Tag: carl jung

What is Luck?

Hans had completed seven long years of work for his Master who rewarded him with a great lump of gold. The gold was very heavy and Hans was soon utterly worn out from carrying it. A kindly man passing on his horse asked what the trouble was, offering to swop his horse for the gold so Hans could ride along. Hans was extremely pleased at this sudden good fortune though when he mounted, the horse bolted and threw him down. A lady with a cow passed and helped him up, generously relieving Hans of the troublesome horse for the amazing cow which would supply him with milk and cheese for all eternity, though when he tried to milk her she kicked him in the head.

A compassionate swineherd gave up his pig for the horrible cow and now he had more bacon than he could imagine, though more fear too since it seemed that the pig was stolen and so he quietly swopped it with a very helpful man for his plump goose. Having said that, all these fortunate events gave him no coin in his pocket and so he swopped the goose for a grinding stone that was only a little damaged. It would be a great living but it was also pretty cumbersome and so when it accidentally fell in the well when he went there to drink it seemed he was now entirely free of troubles and so he went happily on his way.

The story appears absurd on the surface. Hans repeatedly trades for things of objectively lesser value until he owns nothing at all. Instead of regretting his losses, he becomes happier with each exchange, finally overjoyed after accidentally losing the final treasure.

From a conventional perspective, Hans is a fool. From another point of view, he may represent someone moving away from identification with material value towards psychological freedom. It’s as if the fairy tale quietly asks: What if our valuation system itself is mistaken?

The tale dramatises a journey from being possessed by the object to freedom from it, from the oppression of collective values toward a lighter relation to life. The repeated losses strip away identities that seem necessary but also prove to be hardships.

It seems the purpose of the story, like the bit in Jack and the Beanstalk where Jack trades his cow for a handful of beans, is to challenge our assumptions about what it means to be lucky, to reflect on the prejudice we tend to share that luck and increase are synonymous. The story also invites us to reconsider the notion that luck is simply something which befalls us from out of the blue, merely a matter of external forces acting upon a passive subject without reference to the attitudes or dispositions of the person in question.

And yet, before we’ve even thought about it too much, we know that some people seem to be more lucky than others. There seems to be more to it than a mere roll of cosmic dice. Jung went so far as to say that ‘what happens to a man has something to do with him.’

What does this mean exactly?

From the standpoint of psychological meaning what ‘befalls’ us is not merely accidental. Our unconscious dispositions, conflicts, and patterns are intimately connected with the events we experience or the way we experience them. In his work, ‘The Interpreted World’, Ernesto Spinelli says, ‘The definition or meaning given to events has as much to do with you, and the meaning system that you employ, as it does with the thing itself.’ 

He then develops this argument, ‘This interpretational process must be acknowledged in our statements about reality… Reality, as far as each of us experiences it, is this process. In other words, interpretation is inseparable from experience itself.’ Refraining from a knee-jerk interpretation of what we imagine things have to mean requires the development of what Jung calls the symbolic attitude.

The Symbolic Attitude.

The symbolic attitude is a way of relating to experience which neither takes it literally nor explains it away. It is an attitude of openness to the possibility that an image, event, dream, emotion, or coincidence expresses a meaning that has not yet been fully grasped by consciousness.

If a symbol is the best possible expression for something as yet unknown then a symbolic attitude is one which holds open the possibility that the significance of events is not necessarily as obvious as they might seem.

A symbol points beyond itself. It is a living image that mediates between conscious understanding and unconscious reality. By the same token the symbolic attitude is the willingness to relate to events as living realities, rather than objective givens of which we are the passive recipients.

The symbolic attitude avoids two opposing errors. Literalism on the one hand and reductionism on the other. Literalism says a dream of drowning means I am literally going to drown. A black crow means death is coming. I lost my job because I am cursed. The wafer is the body of Christ. etc. Here the symbol is collapsed into an external fact.

Reductionism does the opposite. The dream is ‘only’ anxiety. The crow is ‘just’ coincidence. Religious images are ‘nothing but’ wish fulfilment. Here the symbol is explained away as being no more than something already understood. Both attitudes are psychologically limiting because they prevent the symbol from doing its transformative work.

