Knocking on the door

Work. Keep digging your well.
Don’t think about getting off from work.
Water is there somewhere.
Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to thatis a ring on the door.
Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.

~ Rumi


Had a great time with G yesterday. Put the question to him again... with a negative answer. But I can tell things have moved on. First off, I know what this is all about; it's about the desire for love, trust, a home. And second, I'm not infatuated anymore, and I haven't been for a while now.

Last night, and recently as well, I've noticed my reactions towards him, and the things I've notice about him: his immaturity mainly. And, although I've known it for a while, his weakness, the general weakness and cowardice that's a basic part of his personality. Although at one point I did think that we were on different levels (i.e. that I was more psychologically developed) later I wasn't so sure - different maybe, with different strengths and weaknesses but maybe not different levels. But his shit isn't cute anymore and, although it could be something for us to work through if we actually had a relationship, I really think it's not going to be.

The biggest thing I had to deal with in the aftermath of our day was feelings of loss, of longing for love, for someone who would be protective of me, to whom I was special, unique and beloved. To be beloved of someone, and to protect and have them be my beloved. And I still feel grief over the loss of what we could have had - I still think that we mesh well together - but I think I have my answer about who the pairings in the readings I've been getting are. I kept wondering; are the "two beings" who unite and work together as one me and G, or two different sides of me? And I think I have the answer.

One of the things I was thinking about is our role in each others lives. I know I'm in his life to help draw him out into living, to spread his wings and fly. But for the longest time I thought his role in my life was for me to suffer all the things I've avoided all my life. Last night I got a deeper look into that. The suffering isn't just suffering for its own sake - the suffering is part of connecting to the world. I fell in love with him because, as Jung said, love makes us risk everything for it's sake. It connects us to the world. And that connection often hurts.

All my life I've avoided anything that hurt. That meant that all my life I never connected to anyone or anything. It was always easy for me to ditch anyone who was difficult or caused me pain, and that meant I never lived, I only drifted through my life, so that I reached my middle years without ever really having lived at all. That's what I needed G for, to be willing to stay with a relationship with a person who caused me pain, stay with it even when it caused me pain. I've never done that before. I did a tarot and i-ching reading after G left and they indicated something big, something big and beautiful and amazing, was coming down the pike. I think it's related to this staying connected with life, even through what feels like unbearable suffering. This is the work that Rumi wrote about, the knocking at the door of Joy until It looks out to see who's there.

The hungry mouth

I get the neck of the chicken;

I get the plate with the crack.

I've been dealing with the parental wound lately; the lack of mother love. It's funny but what the ups and downs of my relationship with G have been leading me to is not my animus but my Mother. I've come to realize that the great, big, gaping hole in me - the one that howls like a starving, half-crazed wolf - is Mother Hunger, hunger for love and nourishment, acceptance. Hunger for Home.

So I've been reading books and scouring the internet for info on this particular kind of negative mother complex (there are several varieties apparently.) Some strike a chord in me... or maybe it's more accurate to say, they struck a wound.

Others suffer all their lives from a sense of their own inadequacy and inferiority; they feel that they are inevitably unacceptable, they are doomed to be outsiders debarred from normal companionship, whatever they do will be wrong, whatever they desire will be forbidden. They are accursed, alienated from God and man, and not least from themselves.

These are the individuals who have never had an adequate experience of mother-love. In childhood they felt they were not wanted, and consequently in them the image of Mother is of a demanding and destructive power. But the archetypal pattern of Mother as the source of life, that Jung described in the passage quoted above, is not, for that reason, obliterated in them, but inasmuch as it has not been activated by their actual human experience, it remains in the unconscious, latent, not even appearing as an image, nor is it capable, in the most injured persons, of being projected to some mother substitute, an aunt, grandmother, nurse or schoolteacher. This positive image, however, does manifest itself, even in the most deprived individuals, as the expectation of Mother. The reciprocal of child is mother, his weakness and dependence being the obverse reflection of her strength and care. And so in these individuals, the absence of the mother-image is felt as a lack - the deprivation is felt but not the possibility possibility of fulfillment. The child wanders in the wilderness, and remains not only deprived but actively hostile to everyone and everything, and not infrequently in his despair he becomes self-destructive as well.

(M. Esther Harding, The Parental Image, pp. 15-16)

Mothers, in many cultures, are expected to be accepting and nurturing. A woman I know has received a minimum of nurturing from her mother and has developed an intense fear of being abandoned. Thus, she has an "abandonment complex" intertwined with her negative mother complex. Her fear keeps her in a state of anxiety. Because of her over-eagerness to be accepted, she tends to drive away friends and lovers.

(Matton, Mary Ann, Obstacles & Helps to Self-Understanding)

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/psychology/complex2.shtml



Most of the things I found - and there's surprisingly little on the internet about this specific form of negative mother complex - were in this vein, but then I stumbled upon this site which contains author and analyst Jules Cashford's amazing essays (I've only read the one referenced in this post - there are many more to savor once I finish this post!) Below are (rather lengthy) excerpts from her piece on Hansel and Gretel, and the process of defeating the inner Evil Witch and restoring peace and fertility in one's life.

What struck me was the motif of the devouring mother, or the hungry mouth (the Evil Witch in the story.) I never thought of myself with a devouring mother, quite the opposite in fact as I had an absent mother, the lack of a mother. But, it seems, when the Mother archetype is wounded, she becomes the hungry maw that seeks only it's ever elusive satisfaction.

Neumann points out that ‘the destructive side of the Feminine, the destructive and deathly womb, appears most frequently in the archetypal form of a mouth bristling with teeth' (The Great Mother, p.168), as in the myths of the North American Indians, Egypt, Greece, some parts of Africa, and the Aztecs. In Aztec mythology, a gigantic open mouth is the hungry and all-consuming earth, and the death goddess is drawn with many knives and sharp teeth.

...That primary sense of life as a source of nourishment is missing.

http://www.julescashford.eu/articles/


So what to do? For many years I thought that nothing could be done about it; certain wounds could never be healed, just managed. But the very fact that I've been lead here must mean something. So I poked around and this is what I found. The whole process of transforming the Devouring Mother into the inner source of nurturing appears to be a long and complex one, but does seem possible. I guess it's important to remember that Jung said that we never solve our problems, we just outgrow them. Continuing with Cashford's essay, let's take a look at what that might look like.

First off, there's the relationship between Logos and Eros, the mind and the heart. Originally, it's the mind that keeps us safe, but at some point we must rely on our feelings and instinct.

Hansel, who as the boy images that aspect of the new life or the Self which is the more conscious, logos-oriented way of solving this problem, manages to outwit the step-mother's particular plan the first time, but fails to follow through the implications of what she intends: that life is not safe at home. It is only when his strategy is itself outwitted by the birds that he can be, as it were, tricked into facing the problem at a deeper level. The story moves towards an intensification of the original situation for the bread house with sugar windows and a witch inside is an image at this deeper level of the sweetness of any home with any kind of mother inside, and points to the danger of fantasizing the missing aspect of the archetype. The need for the mothering that was originally withheld is both appeased and perpetuated in fantasies about the original mother, and, more subtly, re-enacted in the search for a symbolic substitute in any experience. This creates a person predisposed to dependence on the other, hungry (to return to the metaphor in the story) for love while fearful of being starved or detoured (rejected or overwhelmed) by the imagined source of it. It would seem, then, that the first stage of growth would require a distinction between the good and the bad in the actual mother, and between good and bad mothering in general - what one has a right to expect - and, more fundamentally, between the Good and the Bad Mother in the Great Mother Archetype.

So looking at the fairy tale more closely as an image of the ‘anatomy' of the psyche, what can it tell us about this stage of separation? For the children to survive with all the odds apparently against them, so we have to follow what they do and what ‘happens' to them as a model for the instinctive responses that are right for this specific situation. It then appears that the deliberate, purposive working out of the matter, which Hansel adopts, is necessary to start with, but has to be suspended at the crucial transitional point in order for the more feeling, less conscious impulses of Grettel to take over.

