Pissing In the Wind

"The shadow gone autonomous is a terrible monster in our house..."
The Shadow by Robert Johnson


As children most us learn that you can't spit into the wind or throw sand into the wind; you get back the same result: it flies into your own face! But somewhere along the way to adulthood we seem very often to forget this truth. Many of us seek to level our relations with others by these very means. There are relatively few facts in the world; most are about nature herself. For example, day follows night and night evolves again into day; there is the sun and the moon and all the seasons exerting their force and pull upon earth and its inhabitants.

There are airplanes, and then there are pilots; drivers who drive cars; wind and ice which foils them, sometimes with injurious or deadly results. We like to think of our self as master of all, in control. The sad fact of physics is that often we aren't. For many this provokes a deep anxiety or unconscious dread. We are protective, even defensive of ourselves and our positions. This often leads to a sort of self blindness, not unlike that experienced by the Emperor in the Hans Christian Anderson story, The Emperor's New Clothes. Regular readers here will recognize the theme...
Simple acknowledgment of our desire to make things safe for our self in relations with others goes a long way to enlightening the mind.

In the spiritual life, we seek to find a unity with these unacknowledged parts of ourselves, parts which often riotously erupt at sometimes the most inopportune, the most inconvenient moments. For some the solution, at least temporarily, is to squelch or sequester these emotions, this energy out of sight and effectively, out of mind.
"In the cultural process, we sort out our God given characteristics... we begin to divide our lives." This process Robert Johnson calls, 'shadow making' in his book, Owning Your Own Shadow.
Without some measure of self-regulation, routine social interactions would become potentially very messy on a very regular basis. However these now "forgotten" traits don't often slink away; instead they lay in wait for another time. Lying in the darkness of the anterior mind, the shadow strength builds. In some it provokes deep depression or anxiety, in others a general mental disorder.

There is the sorting process which we think of as culture, by which the facets of the accepted and unaccepted self are rendered either active or passive; the active parts we think of as personality and the inactive become unknown, or from time to time emerge as 'bad manners' which culture seeks to rope in and regulate.
Yet this sorting process is "quite arbitrary," Johnson observes. For the spiritual growth of a person in mid-life, the two must reconnect for a balance, for unity to arise.
The Hindus for example, acknowledge the presence of the gods of creation and destruction simultaneously. In Hinduism, the balance of these natural forces is called Ananda.
In the west, the word we use to describe this same process is religion, from the Latin, it means to re-relate, to put back together again, to restore. It is in this move towards restoration that our spiritual selves find rest, peace and balance of the whole.

Your Neurosis, a Low-Intensity Religious Experience*

“Jung’s studies and work led him to conclude that the unconscious is the real source…" Robert Johnson

Jungian psychologist and author, Robert Johnson writes about many things in his book, Inner Work. Most importantly he details the value of the ‘inner world’ of individuals. The inner world as he describes it follows along the ideas of his mentor psychologist Carl Jung who defined the term: the ‘secret inner life we all lead, by day and by night, in constant companionship with our unseen, unconscious self." Johnson, like Jung, makes considered value of these associations, the conscious, the unconscious, dreams, rituals and something he calls active imagination.

“Jung’s studies and work led him to conclude that the unconscious is the real source of all our human conscious… reasoning, awareness, and feeling. The unconscious is the Original Mind, the primal matrix... Every feature of our functioning consciousness was first contained in the unconscious and then found its way from there… The conscious mind reflects the wholeness of the total self… this [is] a storehouse of raw energy assimilates into the personality… the true depth and grandeur of an individual human being is never totally manifested until the main elements of the personality are moved from the level of potential (meaning more at ‘possibility’) in the unconscious… [to] the level of conscious functioning.”

Jung observes about the inner life: the unconscious, when in balance with the conscious mind lives in relationship to one another. However the disaster in this view is that the modern world has completed “the splitting off of the conscious mind from its roots in the unconscious.” Thus all the forms that nourished earlier generations such as dreams, vision, ritual, imagination and religious experience are lost, dismissed by the modern mind as base or superstitious. What’s left? Many seek to fill the void with a ‘conscious consumerism,’ fed by big business, they fixate on the physical, the external, material world.

Still the inner world strives to make itself known. Many have contact with this form of knowledge through the recollection of dreams. While dreams are not taken literally in Jung’s view, they are, however, powerful imaginings and symbols pointing the way; thus the dream is a portrait of the dreamer. They are influential reporters of our behaviors, whose origins are from within. And “curiously people resist their good qualities even more emphatically than they resist facing their negative qualities,” writes Johnson. Dreams “constantly speak to us about our beliefs, and attitudes.”

Moving from dream work to the place of ritual is part of the process Jung describes as a function of making the unconscious individual. Ritual is a most important tool with great energy to bridge the difference between the paradox of opposites. It ties our divided selves together. In the West, Johnson says, there is a great urge to make everything abstract, to use intellectual discussion alone in substitution for concrete, direct, feeling experiences. When emotions are registered physically and concretely, they register at the deepest places of the psyche.
Another important point Johnson brings up is that of common sense. While imagination is a useful and valid part of conscious reckoning;its content and origin are produced uniquely within the self. Many conduct themselves without common sense. Not everything one imagines is to be acted upon. Some things are just for contemplation. Through thoughtful consideration, the distinction between the active and contemplative becomes apparent.
The Hindu master Sri Aurobindo once said, “Why is it that when people first relinquish the world (worldliness), the first thing they relinquish is common sense?” Courtesy and respect of others remain important community values.

