Knots

I’ve been writing about how I’ve navigated the experience of being cheated in order to illustrate how depth psychology and faith can combine to help a person get through difficult circumstances and grow. People don’t exist in vacuums; we are tested and proved through what we do when what is most dear to us is threatened or taken away. We see who we really are when we’re our most vulnerable; vulnerability also shows us where our boundaries are.

In depth psychology, we refer to complexes, which are a cluster of mental factors associated unconsciously with a particular subject or theme in the individual’s life. The simplest way of understanding a complex is the way Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh describes it, which is as a knot. The Buddhists have a concept called an internal formation, which acts very much like the complex of depth psychology. The development of a knot or internal formation is described thus on the Awakening blog:

When we have a sensory input, depending on how we receive it, a knot may be tied in us. When someone speaks unkindly to us, if we understand the reason and do not take his or her words to heart, we will not feel irritated at all, and no knot will be tied. But if we do not understand why we were spoken to that way and we become irritated, a knot will be tied in us. The absence of clear understanding is the basis for every knot.

Put in Jungian terms, the knot isn’t typically tied the moment someone speaks in an unkind way or otherwise hurts us. The most troublesome knots have already been tied in the past, usually by a parent or significant person in our life, or knotted up around a concept such as our love or respect for ourselves, our value, etc. Proverbs 26:2 says, “like a sparrow in its flitting, like a swallow in its flying, so a curse without a cause will not alight.” As a general rule of thumb, what irritates, angers, and wounds us can’t build a nest unless a tree is there first. When the writer of Hebrews warned Christians to let no root of bitterness spring up, he was referring to potentiality and proportion: from a relatively small beginning, a very large thing may grow.

$249.98 AND TWO KNOTS LATER

You’ve just spent almost two hours at your neighborhood Target store, buying groceries and back-to-school stuff for your kids. The checkout lines are long, so you brace yourself for the last leg of your retail journey. As you wait in line behind another mother doing back-to-school shopping, you notice that the girl at the cash register seems angry. Her mannerisms are sharp, quick, and rough. She keeps her eyes on the items and nearly barks at the customer when an item without a price tag is discovered. She rolls her eyes as she turns on the lane light requesting a manager’s assistance.

Under normal circumstances, you’d hardly notice her behavior as you went through the line. Out of boredom, you might speculate about the cause of her impatience, or associate her several facial piercings with angry young people and grin ruefully within yourself. Even if you noticed, though, you’d be most likely to smile sympathetically and ask, “rough day?” or something similar, eliciting a grudging smile from the girl at the register. You wouldn’t normally personalize her actions.

But supposing the girl has the mannerisms of your mean second grade teacher, Mrs. Smith. Second grade was hell for you that year; you never stopped feeling afraid in class. All year you had a knot in your stomach every time you entered her classroom, because you never knew when Mrs. Smith was going to whack you in the back of the head with her ruler. She regularly said that you were dull-witted and slow. It wasn’t until years later that you learned that you are neither dull-witted or slow, but that your temperament type isn’t the best at pencil-and-paper work, and that many artists, musicians, and writers share your MBTI type.

As you stand in line, you don’t consciously recall how abandoned you felt when you tearfully told your mom and dad about Mrs. Smith’s meanness, and they impatiently interrupted and told you to take care of it yourself. Your parents were no help, but you didn’t understand that they were preoccupied with adult worries. You don’t recall that this was also the year your mother was diagnosed with a uterine growth and had a hysterectomy. None of this information is consciously available to you, but all of the emotional results of these situations are very much alive and active even now.

You don’t know all this as you stand in the checkout line, of course. As you stand there, you remember nothing from the past, and thus can connect nothing. But you feel a growing irritation; a knot starts to form in your belly. Unbeknownst to you, it is the Knot of Second Grade. You feel the knot, but you cannot think the knot through as you wait in line. Thinking through the knots and thus untangling them takes much time and diligent work. Catching yourself tangled in bits of the knot as you go through life takes great vigilance. But because you’re not conscious to your knot or the snare it is to you, your exasperation increases with each impatiently scanned item and grumbling statement the checkout girl makes.