In the beginning Grettel can only weep and must be comforted by her brother, who provides the ‘temenos' in which she can feel safe: ‘"Be comforted, my dear little sister, and go to sleep"', and he crams his pockets with the white pebbles that glitter in the moonlight. The way he drops these signposts for their return is instructive for, apparently unnecessarily, he stands still and looks back at the house each time he drops a pebble, pretending he is looking at his kitten waving him farewell, an image, possibly, of the magnetic power of the complex. Jung writes that a ceremony is magical so long as it does not result in effective work but preserves the state of expectancy' (VIII, 46), and in Hansel's ritual we could see a reluctance to give up the former expectations from his home. The first time his plan succeeds, but it does so only to lead them back to the original situation with nothing changed, pointing to the circularity of conscious solutions to problems of feeling. The second time there is a famine, the step-mother argues still more forcefully, and this time the door is locked against Hansel's ingenuity and they are taken still deeper into the forest, ‘further than they had ever been in their lives before'. This tells us that left alone the complex gets worse. They are more lost than last time, and they have half as much bread, for Hansel has to take from his own portion to feed his strategy, the dropping of crumbs that are picked up by ‘the thousands of birds that fly about in the woods'. The beauty of this image already implies that the failures on the side of the good, that reason, ‘the ratio of what is already known' (Blake), must fail in order to call forth from a deeper level of the psyche that which is not yet known, but which knows. "Never mind", said Hansel to Grettel, "you'll see we'll still find a way out"; but all the same they did not'. This ends Hansel's effective leadership, and for three days, the time of the moon's disappearance, Jonah in the whale and Christ in hell, things get darker than ever before. Once consciousness is unable to operate, however, as in all fairy tales, the unconscious is free to surprise us with its magic, and into this gap, this desperate need for help or else they would surely perish, comes ‘a beautiful little snow-white bird sitting on a branch, which sang so sweetly that they stopped still and listened to it'. Like Orpheus, the song enchants them, end they are distracted from their hunger and their longing for a way out of the forest - their own sense of what help is needed - and when the song is finished the bird flies in front of them and leads them directly to the witch. It is obvious that the bird does not belong to the witch even though it perches on the roof of the house she has made to lure them inside, so here we see a deeper impulse in the story.

[W]hen the snow-white bird brings the children to the witch, and obliges them to confront irrevocably that which they would have avoided had they known, we can see at work the fundamental directing agency of the Self. For the superior wisdom of the Self brings together the fantasy and the reality of the mother in the children, given in the image of the fantastic house of food on the outside and the child-eating real old woman on the inside; which is to say that the Self brings together the superficial conscious attitude adopted to the deprivations suffered from the mother - that it didn't really matter - and the interior unconscious feeling - possibly, that it hurt so much it's impossible to break the spell and get away from her. For what is a witch to a child except a figure whose power is so absolute, so all-containing, that escape is unthinkable? And when the imagination fails then the spell is cast.

What is the meaning of this psychologically? Two comments of Jung are particularly relevant here: ‘A complex can be really overcome only if it is lived out to the full. In other words, if we are to develop further we have to draw to us and drink down to the very dregs what, because of our complexes, we have held at a distance' (IX, i, 99). Also, ‘A neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering' (XI, 75). So the children must go inside the sweet-tasting house and fully experience the evil of the witch within. They must suffer emotionally to the extent of imagining being boiled alive, roasted and consumed in what they had tried to avoid feeling too deeply because it hurt. Fire is traditionally a symbol of the heating up of feeling, the intensification and concentration of the whole being so that the inessential is burnt away and only the essence remains. The alchemists insisted that the fire be kept forever burning beneath the retort lest the heart falter and become distracted.

One of the things that strikes me about the above is how the mind helps us deal with things. It's the mind that schemes and helps us avoid being truly thrown "to the wolves." Of course, the problem is that Hansel - the mind - can only bring us back to the problem, never lead the way forward. For that we need the white bird, the symbol of the Self. It's only when we follow the bird that we finally break free of the endless cycle of suffering. Of course, originally it's to more intense suffering, but it's our legitimate suffering. Unlike the neuroses that we escape to - and are trapped in - when we try to avoid our problem, this suffering is ours. It belongs to us, as ugly and as horrible as it is.

Now that the witch can be seen for what she is, what can she tell us about the way the negative mother complex works? The story says that ‘witches have red eyes, and cannot see far, but, like beasts, they have a keen sense of smell, and know when human beings pass by'. This suggests that the complex acts relatively blindly, automatically, crudely, without differentiation and can be discerned whenever the person ‘takes things literally', recalling the literal imagination of the step-mother, who could not ‘see through' Hansel's strategy, supposing each time he was mistaking what he said he saw for the morning sun glittering on the chimney. On the other hand, she can smell like a hunting animal, which suggests her power is in the unconscious which is where she must be faced. On the surface, though, she is ‘apparently friendly', and her house likewise is a temptation to overlook what it contains, to take it literally for what it pretends to be, which is what the children do. They respond to it as though under a spell; they don't ask questions - whose house is it, will they miss the roof? Even when a shrill voice calls out from inside ‘who's nibbling my house?' the children answer: "Tis Heaven's own child, The tempest wild', and go on eating ‘without putting themselves about'. Because of their great hunger she gets them in her power, the extreme longing to be loved creates the dependence.

However, once Hansel and Grettel see the woman to be a witch, their relation to each other and to the problem change places. Hansel, as the carrier of the more conscious approach of the self, is locked up in the stable, and it is up to Grettel, the feeling powers hitherto dormant in the self, to take the active role. At first, like Cinderella, she has to serve the witch, is held in thrall to her, called a lazybones and starved of anything but crabshells, while Hansel, the imprisoned leader, is to fatten up to be eaten. Perhaps this is the testing time that is so difficult to predict. Who will win.

The tale tells us that trickery wins, that the trickster archetype is what is needed here. Both Hansel and Grettel play the witch's game, only they play it better than she does. Hansel pretends that he is thinner than he is, knowing she wants to fatten him, and holding out a bone instead of his finger, gains them time. Grettel pretends she is as helpless as she used to be - ‘I don't know how to do it; how do I get and shoves the witch in the oven instead of herself. That Grettel does to the witch exactly what the witch would have done to her may suggest that feeling must accept some identification with the dark aspect of the mother imago personified in the witch, maybe in the form that it is a greed for life's inexhaustible possibilities that contributes to the fear that they may not manifest themselves... At any rate, with the witch and Grettel before the open oven, ‘from which fiery flames were already issuing', it is not the time for moral deliberations, and we cannot but think that Grettel acts spontaneously rightly. But where does this usually weeping girl get her strength from? It seems from a combination of awareness and intensity of feeling. We are told that ‘Grettel perceived the witch's intention', and it is perhaps this moment of awareness that transfers the power of the witch to Grettel by releasing the energy trapped in her fear. At the point of immanent death she gathers enough strength, rebellion and even ferocity of feeling to say No to being devoured and this tips the balance and the negative complex is, as it were, burnt up. As with the stepmother, the witch's literal reaction to Grettel's pretense is no match for the dual perspective of awareness. Perhaps what this means is that the person trying to deal with the ‘witch' in himself or herself, since, while the witch may play a different role in the male and female psychology, there is a level at which the need for freedom from this complex is the same for both), must somehow trick the witch within, that is, withhold the habitual, automatic reaction in order to allow the feeling to deepen to an intensity that gets its power to respond from a hidden, previously submerged level of the psyche. As the trouble with this complex is that the instincts themselves have become distorted, it would seem necessary to, as it were, distort the distortion, do what feels wrong, to reach that last instinct of survival common to all animals when even a zebra will fight a lion to protect her young. It may be that in human animals this instinct has its parallel in the instinct of individuation.

Grettel flies straight to Hansel, crying: ‘Hansel, we are free; the old witch is dead', and we are told that ‘Hansel sprang like a bird out of a cage when the door is opened', a wonderful image of ‘the release of the dove'. Now appears the treasure of the Self, the pearls and precious stones disclosed in the other rooms of the house which they are free to explore once the fear has gone. Here are the jewels of the life renewed - joy, fearlessness, purpose, affection all that immersion in the waters of life makes possible. Leaving the ‘witch's wood' they come to a big lake with no bridge or ferry-boat, but just a white duck swimming in the water. The ‘crossing of the return threshold' is the hero's last trial in the hero myth (Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 210-243), in which he is set the task of reconciling the truths won in the inner world with the actions he undertakes in the outer, public world. Here, some period of adjustment or some effort at translation is obviously indicated in the absence of any predictable way to cross the water to find the familiar part of the wood they came from. It is significant that at this point Hansel is the one who decides they can't get over because there is no bridge, and Grettel who sees the white duck and asks her help. The renewed feeling of the self can now for the first time exercise power for the care of life, for Grettel, sensitive to the duck's needs as well as their own, overrules her brother: "No", she answers, in total contrast to her submissiveness at the beginning of the tale, "we should be too heavy a load for the duck: she shall carry us across separately". The logos and eros of brother and sister are now in harmony with each other, such that each takes the lead when it is appropriate, and thus the original imbalance in the family is redeemed. Implicitly the story says that the killing of the witch is the death of the step-mother, for when the children run to ‘their father's house' and fall upon his neck, we are told simply: ‘but the woman had died'.