The symbolic attitude in practice.

If someone asserts, “I’m unlucky,” the literal attitude asks, ‘Is that objectively true? The reductive attitude asks, ‘Is this just cognitive bias? The symbolic attitude asks, ‘What psychic reality is being expressed through the experience of being unlucky?

This does not assume the person is objectively unlucky, nor does it dismiss their experience. Instead, it asks what the image of “unluckiness” might be saying about their relationship to fate, agency, suffering, hope, identity, or the unconscious. This is important because the symbolic attitude facilitates mediation between the ego and the unconscious, making psychological growth possible.

Without the symbolic attitude dreams become either meaningless or superstition, religious images become either dogma or delusion, myths become mere stories, suffering becomes either pointless or merely pathological. With the symbolic attitude each of these can become a source of psychological insight and development.

Gerhard Adler’s development

Adler extends Jung’s idea into clinical practice. For Adler, the analyst’s specific task is to protect the symbolic space. If the analyst interprets too quickly, the symbol dies because it has been reduced to a fixed meaning. If the analyst encourages literal belief, the patient becomes possessed by the image. Instead, analyst and patient stay with the image long enough for its meaning to unfold. Adler often describes this as allowing the symbol to remain “alive.”

The symbolic attitude is thus an epistemological stance, a way of knowing. It rests on the recognition that some aspects of experience are not yet fully intelligible and so we are ill advised to rush to any kind of definitive conclusion. Rather than forcing premature certainty, the symbolic attitude tolerates ambiguity while remaining engaged with the experience.

In this sense, the symbolic attitude is closely related to what the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’, the ability to remain “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is the capacity to remain with the unknown rather than rushing to closure.

The essence of the symbolic attitude is thus the capacity to meet an experience by asking, “What is trying to become known through this?“ This shift, from explanation in terms of what-is-known to a dialogue with the yet-to-be-known, is what allows symbols and events to transform consciousness rather than merely decorate it, to participate in meaning rather than be bludgeoned by it.

Luck and archetypal identification.

Edward Edinger’s contribution to this thread is subtle but substantial. He doesn’t write specifically about luck, nor does he focus on the symbolic attitude in the way Adler does. Instead, he provides a compelling account of how the ego becomes identified with archetypal patterns, making certain self-descriptions feel unquestionably true.

In Ego and Archetype, Edinger argues that much of psychological suffering arises when the ego unconsciously identifies with an archetypal image. Rather than simply having experiences, the person becomes the rejected one, the victim, the chosen one, the failure, and so on.

Applied to luck, the question shifts from, ‘Am I un/lucky? to ‘have I become identified with an archetype whose story is one of perpetual misfortune?” In other words, “unlucky” may not be a neutral description of probabilities but part of an identity organised around an archetypal narrative.

The ego lives inside a myth.

One of Edinger’s recurring themes is that individuation involves discovering the myth one is unconsciously living. Someone who says, ‘Nothing ever works out for me,’ may be living the myth of Job (endurance amid suffering), the abandoned child, the scapegoat, the exile, or even the tragic hero. In Carl Orf’s ‘Carmina Burana’, the song ‘oh Fortuna’, expresses this sense of being identified with an archetypal reality which clearly has its own personality…,

‘Fate, monstrous and empty, you turning wheel, you are malevolent, your favour is idle and always fades, shadowed, veiled, you plague me too. I bare my back for the sport of your wickedness. In prosperity or in virtue fate is against me, Both in passion and in weakness fate always enslaves us. So at this hour pluck the vibrating strings; because fate brings down even the strong, everyone weep with me.

The song is full of the sense of being trapped in another’s narrative. Such identifications may not determine objective events, but they strongly influence the lens through which events are experienced, colouring and shaping which events are noticed, remembered, and imbued with certain meanings. Ego configurations dominated by archetypal patterns can produce a form of attachment to suffering which absolutely inhibits the possibility of experiencing oneself as lucky.

