My ex’s response to my request for a divorce was to buy a large white cockerel which announced every coming dawn at 4am and attacked anyone who came into the yard. ‘Pat’ was thirty pounds of malevolent fury. Our four year old got gashed across his shoulder in short order and any venturing out of the backdoor now required the vigilance of counter-insurgency training to remain unbloodied.
I asked her to get rid of her pet for the sake of our son. Despite the fact that a boy in the next village had just lost an eye in a similar situation she refused, so I had to take matters into my own hands.
Pat was afraid of nothing. He had two inch spurs and the momentum of a pro footballer. Get within forty feet of him and he would come straight at you, narrowing all options to fight or flight. But the day I made a firm decision to reclaim the yard and came out the backdoor with my air rifle, he took one look and fled. He knew his time was up.
How?
Chickens are smarter than you think but there was no way this particular specimen could have known what a rifle was or that he was my intended target. What I had slung casually over a shoulder could just as easily have been a rake or a plank of wood. Yet as soon as he saw me that day, his last, he fled to the bottom of the garden faster than he’d ever run, neck craned forward and wings a flapping.
He knew.
Cause and effect are not so neatly squared away as we might like to think. What you know is invariably more than you have ever been exposed to or taught in school.
Such events cannot be explained scientifically. They seem to occur without reference to time and space, and though we cannot grasp the dynamics involved anymore than you can truly understand the concept of quantum super-positions, they happen anyway and compel us to consider that there is more in the mix than we’d like to admit.
When you see someone engaged in profoundly self destructive acts it looks just crazy from the outside, but that is because you are not in possession of all the facts and haven’t considered the possibility of an x in the equation without which events just don’t seem to make sense.
A man goes for a job interview. He really wants the position, needs the money and feels excited about his new prospects but inexplicably gets high right before the meeting and fluffs the whole thing. It doesn’t make sense, until you take up the context and consider the mischief that can be made by an autonomous complex split off from consciousness, demanding he remain infantile and dependent.
Sometimes what trips us up in our intentions is not just the regressive pathology of childhood resurfacing to keep us on an even keel, the devil that you know being safer than the angel you do not, but precisely what is best and most noble about us.
Jung comments that ”the experience of the Self is always a blow to the ego.” The reason for this is that the ego is deposed from its place of primacy in the psyche in the process of realizing its context. It had formerly assumed itself to be at the centre of things with the feeling that the totality of the psyche is a ‘nothing but’ derived from consciousness but then finds itself a mere satellite of something superordinate that will not be reduced to inconvenient material that has simply been repressed.
The Self was there first and it was out of this primordial sea that the land mass of ego emerges. This greater, sentient, encompassing awareness, wants to be realized, wants incarnation, expression, daylight. And if it doesn’t get it… it will make trouble for you.
While the ego continues in its struggles to establish agenda and hegemony, the Self thwarts its intentions past a certain point. Ego satisfaction is not the goal of life. The caterpillar has yet to fulfill itself and must give up its delicious leaves for something that looks like death if meaningful life is to continue. In the process it might well feel as though the Universe is working against you and not a little paranoia can be generated along the way. After all, something unknown is doing I don’t know what.
‘We had thought it was the outer event that had happened to us but now, watching this director’s movement, we see that it is we who happened to our selves.” Frances Wickes. p134 The Inner World of Choice.
This ‘happening to ourselves” is the process of individuation, which the ego might well experience as an attack insofar as it is compelled to acknowledge its source and get off its high horse yet without it, without submitting to the will of the Self, no amount of fulfilling ego’s ambition ever feeds us for more than a moment. Indeed, it can send us spiraling into despair.
Transformation is achieved not by incremental additions to an ever expanding ego but by a humble acknowledgment of its limited powers in respect of an inner principle which affords life meaning in direct proportion to our reliance upon it.
”With this transformation, humiliation becomes humility, guilt is replaced by a responsible attitude towards one’s own ignorance [and] the certainty of one’s own rightness gives way to vulnerability.” ibid
And so, whilst we might wonder at the strange, self-destructive antics of the world’s most powerful man and puzzle over behavior that seems to invite catastrophic sanction, impeachment, or worse..his enactments have significance above and beyond the apparent stupidity of appointing incompetent lawyers which incriminate him at every turn, beyond the foolishness of policies that inflame public opinion, beyond ill advised appointments whose corruption must splash back on his own shoes and even beyond the childlike wish to be brought to book by any adults left in the room. His own soul wants him to fail so that he can grow and to that end compels him to make all kinds of counter-intuitive gestures unconsciously designed to invite reflection and perspective., the kind that might even need a long quiet jail term to integrate.
In our own, much smaller, humdrum lives, we do the same and inadvertently invite consciousness expanding catastrophe upon ourselves with poor matches in marriage, ill considered vocations and unrealistic intentions because all these things ultimately serve to wake us up by the fall from thwarted ambition that follows.
He who persists in his folly will become wise.” W. Blake.
preferably without also becoming someone else’s dinner.