The restoration of the nourishing and healing aspect of the Mother archetype is shown in the emergence of the big lake with the bird now swimming upon it, an image of unity between nature and spirit which puts the duck, as Hermetic ferry-bird, in loving service. For the duck, white again as was the snow-white bird who led them deep into the unconscious, here ‘returns', in touch with the newly discovered waters of life to lead them back again. The treasure of the witch vanquished will buy them food to withstand any hardship, and so they are released from complete dependence on the Great Mother. But nothing is heard of the former famine in the land, and it is as though the confrontation with the reality of the bad personal mother which frees them from the negative mother complex within, activates at the same time the potency of the good mother archetype, so that from now on life may be trusted:

'Thus all their troubles were ended, and they lived happily ever after'.

http://www.julescashford.eu/articles/


Ok, I'm kind of stuck here. Everything up to the examination of Gretel shoving the witch into the oven makes sense to me. Part of it is that I'm still pretty early in the process (basically at the point where I'm exploring the nature of the witch), but part of it is that this explanation doesn't resonate with me. This is just speculation, but my feeling is that Gretel pushing the witch into her own fire represents "burning" the witch - the hunger and desire - in it's own "fire." In other words, cooking in one's own juices. This is, in fact, the dragon's fire that I wrote about in an earlier post on snake symbolism:

[It] is hard to accept: the fire has to burn the fire, one just has to burn in the emotion till the fire dies down and becomes balanced. That is something which unfortunately cannot be evaded. The burning of the fire, of the emotion, cannot be tricked out of one’s system; there is no recipe for getting rid of it, it has to be endured. The fire has to burn until the last unclean element has been consumed, which is what all alchemical texts say in different variations and we have not found any other way either. It cannot be hindered but only suffered till what is mortal or corruptible, or, as our text says so beautifully, till the corruptible humidity, the unconsciousness, has been burnt up. That is the meaning, it is the acceptance of suffering.

(Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy.)

So, the way I'd interpret it is that Eros (Gretel) draws us to those situations in which we have to cook in our juices. While our mind may tell us to stay safe, our heart keeps dragging us into just those situations where the witch is tossed into her own fire. Again, early days but this seems to be the more likely interpretation of the fairy tale. At least for me.

... *dammit*



Edit: 7/31/12

Some further thoughts (I expect these to keep coming for a while):

The house is a spun sugar fantasy of a relationship. It's not a real house, it's a fantastical house. When we've been driven from "home" (nurturing) by a mother who cannot give us the mother-love we need, we end up lost in the woods. And what we come upon is this faux house; it's not only not a real house, it's pure temptation. It's everything we thought we wanted, we are fed after we've starved for years (the years of famine.) But inside the house is the witch, the demonic caricature of the murderous stepmother. Something else to consider is that it's the Self itself that brings us to this deadly situation, because this is exactly what we need in order to truly resolve the problem at home. It's in the witch's house itself that the treasures of the Self reside.

Another thing is Gretel; this whole experience with the evil stepmother makes her completely helpless. When we are denied this mother-love our feelings can't function; we feel like we can't let ourselves feel, like it's all too much for us, leading us to rely on logic and reason. This can keep us out of trouble for a while but by itself it's incapable of finding a way out of the situation. The problem is that Gretel - our feelings - can't find her power until we're actually in the witch's house, i.e. the middle of our tumultuous emotional drama.

What does this mean? Is it that being in the situation with the witch puts the mind under lock and key forces us to rely on our feelings? Or is it that being in this situation allows us to bring some of the witch into us (Gretel doing to the witch what the witch had planned to do to her)? In either case the empowerment of feeling is part of the healing process as Gretel becomes more active, until at the end she tells Hansel they can't both ride on the white duck.

Gretel, as the female child, is the renewal of the feminine instincts. In the stepmother and the witch, and the presence of the famine in the land, the current female instincts (emotion, instinct) are wrong, turning them into the opposite of the nurturing mother into the destroyer. But, as with many stories of "evil" older women, their actions instigate the confrontation and change needed for renewal. The white dove is a symbol of the Goddess, and the white duck at the end is also female; with one hand the Mother Goddess drives us to wholeness with her terrifying side, and with the other she lures us to the same with her angelic side. All of this is in the service of pushing the young feminine, represented by Gretel, into her own power.

This reminds me of significant dreams I've had about the young girl in me (breaking and entering , the girl with long white hair) - is she the Gretel in me? The tender, connected emotional part? The part that the tough, intellectual surface me has always protected, the way Hansel protected Gretel? This seems to be the case, but I'm still not quite certain what she needs to do now. I know that I've been in the witch's house with this thing with G that I've been going through (the sugar spun fantasy of love with the raging, hungry witch inside.) What exactly is that Gretel's supposed to be doing?

Hansel has been jailed. Gretel is suffering (the whole thing with G is the pain of her Cindarella suffering - loving and loving, but with no reward.) But what is the thing with tricking the witch with the bone, and with Gretel pushing her into her own oven? How can I empower my inner Gretel to find her power? From my dream I've started by rescueing the trapped little animal, but later the girl was blind (a weakness) and she ran away. Do I need to keep my emotions present - keep Gretel from running away - when all I want to do is stop feeling for him? I need to ponder this some more...



Edit #2:

Had some futher realizations, specifically about the symbolism of burning the witch.

Animus/anima and their function

Yes, I am still trying to work on some more snake symbolism posts (yes I am) but it is taking for-freaking-ever unfortunately... there is just so much! In the meantime, I've had a bit of a random musing about the animus/anima and Jung's understanding of their chracteristics. Jung describes the anima as a man's feelings and the animus as a woman's thinking, but when I think about my own animus, he's definitely not my thinking. I think pretty damn well, actually. And he's also not my spirituality. I have no problems there all on my own. Where I do have problems is in my feeling and sensation functions, and this is where my animus seems to like to spend his time. Who is my animus? What is he like? Well, he's exactly what I'm not... i.e. not intellectual, but rather with a calm, confident emotional stability... Or when he's acting up, a raging, out of control hurricane of a beast.

This leads me to believe that the animus/anima is actually of our opposite function. Since most women Jung knew seemed to be mostly of the feeling function and most men of the thinking, Jung formulated his theory that a woman's animus is thinking and a man's anima is feeling, but I'm leaning more towards our anima/us just being our opposite. Its still early days, and I don't have a lot of evidence to back this up, but this is the direction I'm leaning towards.

Grey wings and red

[T]he alchemical philosophers conceive their aqua nostra to be ignis (fire). The source  means not only the flow of life but its warmth, indeed its heat, the secret of passion, whose synonyms are always fiery. The all-dissolving aqua nostra is an essential ingredient in the production of the lapis. But the source is underground and therefore the way leads underneath; only down below can we find the fiery source of life.

(C.G. Jung, Dreams, p. 194)


It's cool how the universe sends exactly what you happen to be thinking about, when you're thinking about it. I'm still thinking about the dream about the man with grey wings and everything that brought up, so of course I keep finding stuff related to that. I was trying to finally finish Jung's Dreams and I kept running into the topic.

The dream about the Man with Grey Wings is about G. The symbolism of the color grey suits him pretty much to a T, both the problems he's having as well as the strengths that are his:

[S]ecurity, reliability, intelligence, staid, modesty, maturity, conservative, old age, sadness, and boring.

[T]imeless, practical, and solid... [C]an mix well with any color. Although well liked and often worn, people rarely name gray as a favorite color possibly because Gray also is associated with loss or depression.

Gray is the color of sorrow. People who favor gray can be the lone wolf type or narrow-minded. Gray with more silver in it can be a very active color.

Native Americans associate gray with friendship. Gray is the symbol for security, maturity and dependability. It connotes responsibility and conservative practicality.

Gray is the true neutral color. Its energy imparts void, emptiness, lack of movement, emotion, warmth and identifying characteristics. Because of this, gray can be restful. It has a detached and isolated feeling. Gray can have a cooling effect when placed next to other more vibrant colors. It has a stabilizing effect, making vibrant colors stand out while muting their vibration

This is pretty much a perfect description of G, and even as I was interpreting the dream I realized that my red wings had to have something to do with this. Below are what the color red symbolizes, from the same websites:

Red can symbolize many things; from blood, to love, to infatuation. For example, red can symbolize excitement, energy, speed, strength, danger, passion, and aggression. According to Henry Dreyfus, it is popularly felt that red, the color of blood and fire, represents life and vitality... Red is also looked upon as a sensual color, and can be associated with man's most profound urges and impulses.

Red is the warmest of all colors... Red is associated with fiery heat and warmth. It can also mean danger (burning). Red is the color of blood, and as such has strong symbolism as life and vitality. It brings focus to the essence of life and living with emphasis on survival. Red is also the color of passion and lust.

Put some red in your life when you want:
increased enthusiasm and interest
more energy
action and confidence to go after your dreams
protection from fears and anxieties

I can't help thinking about the Union of Unreconcilables and how central this difficult union is to my current tasks, in particular in regards to my relationship issues with G. Even in the description of the color grey they talk about how these two opposite colors have the ability to moderate each other. At the same time, it makes it obvious why our dynamic is as annoying as it is, with me pursuing (and scaring the bejeesus out of  him) and him being scared and running away. Aside from the fact that people who are focused on this world, as sensation types like him are, are pretty much completely terrified of the "other world" (which is also precisely what he needs from me), there's the fact that as the Grey in this pair, he's the one who's careful and fearful. And I'm the one who's frightening. Maybe I need my Mantis to help me keep this in mind and not take things so personally.