Edinger repeatedly emphasises developing what might be called a psychological objectivity, the capacity to observe one’s identifications rather than be wholly absorbed by them. This resonates strongly with Adler’s symbolic attitude. Instead of saying, ‘I am unlucky’, one might come to say, ‘Part of me experiences life through an image of being unlucky.’

That small shift, from identity to observation, is psychologically significant. So if someone persistently thinks of themselves as “unlucky,” Edinger’s distinctive contribution is to suggest that the belief may be less about objective patterns of chance than about an archetypal self-image. The work is not to prove or disprove the claim statistically, but to understand what psychic story has become fused with the ego and whether that fusion can be disentangled.

Luck and the symbolic attitude.

For someone capable of a symbolic attitude luck ceases to be merely external chance without reducing it to magical causation. This suggests that the symbolic attitude is not simply an intellectual stance one chooses to adopt; it rests upon a developmental achievement in which emotional experience has been successfully transformed into symbolic form. Where symbol formation has been compromised, the analyst may need first to help establish the capacity to symbolise before the patient can genuinely engage in the symbolic attitude which Jung regarded as central to individuation.

In his book ‘The Luck factor’, (2003) experimental psychologist Richard Wiseman’s central conclusion is that “lucky” people differ less in what happens to them than in how they respond to events. The first of his four principles of luck, derived from interviews and experiments with hundreds of self-described lucky and unlucky people is that….

1. Lucky people create, notice, and act upon chance opportunities.

Wiseman discovered that lucky people tend to have broad social networks; talk to strangers and maintain casual acquaintances; remain open to new experiences and avoid becoming so focused on one goal that they miss unexpected opportunities.

In one experiment, Wiseman gave participants a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs. A large message halfway through the paper read, “Stop counting—there are 43 photographs.” Self-described lucky people noticed the message far more often than unlucky people because they were less narrowly focused.

2. Lucky people make fortunate decisions by listening to intuition

Wiseman found that lucky people often trust their intuitive judgments. They pay attention to “gut feelings”; give themselves time to reflect before making important decisions and avoid overanalysing every possibility. He also found that reducing stress improved intuitive decision-making. Anxiety tends to narrow attention and interfere with noticing subtle cues.

3. Lucky people’s expectations help create good fortune

Lucky people generally expect things to work out well. Because of these expectations they persevere after setbacks; approach new situations with confidence; are more approachable socially; take opportunities they might otherwise avoid. Wiseman suggests positive expectations influence behaviour in ways that increase the likelihood of favourable outcomes.

4. Lucky people transform bad luck into good.

When something goes wrong, lucky people habitually imagine how the situation could have been worse; search for possible benefits; treat setbacks as temporary; learn from adverse experiences. Rather than seeing misfortune as evidence that life is against them, they reinterpret it as information or opportunity.

The connection with Jung.

Although Wiseman himself does not frame his work in Jungian terms, there are some intriguing parallels with Jungian psychology,

  • Principle 1 resembles Jung’s idea of a symbolic attitude: openness to unexpected meanings and possibilities rather than rigid literalism.
  • Principle 2 echoes Jung’s respect for intuition as one of the four primary psychological functions, capable of perceiving possibilities not yet consciously evident.
  • Principle 3 aligns with Jung’s observation that our conscious attitude influences the kinds of experiences we are prepared to encounter and integrate.
  • Principle 4 is perhaps closest to Jung’s concept of the transcendent function, in which conflict or suffering can be transformed into psychological development through a new symbolic perspective.

These principles resonate with our tale ‘Hans in Luck,. Hans repeatedly remains open to possibility and chance encounter; he pays attention to his intuition, expects things to work out and interprets apparent losses as gains. Wiseman would describe this as having a resilient cognitive style; Jung would likely observe that Hans embodies a symbolic attitude which transforms fortune and misfortune through his relationship to them rather than attributing the events themselves with intrinsic meaning.

I once overheard two men talking on the train. The first was telling the second that he had been in analysis. The second man was curious and asked him about it, whether it had helped and so forth, finally asking if he could specify what the difference was before and after the analysis. ‘Well,’ said the first man, ‘before the analysis life was just the same old boring daily grind.’ And afterwards?’ prompted the second man. ‘Well,’ said the first man perking up, ‘afterwards it was simply one thing after another.’

