Self-Exploration: Far From the Madding Crowd

SELF EXPLORATION
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

Iona Miller, 2017

 "You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean.
You are not a stranger here." ~ Alan Watts

Common sense self-awareness is about our strength and weakness, abilities and preferences and their implications, and how we impact others. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) claimed, "Humanity's task is to become responsible for its own actions, conscious of the oneness of everybody with its soul."

For example, former astrophysicist, Giuliana Conforto has applied Bruno's ancient Art of Memory to recall human origins. Thus, we “see” within and communicate with the “only Force, which links and gives life to infinite worlds” that Bruno and other sages praise. She proposes an anthropic and astronomical revolution, centered on each being’s direct communication with this Force that actually is universal Life.

The soul is the 'friend' or the heart of the beloved that gives us generosity, moderateness, and eloquence -- the opening heart, experiential understanding. The emotion we have when we are open and motivated to explore the unknown is a positive emotion -- openness to ideas and creativity, the aspiration for a better life.

It doesn't take seeing a therapist to see yourself. Millions more people have used Jungian and post-Jungian models of the psyche with good results for their own self-understanding than ever went to therapy. A self-taught grasp of the categories, concepts, and dynamics can be applied to oneself, producing realizations. It certainly doesn't need to be intellectual at all, and can involve such traditional activities as journaling and dream work.

Focus mean noticing intuition more often, rather than ignoring or missing the psychic dimension of activity. Emotionally engaged intuitive understanding allows us to relate to one another as people. We can only do it if we innately know who we are, and why we are here. Self-awareness is connection to inner instinct, the inner voice -- the truest expression of ourselves as human beings. Are we fully here, or are we distracted?

Metaphor is important because if we can't say what a thing is "like," we are held in its thrall unable to incorporate it as an experience. In other words, when you are 'in it', you can't 'see it'. The soul has also been likened to symbolic metaphors of a journey or quest, a stream of consciousness, a vast ocean of energy, and a deep cave of eternity containing the treasure of all mankind.

Self-knowledge and awareness helps us navigate our way through our suffering. Psyche or soul is a root metaphor of the self-deepening reflective process, reflexive mirroring with its infinite re-valuing and re-visioning. In imagery self-reflectivity is expressed as repetition: recurrent references, intrinsic circularity, reflexive epistemology.

The mirror motif suggests the emergence of self-awareness and self-consciousness -- being aware of being aware of being. Soul's reflective perspective is a reflexive, self-reflecting, or feedback-based model of self-consciousness. 

"Emergent phenomena in our brains — for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will —are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself is determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing "resonance" between different levels... The self comes into being the moment it has the power to reflect itself. (Hofstadter 1980 p. 709)”

Jung distinguishes between the small self and the archetypal Self, as a guide of the spirit. He considers the later the core of individuation and spirituality. However, by attributing it godlike manifestations of awe and numinosity, he does not imply an ontological entity at large in the universe. He insists we can only relate, whether 'God' exists or not, to a god-image or god-complex and its phenomenology of the psyche.

The soul has many personalities and we are one of them. Hillman diverges from Jung by adopting a multi-centered approach to natural and 'divine' phenomena. In either model, this personified relationship is at the core of our self-exploration, whether we 'believe' in God or not. We don't need to have a crippled childhood or post-traumatic stress to be disturbed in today's post-postmodern world. 

Most of us experience nightmares, anguish, fear of death and life. We question the whole socio-political landscape and our responsibilities to our fellow beings. Personal and collective evil may suppress our actions or create obsessions and the paralysis of fight/flight/freeze. Society is rethinking old assumptions and roles.

Evil is about the absolute nature of reality. Such evil that plagues us leads toward seeking gradual recovery of self through a new birth in consciousness. Even our own self-awareness and affective knowledge can emerge from traumatic realizations, beyond self-deception.

Tragedy must be distinguished from evil. Our human existence is a confrontation between the finite and infinitude, forming the existential conditions of life. We are always overwhelmed by the infinite, so we suffer from our limitations, including mortality. It's central to the nature of our being, and we deal with it everyday.

There is no existence without limitation. It's a constant tragic reality that we remain vulnerable. Tragedy reveals our vulnerability but isn't evil as a condition of human existence. How are we to understand a story like this?

Ancient wisdom and modern science agree that consciousness is not something we “have” but the fundamental nature of both ourselves and the entire Universe. Psyche and matter are synonymous, unifying the nature of reality. We have to look at the world through a limited frame of reference we can comprehend at any given moment. There is no real life or spirituality without archetypal experiences.


Spirituality & Trauma Suffering
Our ongoing dialogue with God is the dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious, including the visions, reflections, and comments that arise in the course of our journey to the center of existence.  The psychospiritual development of individuation is a relationship with the numinous archetype of the god-image, the deep Self -- God realized in one -- superconsciousness realized in one.

Go into yourself, your soul, deep enough to find truth. It's really the content of our delusions about self, other, and god that keep us from the direct experience of primordial awareness -- the realm of the sacred ground beyond objective psychic contents -- the dissolution of conceptual structures.

"Man is a gateway, through which you pass from the outer world of Gods, daimons, and souls into the inner world, out of the greater, into the smaller world. Small and inane is man, already he is behind you, and once again you find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller or inner infinity. ... Man here, God there. Weakness and nothingness here, eternally creative power there. Here nothing but darkness and clammy cold, there total sun." (Jung, Red Book, Page 354).

Being overwhelmed by the burden of a hyperactivated unconscious can feel like being crushed, torn apart, or drowned. Even the transformative power of the psyche appears first as a monstrous or numinous threat as it targets the old ego which must dissolve or "die" for the new personality to arise. Dreams may reveal we are threatened by archetypal powers that bring disintegration, pain and fear to the ego.

We discover the particular images that hide behind the emotions and tyranny of our own ego, thoughts, and automatic reactions. We can deploy our own imaginative and symbolic capacity. We foist our human compulsions on the god of our own image, who historically shares some of our personal and collective foibles.

