A little disclaimer. I’m not an expert on Carl Jung except that I find him very fascinating and have been reflecting on his concepts over the past decade. I love for poetry, symbols, icons, rituals, dreams and Jung makes them come to live for me. So when I listen to interesting songs or observing symbols that I’ve never been exposed, there is the dimension of depth being added. I was listening to Lost Starts by Adam Levine of Maroon 5 and a phrase caught my attention “Yesterday I saw a lion kiss a deer.” That was profound. Or recently when I came across Ouroboros and as someone who dreams of snakes often, it just takes on a different meaning for me.
While working with a schizophrenic patient in a psychiatric hospital, Jung realized that there were images and ideas that did not belong to the patient’s individual unconscious. These memories belong to the collective unconscious of generation past. Slowly he started to notice this pattern in other patients as well and in his personal unconscious.
A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.
Jung calls them archetypes. “Psychologically … the archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives; it is the sea to which all rivers wend their way, the prize which the hero wrests from the fight with the dragon.” Jung first referred to them as primodial images. It is like a prototype: a prototype of a car, a plane, a robotic system, mobile applications etc. Yet it is more than just a prototype. It is like an app where wise people from generations and generations have been coding and recoding with the aim of helping us live a whole and complete life. And this app is inserted into our unconscious minds. When we deviate too much the warning signs will appear in the forms of stories, strong feelings, images, symbols and dreams. And the warning sign will flash, system compromised. Please recalibrate. This is the essence of Jung’s archetypes.
I had a client in his mid 20s who is angry and very argumentative. He has to right, right at any cost. He grew up with a mother who is obsessive with being right. A good and worthwhile person is the one who is right. There is no room in his psyche to accommodate any wrong. To be erroneous is to be worthless. This split torments him.
A young Hispanic medical student was referred to me. She came from a morally and traditionally conservative family. She can’t fail morally or professionally. Apparently she failed both….she was repeating her second year of medical school and failed short in some moral dimension. She came in, said a few words and cried. This went on for six months. There was no place in her psyche for failures.
So what have these splits to do with all these symbols and icons? Everything.
In The Da Vinci Code, the character of Professor Langford was scripted to say, “Symbols are a language that can help us understand our past.” These religious symbols and icons offer a spiritual perspective that brings about healing for the soul.
What do these symbols represent? Professor Langford while gesturing the symbol of a triangle with his arms explained to Sophia, “This is the original icon for male. It’s a rudimentary phallus. This is known as the blade. It represents aggression and manhood. The symbol is still used today in modern military uniform. The female symbol is its exact opposite.” Many religious symbols contain union of these opposites: male and female, light and darkness, life and death, joy and suffering, good and bad. Carl Jung calls this coniunctio oppositorum. “For the symbols,” writes Jung, “are natural attempts to reconcile and reunite opposites within the psyche.”
A couple of religious symbols I want to touch upon briefly. The Star of David with two triangles overlapping one another. Sri Yantra, 9 interlocking triangles with upright triangles representing Shiva and upside down triangles representing Shakti, the force of femininity. Together it symbolizes Avaita or non-duality, oneness. Then there’s the Yin/Yang symbolism that forms the core foundation of Chinese cosmology. Yap-yum in Trantric Buddhism. The union of male diety and shakti, compassion and insights that we need to reach enlightenment. The Cross in Christianity, the unity of death and resurrection, finite and the infinite. These symbols are invitation for our psyche to hold on to opposites and it is this ability to hold on to opposites that healing and harmony take place. My argumentative client was not able to accept the fact that people make mistakes. The Korean medical student was not able to hold success and failure at the same time. And this is very crucial because nature does not have preference for one over the other. It is all a part of the same reality. While we tend to attach negative connotation to failure and positive to success, for nature there is no preference. But it becomes a monumental problem for us because we have inherited a very strong tendency toward linear rational thinking.
For Jung, of all the archetypes, mandala is among the most significant. Mandala, translated from Sanskrit meaning circle, is a geometric figure with layers of either concentric squares or circles representing wholeness. In ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections” Jung writes “I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing…which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time…only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is…the Self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well is harmonious.” Hence Jung calls mandala the archetype of wholeness.
Mandala emerged in various geographical regions in various forms and yet remains true to its content such as the Tibetan paintings, labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in French, stupa, Ankor Wat (Cambodia), Borobudur in Indonesia and many more.