Synchronicity and the transcendent function.

So far we have been discussing how the interpretation of events governs the nature of the experience associated with them, the freedom of movement we have to experience causally connected phenomena which seem to have objective value but in fact do not. Then there is the question of how things might line up independently of our perception of them to produce experiences of being either lucky or unlucky.

Synchronicity could be described as the expressive emergence of the transcendent function. The transcendent function is an intra-psychic process which creates a new symbolic standpoint; synchronicity is an expression of that same process manifesting as a meaningful correspondence between psyche and the external world. In other words, they are distinct concepts, but they arise from the same underlying dynamics of individuation. The transcendent function is crucial to the manifestation of synchronicity. Without a symbolic attitude, synchronicities remain mere coincidences.

The transcendent function integrates opposites within the psyche, synchronicity reveals that psyche and matter themselves participate in a deeper unity. The transcendent function prepares consciousness for an experience of the unus mundus, while synchronicity offers occasional empirical glimpses of that underlying unity.

In her book, ‘The Inner World of Choice’, Frances Wickes gives an illustrative example of her patient, a mother who was struggling to let her grown up son live his own life. This mother was very controlling but in considerable denial of the fact. The son had fled her ‘care’ and gone to live several time zones away. Wickes steadfastly attempted to draw her patient’s attention to the fact that the young man’s departure was a response to her overbearing manner and that she had effectively been suffocating him, all of which jarred terribly with her own remonstrations as to his ingratitude. Finally the patient managed to hold the tension between the conscious realisation of her maternal task to let him go and the unconscious wish to hang on to him eternally.

‘It was her last hour of analysis before fall. As the hour drew toward a close, there came to her, like the breaking of a new dawn, a consciousness of her own separate life, a gift originally given, an individual potential which was hers to live, whatever might happen in the life of another. She said, ‘I am going to take up my own life and learn to live it even if I never see him again. My sorrow will go with me always but it will be my own life that I shall live.’

It was the end of the hour. The clock struck twelve.

Three days later she received a letter. Its date was the day of her decision. It read, ‘Dear Mother, I am sitting on a hillside three thousand miles away. Just now I heard the clock strike nine and suddenly I felt that a fear that had been with me always was gone. I know now that I can come home because you no longer need me.’ 

The mother recognises her possessiveness and her unconscious need to keep her son psychologically dependent. Then rather than trying to regain him, she bears the grief of letting him go. Subsequently a genuinely new attitude emerges, she discovers her own separate life and relinquishes identification with the maternal role. Finally, at the very moment of this inner transformation (marked by the striking of the clock), the son experiences an equally decisive inner shift thousands of miles away.

This is one of the clearest clinical examples suggesting that a transformation produced by the transcendent function is accompanied by a synchronistic event. It therefore provides a compelling bridge between Jung’s essay on the transcendent function and his later essay on synchronicity.

This lived sense of ‘Fortune favouring the brave’ is expressed in a remark by one of Goethe’s couplets, ‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!”  

This is not about exercising the freedom to interpret events but is rather about generating the improbable occurrence of the event itself..’something that surpasses our powers of comprehension, and can only be conceived as possible by virtue of the most wonderful pre-established harmony’. Schopenhauer.

‘Synchronistic events rest on the simultaneous occurrence of two different psychic states. One of them is the normal, probable state (i.e., the one that is causally explicable), and the other, the critical experience, is the one that cannot be derived causally from the first.’ (Jung CW8 para 855) Circumstances are not simply open to interpretation such that a variety of meanings could be derived from them; rather, meaning presents itself despite one’s best efforts to look the other way.