Another thing that's helping put things into perspective is in remembering the dream about The Man with Gray Wings is that fact that it's not me he's necessarily running away from, it's the shouting man in the water; i.e., himself. All I'm doing is reassuring him. But I really do feel this is something he needs, especially since he's living the more negative aspects of the Grey than the positive ones right now. Below is another thing that came up, which explores the relation of Dionysian passion with Hades (which is what G is):

The Dionysian element has to do with emotions and affects which have found no suitable religious outlets in the predominantly Apollonian cult and ethos of Christianity. The medieval carnivals and jeux de paume in the Church were abolished relatively early; consequently the carnival became secularized and with it divine intoxication vanished from the sacred precincts. Mourning, earnestness, severity, and well-tempered spiritual joy remained... "But Hades is the same Dionysos in whose honour they go mad and keep the feast of the wine-vat."

(1, p. 217)

I'm still not 100% sure of what it is that I'm supposed to be doing but at least the situation is becoming much clearer, especially compared to when I first got hexagram 38, Estrangement and I had absolutely no idea what that had to do with anything. Now at least I know what it has to do with... now I just need to figure out what it is that I need to do. I think it's to stay with it, but with a certain Mantis-like detachment and larger vision.



References

1.   Jung, C.G., Dreams.

http://www.three-musketeers.net/mike/colors.html#red
http://www.squidoo.com/colorexpert#module1541678
http://crystal-cure.com/red.html

"The Union of Irreconcilables"

Recently, I got hexagram 38 ("Estrangement") when asking about what the heck is going on with me and G. It was the same old story, but what I ended up getting was a puzzle to say the least: the image of fire over a lake, each one pulling in opposite directions. I had no idea how it applied to my situation: Did it mean us? Or was it something I was supposed to do?

As usual I did the best I could with understanding the meaning and then went on with my life... and as usual, when I don't really understand something, something else comes up and sheds light on the issue.


Boxing the sheep

To begin with, I want to go back to von Franz and her exploration of the puer/puella; specifically, with their difficulty in standing tension. The following refers to Antoine de Saint Exupéry's The Little Prince - the scene von Franz is referring to is the one where Saint Exupéry first meets the little prince and tries to draw a sheep at the prince's request. Three different drawings are rejected for one reason or the other, and finally Saint Exupéry just draws a box and tells him the sheep is in the box.

Placing the sheep in the box is not a gesture of escape; rather, it springs from what one might call a certain vital strength in order to be able to stand a conflict. Saint Exupéry wants to get back to work on his engine. Instead of letting him quickly draw a sheep, the star prince bothers him, saying this drawing is not right, not this, nor this, so that Saint Exupéry is torn between the engine and the child, whose importance he completely realizes, and who, in a typically childlike way, bothers him. He feels sure that even if he draws another sheep it won't be right, or there will be a lot of questions, and in reality there is the urgent situation of getting his engine in order. If you take that symbolically, it means a conflict between the demands of the outer and the inner life, which establishes a tremendous tension. How can you comply with the demands of outer reality, which reason tells you is right, and those of the inner life at the same time? The difficulty is that the demands of the inner life need time. You cannot do active imagination for five minutes and then go off and do other things! If, for instance, one is in analysis, dreams have to be written down. This may mean two hours' work to just write them down, which is only the beginning, for one has not yet done any work. One should also meditate on them. It is a full-time job, but very often there are also the urgent necessities of outer life. This is one of the worst and most difficult tensions to stand - to be capable as far as possible of giving each claim what it needs.

(von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus, pages 45-46)

This is yet another feature of the puer/puella, but I didn't make the connection between the reading and this section until I read the following from Jung. Here too was a description of the difficulty in standing the tension between the worlds of the conscious and the unconscious, the demands of our inner and outer lives. Jung goes into more detail about what the conflict between the two consists of, not just the time demands but the radically different worldviews of the two worlds; the rational, ordered world of the conscious and the irrational world of the unconscious. The situation comes up specifically during the circumambulatio, the psychological circling around a central area of focus:

[I]f the life-mass is to be transformed a circumambulatio is necessary, i.e., exclusive concentration on the centre, the place of creative change. During this process one is "bitten" by animals; in other words, we have to expose ourselves to the animal impulses of the unconscious without identifying with them and without "running away"; for flight from the unconscious would defeat the purpose of the whole proceeding. We must hold our ground, which means here that the process initiated by the dreamer's self-observation must be experienced in all its ramifications and then articulated with consciousness to the best of his understanding. This often entails an almost unbearable tension because of the utter incommensurability between conscious life and the unconscious process, which can be experienced only in the innermost soul and cannot touch the visible surface of life at any point. The principle of conscious life is: "Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu." ("Nothing is in the understanding that was not earlier in the senses.") But the principle of the unconscious is the autonomy of the psyche itself, reflecting in the play of its images not in the world but itself, even though it utilizes the illustrative possibilities offered by the sensible world in order to make its images clear. The sensory datum, however, is not the causa efficiens of this; rather, it is autonomously selected and exploited by the psyche, with the result that the rationality of the cosmos is constantly being violated in the most distressing manner. But the sensible world has an equally devastating effect on the deeper psychic processes when it breaks into them as a causa efficiens. If reason is not to be outraged on the one hand and the creative play of images not violently suppresed on the other, a circumspect and farsighted synthetic procedure is required in order to accomplish the paradoxical union of irreconcilables. Hence the alchemical parallels in our dreams.

(Jung, C.G., Dreams, pages 219-222)


The moral dimensions of staying

Standing the tension has elements of both in-born strength or weakness, as well as the moral choice we all have to make. In the section below, von Franz emphasizes the "nature" side of the "nature vs. nurture" equation, while Jung, on the other hand, points to the importance of making a choice and actively coming to terms with the challenge. In fact, it is on becoming aware of one's personal responsibility that it becomes a moral choice.

The weak personality - and I don't mean "weak" as a moral criticism - would imply not being born physically strong. The weak personality reacts with a short-cut response, making a definite decision to do the one and put the other aside. Here, there is an incapacity for standing the tension beyond a certain point. A weak personality has an impatient reaction, whereas a strong personality can continue in the tension for longer. In this case, one sees that Saint Exupéry, after the third attempt to draw the sheep, gives up and makes a short-cut solution in order to get back to his engine. This is an indication of a weakness that shows in certain other features; for instance, the star prince's planet is very tiny, he himself is very delicate, or, to take the first dream, the hero does not come out of the devouring snake; i.e., the mother. Also, if you look at photographs of Saint Exupéry, you will see that he has a very strange "split" face: the lower part of it is like that of a boy of seven, the expression of the mouth is completely immature; it is a naive, little child's mouth, and there is a thin little chin, whereas the upper part of the face gives the impression of a very intelligent and mature man. Something is weak and just like a child; therefore, there are certain tensions which he cannot stand.

(von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus, pages 45-46)

The focusing of attention on the centre demanded in this dream and the warning about "running away" have clear parallels in the opus alchymicum: the need to concentrate on the work and to meditate upon it is stressed again and again. The tendency to run away, however, is attributed not to the operator but to the transforming substance... It did not occur to these philosophers that they were chasing a projection, and that the more they attributed to the substance the further away they were getting from the psychological source of their expectations. From the difference between the material in this dream and its medieval predecessors we can measure the psychological advance: the running away is now clearly apparent as a charcteristic of the dreamer, i.e., it is no longer projected into an unknown substance. Running away thus becomes a moral question [emphasis mine].

(Jung, C.G., Dreams, pages 219-222)

The question here is: Do we really believe we are given exactly what we need? Inherent "weakness" itself is part of our challenge. In those further from the unconscious - i.e., those who are more comfortable in the outer world than the inner - the challenge is to find the strength to withstand the terrifying incursions of the unconscious into one's safe, rational life. On the other hand for the puer or the puella, who lives close to the unconscious, the challenge is to work, to stick it out in in the deadly boring, everyday dreary reality which is so unbearably painful. But the conflict is ultimately the same; the clash between the outer and inner worlds, the conscious and the unconscious.

The two are shadow sides of each other. The extrovert or sensation type is focused on this world. They are willing to work hard to achieve perfection; and yet, because of their pathological aversion to doing anything which is less than perfect, they often find themselves impotent and incapable of achieving anything at all. Anything they do would be imperfect so they do nothing at all. This is G's problem. The introvert or the intuitive, on the other hand, because they can't stand the tension of staying with a thing until it's done well will eventually throw something haphazard together but this is usually after an extended period of doing a whole lot of nothing. So in the end both fail to overcome the tension.

Both G and I have to stand this tension. Also, as a puella, I have to stand the specific tension of staying with unpleasant work. It can be argued that, whether we are aware of the choice or not, we have a moral obligation to make the choice - that the refusal to see the choice is itself a choice. And that, regardless of our personal strength or weakness, in every situation we are confronted with, the choice is always present.


Fire over the lake

"The 'union of irreconcilables:' marriage of water and fire. The two figures each have four hands to symbolize their many different capabilities."