The soul is who we are, our deepest essence. We imagine the divine imprint within us. If we imagine ourselves 'divine' we usually implicitly choose from the menu of positive qualities. We look at the outside world from the inside.

Trauma creates existential desolation and confusion in relationships, and our relation with the divine can be one of them. It can also bring a treasure of soulful wisdom and compassion. The mythic wound is the legend of the grail king, as Hillman implies, "...in the goblet of the wound, there is the soul. This means that it is the psyche, the purpose of our love, bleeding, and that the wound is a grail."

The impulse should be present in the soul for spiritual knowledge, spiritual understanding, deep self-knowledge and ways for self-expression. Emma Jung called it, “the psychological expression of an extraordinary stirring of the unconscious”, an unconscious projection of the Self. As the feeling function, the Grail helps us distinguish good and evil.

That impulse is inextinguishable and informs the quest for renewal of the mysteries. The journey into self-knowledge is the quest for the Grail. We recognize the interrelation of things as an experience of the Self and love at its highest level. 

Trauma is sacred wounding. When the ribbon of our fate unravels, the wound may be physical or psychological, but is likely psychophysical. Wounds and scars help forge our character as we tend our sacred wounds. In some sense we're all wounded by the overwhelming nature of modern life and the escalating arc of technological and socio-political adaptation.

Old rules no longer apply and we must search and find our own path through it all. We can embrace and prioritize woundedness, humanity, and limitations over a quest for perfection, transcendence, and transformation. As Jung says, "To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the "thorn in the flesh" is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent." CW 12, Par 208.

In terms of trauma this needn't be defined by the type or degrees of trauma we experience, nor specific stress or trauma management we use, spiritual or not. Greater or lesser trauma is naturally inflicted on us by living life and that relates to our self-care and self-exploration.

Trauma is also where a spiritual dimension arises in terms of our lot in life, our inner support resources, and our reactions to it. What one can shirk off may incapacitate another. Spirituality becomes a field for working this out. It may be unconscious, presenting as depression or anxiety, numbness, spaciness, turbulence, lack of motivation, or a failure to connect or thrive. We feel loss of control or might simply feel stuck, uncomfortable, or confused, either as an individual or in relationship.

What happens when yearning for emotional succor becomes traumatic, unavailable, misdirected, or overwhelming in itself? We may also misinterpret signals from our inner authority and can enter dangerous detours or distorted self-interpretations. Boundless good and unspeakable evils have been done in God's name. Some of them involve our own self-defeating and self-destructive impulses, shame, blame, and projection. We project onto our God like any other psychic entity.

Trauma is one of the ways that death pervades life. The trauma of atrocities, combat, war, and terrorism, the trauma of abuse, or drug-related violence, or natural disasters etched in our psyches, have similarities, but are not the same. Trauma is a break, a tear, a rupture, a splitting open. It strikes like an unexpected bolt of life-changing lightening. It comes in many forms from accidents, to huge events or a more subtle pain that we try to overlook, though it continues to haunt us. 

Many child victims never learn healthy ways to manage their own needs and responsibilities. Severe or chronic childhood trauma can result in a set of negative core self-beliefs, grief, stuckness, and bereavement. Certain parts disintegrate and fragment. Trauma leads to an adaptive preservation of Self at any cost, unconscious ways of avoiding pain. What doesn't work is a spiritual bypass.

There are many kinds of moral injury or affront and trauma but one of the most overwhelming is an uncontainable encounter with infinity. There is a tradition of equating God with trauma in a variety of ways. We can't represent the ineffable because the trauma remains unsymbolized, unintegrated into normal memory.

Surprising us utterly, trauma slips unaware into the very fabric of our being. as a past that was never present. Grief can turn a life upside down. Historical trauma includes triggers from our epigenetics, passed down  through generations of traumatized ancestors. Triggers are overreactions to perceived danger. The past interrupts the present, without warning. The reaction may be delayed and untethered -- unconscious surges of anxiety and anger arise seemingly out of nowhere. 

What speaks to the depths of suffering a person experiences? Trauma is enigmatic suffering that doesn't go away. It is too much to bear the continual crisis living within. Such a wound buries itself deep in our consciousness and physical being as tragedy too heavy for us. It happens in the past, but asserts itself over and over, if not continuously, in the present.

The precipitating event comes with unexpected force and shatters familiar frameworks of meaning and existential trust. Devastating incidents include sudden death, sex too early, familiar violence, intimate betrayal, prolonged neglect, normalized violation, excused abuse, oppression, neglect, and pervasive pain. The past occupies the present in traumatic time.

Symptoms persist long after an event is over. Trauma and violence affect our imagination, as well as body and soul and our capacity for altered states. Time, body, attachment style, and words -- the language of soul -- are altered. Energy infuses our deeds and words at the real level of our motivation from either fear or love. 

The less avoidant and less anxious, the more secure we feel in close relationships. We don't know how to faithfully navigate the overwhelming wounds and unpredictable triggers, even with social support. We feel angry, fragile, powerless, and vulnerable. Trauma interrupts our lives and we can lose confidence in our navigating skills.

Restructuring our imagination of self and the world is part of the healing process. .Should we insist on our “need to process” — the need to focus exclusively on our trauma? Do we need to speak at length about the pain, to obsess over it, to become preoccupied with our wounds? It may or may not be that only in giving ourselves over to our trauma we can be free from it. We may only be able to listen and tend to it with the poetic voice of reality.

Research in spiritual emergency vs. spiritual emergence (Grof) shows that numinous experience can be traumatic in its overwhelming and life changing dimensions. 
 The temporal lobes plays a key role in emotional stability. It interprets and integrates input to give it meaning, in the deeply emotional rather than intellectual sense. 

People can be traumatized by anomalous experiences for a number of reasons. Their content may be positive or negative. Such mystical experiences often arise from prayer, meditation, or the sensitivity of elevated temporal lobe activity. 