The outcome of being ensnared by our own knots depends on many factors. If you’re the only one with a knot in the situation, you may simply carry the irritation with you to the car and mentally curse the girl at the register. If she has a knot that you make worse, the two of you may get into a tangle like two necklaces in a jewelry box. Her surliness and your irritation may combine to require calling for a manager. “Your girl is being rude and rang my items wrong!” you’ll heatedly exclaim. The girl may just stand there, eyes downcast, seething with anger because her own knot is growing, a knot surrounding middle aged women like her mother (you are judgmental, demanding, and mean, just like her mom).

I’m convinced that many of the conflicts we experience in everyday life arise from our own knots or complexes, which have the power to make us into caricatures of our best selves. Our knots entrench us in such a way that it’s impossible to yield to others, because we’re fighting for truth but don’t know it. If forced to yield, as my husband and I were when we were cheated out of what was promised us, we become disproportionately angry. We assert our rights; we are willing to cut people out of our lives like cancerous growths.

BEING HERE NOW

The Bible teaches that sin—missing the mark of what is loving, true, good, and right—separates us from God, our own true selves, and others. Love and truth build relationships and people. Love is unity; but there can be no unity without consciousness and awareness in the present moment. If one person in a relationship or situation is not present, but is caught up in the snare of some past knot, that person is not really there. That person is still in the past.

To love is to be present and there; Thich Nhat Hanh writes that “if you are not really there, nothing is there.” The thing is to be here now. If you’re truly in the present while standing in line at Target, the sharp movements and unhappy presence of the checkout girl can only inspire you to be empathetic and compassionate. Everything about this girl—her shabby clothing, her fingernails bitten to the quick, the yellowing bruises on her upper arms—speak trauma. Something is wrong in her life and it’s not about you. It’s only about you if you have a knot to untie.

When we were cheated out of what we contracted for and thus expected, we were devastated. We felt very much as we have felt when we’ve lost something of great value. Yet attached to that grief was an underlying knottedness that we each recognized as being not-now. Something from the past was tugging at us, pulling us backward. We knew this because we felt too hurt, too angry. I uncharacteristically gave up; my husband uncharacteristically gave in. We started being who we weren’t, abandoning who we are. Our feelings and bodies showed us that we were no longer in the here-and-now with our partners, at the same time that their stubborn refusal to budge one millimeter proved just how large and consuming their knots were.

Like Jacob and Esau, we were tangled in a conflict of gigantic proportions, one that had the potential for long-term harm to everyone connected to us.

Twins

I’ve been writing about the Bible’s story of twin brothers Esau and Jacob, whose story may be looked at metaphorically and symbolically as well as historically. Though this tale is about birthrights, inheritances, being cheated, suffering, and the evidence, degeneration, and building of character, it is firstly a story about twins.

The birth of twins is a common theme in many myths, for the image of twins, especially twin brothers, is used to express the inevitable dual nature of things. Born of the same parents, twins indicate that in every entity there are opposites: light and dark, good and evil, the peaceful and the warlike, the thinker and the doer. People, relationships, and nature itself are full of contradictions and opposites; we all know this even if we forget it or choose to ignore it.

Jung noted that in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, Mary (symbolizing the Church), is referred to as the “holy dove which hath brought forth twin nestlings,” a reference to an old legend that Jesus had a twin brother named Judas Thomas (CW 5, par. 318n). The symbolic power of the twin image is so strong that even Christianity could not escape untouched by its duality.

FRATRICIDE: THE ULTIMATE FRAGMENTATION

In most myths or stories of twins or same-gender siblings, the siblings usually find themselves in conflict with one another and must ultimately separate; but wholeness is not found unless they reconcile and experience unity again. Many times, one brother kills the other, but when this occurs, in Jungian terms it is always an act of fragmentation. You can probably think of many literary examples of divided twins or siblings: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Romulus and Remus, Castor and Pollux, and Set and Osiris, among others.

Most people are probably familiar with the story of Cain and Abel, in which the brother whose altar offering was acceptable to God was slain by the brother whose offering was not. In another tale of fratricide, twin brothers Romulus and Remus argued over which brother had the support of the local deities to rule the new city and give it his name. This pattern of conflict and jealousy leading to betrayal, injury, and even death is a familiar one.