Some years ago I lost my home and my artists studio which were being sold by the landlord. I found a new place to live but it didn’t have a studio. Despite the beautiful location I felt frustrated at this disruption to my artistic calling. I put an A5 ‘wanted’ advert into the village PO window with an image of my work and waited. Months past. I waited and waited, refusing to settle or accept my new situation. One day, I was looking out of an upstairs window onto a blustery day. In the far distance, way up in the sky, I saw what seemed to be a fluttering bird. The wind blew it closer and I realised it was not a bird but a piece of paper, hundreds of metres in the air. Closer still and I saw a familiar flash of colour. Could it be? No way and I pushed the thought from my mind. Minutes later, I opened the back door to find my advert squarely planted on the welcome mat. The message was undeniable. I had to accept where I was and be grateful for what I had.

Such events cannot help but have us wonder if the gods are not involved because they seem to border on the miraculous. ‘For want of a demonstrable cause, we are all too likely to fall into the temptation of positing a transcendental one.’ Jung’s objection to this is that,’ ‘a “transcendental cause” is a contradiction in terms, because anything transcendental cannot by definition be demonstrated.’ And yet it can be inferred. I wonder if Jung is anxious to steer away from speaking about divine intervention and that it is precisely this which he alludes to when referring to his reticence in broaching the subject of synchronicity in his essay’s opening remarks. (vol 8) Elsewhere he repeatedly emphasises and even underlines the intentionality of unconscious contents, poetically expressed by Kierkegaard’s own observation, ‘there’s what I want to think about and there is what wants to be thought.’

Jung’s explanation of synchronicity is two fold, ‘Synchronicity therefore consists of two factors: a) An unconscious image comes into consciousness either directly (i.e., literally) or indirectly (symbolised or suggested) in the form of a dream, idea, or premonition, b) An objective situation coincides with this content. ‘[859] He assiduously avoids Goethe’s reference to the intentions of Providence, though he inadvertently includes this factor, albeit from the writings of Albertus Magnus quoted lower down the page,

‘Whoever would learn the secret of [synchronicity] must [first] fall into a great excess … and he must do it at that hour when the excess befalls him, and operate with the things which the soul prescribes. For the soul is then so desirous of the matter she would accomplish that of her own accord. Everything she does with that aim in view possesses motive power and efficacy.’

This then seems to suggest a fourth factor, the emotional state of the ego personality. Seizing the day requires intense emotional involvement. Alchemical treatises often emphasise the need for patience, love, living with uncertainty, longing and humility. Yet there are also far more challenging feelings which must be endured and willingly entered into, the conscious suffering of bearing the opposites, the despair, confusion and grief of the Nigredo. In Shakespeare’s ‘the Tempest’ this is represented by the storm itself, the chaotic and mortifying collapse of Prospero’s status, certainty and identity; his renunciation of power and vengeance. In Dante’s Inferno there is the emotionally impactful suffering of a descent into hell which prefigures Purgatory and Heaven. In Faust, Goethe makes explicit the feeling tone of what it means to seize the day, ‘“Thus let it be! Henceforth I’ll fling me into the roaring tide of time, into the surge of circumstance, And then may pleasure and distress, Success and failure, interchange as they can; For man grows active only through unrest.”

The literal translation of this last line is,’ “Man errs as long as he strives,’ which accentuates the necessity of error, suffering, and misjudgment in the pursuit of wholeness. Faust’s renunciation of bookish scholarship, his willingness to engage with Mephistopheles brings about the death of an old way of being, a state described in alchemical literature as ‘the torments’, a process equivalent to psychic dismemberment.

The Unus Mundus.

The capacity to bear the tension between opposites eventually gives rise to new life, Heaven’s birth, the ‘filius philosphorum’. Jung writes that the union of opposites culminates in the appearance of a new personality, not a compromise but a third thing produced from the tension itself.

Alfred Ribi argues that this ‘unus mundus‘ (one world) represents a further stage in the evolution of consciousness, one that moves beyond the modern split between mind and matter. In ordinary consciousness, we experience psyche and the physical world as fundamentally separate. At the level of the unus mundus, however, this division is understood to be secondary to the idea that psyche and matter emerge from a deeper, psychoid reality in which they are originally united. Synchronistic events provide glimpses of this underlying unity because they reveal meaningful correspondences between ‘inner’ psychological states and ‘outer’ events without requiring a causal explanation. Rather than reducing the psyche to subjective fantasy, this perspective restores it as an objective aspect of reality, equal in ontological status to the physical world. The individual thus comes to experience consciousness as participating in a larger, cosmic order rather than existing as an isolated ego. 