This was the image that Jung chose to illustrate the section I quoted; and it was this picture that got my attention. As soon as I saw it I knew it exactly described hexagram 38. This is what happens when we can stand the tension of opposition. It's after reading all of Jung and von Franz's exploration of what it means to withstand the tension, what it is, what it's for, how to do it, and the necessity to do so that the I-ching reading's mysterious pronouncements begin to make sense:

Hardly have conscious and unconscious touched when they fly asunder on account of their mutual antagonism. Hence, right at the beginning of the dream, the snakes that are making off in opposite directions have to be removed; i.e., the conflict between conscious and unconscious is at once resolutely stopped and the conscious mind is forced to stand the tension by means of the circumambulatio. The magic circle thus traced will also prevent the unconscious from breaking out again, for such an eruption would be equivalent to psychosis. "Nonnuli perierunt in opere nostro": "Not a few have perished in our work," we can say with the author of the Rosarium. The dream shows that the difficult operation of thinking in pradoxes - a feat possible only by the superior intellect - has succeeded. The snakes no longer run away but settle themselves in the four corners, and in the process of transformation or integration sets to work. The "transfiguration" and illumination, the conscious recognition of the centre, has been attained, or at least anticipated, in the dream. This potential achievement - if it can be maintained, i.e., if the conscious mind does not lose touch with the centre again - means a renewal of personality.

(Jung, C.G., Dreams, pages 219-222)

Fire above, lake below.
Amid fellowship, the superior person retains their individuality.

Fire moves upward, water seeps down: When they are quiescent, their movements can unite; when they are in motion, they draw farther and farther apart. But since this movement is a natural one, it comes itself to a turning point when it has reached an extreme.

Usually opposition is an obstruction, but it can also be a polarity: Heaven and earth, spirit and nature, man and woman. When reconciled these bring about the creation of new life. Heaven and earth are opposites, but their action is concerted. Man and woman are opposites, but they strive for union. All beings stand in opposition to one another: what they do takes on order thereby. Great indeed is the effect of the time of opposition.

Opposition is the natural prerequisite of union. As a result of opposition, a need to bridge arises. In the same way, it is the differences between things that enables us to differentiate them clearly, and therefore classify them. This is the effect of opposition, a phase that must be transcended.

Regardless of co-mingling, they will always preserve their individuality. Fire and the lake tend to combat each other, creating opposition, while their attributes lead to it's being overcome. The joyousness of the lake is fellowship, and the clarity of fire is clearly recognizable individuality. The reason the two tend to opposition is that the eldest, whose authority would maintain order, is absent.

(Hexagram 38: Estrangement)

Circling and stillness are the same thing, and they both are what Jung and von Franz mean when they talk about standing the tension. The focus must be keps on the center, where the change is taking place. "We must hold our ground, which means here that the process initiated by the dreamer's self-observation must be experienced in all its ramifications and then articulated with consciousness to the best of his understanding."

"Co-mingling" is the tension of bringing the inner and outer worlds together. Even when they are together they will always be different; it is their difference that creates the tension. However, they carry within them the very attributes needed to transcending the tension: the joy and fellowship of the heart, along with the clarity and ability to discriminate differences of the mind. The reason heart and mind, body and soul, have problems is because Spirit is missing.

Right now, I feel like Hexagram 38 is mostly about me, but some of it is about me and G: G is the outer world. I'm the inner. His movement to me is characterized by coming close then backing off; this is the referred movement of opposites to one another (and followed by repulsion, with attraction once again.) The thing is, G isn't standing the tension. He just let's himself by controlled by his fear and desire. The question is: Am I? Am I doing the same? Or am I doing the difficult work that needs to be done... not moving and standing the opposite pulls?

Is this why I got this when I asked about me and G? Because it's what we need to do in regards to each other; and that shows what we are (or aren't) doing? Do I need to be doing this? I feel like I've moved on from this relationship... Maybe it's because, despite having "stood the tension" and stayed with all the painful feelings, he's still failing to do the same. But, even if it's time for me to move on, this question will still be a part of my challenge. I don't think any of us ever grow past it. Also, it talks about opposition bringing about the need to bridge the differences, to transcend the diferences; this is necessary to bring about the creation of new life. So maybe it is about is... God, I still do not know! I feel like the more I understand about this the more I don't understand it!


I'm having a hard time finishing this post. Everything except for the conclusion came so easily, and this last part is like pulling teeth, so I just banged it out, trying to get out all the thoughts that have been circling in my head. The conclusions are many, but one that stands out is that I'm to stay in the tension. Whether that means in this relationship or simply in life I don't know. What I do know is that this isn't finished yet. I'm sure there will be more to come on this topic in the future!

Race and ethnicity in dreams

A lot of my dreams have included people of different ethnic groups and I've puzzled over what these mean. Asia, particularly Japan, frequently shows up, both as people and as objects, and I'm starting to think that, being an American of Japanese ancestry, it means the unconscious realm; the mysterious, foreign land but also something vaguely familiar. It's as if it's calling me home, back to that far-away land. It's of the "foreign" spirit realm but it's also my true home. This would be different, of course, for people who have no relationship to Japan; probably for them, it's just a foreign country as India or China are for me. In my own dreams, India is more foreign as in pure foreign; exotic, and with no feeling of "home." China, which has also occasionally shown up in my dreams, is halfway in between India and Japan; foreign but with a tinge of the familiar.

The other group that shows up a lot in my dream, almost as much as Japan, is black people (they seem to be African American black people, not black African people) and I've often puzzled over what they mean in my unconscious. Being progressive, black people carry the following conscious meanings for me: maybe rough around the edges but honest; real; although often pushed down, never give up. But our unconscious ideas about things often differ from our conscious. Last night, as I was re-listening to Marie-Louise von Franz's The Way of the Dream, this caught my attention:

It was a hot summer's day, and I was walking with a gorgeous black woman through rolling green country along the side of a jungle. We'd known each other for a long time, and I called her my goddess. It was my pet name for her.

Suddenly she stopped and said, "I have a problem." I didn't understand what she meant, but instead of telling me with words she pulled down the strap of her dress and bared her shoulder. Her black skin on the top of her shoulder was peeling where it had been exposed to the sun, and under the top skin, underneath the black, her skin was golden-white. She looked at me and said, "If I keep seeing you, it's going to happen all over my body. I've got to talk to my mother and get some advice from her about what to do..."

In the alchemical tradition, the transformation of the Shulamite, or the Queen of Sheba plays a tremendous role. One of the recurring fantasies of the alchemists was that the matter which they wanted to transform into gold was initially black. They compared it to a black woman who then takes off her skin or black garment and is transformed into pure gold. Notice that in this dream the woman's skin is golden white under the black.

The black garment represents a typical feature of the undeveloped inner anima figure. Just as we shall see that the animus in women is sometimes destructive and negative, the black anima is relatively negative in a man. The black anima indicates that his whole capacity to love is mostly autoerotic. When a man has not developed his anima, his feminine side, he is generally very narcissistic. That's what a woman painfully feels when a man is meowing under her window like a tomcat. He really loves his own fantasy. He loves his own being in love, but that's a long way from learning to love her and not merely enjoying his own being in love. And often in literature, a young man, when he first discovers the experience of love, is completely autoerotic. It is a fantasy out of which, through a painful development, he has to learn to love the woman, not as the object of his romantic fantasies, but as a human partner.

Just as in a man his anima is originally narcissistic and autoerotic, in women our feelings of "love" are also initially narcissistic and ultimately autoerotic: the partner is basically just a living, breathing blow up doll, a convenient hook for our projection. An example is when women "fall in love" with a famous figure, as many girls and women have done with the characters in Twilight. While projection can be a useful way seducing one into the hard work of building an actual relationship with the actual person it is by it's nature itself only a relationship with yourself: you project a part of yourself onto the recipient and then proceed to fall in love with that part of yourself. And just like men, we also project our bright shadow and/or our animus and/or our Self onto our "beloved" instead of having a human relationship with the human right in front of us.

All the same, I do feel as if some amount of projection is a necessary part of falling in love. I'm not sure but it seems to be the reason why we fall in love with some people but not others. Some questions to think about are how thick and obscuring the projection is, and whether or not there's a significant part of the beloved that matches our projection or if it's just pure fantasy, but in any case, the ultimate goal is to relate to the human being underneath all the projections.

There are also some further questions: occasionally, while interpreting fairy tales or dreams, von Franz talks about the animus of the anima, or vice versa; i.e. the evil troll who has bewitched the princess into murdering all of her husbands. Who is this animus? Or, in the case of women's psychology, who is this primitive anima of a woman's animus? Is it even the anima of the animus? If it is, is it actually an aspect of the Self? I've had some indications that suggest that that's exactly who this figure is; the black women appearing in my dream, and at the same time I dream of a mutilated female figure who must be confronted and saved. The readings referring to the coming of a Queen when I ask about love and romance. It's as if through our travails with love, we heal the anima behind our animus, which is really the part of the Goddess who needs healing and wholeness. Once She is made whole we ourselves become whole. It also suggests that the way to heal the part of our Self that is mutilated is by working through love issues, and also that it's only when we heal this wound that we can truly love another person; it's only when the Goddess is whole that her servant, the animus, becomes healthy and strong.