* As for Neurosis, Jungian analysis sees this as a situation where unconscious motives are expressed in ways that do not directly serve the person; they may actually be detrimental imbalances to the self. How? For more information: This is a long discussion contained within the book, Inner Work by Robert Johnson, and also many prior references by Carl Jung in his writings.

The Idea of Maya, or What Part of Me Believes That?

The woman who gave birth to Buddha Shakyamuni is called in the scriptures, Mahamaya, meaning Great Maya, or Mayadevi, the Goddess Maya. In Tibetan, she is called Gyutrulma. In English, she is generally called Queen Maya, a designation that obscures more than it reveals.

Maya is actually the Sanskrit term for Illusion. So Mahamaya actually means the 'Grandest Deception, or Illusion' of all -- that which convinces us of Existence. Maya along with the other two who are 'Shakti,' that is Activity, and Prakriti or Matter, what we can call Nature.

There can be no life or existence without any of them, but we rely especially upon Maya. It is her conduct that makes the others perceptible, for without her we would have no access -- we would not be able to read existence or, reality.

Maya is not a Trickster in the sense of an spirit that purposely misleads or misguides. She is not Mara in disguise. Her majesty, ingenuity and intricacies generously permits us, or inspires us to glimpse the possibility of "enlightenment." It is our own self-preoccupations that distract us from this objective.
--Source unknown

Maya as the giver of insight is also a focus of many of the books written by Robert Johnson.In his book, Inner Work, he writes "sometimes the generative power of the inconspicuous is so strong that it creates fantasy (meaning:to make visible, to reveal) filled with vivid, symbolic images, capturing the mind so completely it holds our attention for a length of time." These "mini-movies" are a primary way our unconscious mind attempts to express itself--through the imagination (meaning: to transform to visible images), using the symbolic language of charged feelings. It just has to get our attention!

Another way we may experience unconscious thought is through a sudden surge of emotion, emotion of all types. There may be profound joy, love, anger, sadness which invades the conscious mind, and takes it over. These flooded feelings make little or no sense to the conscious mind, because the conscious mind did not produce them. We are often left with a feeling or thought later wondering, 'where did that come from? ' What was that about? ' Why did I do that? 'we often think or feel that the emotion came from somewhere outside of ourselves. "

In fact, these riotous, fractious, ungovernable emotions come from deep within oneself, from a place unseen, unknown by the conscious mind. It is precisely because it is intangible that it is called the "unconscious." At times we sense that we have carried these unseen, unknown elements within us for a long time, but how--but where? There is another part of the mind's self which lies completely outside the boundaries of the everyday, conscious mind.

It is a world of possibility, of promises, hopes and fears. It is also a world of energies, forces, and forms of intelligence, even distinct personality, lying within the unconscious. It is the source of much of our daily thoughts, feelings, and daily behaviors. We are more under the influence of the unconscious than we might suspect. Many of us have an intuitive feeling about the unconscious. We have had the feeling of being somewhere else, or perhaps, have driven or taken ourselves from one place to another, all while in deep thought, and not recalled the trip--only that we've arrived. This is the unconscious taking over some of the conscious functions, freeing the mind to do its imagining work, some call "daydreaming."

At times, feelings and emotions arise, and suddenly we are confronted by them, "I didn't know that I felt that way." When we suddenly blurt out these things, learning to recognize them by asking, "what part of me feels that way," is a very valuable exercise, and tool for self realization.

Sometimes these previously concealed identities or attitudes are embarrassing, or even violent and we are humiliated by them. At other times they reveal themselves as our own strengths and good qualities. For example, we may find that they are resources available to us that were previously hidden; we may express new wisdom, or speak in ways that show love or understanding previously unknown in our day to day life.

By gaining a true sense of our self through better acquaintance with the unconscious, we become more whole, more complete; our self is strengthened. By developing a relationship with the mind's eyes, the conscious and unconscious, we live richer lives. Most people however in todays modern, scientific world have lost touch with that place of dreams and imagination; they most often encounter the inner world only when they must--in times of psychological distress.

The mature self is a balanced self between conscious awareness and developing creativity derived from the power-storehouse of the unconscious. When out of balance, the power of the one or the other can become frightening, paralyzing us in our tracks. Unable to perceive the world outside or inside, we find many types of decision impossible in this state.
The purpose of learning to work with a whole, complete mind is not simply to resolve psychic distress or simply resolve conflicts; rather it is the source of our deepest feelings, our strongest religious longings, our great strength, and growing wisdom.

A great wind of energy originates in the integrated mind. We, in fact, as human beings, depend upon it, whether we know it or not, for all its image and symbol making power, for poetic, literary images, for math, scientific discoveries, for all artistic endeavors and for religious functioning. Without our native ability to generate these sense-symbols, we would not have the ability to function as a person in the day to day world. Thus it is hasty to denigrate the imagination--it is essential for much of our living.

In the case of dreams, imagination has the utmost power to convert the invisible forms of the unconscious into symbols and images that are perceptible to the waking mind. Sometimes dreams are so vivid, it's as if we were awake and experienced, in the day to day way, the contents of the dream. However real the symbols may seem, Johnson in his book, Inner Work cautions that one not take them literally. They are after all, unique symbols, your symbols speaking directly to you alone. A "spirit guide" contained within. Listen to their rhythms.
What part believes this? And what do you live for?