According to the myth, each brother took up a position on a separate hill overlooking what is now Rome, and waited for a sign from the gods. A circle of six vultures flew over Remus, signifying that he should be king. When Remus reported this sign to Romulus, though, Romulus lied and said that he had seen the sign first. As they were arguing, the brothers looked up and saw 12 vultures flying above the hill they both stood on. Romulus claimed that he had seen his six first, and that Remus’s birds had flown to join his over the hill Romulus stood on to prove that Romulus should be founder and king of Rome.

The fact was that Remus had received the sign first. Because the lies of Romulus were convincing, however, Remus grudgingly conceded leadership. Romulus later had Remus killed because Remus’s resentment over being cheated had become so great. In Remus: A Roman Myth, Wiseman writes that Romulus overthrew Remus by cheating him “through haste and jealousy of his brother, and perhaps also by divine direction” (p. 8). As with the tales of Cain and Abel and Jacob and Esau, contention over a spiritual blessing is one of the primary reasons for the conflict; a spiritual force greater than mere mortals (or even immortals) has a will and a hand in the situation, too. Each brother in these fratricidal tales wanted his offering or action to be the only “right” or acceptable choice before God; but only one brother—the one with the character of a Darth Vader—was willing to kill to get it.

The ancient Egyptian tale of brothers Set and Osiris is a final example of a myth that may be seen in Jungian terms as one about psychic fragmentation. Younger brother Osiris was the wise king and bringer of civilization who was happily married to his sister, Isis. Elder brother Set, envious of his younger brother, killed and dismembered him in a jealous rage. Isis reassembled Osiris’s corpse, which was embalmed by the gods and became a mummy reigning over the underworld as judge of the dead. Yet again, we see that jealousy and competition over some spiritual possession can cause deadly conflicts between siblings.

TWINS AS SYMBOLS OF WHOLENESS

The myth of Castor and Pollux is an example of the more rare twin tale in which brothers manage to maintain their unity. Twin sons born to the same mother but different fathers, one mortal and the other immortal, Castor and Pollux are known today as stars in the constellation Gemini—the Gemini twins. Castor, the mortal brother, receives a deadly wound one day, and Pollux (the immortal one) is able to trade half his immortality for his brother’s life. The brothers must then live the rest of their days by dividing their time between Mount Olympus (the home of the gods) and Hades, the underworld where the dead await judgment.

REMOVING THE LOG

Whenever I find myself bogged down in life, I often find that I’m experiencing a problem of the psyche, which is a self-regulating system. I’ve come to understand and find very valuable the idea that “everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole” (Carl Jung). Put in Christian terms, I’d say that people manifest outwardly, through word and deed, what is already in their hearts.

Once the thought of having an Esau-spirited partner presented itself to me, it would have been natural and even predictable for me to look at the idea from only one direction: the other person had that spirit and was manifesting it, and it had nothing to do with me. This idea, as tempting as it is, conveniently sidesteps the possibility that I have an Esau part in me, too. Indeed, the writer of the book of Hebrews in the New Testament agreed, warning Christians to see to it that there was no one among them who had that spirit. The idea is that anyone, even a person of faith, can have the character of an Esau or fall into it.

From these myths of twins we can see that being cheated out of something valuable can cause serious consequences, even death, whether actual or metaphorical–the death of a relationship, death of a dream, death of a way of life, etc. In the myth of Castor and Pollux, on the other hand, we see that one of the greatest gifts one person can give another is to share the life that comes from that eternal well. As I grappled with the emotional and psychological consequences of being cheated out of what was rightfully mine, I found that I had to look at my own duality before I could afford myself the luxury of looking at someone else’s.

“First remove the log in thine own eye; then thou may see clearly enough to remove the speck in your brother’s.”

The Fifth Essence

On a dreary afternoon in the fall of 1974  I was walking in the hills of Zurich, feeling bleak and very sorry for myself, when I spied an object on the path. I stooped down and picked it up. It was a little black elephant made of ebony. It was numinous to me, a magical thing. On the spot, I fell in love.