There's still more to explore in this subject, but this is a good start.

Sometimes it's good to be a sheep

More stuff coming up about the puella and... drumroll please... my "romance" with G is a part of it. As are my work issues... it's the whole trifecta enchilada of my current concerns! It's not surprising but it is pretty cool when things come together this way. For a while I've been working mostly on these areas and, although there was a sense of them being connected, that connection has been just made clear.

I was re-reading von Franz's Puer Aeternus (expect more stuff on this book) and came across the following:

It is the sheep mentality, the crowd-man, which drives them into military service, but this collective adaptation can be - and is sometimes temporarily - a help to pull away... it is the moment to pull away from the mother.

You can say that all kinds of very humble, unindividualistic, collective adaptations help against the mother complex; namely, as I mentioned before, doing one's work, going to military service, trying to behave like everybody else, not having that kind of fancied invdividuality which is typical for the mother-complex man - and giving up the idea of being somebody special, someone who does not need to make all such low kinds of adaptations - for that is a poison of the mother complex. Therefore, to give that up and to accept being just somebody or nobody, in the crowd, is to a certain extent a cure, although only a temporary one and not the whole cure. Still, it is the first step in pulling away from the mother.

I read this just today, after asking the I-ching if I would ever have a love relationship last night and getting the following in the reading reading:

One light line is in the place of the Queen, the other her minister. These two gather all of the dark principle together. "Crowd" and "joyousness" indicate the basis of the gathering together, and the two nuclear trigrams "standing still" and "exerting influence" also indicate gathering together.

Only collective moral force can unite the world - such times will leave great achievements behind. This is the significance of the great offerings that are made: there is a need for great deeds in the time of gathering together.

The mass is devoted and at the same time joyous. In order to gather people together, the ruler needs joyousness, and the people devotion.

When I first threw the reading I had no idea what the significance of "crowd" was. Then I read the part in von Franz about the importance of being like a sheep, or a "crowd person" was to pull away from the mother complex, the feeling of being special which is actually so common and actually not special at all, just a part of the puella neurosis. And of course what's going on here at work immediately came up - I've always felt separate from all the other "peons" who took this job as a career or something silly like that. But not me, I'm too special! I have a special destiny! Not like all the rest of my co-workers... except for the cool ones, like the musicians and writers who were just doing this to pay the rent. Those people I could identify with, but not the regular 9-5ers.

Well, apparently I need to be a peon!

It's just this kind of "I'm too special to effing live" attitude that has to go. Von Franz goes on to say that you can't stay in the sheep mentality, but by giving up the false, neurotic idea of "specialness," and being carried away by the current of the group, the puella grows beyond that neurosis.

Looking back at hexagram 45, I'd have to say that being a 100% enthusiastic member of the crowd - taking my grubby, earthbound work seriously and being conscientious about it - along with working joyfully, is what I have to do now. That and devotion; devotion to my job, to my position in society, my family and my job. Devotion to doing my job, all my jobs, well; to not be sullen and resentful at having to crawl around in the dirt but to have an attitude of comradeship with my fellow dirt crawlers, to enthusiastically crawl around in the dirt to the very best of my ability. It's only by crawling around in the dirt that we puellas can fulfil the command of Heaven... that is, to fully come down into the Earth and to finally fully live our lives.

Rescuing Hades

Had a brainwave on the train today, I was thinking about G and I realized something. He's living (or needs to live) the myth of Hades and Sisyphus:

Zeus was enamored with the daughter of a river god and was romancing her in a wooded valley when her father started looking for her and ran into King Sisyphus who told him that Zeus had fallen in love with his daughter and was in the process of abducting her. The enraged father found them walking in the woods and, brandishing a large club, raced toward the unarmed Zeus (who had hung his thunderbolts in a nearby tree while he courted). The startled Zeus quickly turned himself into a rock, confusing the father, and this allowed Zeus time to retrieve his weapons and "shoot" him in the leg with a thunderbolt.

Even though he’d escaped, Zeus felt humiliated and was furious with the king and his big mouth! Zeus ordered Hades to capture and imprison the king and to administer the severest of punishments possible.

So Hades went to fetch Sisyphus. The king not only refused to go quietly but also tricked Hades into handcuffing himself, then kept Hades in captivity for over a month, walking him around the palace on a leash and making fun of him. Needless to say, the somber and dignified Hades was not at all amused!

Ares, the god of war, currently bored with the endless petty wars of the Greeks decided to rescue Hades and came to his assistance, threatening to decapitate Sisyphus if he didn’t release him and turn himself in as Hades’ prisoner.

The rescue was successful, but the wily Sisyphus had another trick up his sleeve. Once they had arrived in the Underworld, Sisyphus pleaded his case in front of the Queen, arguing that he could not be retain in the Underworld because he was not yet dead, nor had he ever paid the ferryman. Persephone allowed him to leave, but with instructions to return the next day, suitably dead and with a coin under his tongue to start his sentence.

Sisyphus laughed all the way home, thinking that there was no way that he would go back . . . but the next day Hermes showed up on his doorstep announcing that Fates had decreed that it was his time to die….and Hermes escorted him into the Underworld to face his fate.

Once they reached the Underworld, Hades’ Judges of the Dead pronounced his sentence -to push a heavy rock over the top of the mountain in Tartarus and each time the rocks rolls back (which it always did, of course) to start all over again. Hades added an extra touch and had the rock shaped just like the one Zeus had transformed himself into, just in case Sisyphus missed the point!

He's so stuck in his isolated world, only doing what he can do "perfectly," which means that he never does anything at all! But, even though this Capricorn/Saturn/Hades is an important part of him - and has, I'm sure, done a lot to help him - he's completely unbalanced. I know he also has an Ares/Aries side, which his Hades side keeps pushed down. One of the signs of this is the kind of women he's attracted to, like derby girl Suzy Hotrod - tough, passionate, lives loud and takes no prisoners. She's basically a female version of Ares, the part of himself that he runs away from (and whenver I try to talk to him about this he literally runs away.)

Ares part of the myth goes like this:

Ares, rarely went out of his way to come to the aid of his fellow Olympians. But once, bored with the endless petty wars of the Greeks, he decided to rescue Hades who was being held captive by King Sisyphus. Ares came to his assistance, threatening to decapitate Sisyphus if he didn’t release him and turn himself in as Hades’ prisoner. Trembling with fear, Sisyphus surrendered to Hades.

His Ares side has to rescue his Hades side. Maybe because it's bored? I don't know, but I do know that he's living this myth out.


Yesterday I read about Marie-Louise von Franz's relationship with physicist Wolfgang Pauli. She tried so hard to help him live the life his soul was directing him to but he ran away, too. In the end, he died that way. As she put it, "If you want me to sum up the relationship: I tried to pull him out and didn't succeed." It's sobering to see that it's possible to love someone and desperately try to help them and fail - it's possible to be as brilliant and strong as von Franz and fail - if the person you care for is too scared to go down the road that's calling him.

In the documentary The Way of the Dream von Franz talks about how women will sometimes try to protect themselves from the pain of relationships by not letting themselves fall in love. Well, that's what I'm getting to experience right now. It's hard enough to have to suffer for your own sake, but the grinding frustration of caring for someone but being completely helpless is almost intolerable! But we have to remember, as she said in the interview about Pauli, that to really love someone is the most healing thing you can do for them:

In a love relationship... you risk everything. You put yourself on a table, you stop the power game and the trying to dominate or conquer the other person. If you succeed in really loving the other person, if you really relate, then all sorts of miracles happen.

Hopefully, by staying with this, a miracle might happen.

From transference to the heirosgamos

"These are angels!" I called out "Yes," he replied, "that is you." I saw the gray curtain that separated the two angels, and the teacher explained, "That is the veil of illusion." It had lots of holes. I was deeply moved and shouted, "Oh, it's falling away, it's falling away," and I had the feeling that thousands of years that had been lived through in the half-conscious hope that it could be broken through were now fulfilled. I went to the angel who was "me" and saw a silver string reaching down from him into a very tiny creature that was also "me" in the realm of illusion. Another string reached down into a woman down there. It was Alberta. The two angels seemed identical and sexless, and they could "think together" in a kind of identicalness (that sometimes happened to me with Alberta in reality "down there'). And we thought, "Such a small part of our consciousness lives in these little creatures, and they worry about such little things. Poor little creatures!" And we saw that their union could not come about properly if the two little creatures did not fulfill their obligations to those near them rather than following their egoistic desires. And at the same time it was clear to us that it would be a sin against that "ultimate reality" (a sin against the Holy Ghost?) if we did not go on with the process of mutual striving for consciousness.

