Intermission

I’ve been very bad about updating lately due to the demands of everyday life, not the least of which is that I’ve started work for my certificate in Jungian studies and am writing a paper for the seminar that occurs this week. I find it impossible to do justice to the Jacob and Esau series while also writing for the seminar, so thought I’d have an intermission during which I post some of what I’ve been reading over the past month.

creating a life

I’ve been reading Creating a Life by Jungian analyst James Hollis and Jung’s Symbols of Transformation at the same time. Hollis is the head of the Jungian studies program I’ll undertake over the next two years. Creating a Life is the book a person should read after reading about (and hopefully undertaking) the developmental tasks of middle age (40+ years), for it points you in the right direction after the razed earth policy mid-life seems to demand.

I appreciate Hollis’s honesty about the work of a therapist, because it made me feel much better about having quit my work as one. He writes:

“Were therapists required by “truth in advertising” legislation to tell their reality, then virtually no one would ever enter therapy. The therapist would be obliged to say at least three things in return to the suffering supplicant:

First, you will have to deal with this core issue the rest of your life, and at best you will manage to win a few skirmishes in your long uncivil war with yourself. Decades from now you will be fighting on these familiar fronts, though the terrain may have shifted so much that you may have difficulty recognizing the same old, same old.

Second, you will be obliged to disassemble the many forces you have gathered to defend against your wound. At this late date it is your defenses, not your wound, that cause the problem and arrest your journey. But removing those defenses will oblige you to feel all the pain of that wound again.

And third, you will not be spared pain, vouchsafed wisdom or granted exemption from future suffering. In fact, genuine disclosure would require a therapist to reveal the shabby sham of managed care as a fraud, and make a much more modest claim for long-term depth therapy or analysis. “

Hollis concludes this topic by suggesting that depth therapy or analysis will not cure anyone, but will, at least, make life more interesting by helping one discover the “complex riddles wrapped within” and thus, hopefully, bring them and other inner contents into consciousness.

purgatorio

I found Creating a Life comforting, even though I know that bringing these contents into consciousness heralds an inevitable, purgatorial descent in mid-life that is shunned by most. Having surrendered most of the so-called convictions I acquired and lived by in my 20s and 30s, I experienced my 40s as a psychological postapocalyptic wasteland peopled by fellow pilgrims who were very, very few and quite far between. I thought I was alone in grieving the dearth of mentors in whom the Wise Old Man or Crone archetypes had been made manifest, but Hollis showed me that I don’t perceive or grieve the loss of mentors alone. He writes that we have very few initiated adults among us because most will not take the path of ego-annihilation demanded by the initiation process.

When Jesus said that none were worthy to follow Him unless they took up their cross first, He meant it. One can never be raised in the image of the God-man until he has first suffered and died, suspended between heaven and hell, eternity and this mortal world. Yet because of the pain of this suffering and in spite of our best intentions, we end up trudging along the paths our parents and grandparents trod before us. We don’t want to suffer; we will not die. We keep feeding the ego with its constant cries of “I want, I need,” catering to its demands and claims and its need for status and collective approval. We end up being older, more tired and fearful versions of our old selves. Our lights grow dim from flickering; we shrink back from the challenge before us and eventually shrivel into mere shadows of the selves we were meant to be.

As I have said while writing about Jacob and Esau and as we will see as I progress with the series, nobody–and I mean nobody–attains wholeness while forging through life on an ego-based, selfish path. This is why, as Stephen Covey says, we are called to imagining and implementing “win-win” solutions in every single conflict. Anything less does not demand the little deaths demanded by compromise. The fact that we are polarized as a nation along political, religious, cultural and socioeconomic lines illustrates just how unconscious we are to saving our own lives, how impossible the likelihood that we will yield and thus grow.

a bloody blundering

My 12-year-old daughter asked me the other day whether I’d choose to go back in time if I could, if I’d want a “do-over” for any part of my life. I imagined being 12 or 16 or 28 or 36 again, mulling over the mistakes and blunders I’ve made, the people I’ve hurt, the stupid decisions I’ve made. Did I want to go back and change something, anything? After awhile I told her that I wouldn’t want to go back under any circumstance, for in spite of these mistakes and regrets, the first half of my life was, as Hollis writes, “a great and inevitable mistake, a bloody blundering.” An inevitable mistake, a mistake that had to be made.

To be young is to be a fool living among fools, no matter how wise we imagine we are. The wisest old folks you know (if you can find any) will tell you they were fools when they were younger; the trick is to learn from having been one and to press on toward wisdom and clarity. This is how it is with me; I’m pressing on, creating a life for myself. As it says in Proverbs, “if you are wise, you are wise for yourself; if you are foolish, you alone will bear it.” Having carried the results of my own follies for all the years since I did them, I’m wiser for having carried them. I’m lingering in a place where I am happy and miserable, content and full of yearning, clear-eyed but stumbling blindly, sane in the craziest way possible, grateful to be where I am at this moment in time, this ripe moment, this beautiful, pregnant moment.

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.”