I took it to be a case of what Jung calls synchronicity, where an outer event coincides with what is going on inside. I assumed it had something to do with my psychology and I spent the next few years exploring what that might be. [. . .] I painted pictures of elephants and my dreams were full of them.

Now I have a pretty good idea of what elephants have to do with me and why I found that first one. I was thirty-eight years old at the time. I had burned my bridges and I was on my knees. I had gone to Switzerland to begin training at the C. G. Jung Institute of Zurich. A lot has happened to me since, but much of it has to do, metaphorically, with elephants. (Sharp 7).

This story told by Jungian analyst, writer, and editor Daryl Sharp illustrates very well the function and form of “synchronicity,” a term coined by Carl Jung to describe what he called “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” When two or more events, symbols, or ideas that are causally unrelated and are unlikely to occur together by chance occur together in a meaningful way, they are said to be synchronous. Because the meaning of a synchronous event is subjective, relying on the individual for meaning, its numinous value is usually only consequential to the individual. The individual to whom these synchronous events occur makes of them what he may, communicates them as he will.

I’ve been writing lately about how my husband and I have been working through the experience of being cheated by people with whom we struck a five page, contractual deal almost five years ago. Even as I’m poised to write about synchronicity, I have to pause to look at the fact of five: five pages, five years. Of the fifth of anything, Jung quotes medieval physician, chemist, and alchemist Paracelsus as writing that

“The spirit of the fifth essence [. . .] is the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot comprehend without the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, or without the instruction of those who know him [. . .].”

“He is the soul of the world, moving all and preserving all. In his initial earthly form (that is, in his original Satrunine darkness) he is unclean, but he purifies himself progressively during the ascent through his watery, aerial, and fiery forms. Finally, in the fifth essence, he appears as the ‘clarified body.’ This spirit is the secret that has been hidden since the beginning of things” (Jung, CW 13, par. 166).

You might say that the fifth year of our agreement with these long-time friends acted like fives by unloosing the spirit of five, which is “the spirit of truth” upheld, manifested, and communicated by the Holy Spirit in people who purify ourselves progressively through water, air, and fire until we are purged of our impurities, secrets are brought to light, darkness banished, and Truth arises in the ‘clarified body.’ In plain language, truth (including truth about ourselves and truth about others) comes through process. We may perceive and understand the truth all at once, but our awareness of it grows along a timeline as the result of a process. Our entire psyche, in fact, regulates itself by always moving toward truth and light in the following ways, according to Jungian Daryl Sharp (93):

THE SELF-REGULATION OF THE PSYCHE

1. Difficulty of adaptation. Difficulty of progression of energy.
2. Regression of libido (depression, lack of disposable energy).
3. Activation of unconscious contents (infantile fantasies, complexes, archetypal images, inferior function, opposite attitude, shadow, anima/animus, etc.). Compensation.
4. Formation of neurotic symptoms (confusion, fear, anxiety, guilt, moods, emotional reactions, etc.).
5. Unconscious or half-conscious conflict between the ego and contents activated in the unconscious. Inner tension. Defensive reactions.
6. Activation of the transcendent function, involving the Self and archetypal patterns of wholeness.
7. Formation of symbols (numinosity, synchronicity).
8. Transfer of energy between the unconscious contents and consciousness. Enlargement of the ego, more adequate progression of energy.
9. Integration of unconscious contents. Active involvement in the process of individuation.

IN THE VASTY DEEP

Knowing how the psyche regulates itself and cooperates with the spirit realm in bringing to light the things hidden in darkness is useful, for when I suddenly find myself having problems adapting or experiencing bouts of depression or lethargy or having outbursts of anger, foot-in-mouth disease, or seemingly inexplicable emotional reactions to next to nothing, I know I’m in the vasty deep. I may choose to stay on top of it by attempting to float obliviously along, which makes meaningful progress difficult at best; or I may succumb to the waves by regressing and letting the depression, sorrow, and lethargy swallow me; or I may give myself fully to reality by accepting that I’m in the vasty deep and must use the navigational tools of the seafarer.