(from Psychotherapy, by Marie-Louise von Franz)



I seem to be smack dab in the middle of some serious Animus work (projections, transference, etc.), as will be obvious to anyone who's read the last few months of this blog, and this post is largely a continuation of the post about relationships I'd done a couple of months ago. In that post I explored how romantic attachments (or obsessions) are a part of the individuation process. This post is a really condensed overview of what I think that process looks like - I'll go explore the various aspects in later posts.

The hierosgamos, the sacred marriage of Goddess and God, is basically the symbol of ultimate individuation, the union of opposites. It's often associated with other images of individuation (like the Holy Grail) and I think it's the reason why we tend to be obsessed with romance in our society. We no longer fall in love with God (or Goddess); now, the literal relationship between men and women has become the sacred space where we meet the Other. And this can lead to some serious problems, as is obvious from the high divorce rates our marriages suffer from. But if our romantic relationships are a kind of vale of tears, it's also where we meet the Soul... if we're lucky. And if we work hard.

As usual I'm going to be borrowing heavily from Marie-Louise von Franz because, quite honestly, I couldn't really say it better than she has.


Transference

The anima is a kind of desire or a system of expectations that a man has in relation to a woman, an erotic-relationship fantasy. If outer expectations like ordinary sensual desire or schemes regarding money, power, and so on, get mixed up with it, everything is lost. Thus conscious recognition of the anima means loving the other for herself and for love's sake. "When I follow my love, then my love is fulfilled." Only for a man who pursues the anima for her own sake does she become Beatrice. For such a man she becomes a bridge to the transcendental realms. "Meditating, I followed the path of love," as Dante expresses it. But the anima is initially also to be found in a man's ambition, and thus she entangles him in guilt and error if he does not consciously recognize his lust for power. If a man is incapable of this, he finally ends up completely isolated in a state of possession

We could also apply this description to the animus, which is really a system of understanding.

For the animus what counts is insight or truth for truth's sake over and against any admixture of sensuality or power craving. Only a woman who loves the truth for its own sake can integrate the animus, and then he becomes, like the anima, a bridge to the Self, that is, to the knowledge of the Self. And when two people in a relationship with each other are on the path of a reciprocal individuation process, then the motif of the coniunctio of a suprapersonal couple is constallated. Jung pointed out in the citation given at the beginning that in the hierosgamos, it is not two egos that are face to face, but rather "everyone whose heart we touch." This strange multiplicity is very difficult to understand. It is as though in the "beyond" there exists only one divine couple, Shiva and Shakti, who are in eternal embrace, and the earthly human being participates in their coniunctio only as a "guest at the feast."

 (1, p. 251)


Transference is basically taking an unconscious image of an archetype and laying it over some new person. For example let's say your father was authoritarian. If you meet an older man who provides a convenient hook (by being strong willed or demanding, for example) then you react to him in a way that's out of proportion to anything he's actually done. Just the memory, possibly not even conscious, of this archetypal relationship infects your present relationship. This makes sense from a basic biological psychology perspective; all animals make emotional associations. This is an adaptive response that enables them to make instant decisions about things that might be harmful or helpful. But we humans take this even further.

There are 4 stages in the process from transference to the hierosgamos:

1. archaic identity (or "participation mystique")
2. mutual projections
3. personal relationship
4. fated togetherness in "eternity"

Archaic identity is an unconscious state in which we aren't even aware of being possessed by these images, we simply unquestioningly assume that they're real - there really is a ghost, that tree really is talking to me, gods and demons really do exist. This is why projections can be so useful; it's only when these unconscious parts of ourselves are projected onto another person that we can start to become aware of them, and then proceed with the difficult process of owning and withdrawing those projections.

In the second stage, at first we're not even aware that there's any projecting going on, we just think we're relating to the person as they are (i.e. we're "in love"). But this isn't love. It's a facsimile of love that "creates an unrealistic erotic attraction darkened by infantile demands and prejudices". (1, 238) For as long as the beloved doesn't do anything that violates our projection, everything is bliss. But sooner or later (usually sooner), we see them for the mere human beings they really are.

If, however, we can get beyond the stage of mutual projections and accept the other for the special and unique person they are, we can get to the stage of personal relationship. This is where we finally start to have a real relationship, and it's where the hard work really begins; the difficult questions of finding a moving balance between intimacy and distance, and staying present regardless of whatever emotional upheaval you're undergoing. And yet, it's also the gateway to the fourth and final stage, the hierosgamos.


The Heirosgamos

This brings us to the fourth aspect, which I have called a "fated togetherness in eternity," the real mysterium coniunctionis. This stage has to do with the experience of the Self, the inner wholeness that cannot be understood intellectually, but only through love. Jung writes: "This love is not transference and it is not ordinary friendship or sympathy. It is more primitive, more primeval and more spiritual than anything we can describe." In this realm, it is no longer two individuals relating with each other on the personal level, but the "many, including yourself and anybody whose heart you touch." There, "there is no distance, but immediate presence. It is an eternal secret..." In a certain sense, in the manifestation of this fourth aspect a return to the first aspect takes place, but on a higher, more conscious level. For that reason an inkling of this highest stage is already present in the first and brings about the depth of passion with which many try to cling to the stage of participation mystique and to fight off a conscious coming to terms with, and recognition of, the limited human reality.

 (1, p. 245)


This is the final stage (about which I'm just using my imagination, hence the even more liberal use of other people's quotes.)  Most relationships don't even get beyond the second stage because most people don't even realize they're projecting, let along do the hard work of owning and withdrawing their projections. But if they can get to the third stage, of personal relationship, and endure the uncertainty and maintain their presence with the other, they can occasionally touch upon the eternal relationship.

As in the third stage, the hierosgamos requires a moving balance, as it is "both more primitive and more spiritual than anything we are capable of describing. The king and queen [the spiritual couple], as well as the the animals [the instinctive couple], represent something completely transpersonal, like something that exists in the divine realm, beyond space and time. That is why the dream tells us that the royal couple are 'strangers to the world.' The human ego has to help them move in this concrete sphere. The dream beautifully depicts the intermediate position of the ego, which on the one hand imposes a certain spiritual discipline on the animals and on the other has to provide the royal couple with an element of earthly reality." (1, p. 247)

With the awareness and strength to withdraw projections, and with the continual struggle to find the difficult and moving balance between sexuality and spirituality, we may finally attain the hierosgamos. This is the reason why love (and desire) exercises such fascination for us; because it is through our relationships that we come face to face with the Divine.

When this event is highlighted in the background of a human encounter, when the god and goddess are present, then a feeling of eternity arises, as though the moment of the earthly encounter were now and always at the same time, as Jung expressed it, an "immediate presence." Thus Jung wrote in his memoirs that "emotional ties... still contain projections, and it is essential to withdraw these projections in order to attain oneself and to objectivity... objective cognition lies hidden behind the attraction of the emotional relationship; it seems to be the central secret. Only through objective cognition is the real coniunctio possible."

(1, p. 253)


Books referenced

1. von Fran, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy.

The urge to become whole is the strongest drive in a human being, and that is what is really hidden behind the deeper passion in the transference. At the end of his life, Jung admitted: "I falter before the task of finding language which might adequately express the incalculable paradoxes of love. Eros is a kosmogonos, a creator and father-mother of all... consciousness.... Here is the greatest and smallest, the remotest and nearest, the highest and lowest, and we cannot discuss one side of it without discussing the other... If he [man] possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per ignotius - that is, by the name of God."

And once in a conversation, he said, "The problem of love is so difficult that a person has to be happy if at the end of his life he can say that no one has been destroyed on his account."

(from Psychotherapy, by Marie-Louise von Franz)

Power or love

This is somewhat of a continuation (or may be elaboration) of the post "Relationships and individuation" - I saw the following quote while reading:

Power and eros exclude each other totally. Jung writes, "Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking." You cannot combine the two; it's either one or the other. Jung said that no man can ever assimilate or even get to know what the anima is before he has overcome power-schemes in connection with feminine contacts, purely sexual drive or purely aesthetic considerations. As long as a man looks at a woman for sex or for her good looks, or maybe for her bank account, there is no question of love and therefore no question of getting to know what the anima could even be.

For a woman it would be if she falls off course in her search for the truth. You see, the animus in its positive essence is a healing spirit, a spirit of truth. So if a woman falsifies her inner search for truth by getting enmeshed in power games, or by pursuing a man simply because he has money, the same catastrophe will ensue. For example, you go to university and have to write a thesis. You have an idea for that thesis but you know it's one your professor will not accept. If you don't write about that idea because it is more important to you to get good grades than to write what you believe is true, then you have betrayed your truth - just as a man betrays his love by having an eye on the woman's bank account. Again it's power. . . .

Seen in the light of the anima problem of men, the question ultimately becomes that of having to to decide between love - one's heart, one's feelings - and social status or some other worldly value.

This is followed by the following quote by Jung

It is really the individual's task to differentiate himself from all others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities, such as membership in organizations, support of "isms," and so on, interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible.