One of Ribi’s original contributions is to place this idea within a developmental model of consciousness. He proposes that humanity has progressively moved, from an archaic, undifferentiated participation in the world, through the modern scientific separation of subject and object, toward a stage where differentiation is preserved but reunited within the unus mundus. This is not a regression to primitive consciousness but an integration which recognises the psyche’s objective reality while retaining reflective awareness.

For Ribi, the resolution of opposites is not simply an intra-psychic compromise but the realisation that both psychic and material realities participate in the same underlying ground. Individuation therefore culminates not merely in personal wholeness but in an experiential awareness of the unus mundus, where apparent dualities, subject and object, inner and outer, psyche and matter, are understood as differentiated expressions of a single, psychoid reality. 

This interpretation aligns closely with Jung’s late writings in Mysterium Coniunctionis, where the unus mundus is presented as the hidden, unitary background from which both psyche and matter arise, and where the coniunctio symbolises a restoration of this primordial unity rather than merely a reconciliation of psychological conflict. Thus increases in “good fortune” are to be understood as a by-product of living in greater accord with that unity, not as its purpose.

What is Shadow-work? The salutary tale of St George.

St George, patron saint of England and slayer of Dragons, has had the kind of rebranding over the centuries that would make even the most ardent spin-doctor blush. His name has become synonymous with the defeat of evil but he didn’t start out like that. Not at all.

George was a Roman soldier who spoke out against Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians and refused to renounce his faith. He was tortured and beheaded for his trouble near Lydda, also known in antiquity as Diospolis, near present-day Tel Aviv. Lydda then became an important pilgrimage site, and a church was built there over his reputed tomb. The location is especially significant because it later became a shared sacred site, venerated by Christians as Saint George and by Muslims as Al-Khadr, a mysterious, revered figure in Islamic tradition and Middle Eastern folklore, known as a bearer of divine wisdom and a symbol of life and regeneration. His name, meaning ‘the Green One,” reflects the belief that wherever he walks, life springs forth, linking him to vegetation, rain, and springtime renewal.

The earliest references to Al-Khadr are in the Qur’an (Surah al-Kahf, 18:60–82), Al-Khadr appears as a servant of God whom Moses meets while seeking deeper knowledge. The story is a living embodiment of shadow work.

Moses once set out on a long journey in search of self knowledge. He had been told that there was a servant of God who possessed a wisdom he did not. When Moses finally met Al-Khadr, the Green One, Al-Khadr agreed to let Moses accompany him on one condition: Moses must not question anything he saw until it was explained.

They first boarded a small boat owned by poor fishermen. As the boat carried them across the water, Al-Khadr suddenly damaged it, tearing out a plank. Moses, shocked, cried out, “Have you ruined it to drown its people?” Al-Khadr reminded him of the promise of silence.

Later, they met a young boy. Without warning, Al-Khadr took the boy’s life. Moses could not restrain himself: “How could you kill an innocent soul?” Again, Al-Khadr warned him that he would not be able to bear what he did not understand.

Finally, they entered a town whose people refused them hospitality. In that town they found a wall about to collapse, and Al-Khadr repaired it without asking for any payment. Moses, bewildered, said, “If you wished, you could have taken a wage for this.”

At that moment, Al-Khadr revealed the meaning of what had seemed unjust. The boat, he explained, belonged to poor men who earned their living at sea. A tyrant king was seizing every sound vessel by force; by damaging it, Al-Khadr had saved it from being taken. The boy would have grown to oppress his faithful parents and lead them into misery, so God would replace him with a child more righteous and loving. And the wall belonged to two orphans; beneath it lay a treasure left by their virtuous father. Repairing the wall protected it until they were old enough to claim it.

Thus Moses learned that what appears cruel or senseless can conceal mercy, and that divine wisdom often unfolds beyond the limits of human judgment.