They include among others, seeing God or spirits, out-of-body experiences, episodes of meaningfulness, spirit mediumship, sensed presence, vision quest experiences, prophesy, and hearing the voice of spirit guides, with different intensities subtlety, and frequencies.
More: https://ionamiller.weebly.com/temporal-lobes.html

Some imagine 'angels' or 'demons'. Left temporal lobe hallucination may involve single words, verbal monologues, sentences, commands, advice, or distant conversations which can't quite be made out. Such experiences affect our worldview and sense of self and others.

Spirits are not ontological or metaphysical facts, but imaginal realities. The psychological or therapeutic approach does not require ontological speculation or meta-questions. We perceive them as epistemological metaphors, or 'how we know what we know' and what it's 'like,' which awakens their psychophysical aspects.

Dream imagery or psychedelics are associated with the right temporal lobe. The interconnected amygdala, hippocampus, and temporal lobe can act in concert during mystical experience. Hyperactivation infuses perceptions with tremendous religious and emotional feeling, endowing it with special or religious significance.

Issues of the spirit can initially present as tie strength, addictions, shadow possession, soul loss, and other problems. Too often protection, stability, and love are ripped away by the blunt realization of humankind's dire situation.

Finding our own words for articulating our suffering helps by framing categories, concepts, and even prayers that foster a means of finding meaning. The strategy of inner dialogues has the cathartic effect of "tragedy." Dealing with cycles of trauma the challenge is to continually resist the temptation to cover over or smooth over the suffering. mirroring the dissociation process with witnessing and the language of redemption.

One-sided identification with good also arouses confrontation with personal and collective evil. Trauma disrupts our moment to moment self-narrative and is a deep challenge to theology. It can be an encounter with death, or disconnection from what we know to be true and safe in the world -- a suspension in the psychic darkness of limbo. Our spirit may be a sustaining power through all the witnessing of ruptures as we move between life and death. It suggests that death is not an event that is ever concluded.

Research in complex post-traumatic stress shows that dynamic effects remain long after a traumatic storm and we cannot will, wish, or even pray them away. In fact, often no life after the storm can be imagined. Trauma is virtually unimaginable because it is the experience most difficult to put into words and concepts. Languages cannot account for traumatic or ineffable experiences. Often we feel no one can really understand our own particular pain.

The storm remains, occluding our straightforward visions of life or death. Pushing the process can be dangerous by amplifying suffering and repetition. The whole self can be held in the shock waves of chronic violence. It's always there. After traumatic events some people turn away from religion while others seek solace by immersing themselves in it, seeking grace that a post-traumatic god may or may not manifest on their behalf.

The experience of God can be beautiful even if the content is questionable. 'Sensed presence' or experience of a positive or negative being can be induced by magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes of the brain. Spirit beings and wisdom figures are evoked on the left side of the limbic system (prayerful, compassionate, contemplative). And, malefic beings arise from the right (inward, silent, dark). We experience what we are prone to.
Todd Murphy - https://www.god-helmet.com/wp/religious_mystic_in_evolution.htm

Church, temples, or mosques rarely provide a place to bring such unresolving experiences, including historical and political trauma, institutional trauma, and global trauma. We know it affects us materially, genetically and psychically. The history of the wounded heart gets buried. We want God or someone to speak to our story, not erase the truth we cannot fully bring into words.

We are affected and remain affected spiritually by overwhelming trauma. Hence, the saying, 'there are no atheists in foxholes.' They also say, "God shows up next to us in the foxhole, with words meant for the foxhole, words we never could have fully understood anywhere else."

Well, maybe. But what if God remains absent when we're under fire? Trust and beware. The traumatized must feel their ways through spiritual warfare, dogma, and propaganda  like everyone else, but with a peculiar handicap.

The God who can allegedly do anything may not grant your desires or even fulfill your true needs. Can we embrace the possibility, with or without faith? If we imagine there is a God who could bring resolution but doesn’t (like an emotionally unavailable parent), we feel isolated or perhaps unworthy, compounding our pain with self-recrimination.

All perceptions are filtered through a distorting lens of trauma. Whether we dwell on it ornot, the past keeps returning to wound long after the precipitating events are over. Overwhelming or violent events return with unaccountable impact on present and future. Life is more uncertain, tentative, murky. A fragile presence of spirit may be marked by absence, abandonment, foresakenness, and alienation.

The fixation or repetition compulsion often has an unconscious spiritual component. Guilt, survivor guilt, toxic shame, despair, confusion, emotionalism, terror and nightmares, suspicion, self-harm, dislocation, fragmentation, disorientation, temporal distortions, epistemological ruptures, panic, and anxious uncertainty remain.

Falling in the same hole, we are re-traumatized. No one can simply 'get over it' anymore than someone could make themselves sane. Resorting to extreme spirituality as a presumed refuge may create re-traumatization, rather than relief. Life may never again be the same as we knew it. Trauma is suffering of the heart, soul, and mind beyond human capacity and comprehension.

Often we expect mental healing to follow closely after physical healing, but it is often not so. We may heal physically but not psychologically or spiritually. And conversely, we may heal our psyche and spirit even when the body remains afflicted.

Our worldly traumas can carry a deeply felt spiritual dimension within their matrix, content, and effects. This is not to reduce 'God' to a trauma, or insist on a spiritual core for traumatic experience, but the God-image or God-complex is an aspect to consider in a psychological approach. Imagination is not an abstraction of reality. As a creative activity of the spirit, it gives coherence and resonance to what dwells in us. 

In his book, God as Trauma, Mogenson points out, "Whether a divine being really exists or not, the psychological fact remains that we tend to experience traumatic events as if they were in some sense divine. Just as God has been described as transcendent and unknowable, a trauma is an event which transcends our capacity to experience it." 
 
No one remains untouched by overwhelming violence, either personally or intergenerationally. Being a witness can wound as deeply as being a direct victim. Trauma is what does not go away but persists in symptoms, sensations, intrusive memories, and internal images in the body. Because they are not amenable to rational explanation, the symptoms need to be lived through, not interpreted.

We don't interpret or understand fantasies, but experience them more deeply. We can treat visions as works of art, with respect, gentle attention, lyrical and raw realistic tones. Our self-care stimulates reflection, raising questions about the secrets of the soul and inner urges. We discover visions that sustain and regenerate us through the use of symbols which various characters carry, but not in any cognitive or formulaic way. 

