Jung & I

Pretentious of me, but, well, why not? Am I not also just a human-being attempting at being? Stumbling and fumbling, tripping and falling, and mostly failing – or is that last point my labelling myself with negative spin? I don't know. And perhaps that is the point. We cannot know, not in some deep, organised final, absolute, truth from all points of view, ultimate frame sense. In a relativistic universe all we can aspire to is some sort of truce of understanding – a partiality that functions – a survival map.

The very paradox of life, at its core, is that we must believe in the world we inhabit, believe the fiction that we impose, take that mind-trick as reality. If we do not believe whole-heartedly then we tear ourselves apart. We deny the reality of reality - or at least of the only reality we can have: none other is on offer. We must have absolute conviction that the ground under our feet is indeed ground under our feet, that the sky over our heads is indeed sky over our heads, that what we touch and feel is as we perceive it to be. We must not step outside of that illusion. Yet at depth we know it to be an illusion; know it cognitively; know it logically; know it scientifically: but if we dare to know it with our whole being then we walk the path of madness.

Such a place is a place of gut wrenching fear, or numbness, or terror. To dissociate from the reality of reality is to enter a very dark hell. The longing that you have for reality to be real once more, to walk and talk, to wake and sleep, to feel and touch, to hear and see once more as when you were a child, when reality was truly real and sharp and pressed upon you with a keenness, that longing is unbearable. So we live the paradox, no, more, we embrace it, oh how we must embrace it.

It is as if we were passengers upon a ship at sea, a ship with no windows or door to the outside. A ship that contains all that we know and all that we can know. It furnishing and light, its rooms and spaces are the sum total of our world. They are the limits of our being. Yet it is but a ship tossed on a vast sea. A vast sea with deeps and shallows, with storms and calms, with unending skies and dark nights. A sea in which lurks who-knows-what monsters and apparitions, for it is a sea which we will never glimpse.

At times we may get intimations of the sea's existence. Our world is tossed by its storms and we are thrown about by its tumults – but yet we have no way of referencing it. It is the outside that we can never access. We can, by act of imagination, by picturing, by turning down the volume of the rush-a-day life of the inboard, of what we take to be the totality of our reality - this dance of life - and just for a time sense the dark sea on which we travel. Then we will understand that all that we see, all that we know is but the inside of an ocean tossed ship.

Like Jung I suffered, as do many, perhaps most even, a mid-life crisis. Perhaps it is no more than the shedding of a younger skin, something that we must all do, so that we may grow old usefully and not trapped in our youthful follies. There is something sad about older people who are still try to be no more than their younger selves. The Peter Pans of this world, be they male or female. The older women dressing the same as their daughters and going out clubbing, competing together for the same men. The older men still trying to be seen as young and vital, with flash cars, gold chains and designer watches. A face-lifted society forever pretending to be what they once were.

To survive we often feel that we need to devise a map of this existence we are in – to help us come to terms with it, to help us to regain a sense of sanity. To put the “reality” that we know it into place. To understand it in a wider context. To see the life-ship upon the sea as it were. For Jung it was the mandala, the recurrent pattern of the quaternion and the circle that provided him with a key. With it he built his map - the cross sectional view of the levels of the self. For me it was the pentagon emerging from a scattering of rune stones.

The insight inspiration, the leap of imagination that produced my map was, when it happened, overwhelming. It poured into me and swamped all other thoughts and activity. It was a knowing of a deeper understanding, a wordless understanding, an emergent eureka. I felt so much at peace – a feeling of a great mental battle won - and yet I had not been aware of the battle, just the angst, just the nausea, just the perplexity, the grinding sense of unease. Worse, a sense of a world pattern in which I could no longer live arranged as it was. I felt the sharp edge of the paradox. I knew reality to be an illusion within an illusion, and it made no deep sense.

My world had crashed. I was no longer fit for purpose. My occupation had gone. My house had gone, carried away on a tide of debts that were not of my making but on a whirlpool of chaos generated by the flounderings of my wife under which we were sinking. My daughter had tried to kill herself, the opening salvo of a creeping guerilla war that was her own struggle for sanity and her own attempt to survive her own life-pain.

All this left my emotions mind-wrenched. I had an unvoiced deep fear that at bottom all of these were due to my inadequacy, my falling short of being a proper man, of my being a halfling, a biological error, a freak. Being a man was outwardly an illusion, and inwardly a delusion. In the end the double subterfuge had been shown for what it was – a mockery of adulthood. I was simply a non-real person, a botched attempt of biology that was so dreadful that it could not even be named. A hermaphrodite masquerading as a human. I knew with absolute certainty that I was only tolerated if I hid under a cloak of shame, that inner truth of what I was utterly unmentionable – the masquerade to be preserved at all costs. And in my shame and because of the shame I colluded with this – struggling to maintain the pretence.

Jung built his map. Four diamond quaternios stacked one on the other, reaching from the fuzz of the “Rotundum” to the purity of the “Anthropos”. It was his ladder to sanity, his map of the soul.

Mine was the pentangle. Each point an aspect of being, united in the middle in a pentagon.

Each aspect of reality was necessary as a part of the map of what it is to be human and the realisation of the internal truth of each aspect of reality was essential to gaining a balanced view of being.

The Material world was the description of the world that might be given by science – at bottom little more than an energy fuzz knotting into ever more complex field and forms.

The Raw world: the experienced reality without human language constructs projected upon it. The world of things-in-themselves. The world touched on by Zen. A world without purposefulness, without intent; the very ground of being through which life flows by accident as no more than a temporary phenomena. 

The Word world: the projected world of human intention and meaning – a shared illusion, an artefact of language; the place we inhabit once we are inducted into the shared mythology of its existence; a children's game made real – a lets pretend played for high stakes. 

The Life force: that which burns through each living thing starting from that first spark aeons ago, and which will burn through each of us and on beyond. We are but fuel to its passage. 

The Vital world: that which charges each and every place, each and every thing, each and every moment with emotional richness, with love and wonder, with its own energy of person and place, of timeliness and potential. It is what enchants or alienates, petrifies or enthrals, chills, stagnates, enlivens, deadens, bores or enwraps. It is that by which we engage with the world. It calls us forth to wed it with our being. It is, if you will, the spiritual reality, that vitalisation that is the very magic sparkle which can intoxicate us with the mere act of living by its burning presence.

Some sort of map. A little temporary sense, or semblance of sense. I am not about to suggest that it is in anyway a good or useful map. It helped me for a while, that is perhaps why it emerged. But in truth little more than some rickety scaffolding that was helpful in rebuilding an illusion of sanity – something that could be hung onto as I attempted to crawl back into life. My compromise of understanding held against the prospect of its all being swept away: my survival map.

It still helps.