(1, p. 118)

This passage struck me as important. My first thought, of course, was in relation to my tendency to "push" those I cared for to do what I thought best for them, and how that was at heart a power play, even though it was done with the best of intentions. 

On a purely personal level the conflict between power and love, and which one one chooses, is at the heart of our everyday lives. Which is it going to be? How are we going to approach others and our lives? But the question of power or love goes beyond that. It's a question of the attitude one takes to one's entire life, everything we do. Our very goals. It's always a question of intention: Why am I doing this? Am I doing it to advance myself, or because I feel deep down that it's the right thing to do?

The question of which we choose, power or love, strikes at the heart of the conflict between the ego and the Self... and also why the ego must die. It has to die to it's desires for "worldly" success. And it has to die before it can be reborn; if the ego cannot survive without the Self - cannot even exist without the Self, as the ego is merely a structure which grows out of the ground of the Self - then the Self cannot fully flower without the ego and the ego's consciousness. But in order for the ego to be able carry out this task it has to die and be reborn.


Books referenced

1. von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales.

Relationships and individuation

The motif of the hierosgamos is... the mystery of mutual individuation, "for nothing can be completed without love, because love puts us in a state of mind in which we are ready to risk everything without holding back anything of importance." Only in this way is an encounter with the Self possible.

(von Franz, Psychotherapy, p. 254)



It's a hard, hard road. Hard! I'm struggling with this stupid, goddam, painful, annoying, humiliating "romance" thing (can't even really call it a romance because nothing ever actually happens with it.) Wanting to give in again but, besides getting some clear signals from my dreams, I got slapped in the face by the subconscious this morning by while I was reading on the train: "No running away from the work!"

Wanting to just give up and push these inconvenient (to say the least) feelings away again. I am SO. TIRED. OF. THIS! This thing where I guess I'm supposed to be using my feelings for G to individuate has been going on for a good half year, and I am so tired of it!!!

At any rate, I did a bad thing and did what Jung would call magic*. Spiritual growth is accomplished by listening to the messages from the subconscious, which often appear as freakish, synchronistic events. Shit just happens - my rational side can't explain it and it makes that part of me very uncomfortable, I can tell you. Magic, on the other hand, is when the ego tries to use the power of the subconscious to do something, especially to affect others. Which I did. I imagined him no longer in my life, not thinking about me, not coming by my desk every goddam day to talk. And I imagined my feelings no longer going out towards him. I put the lioness in a cage, with images of every single time he rejected us and pushed us away, so she would stop jumping out to try to get to him.

Even as I was doing it, I knew that it was wrong, but I was so hurt and so... tired. I just want to want someone who's not so afraid and always running away from everything. Especially me! But regardless, I got my answer, both in the dream referred to above, but also in what ended up in the reading rotation this morning.

As soon as I opened the book to read it I just groaned. Seriously, sometimes the subconscious likes to beat a dead horse. To death. But I guess that's what I needed. Also, I had suicidal thoughts (actually, more like "I wish I could just disappear" thoughts) last night, which is always an indication of a something big coming up from the subconscious. This appears to be it; the stronger your resistance, the bigger the explosion.

Before I get into things I want to include a quote that just leapt out at me. Unfortunately this is telling me, in no uncertain terms, what I'm supposed to do:

The painful, sticky, unresolved quality of the situation must simply be endured by both sides. In fact, Jung writes in a letter that people become entangled in unanswered love when it is important for them to avoid an erotic experience of individuation, that is, from the striving toward greater consciousness

(von Franz, Psychotherapy, p. 241)

This post is going to be largely selections from the chapter titled "Some Aspects of the Transference" from Marie-Louse von Franz's book Psychotherapy - in light of the crisis I've been going through, the entire chapter was like the ringing of a huge, cosmic bell. Later I'm going to post something about the animus, the anima and the heirosgamos itself.


What's really a "fated" relationship?

From almost the beginning of this relationship I've had the feeling that it was fated, that we were brought together to work out issues and grow. I also thought that we were "meant to be together" but reading the following gave me a shock that's forcing me to re-evaluate everything.

[M]any do not interpret their own love fantasies as projections but rather as necessary relationships "destined" by life or the Self just because this is really their own secret desire. In this way one is simply taken over by an unconscious lust or rejection tendency, with negative results for both parties involved.

(von Franz, Psychotherapy, p. 241)

Is that what this is? Am I projecting a fantasy simply because I want it so much? I'm really struggling to see where the ego is in all of this, and where the Self. There are definitely things coming from the ego: the need to have a relationship in order to be "normal" ("If you're alone it must be because there's something wrong with you.") But also the desire for physical closeness. How much of what I feel is coming from the Self and how much from the ego? This afternoon, while thinking about this, I got the definite sense that ego desires have contaminated my feelings for G, and are also the source my feelings of wanting to run away from him. The question is: what am I supposed to do about it?

[I]t can be as misguided to affect elevated spirituality as a way of evading concrete obligations as to let the relationship degenerate onto an atavistic-primitive level. These two represent a Scylla and Charybdis through which one has to steer one's way.

[T]ransference always does lead to crucifixion, that is, to the death of the natural - that is, unconscious - person one has hitherto been. We are the crossing point for conflicting forces, first for the manifestation of our own shadow in the form of jealousy, territoriality, sexual passions, and so on; and second for the fact that the partner is not as we would have him or her; and third for the contents of the collective unconscious, which through the transference come to the surface and begin to have a shaping influence on our destiny. All this leads to a death of the ego, and if everything goes right, to the birth of the Self. The principal task in this phase, as we know, is coming to terms with the animus and anima.

(von Franz, Psychotherapy, p. 250)


Is it love? Or is it just a power play?

One thing was highlighted in this last round of me attacking/G running away; that this was a stereotypical incident for us. One could even say that it characterizes or relationship: He starts talking about how hard a time he's having. I come back trying to push him to do something about it. He runs away, and then I get hurt.

I definitely care about him. I do. In fact, even when I try to back off and not to get involved I get sucked back into everything when he starts talking about feelings of despair and like he'll never be able to accomplish anything. The very reason I push him is because I feel compelled to help him. But the question is, is this really the right way to go about things?

I recall this in connection my first analysis with a seriously disturbed analysand, a borderline case. I tried desperately with all the forces at my command to prevent her from slipping into a psychotic episode. At that point Jung had me come to see him. He listened to the whole story and then said very seriously, "What makes you so sure that the analysand doesn't have to go through an episode? Many people improve after such an episode. What makes you think you know her destiny so precisely? Perhaps you are hindering the very thing that according to God's will should happen."... Too much Christian helping spirit is, as Jung once wrote, "an invasion of the will of the other. One should behave like someone who is offering an opportunity that can be either grasped or turned aside. Otherwise one gets into difficulties. This is so, because the human being is not totally good, but is nearly half a devil."

(von Franz, Psychotherapy, p. 243)

This is definitely not how I approached G. I'm generally very detached from people - friendly but I don't push one way or another. If you choose to take my advice... good. If not... *shrug*. But when I care about someone or something, I push. Sometimes I do act casually with G... then he just walks away when he's starting to feel overwhelmed, and comes back when he needs another dose. No harm, no foul. But when I feel intensely, too lioness-y, I charge him, sending him running for the hills.

This image of "offering an opportunity," as if you're offering your hand in a friendly, encouraging but non-obtrusive way, really struck me. It's how I generally am, and it's interesting to see how others react when I start with the pushing. Or how I balk when I feel others pushing me in a similar fashion. This is clearly what von Franz means when she talks about a power play. It's all about forcing your will on others. Even when it's with the very best of intentions, it's still a violation.

At the same time, when I'm casual I'm also not invested; I have vague feelings of concern and caring but, let's face it, when I'm casual it's because I don't really care. Not really. I push because I care... I push when I care. The trick is to care deeply, but not try to force people to do something "for their own good." Keeping this delicate, living balance is another Scylla and Charybdis.



While I was thinking about writing this post, and re-reading the chapter, the thought occurred to me: Which is more important, having a romance relationship like everyone else has, with the lack of consciousness and everything else most people are mired in? Or to live a more full, whole life, where I'm connected with the Self/God? Which do I want more?

I thought to myself that I had agreed that I would submit to whatever was required of me. I was still rebellious and resistant but coming down the other side. And for a moment I felt the lightness that being connected with the Self brings.



Edit
12/23/11

While writing a general introduction to Jung's ideas I came across the following quote:

In spite of being disturbing and socially dangerous, projections also have a meaning; for it is apparently only through projections that we can make ourselves conscious of certain unconscious processes. Through projections there arise, first of all, those fascinations, affects, entanglements which then force us to reflect on ourselves. There is no becoming conscious without the fires of emotion and suffering.

That says everything, right there.


*Footnote on terminology

The words "witch" or "magic" are used here in the sense that Jungian analysts like Marie-Louise von Franz use them, as ways of using the subconscious to manipulate other people or reality. Witches, in the sense of practitioners of Wicca, are completely different, and have little or nothing to do with the terms in the Jungian sense. The same goes for other words, like "magic."