Connecting the Dots (or a brief chronology).
The encounter with The Catalyst and the feeling that I’d just woken up.
Wandering and wondering, I lean into some inner leading via feelings mostly and active searching for an answer to what am I supposed to do—is it the man, or something more?
Five years of that and I have a ‘feeling’ that dreams are important and start writing them down. Within weeks I find Carl Jung whose psychology incorporates the importance of dreams as a communicator for that inner leading.
The next synchronicity coming up—I ‘happen’ upon a book that answers the persistent “Why?” questions. (Remember, every answer to a “Why” question can always solicit another, “Why?”)
You may remember how I found Carl Jung synchronistically. My trip down the Natchez Trace for a day off, the intriguing mystery of Meriwether Lewis’ death, and off to visit the library for a book to decide for myself if Lewis was murdered or committed suicide. Then seeing Carl Jung among all the other A to Z biographies in that section, and pulling his book off the shelf. The reading of his bio, “Memories, Dreams and Reflections” bringing a feeling of ‘elation’ as I read what had been happening to me in the previous five floundering years.
That fateful trip down the Trace was a Thursday, August 22. A note in my journal shows that I started reading the Jung bio on Friday, August 23, with the note, “Elation!” On August 28, less than a week after my sojourn down the Trace, I had this dream:
(From my dream journal) “After starting to read Jung’s autobiography: I had a remember-able dream about going to some foreign country, an “S” country—I just remember it as “S” and cold/white)–and landing in an airplane backward (the tail section first) and thinking it funny with the people I was traveling with—or was sitting beside in the plane—looking out the window and realizing the plane was tail first streaming down the runway. Seems like my travel or seat mates were an older man (Jung?) and an older woman. When I got into the airport/customs area, I realized I had no passport/credentials to enter a foreign country and started to feel dismayed until brightly I realized I would still be able to get into the foreign country. It would just take me 45 min to 1 hour longer to get cleared. A young girl, helpful, efficient, personable, tall, set about clearing me. I was never worried about it at all, just confident it would work out even though I was ‘breaking the rules’ and not doing it like everybody else. It would just take me longer.“
It would be the first of many directive, insightful, instructive, and encouraging dreams that I would have.
From Jung:
“To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its food as best it can.” …I regarded the unconscious and dreams, which are its direct exponents, as natural processes to which no arbitrariness can be attributed and above all no legerdemain. (trickery or sleight of hand) Carl Jung “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” (MDR) p 161
Apparently my subconscious works on getting me to understand while sleeping. For the nights following the plane dream, it was like I would only feel about half asleep, the other half working subconsciously on figuring things out. I’d sorta figure out parts of things, then semi-wake up to realize it, cement it in my memory. (I’m thinking that probably the subconscious can work better with the rigid, objective mind when it is half asleep.) My interpretation became pretty clear on September 2.
This from my journal:
“I was trying to be admitted to a “foreign land” without the proper “official credentials.” (In real life, I was trying to understand a foreign area—the unconscious…Jung’s psychology) S-country could be Switzerland, Jung’s country. Without the proper official papers—a degree. I was happily confident I would be admitted: it would just require a very small, pleasant, (patient) unruffling delay. Is the foreign land the unconscious rather than just Jung’s psychiatry? The unconscious feels to be the avenue I need to approach now…to see “where” the really “big picture” comes from.”
I may have already mentioned that when you delve into the unknown, time warps, maybe elongates. So I wondered how long the “45 min to 1 hour time” depicted in the dream would take to be “admitted to the foreign country.” Relatively speaking, 45 min to 1 hour delay in Customs didn’t seem too unreasonable. I would later learn that the Unconscious was oft depicted as a ‘foreign land.’
The Unconscious, you may note, has now taken on a Capital “U.” Important.
Is it the Unconscious that is doing the leading here? How long would it take for me to be “admitted” to an understanding of Jung’s psychology? Or would it be the Unconscious itself that would take the time? What is the Unconscious and how does it affect me?
The next synchronicity was just around the corner. I’m driving home from work one day and on a last minute whim, I whip off the interstate to hit up a bookstore. (I remember slashing across two lanes of traffic to make the exit in time.) Whims can be dangerous. This one was worth it. Once inside the store, just browsing, seeing what attracted my attention. I see a sale table. Nice. I like sales. Thumb. Thumb. Thumb through…and there…oh-oh, a big Jung book, “Man and His Symbols.” Hmmm…might as well…if dreams are communicators of the psyche, best to start learning about their symbols, right? And at a sale price!
I would learn that I was neither a singular, nor an anointed case.
No specialty required to get synchronicities or dreams or books dropping breadcrumbs. Jung’s Psychology of Individuation assures that these things happen to anyone who opens themselves up to something bigger than outward appearances. To the hero and heroine who enters the forest on his or her own path to search for the holy grail, their true Selves.
“The Self can be defined as an inner guiding factor that is different from the conscious personality…how far it develops depends on whether or not the ego is willing to listen to the messages of the Self.” Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, (MAHS) p. 162
Jung’s psychology came from his lifetime of having lived all that he writes about… understanding the human psyche, recognizing how the myths that mankind laid down are pathfinders, and following his own unknown leading, In his bio, “Memories, Dreams and Reflections,” Jung tells about his experiences as a doctor, psychiatrist, and scientist who submitted to the leading of his Unconscious.