A whole person is someone who has embraced himself/herself fully. Wholeness refers to the self that has fully embraced itself. When the self is fully embraced you are at peace with yourself. You come to term with yourself. This is me with all my deficits and flaws, weaknesses, strengths, courage, creativity. People’s praise does not inflate your ego. People’s criticism does not deflate yours sense of self. Your internal equilibrium is internally regulated. The more your sense of self is externally controlled, the more vulnerable you become. So when someone said, you are so average, he responses “Ok.” “You are not that smart.” “Sure, why not.” “You are fat.” “I love to eat, let’s go have dinner.” Because this person is able to embrace everything, this person can’t really be destroyed.
The significance of a mandala is the center that holds everything together. The center that can hold everything internally together. There are so many things in life, pleasure, pain, life, death, high, low, success, failure, tears, laughter, darkness, brightness, fear, courage, ugliness, beauty. The question is, what is at the center? And can this center hold everything together because things that we cannot hold them together will take us down.
Once I had a client who grew up with a mom diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. It was total chaos. He was very shameful of his past, of his mom, of his history. He created a facade of a beautiful life. But internally he was falling apart. He was financially broke and on drugs. His wife threatened to leave him. He was unable to embrace himself, his past. His center could not accommodate ugliness and shame. He was falling apart.
Mandala points to the center that can hold everything together. One of the iconic image that conveys this distinctive belief is that of Shiva in the most serene state and a cobra wrapped around his neck.
Archetypes are not just symbols with meaning. Archetypes speak to us as well. One day in class while we were discussing dreams, a skeptical student related her dream, a dream that kept recurring in her life. She will be standing in front of a television and the only thing she sees is the snow screen. And then she falls right through the ground and she just keeps falling ad infinitum. So I asked if she had been struggling with communication with a significant person in her life and that it felt like there is no solution in sight. She nodded. Jung calls this phenomenon the religious function of the psyche. The archetype is not passive. It speaks. There is something inherent in our psyche that will drive us toward wholeness if we will pay attention.
A scene from one of my favorite movies “My Life” portrayed a dying cancer patient visiting a Chinese doctor. And the Chinese doctor held the patient’s finger pointing to his own heart saying, “Life is trying to teach you something. Listen.” For Jung, life is constantly trying to tell us that we need to learn to embrace the totality of who we are, the good and the bad, the beautiful and ugly, the high and the low, the strengths and weaknesses. Our psyche will speak to us through dreams, symbols, images, stories, strong feelings about things in our lives that we have not embrace. It will keep trying to tell us about things we need to learn to embrace. Listen to your hearts, Jung reminds us.
A jazz vocalist Marena Whitcher, in “Coniunctio Oppositorum,” sings:
I’m climbing these stairs
They‘re leading nowhere
Will the circle close
Or come around?
Not sure if I am going up or down
The more that I want the less I got
The more that I am the more I’m not
I try to soar but then I dive
The more I say the more I lie
I resign
I’m fine with disillusions
Seeing through
Misleading false conclusions
Sailing to the middle stream
Can‘t decide for one extreme
Drifting in between
Ebb or tide
Wax or wane
Above or below
I‘m running in circles
Whichever path I’ll take
I’ll come around
While researching the negative impact the epistemology of western modernity has on the lives of local farmers, I was privileged to interview emeritus professor of economics, Dr. Chatip Narsupa. As he was explaining the concept of local economy among farmers, he paused, looked at my name card and asked, “Do you think there’s an archetype for farmers?” I was taken aback by the profoundness of his question and said that I would come back with an answer. After interviewing 65 farmers in 20 provinces in the north and northeast, I believe there is. There is something very distinctive about farmers, almost as if it is rooted in their DNA. They value freedom. They will work hard and do everything possible to maintain this freedom. And to do so requires living a very simple life. To live simple means you have to come to term with yourself and not allow others to define you. Because if you do, you can’t live a simple life. And if you can’t live a simple life, you can’t achieve that freedom working in the field. This is the individuation that Jung speaks about. It’s the mandala.
One day I was driving my son’s old Honda civic 1982, kind of falling apart, in my coat and tie. I pulled into a gas station. There was a homeless man walking around asking for money. He came to my car and asked, is this your car? I embraced myself and the car proudly saying ‘Yes.’ Then he said ‘Oh my God…Oh my God.’ And walked away without asking me for money.
To Jung, religion is liberation and it comes when we are able to embrace ourselves fully. This is the psychological expression of Hindu moksa, Buddhist nirvana and Christian salvation. It is what it means, in Jungian terms, to be saved. So, paraphrasing Jung, I’ll say let’s explore the internal Ouroboros and go in search of a lion kissing a deer.
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