Imaginative activities feed us with the psychic energy of dreams, visions, and fantasies. The visions are telling: involuntary tales of psychic life, that represent processes and paths of biographical events. We may have valuable premonitions of unknown things, within a mysterious and inexplicable world.

"A psychological identification ... exists between overwhelming events and the categories theology would reserve for deity. The psyche is irrational. It constantly makes deductions and ellipses which philosophy and theology would judge to be mistaken. But these identifications are the facts of the psyche, regardless of their value to other disciplines." Our psychological concern is with the brute fact that the traumatized soul is a theologizing soul--not with the merits of that resultant "theology" as theology. (Mogenson)

Speaking of Mogenson's book, David L. Miller says: 
"It will not be easy at first to sense that God is a trauma, that 'the jungle fire-fight, the early morning rape, the speeding automobile of the drunk driver...may be God images if, like God, they create us in their image, after their likeness.' But little by little, this 'gnostic analysis' gets under the skin, & one begins to see, indeed, that 'whatever traumatizes us becomes our parent' & our God, & that our religion has traumatised us by being 'religious kitsch,' covering our hurts. Greg Mogenson makes the point sensitively, therapeutically, & compellingly that 'the notion of salvation is eternally corruptible,' & that 'we need salvation from the very notion of salvation itself.' It may be as important for souls today to wrestle God as a Trauma as it was for Jacob to wrestle God's angel traumatically...and for the same reason!"

Jung himself used self-care and artistic expression to explore and express his own search for meaning and to recover his own myth. He created his Red Book, an autobiographical narrative of the soul. Identifying with our innate images without explanations or interpretations that betray them becomes a unique process of self-initiation. (Shamdasani, Red Book Introduction, Turin, 2009, p. XXXI-LII).

The vile part of ourselves -- baseness, contemptability, and inability to find peace -- is both a danger and the source of grace that can even heal our God-problem. We are anointed with danger. We may complain and be angry at the impossibility of uniting our unpredictable vile part with the law of love. We fear the danger is greatest where the God is nearest. Fear and doubt stand as guardians on our your path. Gving it shape opens the locks of chaos. If the vile exists, so must the holy.

We learn to trust that process. Internal feelings are valued more than interpretations. The process conjured up a waking fantasy Jung entered as if it were a theatrical representation. He approached the autonomous unconscious with his own moral base in an 'as if' reality. We, too, can learn to discover visions that regenerate through the use of symbols carried by various characters in our unconscious dramas.

Jung's visions included characters that were autonomous, dynamic, and numinous so he took them very seriously. He respected them spiritually. The myth is the charm of intimate feeling, intuitive not discursive, incantational not logically argumentative. It may be more of a crisis, a close birth or death that spurs the quest for deeper meaning.

Our threshold moments may be full of anxiety or tentative ambivalence. Movement toward self-integration and transgenerational integration can be another portentous threshold. The point of reference remains the threshold experience where we go from ordinary awareness toward the synchronous and numinous. 

There is a long-standing tradition of the therapeutes, who were in service to the soul or the gods in the interest of healing. Psyche meant soul in ancient Greek. Therapeutes meant attendants in the temples of Asclepius (or Asklepios), the Greek god of healing.

So the literal meaning of psychotherapy is "tending to the soul," even in a self-help context. It moves rapidly away from issues with the professional 'other' or failures of the system or scientific models. We learn to tend to our own soul and tend our own dreams. That is, we pay attention to the emergent images and honor them -- becoming, sharing, feeling, releasing, yielding, accepting, deepening, intensifying, surrendering, healing, and integrating.

Everything in the dreamtime occurs in the present tense -- it is happening. But it is linked in a non-linear fashion--through association--with the past and the future. Becoming the image creates the experience of a new state of consciousness, new sensations, awarenesses, feelings, visceral and kinesthetic reactions, responses, acceptances. We experience multiple consciousness states beyond ordinary consensus reality.

Typically, the preferred approach for many therapies is through the symptom as a virtual doorway opening the deeper levels of psyche. This is how we cross the threshold into the unconscious. Therapy works best when it emerges from one's inner healer, through one's own imagery, rather than via guided imagery or imported metaphors suggested  or imported from outside.

Epistemological metaphors -- how you know what you know and what it's like -- are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams and symptoms. Content-free therapy can be done through metaphor, rather than through directly reliving trauma in a linear time dimension, thereby avoiding re-traumatizing processing.

In chaos theory, old forms must break down to make way for new ones to emerge. Healing occurs at the creative edge where new order emerges holistically. from rapport and resonance of local and global mind. A small change in attitudes, the messages we send to ourselves, can make huge differences. Change the image and you change the attitudes and feelings associated with it.

Attitudes also are related to our body chemistry, to stress hormones, activity, and lifestyle. Emotions control the immune system. The psychosomatic network can be easily accessed through natural trance. There is a biological, emotional, mental and spiritual aspect to healing. As we journey deeper and deeper into the psyche we eventually encounter a state characterized either as "chaotic" or void of images.

In a therapeutic context, chaos is experienced as a consciousness state -- the ground state. This state is related to healing, dreams, and creativity. Shamanic approaches to healing involve co-consciousness states which lead to restructuring both physical and emotional-mental senses of self.

Dreams, creativity, and healing arise from this raw, undifferentiated "chaotic consciousness." We can use images as portals for consciousness journeys to facilitate transformations ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes.

Imagery (virtual experience) affects the immune system, activating psychosomatic forces, such as the placebo effect and spontaneous healing. Much of our journey lies in our continued struggle and our commitment to ourselves and our spirituality. Fear and doubt may continue to guard our path, warning of potential danger. To integrate grieving, self-knowledge, and critical thinking is to align with self-awareness.

"Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your feelings need you, your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things." - Thich Nhat Hahn

Somehow we abide, remaining ourselves through the whole process, though our experiences may differ markedly in different phases of life. Jung reminds us that, "we can't live the afternoon of life following his morning program. Because what is big in the morning will be small in the evening. And the truth of the morning will become the falsehood of the evening."