He writes,
“…my life has been singularly poor in outward happenings. I cannot tell much about them, for it would strike me as hollow and insubstantial. I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life.”“…my life has been in a sense the quintessence of what I have written, not the other way around. The way I am and the way I write are a unity.” Carl Jung, “MDR”
Aniela Jaffe writes in the forward of the book:
“I often asked Jung for specific data on outward happenings, but I asked in vain. Only the spiritual essence of his life’s experience remained in his memory, and this alone seemed to him worth the effort of telling.”
He retained that which was pertinent to his survival.
Jung’s entire life and life’s work was committed to understanding the human psyche. His early experience with schizophrenics and the mentally ill led him to recognize that many of their delusions were rooted in ancient symbols and myths which he then steeped himself in so that he could understand them. It was his own dreams that gave him answers and clues leading him all the way back to the Alchemists and the Gnostics. This commitment many times caused painful separation from his colleagues, including his break with Freud, but he felt a conviction to stay true to his internal leading. He persevered to provide an answer…that I needed to find many decades later. I particularly loved this line because it plucked a string of my heart and soul, and validated a thought I’d already had in a poem, “Phantom Questions.”
“I also think of the possibility that through the achievement of an individual a question enters the world, to which he must provide some kind of answer.” Carl Jung, MDR, p.318
Be All That You Can Be
Jung’s psychology: The Process of Individuation. I’ve shorthanded it, “the process of becoming whole.” The Army copped it and made a slogan out of it: Be All That You Can Be! (Who knew the US Army was Jungian.) Whole. Becoming Whole. That sorta intimates parts and pieces need to be put together to become whole. Parts and Pieces are next up, but first, here’s why and what the process entails.
“The actual process of individuation—the conscious coming to terms with one’s own inner center…the Self—generally begins with a wounding of the personality and the suffering that accompanies it. This initial shock amounts to a sort of “call,” although it is not often recognized as such. On the contrary, the ego feels hampered in its will or its desire and usually projects the obstruction onto something external.
Or perhaps everything seems outwardly all right, but beneath the surface a person is suffering from a deadly boredom that makes everything seem meaningless and empty. Many myths and fairy tales symbolically describe this initial state in the process of individuation by telling of a king who has fallen ill or grown old.
One is seeking something that is impossible to find or about which nothing is known. In such moments all well-meant, sensible advice is completely useless—advice that urges one to try to be responsible, to take a holiday, not to work so hard (or to work harder), to have more (or less) human contact, or to take up a hobby. None of that helps, or at best only rarely. There is only one thing that seems to work; and that is to turn directly toward the approaching darkness without prejudice and totally naively, and to try to find out what its secret aim is and what it wants from you.” Carl Jung, “MAHS” p. 166
Can you feel the excitement that I must have felt reading those words? The call. Breaking of the heart. Boredom. Turn directly into the approaching darkness. What does it want from me? This was me. This was my life. This was my answer!
I’d been bucking the ‘good advice’ of friends and family in an effort to find my answers. No one had understood my dilemma because it was un-understandable to anyone but me. It was my individual path, my path to find, my path to walk. I had started the Process of Individuation, to become the real me. My first step after ‘awakening, I was learning about and incorporating the animus as one of the parts and pieces to become whole. Would I be led to find the other parts and pieces to becoming whole?
I had lived some distant day into another answer. What amazed me was that, the universal description that Jung gave…it couldn’t have been more personalized exactly for me!
“…symbolically this points to the fact that often the urge toward individuation appears in a veiled form, hidden in the overwhelming passion one may feel for another person. (In fact, passion that goes beyond the natural measure of love ultimately aims at the mystery of becoming whole, and this is why one feels, when one has fallen passionately in love, that becoming one with the other person is the only worthwhile goal of one’s life.”) Carl Jung, “MAHS” p. 206
Jaw-dropping disbelief, that shaking of your head back and forth when you just can’t fathom what you’re seeing or reading! Universal. For the ages. For every human. My exact circumstances! Validation. Explanation. Exultation!
Synchronicity led me to the book, “Man and His Symbols,” and it turned out to be underscore, underscore, underscore. The Dots were connecting so fast there was an audible clicking! Breadcrumbs? Listen to this (and I’m going to go bold on the things that underscore what we’ve been talking about):
“The individuation process is more than a coming to terms between the inborn germ of wholeness and the outer acts of fate. Its subjective experience conveys the feeling that some suprapersonal force is actively interfering in a creative way. One sometimes feels that the unconscious is leading the way in accordance with a secret design.”
Whew! And, yes, there’s more:
“…in order to bring the individuation process into reality, one must surrender consciously to the power of the unconscious, instead of thinking in terms of what one should do, or what is generally thought right, or of what usually happens. One must simply listen, in order to learn what the inner totality – the Self – wants one to do here and now in a particular situation.” Carl Jung, “MAHS” p. 163
“The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth.”
I had listened to that little inner voice that ran like a sentence through my head and heart. I chose to give my self, without any further design or purpose, to an inner urge that turned out to be growth. It may not be the easiest, quickest road or follow-through, but it is perhaps the most satisfying. Just look at the encouragement you tap into that comes to keep you reinforced, armored up, and excited to get the next clue! To find the next part of You…to become all that You can be…were intended to be…that you planned for You to be!
Parts and Pieces—Getting to Know Me!