Beyond the Qur’an, Al-Khadr becomes a powerful figure in Sufi mysticism, where he is seen as an immortal spiritual guide who initiates seekers into inner knowledge. His name, reflects the belief that wherever he walks, life springs forth, linking him to vegetation, rain, and miraculous intervention. As such he seems to represent the rewards of shadow work, provided Moses doesn’t assume too much and keeps his prejudices to himself.

In the West, George was treated very differently. His was a cause of heroism, combat and sacrifice, a model of chivalric virtue. In Western Christianity, the dragon legend displaced the emphasis on St George’s martyrdom and his association with Al-Khadr. It took a thousand years to re-package George, his incarnation as armour clad hero rescuing damsels in distress only fully emerges in the 13th century Legenda Aureate (Golden Legend) by Jacobus de Voragine, whose rendition of George as a latter day Theseus (whose dragon was the Minotaur) or Perseus (saving Andromeda from sea monster Cetus) was embraced by the church as a visible defender of order during the constant warfare and chaotic centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

St George became a saint who fights for faith, rather than dies for it. His martyrdom still mattered, but it became a credential of holiness, not the narrative centre. In the process he becomes a knight who triumphs over the shadow, bringing it to heel, rather than relating to it.

Jacobus de Voragine tells us..

“By this city was a pool or a pond like a sea, wherein was a dragon which envenomed all the country… when the dragon came near the city he poisoned the people with his breath… and so the people of the city gave him, every day, two sheep to feed him, so that he should do no harm to the people… Then was an ordinance made in the town that there should be taken the children and young people of the town by lot…”

This is the opening description of the dragon’s menace and how the city paid tribute — first with sheep, then with human youths from the Golden Legend narrative. When George arrives he first hears the woe of the towns people…

“Thus as they spake together the dragon appeared and came running to them, and Saint George was upon his horse, and drew out his sword and garnished him with the sign of the cross, and rode hardily against the dragon which came towards him, and smote him with his spear…

So, whilst that all seems long ago and far away, much of our contemporary attitudes towards the shadow are hardly any different. ‘Integrating the shadow ‘ or ‘owning’ it runs the risk of simply constituting further subjugation, ”The shadow is not something one can simply assimilate. It remains autonomous and must be met again and again through conscious moral effort.” (Von Franz, Individuation and Fairytales.) She warns that treating the shadow as “mine now,” actually allows it to take over your behavior unconsciously. For her, shadow work is primarily a moral discipline and not a therapeutic technique.

Jung emphasises relating to the shadow rather than integrating it . This distinction matters because it acknowledges the shadow as an autonomous part of the psyche containing those traits, impulses, and potentials with which the ego does not identify. The idea you can integrate the shadow leads to inflation and potentially to what Abraham and Torok called ‘narcissistic incorporation’, the swallowing of something whole where it remains unmetabolised and serves to protect the ego’s self-image rather than modify it.

This is why Jung stresses recognition of the shadow which then makes dialogue, ethical relationship and conscious responsibility for its contents possible. Such an attitude involves acknowledging shadow traits without acting them out, holding moral responsibility for impulses without repression, allowing shadow material to inform creativity and vitality whilst maintaining a safe symbolic distance from it. This is very different from the idea of integration, from which two problems immediately arise. The first is ego inflation – the ego dangerously identifies with shadow qualities (“I own my darkness now”), and secondly a loss of dynamic tension within the psyche, a collapse into sameness. The shadow must remain partly other, so that it can be related to rather than possessed.

Medieval depictions of St George do in fact reference the problematic attitude of wanting to integrate the dragon. Uccello’s painting (above) has the curious and subtle detail of a golden chain linking the dragon to the maiden. They are connected, which means that violence to the one is violence to the other. If we approach the shadow with the lance of intellectual subjugation, ridding ourselves of it by making it ‘mine’, ‘working’ on the shadow in order to diminish it with its hated ‘negative’ emotions, then we do more than lose the richness of the inner other. The maiden, as Principle of Relatedness, will also be devalued, reduced to a concept, and the whereabouts of the inner treasure….lost.

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.