Lifting the Veil
The world is a complicated place, depending on how we perceive it. We think we are sure of what we are or what we think we are. But the life of our human soul is a movement in the dark, in the uncertainty of our conscience. Each of us finds our own small story of suffering and joy writ large in the universal tale of mankind. As Hillman said, "when we are dealing with the unknown-and the future is the unknown - we are forced to imagine."

In self-liberation from life experiences, we simultaneously experience non-duality within duality. Duality within the experience of non-duality is the unfolding course of self-liberation. Coherent relational events empower us. As well as waking up we all need to grow up, to awaken awareness in each other through the medium of our own awareness.

Whether we like it or not, the truth is that we are the cause of ourselves. We are the victims of our own modernity: the family, the ethics of responsibility and sacrifice, religion, the community spirit. However, it is not about class, status, or even age. We seek out truth and connection. But it is not easy to bring down something which is a truth for ourselves. The difference between those who succeed and those who fail to achieve its goals is the belief system.

Sometimes taking a few steps back is the key to a positive change. We have to leave an old limiting belief system, a rotten foundation, to liquidate and find a new foundation for existence. Positive self-consciousness has been the root of the quest from time immemorial. Value is what you perceive and pursue.

We see what we are through narrative, dialogue, and vision. We imagine and our images, models that suggest possibilities, prime us for the appropriate action. Part of the task is to 'see' through the conditioned ego and get around it.

We all have idiosyncracies, vulnerabilities, and passions. Other people know us differently than we know ourselves through our self-concept or primal self-image. We have real individual differences. Subjective self-examination is always a struggle with our conscience, conscientiousness, conditions, and limitations. Negative self-consciousness is a neurotic trait linked to anxiety and stress.

We don't have to prove anything to ourselves to be more present in the imaginal part of our journeys through life. Aspirational self-understanding signifies the unification of consciousness and unconsciousness which represents the psyche as a whole, expressed as wisdom, conscience, empathy, and compassion. Soul shapes us to reveal more of who we truly are. There is even a religious dimension to overwhelming traumatic events.

There is an intergenerational field of transmitted experience, a living relational structure. This power of awakening awareness is transmitted through mothers and fathers, through brothers and sisters, through great teachers, through friends, through lovers, through companions, through strangers, through practitioners of awareness, through enemies, and of course through pets and animals. Timeless awareness manifests in time.

The vortex of the internal structuring process progressively de-structures conditioned patterns of organization. Hillman says "the experience of death offers each experience the opening to the tragedy" (p. 115). The undecomposable level of consciousness is experienced as the pure, unconditioned imprint of the whole, resulting in a new primal self image and sense of relationship to the greater whole which emerges through transformation.

Hillman suggests transformation is guided by our daemon, the guide and bearer of our destiny. We don't have to create or make up this innate phenomena, just listen deeply. The daemon may appear personified as soul-guide, guardian angel, elder, ancestor, or wisdom figure. Though our companion before birth, we tend to forget our companion and feel empty when we come into the world. Archetypes will use and abuse us all before we fall into the luxury of oblivion after death.

This knowledge depends on a long journey into yourself to a new expanded perspective. 
"Every part of the world vibrates with the others. Thanks to this immanence, man is given to internalize, to expand his place, to identify him, in ethical terms, with the whole world."
(Pavel Nikolayevich Evdokimov)

Carl Jung notes, in his "Zarathustra Seminar", that "It is a general truth that one can only understand anything in as much as one understands oneself" (p.742). We live in a matrix of the deepest imaginal memory, rooted in our physical structure. Truth like the unconscious is always multidimensional. Others have recognized the mystery of how the soul transcends finiteness with infinity.

Jung further declared that, "Psyche and body are the same thing, to which we have attributed an independent existence". (Spirit and Life, CW. Vol. 8) The body is the medium of the field, an instrument of perception and knowingness, pulsating in resonance with and within Being itself. More than merely our external vehicle, we are the lived body, ‘lived’ embodiment, pure presence.

The symbolic dimension opens understanding, a world of reciprocity, nurtured by image, coherence, and modes of being in the world. Discernment and understanding of symbolic dimensions is a step towards reflection on the matrices from which we arise. As liminal phenomena, myths open the context of many dimensions, describing how chaos becomes cosmos. As lived reality, myth is sacred reality. Jung was uncompromising in his vision that myths are psychic manifestations representing the nature of the psyche. 

Myth has a functional dimension. We can access deeper levels of self-awareness and self-understanding through epiphanies, feedback from others, listening to intuition, and simple directed attention. Stimulating the imaginal opens up new possibilities. Mirroring our own symbolic narrative processes, myth's narrative processes arouse mysterious or awe-inspiring spiritual or religious emotion, filled with the sense of the sacred or holy.

This apprehension is not 'God' in the ontological sense, but in the epistemological sense of 'how we know what we know.' It is the direct experience of our images and fantasies about God that nevertheless have a numinous and determining effect on our psychic life. In this sense, 'god' can even be a synonym for trauma in the psychic sense of religious category, in the form of images and guiding fictions. 

Dreams seem to have something to tell us about the hidden dimensions of ourselves. Dreams are a key to self-knowledge, connecting what exists now with what is coming into existence with all the necessary detours. More than a detour it can remap the lifemap. The soul is the friend or the heart of the beloved that gives us generosity, moderateness, and eloquence -- the opening heart.

We needn't be concerned with interpreting our dreams or literalizing meanings that stop the imaginal process cold. Hillman suggests, "sticking to the image," as presented. Simply return to the image without  letting any 'A-ha' moment derail it's immediacy. Just take it for what it is, re-experiencing it with deep listening without assumptions.

There are many kinds of dreams, including mundane dreams later recognized as signposts, conflict resolutions, precognitive sequences, and dreams from the transcendent domain. Remarkably, when something is about to occur, we sometimes have subtle emotional hints as dreams unconsciously already know it’s going to happen. 

