from her and the feeling of being torn apart that this can constitute in early life, is a motif that can attend spiritual awakening in later years. They share the common experience of an encounter with Other.

A favorite delusion is that one’s own destiny is simply something to yearn for. But somehow circumstances entangle from the true path… from where you are supposed to be.. forgetting that the path we seek is the one we are on and for good reason. The creatures that used to hide in the closet and under the bed along with all those that come in through the cracks from Elsewhere along the way, have taken up lodging in your outer world and become life’s spiky situations instead.

Healing Phobic Anxiety.

The knee jerk response to Phobia is to try and overcome it. You want to wrestle it to the floor, all helped along with how irrational and stupid it seems to be, adding the weight of shame to the burden of anxiety.

Phobias are like waking dreams, things that don’t make apparent sense and yet are full of rich symbolism, brimming with meaning for anyone brave enough to refrain from instantly running it through with a pointy stick.

People have very particular phobias about all kinds of things, each of which has a specific set of associations, memories, and life events connected to it that provide context, significance and even the psychological necessity for what appears to be nonsense to the dismissive eye.

Phobos was the Greek God of Fear, and as with all ancient tales and myths we can find out a great deal about ourselves and our afflictions by taking his circumstances to heart. Phobos, twined with Deimos (terror) was the son of Ares, God of War and Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Procreation. Phobos personified the fear bought about by war (Ares), and conflict of any kind. Aphrodite was his mother, the dark side of whom is not-being-there. Thirteen kids, countless lovers, a jealous husband whose thing is weaponry… So fearful Phobos and terrified Deimos were also the boy-Gods of loss.

Phobias are connected to the prospect of conflict and the subsequent loss that is wedded to it. And not just about who gets the window seat, but about whether you get to ride at all.

”Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.” CG Jung.

Much of what we fear is on account of its capacity to change us, to upset identity, to alter the status quo. Its not just that it’s ugly or full of teeth but that the encounter is game changing and you may need to check your name tag for a while thereafter.

Add to this the early encounter with Aphrodite, quietly resentful of being a brood mare, secretly loading the child with unfulfilled ambition, unsatisfied longing, the need to be redeemed by heroic action, already at odds with the child’s own destiny before s/he can crawl….

Fear of conflict is rooted in our survival instincts, which is not about the superficial tussle of who said what to whom, but about whether you exist as a person in your own right or as a part-object in someone else’s world. If asserting your own path through the jungle entails damage to parental love, if you are not the child your parents wanted, the child that would fulfill their hopes and dreams, then the desire to be recognized and the wish to be approved of are going to be in terrible, unbearable, collision with one another.

Our instinct to live up to expectation, even the absurd and ridiculous ones, is hardwired into the psyche because it’s connected to the basic assumption that parental expectations are there to promote survival. I am what I see in mother’s face. So that I must become. People pursue even destructive myths about themselves as if they were the holy grail, in order to maintain the conditions in which they first learned to feel at home.

Author Jean Liedloff describes how the Chicago Fire dept was snow bound one winter and put out an emergency radio broadcast warning people not to set fire to their homes. House fires dropped to zero. Then the snows melted, the fire trucks got back in service, vigilance was called off and house fires resumed.

When the instinct to individuate collides with the instinct to live up to expectation, it can all be too great to bear, like your home going up in smoke. So it condenses, a super saturated solution of tension suddenly crystalizing around a symbol which now contains all the conflict and angst, and which you can keep at arms length for some of the time.

Phobos’ uniform presence in the myths is that his face was painted onto the shields of great heroes, like Hercules and Agamemnon.

”Staring backwards with eyes that glowed with fire. His mouth was full of teeth in a white row, fearful and daunting”… Hesiod.

Phobia is a shield, protecting heroic vulnerability. Legitimate but unacknowledged suffering retreats behind it, occluding the puzzle of how to be with other people, inherited from both Love and War.

The Psyche’s phobic solution, to parcel these fears down into objects that can be outside is really useful, provided you can stay away from its homing instinct . Aspects of self taken flight invariably return to roost.

It’s important that Phobos is one of twins. Jung was of the opinion that twins indicated a quickening of consciousness, a doubling of the energies. Many traditions depict twins increasing consciousness or generating life.

The Xingu people of Brazil have stories about the twin brothers Kuat and Iae, who compelled the vulture king Urubutsin to give light to the dark world. Kuat occupied the sun, Iae the moon. Their wakefulness keeps light in the world except for a brief time each month when they both sleep.

According to a myth told in central Australia, twin lizards created trees, plants, and animals to fill the land. Motherless Romulus and Remus created Rome.

This creative aspect of Phobos and Deimos is not all that obvious, but if an affliction is also the means to heal ourselves, if the clue to wholeness is buried somewhere in the symptom, wanting only our patience to emerge, we are then witness to the remarkable ability of the Psyche to both shield itself and leave a paper trail to follow.

This capacity to experience Self-hood beyond our skins is testimony to the fact that the psyche contains the body rather than the usual contrary view.

”Some think the fish contains the sea, I say the sea contains the fish.” CG Jung

This sea contains all kinds of experiences, both the scary variety replete with teeth and palpitations but also those which are sublime and uplifting.

Victor Frankl tells the following story;

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.’”

When you accept that phobias are meaningful, dreamlike scenarios the unraveling of which can actually help deepen self knowledge and compassion, then, in a wider sense and having faced the terror of being but a speck in a grinder, you also make yourself available to the prospect of being redeemed by Nature, the self that exists outside.