As a defrauded person, I can now look back and see what my psyche did to regulate itself and help me like a trusted friend. A person isn’t ever really cheated all at once, are they? We are cheated along a continuum of ever-increasing disappointments. We hope we don’t see what we think we see; we certainly don’t want to see it. But see it we must. Once we’re aware, the psyche kicks in and does its job—if we let it.

Within this formerly intimate relationship, I experienced the regulatory stages of the psyche quite the way Sharp outlines them. Initially, instead of sticking with the truth, I made the false move of accepting what our partners said about their intentions (“We would never want to hurt you”) and began to act as though the truth was, “We would never want to hurt you, therefore we did not hurt you and we are not hurting you now or ever.” The problem with my reaction to words that belied hurtful actions was that such incongruity is not real and true and thus leads to spiritual malaise. Nobody can believe a lie and thrive.

I began to have problems adapting to the reality of the situation and with the “progression of energy” in the relationship (Sharp’s step one). I noticed that the principal partner was being avoidant. If a group were available to diffuse the energy, she would show herself and come near me; if only I were in the room or at an event, she would fail to appear or disappear once I arrived. At the same time, our partners began to appeal to other, gatekeeper team members, who increasingly expressed feeling manipulated, used, and flattered. Everywhere the relationship was, there was an air of unreality, tension, and conflict. I no longer wanted to be around our partners even though we had to see them almost daily. I began to experience a certain fragmentation, feeling one way but acting another.

As the relationship folded, I felt deflated and vaguely unhappy—the “regression of libido” Sharp identifies in step two. I had accepted the excuses of our partners, and thus couldn’t allow myself to look at their behaviors and the facts that I knew full well could lead me to truth. I consciously avoided looking at the facts, preferring a low-grade depression to the unadulterated truth, which was that the relationship would be fully and perhaps even irreparably broken if I were to act according to what I saw and be my whole, true self. Rather than stating and dealing with the obvious fact that we’d been cheated, I kept feeling that “things” were not going well and found excuses for my lack of energy elsewhere. I stopped writing and reading and started playing computer games and Rock Band.

For the sake of our partners, who had become dearly beloved to us both, my husband and I turned a blind eye, thinking we might save them if not ourselves. How foolish that was! As we refused to make the unconscious conscious and slid into living within our own selves in dishonest ways, the contents of our respective unconscious places were activated. Our inferior functions were triggered and we intuitive thinkers increasingly acted like sensing extraverts—reactive to what our partners did and didn’t do, fixated on the here-and-now, and obsessed in the “he said/she said” way. Because intuitive thinkers can never do sensing, extraverted feeling well, we became tiresome even to ourselves.

CLEANSING

The day I was vacuuming the dirt from my carpets, I was in a place of quietness. My eye was on the mandala of the Self. I had prayed and left everything in God’s hands, and was waiting in a place of such complete rest that I had forgotten I was waiting. This is the day that Esau came up in my spirit, setting into motion a chain of Esau representations that have taken my breath away.

I write this rather lengthy explanation of things so that hopefully nobody will be  tricked by their own complexes to believe that this is about religion or the veracity of the Bible or faith in God, or your childhood priest or your judgmental Baptist or Catholic brother, sister, mother, boss, or neighbor. This isn’t about anyone else other than you and me, at our cores. This is about how we become whole, and how the whole universe will help us with synchronous, magical, numinous, breathtaking coincidences, symbols, gifts and delights if only we will keep our hearts and our eyes open. It’s about the symbols that Spirit uses to grab our attention.

As I continue to write about this, it is about what the appearance of the symbol “spirit of Esau” means to me in particular and about what Esau may symbolize to us collectively. It’s about how we can be godless and immoral people like Esau, or heel-grabbing, conniving, supplanting, passionate God-grabbers like Jacob, who became Israel, the father of nations.

REFERENCES & RESOURCES

Jung, C. G. “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon,” Alchemical Studies, CW 13, par. 166.

Main, Roderick. “Religion, Science, and Synchronicity,” Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies, 46, no. 2 (2000: 89-107).

Sharp, Daryl. Jungian Psychology Unplugged: My Life as an Elephant. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1998.

Art by Anselm Kiefer