Depth Psychology approaches the exploration of the subtle, unconscious, and transpersonal aspects of our human experience. The poet Rilke calls this, "dialogues with eternity." We come to recognize mythic patterns and meaningful coincidences in ourselves and their healing potential.

Fritz Perls describes how, "We live for the pleasure, the fun, for the unaccountability. Everything's fine as long as it's nice. Looks nice. Much better than moralism. It is, however, a very serious setback. That is, we have become anxious towards pain and suffering. Let me repeat this sentence: we have become anxious towards pain and suffering. We must avoid anything that is not fun or pleasant. So we escape from any frustration that could be painful and try to limit it to the maximum. The result is a lack of growth." (The Approach. Eye Witness of Therapy, p. 112) 

Yet somehow all the pain is bearable once it enters our story and we can tell it. Fixation on trauma obscures. In this state we experience hiddenness, concealment of spaciousness, disappearance of awareness, obscuration of the light, and reduction of the bliss of beingness.

In a fixated state we cannot experience the sea of lifeforce, the magical sea of synchronicity, the sea of love.  We experience tremendous angst, a type of terror, and feel tortured. Unlike obsessive fixation and compulsion, alchemical fixation is stabilizing by re-opening the capacity to spontaneously experience field phenomena. We can amplify the voice of the afflicted psyche.

Each phase of life has problems that arise naturally and incessantly like relentless surges. We cannot escape them.  But we can have problems and be in the field of awareness.  Realizing that the unfolding field of experience is indeterminate in its vast potential brings forth the the awareness field as spontaneous manifestation. Fixation, spontaneity, and creativity arise out of indeterminacy.

Psychologist C.G. Jung insisted that, depending on our own approach and readiness, "by exploring our own souls, we come upon the instincts and their world of imagery should throw some light on the powers slumbering in the psyche, of which we are seldom aware so long as all goes well." He elaborated on it in The Undiscovered Self (Pages 75-79).

We simply need to listen to what is going on inside of us, our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, memories, and dreams with an expectation of inner discovery. We slough off the layers of our defenses to realize who we are in the present. "The long path I have traversed is littered with husks sloughed off, witnesses of countless moultings... They conceal as much as they reveal. Every step is a symbol of those to follow." (Letters Vol. 1, Pages 404).

As James Hollis puts it, "Stepping into largeness will require that we discern our personal authority – rather than the authority of others or the authority of our internalized admonitions – and live this inner authority with risk and boldness."

Self-exploration is about expression, discovering and unpacking our own unrealized spiritual, relational and intellectual capacities. It can help us resolve core issues by taking a hard look at our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We are in this present "that which is becoming." The abyss of the transcendent imagination lies between the self we imagine we are and our undiscoverable self.

Why do we pursue and generate knowledge and self-knowledge? Can we renew our confidence in the value of self-knowledge? We may seek understanding because we find ourselves bewildered, or we may simply pursue it for self-enrichment. It isn't so much for personality development as expressing soul, relating soulfully with self, others, and cosmos. If we question someone's self-knowledge, they often react quite defensively or aggressively.

We may rage or react violently to any questioning of our "knowledge," including self evaluation. People go to war to defend systems of knowledge they believe are true. We war with ourselves through self-loathing and lack of self-compassion. Besides our open public self, we have the hidden self of the projections of persona and shadow, the blind self of our scotomas (especially around love, relationships, and beliefs), and the unknown self of the unconscious.

Primal emotions drive the pursuit of knowledge. We believe that if we know (are "right") we are protected from the unknown. When we don't know (are "wrong"), we lack protection, and are vulnerable.  So, when knowing/not knowing is a life-or-death situation, to question someone's knowledge challenges their security of being. (C. Moore) <http://sites.psu.edu/moore/self-knowledge/>

Self-knowledge is a perspective linked to the constant of worldview. But we don't really know what counts as evidence for the validity of a world view, from survival, tribal, or power models to more integrative, compassionate, and inclusive modes.
Self-knowledge is more exploratory than acquisitive -- an exploration of the unconscious, the dark chaos of our subjective experience.

We learn from life-experiences. We discover the direction of the soul's path, our destiny. The integration of the unconscious into consciousness becomes a basis for experiential self-education. Ancestors, family relations and personal ties represent necessary and fated connections as impossible to escape as the Gods. Relations with the living, the dead, and the imaginal are the inescapable facts of collective and individual history.

We are often moved in midlife for various reasons to pursue greater self-knowledge. We all undergo structural changes where the symbols of liminality frequently represent such ideas as death and birth.

Real knowledge of the human soul is healing. Chalquist describes it as, "Absolute knowledge: the acausal foreknowledge, relatively independent of limitations of time and space, possessed by the unconscious and apparent in constellated archetypes and in synchronicity."

Reflection is needed for the expression of our psychic wholeness. The unconscious process of symbolization is the primordial manifestation of the human spirit. Knowledge of the future, subtlety of emotion, and hidden knowledge is in the image and in  the phenomena that happen along the way as we work with images, even without the metanarratives of telos, purpose, and goals.  

In "Platonic theology" (1482), Marsilio Ficino attributes a central role to the human soul. He describes the conscious link the link between the corporality of matter, the angelic intelligence and God on the other. "It can descend into the multiplicity of time and space and then trace the physical forms. When the soul flies above the mind, it provides for the future."

Ranier Maria Rilke said, “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” Only when we begin to see in depth do we begin to discover ourselves. It is the unconscious within us who changes. We draw on such information to answer questions such as "What am I like?". We don't know the core of longing but perhaps it is for the longing itself.

Contemplation of nature includes human nature. Creation myths mirrors the emergence of consciousness. A Promethean impulse underlies philosophy. Recognizing the unconscious side of ourselves fundamentally alters our pursuit of self-knowledge and inspire us to live authentic lives. Jung thought the unconscious, "compensates the attitude of the conscious mind and anticipates changes to come."

"The unconscious has a kind of absolute knowledge, but we cannot prove it is an absolute knowledge, because the Absolute, the Eternal, is transcendental." C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 375-391.

"Man’s consciousness is receptive to what Jung called ‘absolute knowledge’ a cosmic principle or quasi intelligence outside the psyche. All thinking which takes place in the ego obscures this ‘knowledge”. A quieting of the ego is required before one can approach it." Marie Louise von Franz, Aurora Consurgens,

Jung thought, "All knowledge of the psyche is itself psychic; in spite of all this the soul is the only experient of life and existence. It is, in fact, the only immediate experience we can have."

 "For the alchemists it was wisdom and knowledge, truth and spirit, and its source was in the inner man, though its symbol was common water or sea-water. What they evidently had in mind was a ubiquitous and all-pervading essence, an anima mundi and the 'greatest treasure,' the innermost and most secret numinosum of man. There is probably no more suitable psychological concept for this than the collective unconscious..." Jung, Collected Works vol. 14 (1970), Mysterium Coniunctionis (1956), ¶372 (p. 278).

Modern consciousness studies suggests much the same in a reframe of neurological theory: "We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated "behind the scenes" by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains. All this happens without any interference from our personal awareness, which sits passively in the passenger seat while these processes occur. Put simply, we don't consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them." https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-11-consciousness-human-mind.html

Self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know our specific individual facts beyond all theoretical assumptions within the chaos and irregularities of our destinies. We need an open and unprejudiced attitude. There are certain things we should be concerned about.

At certain life passages we come to mythical intersections that can radically alter our present and future depending on how we meet the challenge. We can travel the way of personal and collective soul -- awareness and experience of superconscious processes.

It is an ancient pursuit, as Novalis describes, in The Disciples of Sais (1789): "a favorite of fate sought to find the mysterious abode of Isis. He came to the threshold. He came in and saw his beloved. He lifted the veil of the goddess of Saïs. And he saw miracle of miracles - himself."

But self-knowledge requires discernment not marginalizing truth for idiosyncratic views and a high self-opinion. Fake experts invite us to conspire in their own self-deception and illusory powers, to join the folly of creating a fantasy world, pulling a veil over unwanted realities.

Our control fantasies are largely a reflection of our desire to hedge our fears, pain, and uncertainty. This is dangerous ground because whenever desire is opposed to will a tragic conflict appears. The deterministic view is contrary to our experience. Do we owe it to ourselves to doubt our doubts when we can dig under that to an even deeper level?

Will is a useful agent in the service of the self. But, will power cannot overcome unconscious motivations, which transcend our powers of comprehension. Assagioli defends it: "The will is not merely assertive, aggressive and controlling. There is the accepting will, the yielding will, the dedicated will. You might say that there is a feminine polarity to the will—the willing surrender, the joyful acceptance of the other functions of the personality."

"At the heart of the self there is both an active and a passive element, an agent and a spectator. Self-consciousness involves our being a witness—a pure, objective, loving witness -- to what is happening within and without. In this sense the self is not a dynamic in itself but is a point
of witness, a spectator, an observer who watches the flow. But there is another part of the inner self -- the will-er or the directing agent -- that actively intervenes to orchestrate the various functions and energies of the personality, to make commitments and to instigate action in the external world. So, at the center of the self there is a unity of masculine and feminine, will and love, action and observation."  (Assagioli) http://synthesiscenter.org/articles/0303.pdf

Jung concluded that,"The middle is the center where the jewel is located, where the incubation or the carrying out of the sacrifice or the transformation takes place ... [...] the one who happens to come across that cave, that is, in the cave that each one carries in he or she, in the darkness behind his conscience, is involved in a process of transformation that is unconscious at first. By entering into the unconscious, he creates a connection between his consciousness and unconscious contents; a transformation of his personality with consequences of a positive or negative nature. This transformation is often interpreted as an extension of the natural duration of life or as an omen of immortality. " (C.G. Jung, 1939)

The Blind Leading the Blind
Intellectual territory has been opened to the propagation of nonsense in an aggressive bid to be accepted. Often it is branded or institutionalized simply to sell itself. Therefore, a lot of self-help seminars and literature actually foster a more grotesque, egotistic, and controlling attitude. Yet the natural wild glory of the psyche remains uncontrollable as a mirror remains unaffected by what it reflects.

Posers critical of established modalities claim to originate 'astonishing breakthroughs' and radical conclusions. But somehow they are bootstrapped or congealed from a kernel of wisdom elaborated by personal and collective idiosyncratic thoughts with supernatural conclusions. Somewhere along the way, the logic train jumps the tracks on the wings of self-serving emotions. Paranormal conclusions come untethered from hypotheses and reality checks, leaving the process ungrounded.

Critical thinking is discouraged or disparaged. Claims are rarely checked or questioned. Stridently, insisting on shakey 'proofs' in repetitious podcasts doesn't make them true. Stridently, insisting on shakey 'proofs' doesn't make them true. Believers cocoon themselves in a mental fortress of groupthink confirmation bias with their own kind.

They hold 'conferences', begging for the persuaded response: 'yes, you are right, it is like that'. We may enjoy hearing about how godlike and divine we are, and in a certain sense that is core. But any grandiosity or compensation for our functional deficits it brings may just prevent us from becoming more fully human.

Such originality and transgression are just cliches arising from chains of mistaken ideas and emotions manipulated by rhetoric and even disinformation. Without real culture we remain emotionally uneducated, bewildered, lost in private fantasy while dismissing more functional alternatives. It turns quest into cliche.

For example, before obsessing on the threat or influence of aliens we might consider finding the alienated parts of ourselves, whether we literally believe in them or not. Similarly, religious dogmatism begs the question of whether we need more wholeness than holiness for the authentic life. Also, sometimes we keep an alienated or absent parent near by unconsciously acting out their shadow and behavioral traits.

Perhaps the best that can be said for alternative thought, is it all becomes part of our imaginal journey if we don't stay mired down in such memes, personality cults, dogma, -isms and collective confusion. Adopting the twisted reasoning of others or even their quirky interpretations is not the way to individuation.

We cannot take it for granted that we know ourselves any better than the ancients did. Most of the psychic facts of our being are hidden from us. The Delphic injunction “Know Thyself.” opens the question of “selfhood” and the nature of “recognizing,” “knowing,” “acknowledging”.

Some measure of self-deceit, arrogance if not megalomania, is always involved in our being, whether it is infantile or garden-variety narcissism [sociopathic narcissism is another issue]. Some have an innate urge to 'reach homeward' through self-discipline, artistic expression, healing, faith, or other means.

Knowing oneself takes determining what we count as this “self” that we ought to know, beyond simple self-regulation. We are motivated to experience positive emotional states [pleasure] and avoid negative emotional states [pain]. We're motivated to feel good about ourselves in order to maximize ego-traits and feelings of self-worth and self-esteem. But ego is just one aspect of psychic life though it imagines itself as central.

We react without thinking and call it instinct. But even peak experiences can leave us much the same as before without constant repetition and work. Unintegrated, it's just an experience. Thinking about the unity of the self generates paradoxes which actually have depth and importance to introspective penetration and transparency.

Recent events show a large part of the population can't tell fact from fiction. Historically, those with loftier intellectual aims have prioritized our search for meaning and purpose in life as most fundamental. It helps give our lives the structure and the context we need to ground our lives between desire and the infinite.

Individuation incorporates our unconscious selves into our egos. It means a commitment to knowing the nature of the psyche through direct, personal experience. We emerge with better self-awareness, acceptance and sense of purpose. We can refind our roots, reclaiming what was alienated from the matrix.

Myth opens the archetypal field of the symbolic dimension, of chaos and eros, with its shadows. Hillman suggests that, "Loving is a way of knowing, and for loving to know, it must personify. Personifying is a way of knowing, especially knowing what is invisible, hidden in the heart."

Rafael Lopez Pedraza describes the erotic nature of Eros and Psyche that, "takes place with mature slowness through the learning of pain, and never in youthful frenzy. ... the final fruit of love and psyche, pleasure, brings us closer to the mysterious and mystical character of the myth [numinosum], far beyond what we can express with simple words."

Eros, desire, motivates our loves, art, and violence. Eros is the guidance of our instinctual spiritual urge for psychic relatedness. The imaginal includes our metaconversations, the thoughts beyond the words. It combines desire with knowing the nature of the psyche through direct, personal experience. 

Suffering is virtually universal. Evil, misfortune, and injustice are part of life, of culture, as well as coincidence or misfortune. For example, society is undermined by the shadow tendency to be cruel to people less powerful than oneself, personally and collectively. We're flooded with confusion and lies.

The goddess of nature contains dark, sinister aspects -- cunning wickedness and cruelty, unfathomable depths of passion, and the uncanny gloom of death as well as light and the potential for rebirth. Immanent transcendence is found in the unconscious. Transcendence emerges from balanced mind and body, conscious and unconscious, self and nature. Yet, Jung cautions, "Occasionally we must also inquire whether something that wants to go upwards has not taken a false route downwards into the body." (Letters Vol. 1, Pg. 403).

The vast and unpredictable universe inspires fear of the unknown, and particularly, of death.  To reduce this fear, we seek knowledge and self-knowledge, through which we hope to control the unknown and stave off death.  So, fear and pain motivate striving for knowledge as a balm for dis-ease. Dysregulation and disintegration of personality are a hindrance to deeper self-knowledge, though periodic disintegration of the old outworn self image naturally occurs..

Knowing oneself is ultimately a therapeutic goal, knowledge of our own psychophysical states, framed or conditioned by our conscious and unconscious beliefs. Our subjective conclusions about our own being carry a special authority or presumption of truth, including misguided inner authority about psychological or spiritual self-awareness.

According to Jung, "The middle is the center where the jewel is located, where the incubation or the carrying out of the sacrifice or the transformation takes place ... [...] the one who happens to come across that cave, that is, in the cave that each one carries in he or she, in the darkness behind his conscience, is involved in a process of transformation that is unconscious at first. By entering into the unconscious, he creates a connection between his consciousness and unconscious contents; a transformation of his personality with consequences of a positive or negative nature. This transformation is often interpreted as an extension of the natural duration of life or as an omen of immortality. " (C.G. Jung, 1939)

We think we are happy when we are living and participating in our ideals. But, ultimately, self-awareness is more than just objectively evaluating ourselves against our ego ideals. It aims toward the ground of primordial awareness, which is beyond mind: self-arising, self-revelatory, and nonconceptual.

The undesirable alternative to individuation is to remain enmeshed in the collective: 
"Human culture has mutated into a sociopathic marketing machine dominated by economic priorities and psychological manipulation. Never before has a cultural system inculcated its followers to suppress so much of their humanity. Leading this hostile takeover of the collective psyche are increasingly sophisticated propaganda and misinformation industries that traffic the illusion of consumer happiness by wildly amplifying our expectations of the material world. Today’s consumers are by far the most propagandized people in history. The relentless and repetitive effect is highly hypnotic, diminishing critical faculties, reducing one’s sense of self, and transforming commercial unreality into a surrogate for meaning and purpose." -newint.org

Jung and the Anima
In "the Red Book" the soul appears in the most diverse forms: as a dove and a snake. I am talking to you about the dismay of your detachment; you are happy to see her again. After she has lived happy and sad hours, as well as joys and sorrows, her journey must continue with her. It is the spirit of the deep to see it as a living creature, with its own existence, it is not a epiphenomenon object of scientific investigation, it is not dependent on man and it is not built. As such, he escapes every classification, his borders are admire, writes Jung, echoing the eraclitea vision of the soul as an enigma, as the great mystery of being. Not being a processing of intellect like that of philosophers and not having a metaphysical Genesis, which is essentially its essence and function?

The soul is living "Psychic reality". she, by sending images, is a mediator between the unconscious and the conscious world. It's possible to find her to divert her desire from outer things. If not, we are overwhelmed by the horror of the vacuum as a result of the of this world, only when desire is removed from the exterior, whether it is about things or men, and bends over itself, then If he senses a large void, it means that he will desperately seek his soul out of its own property. Only blind people do not see it, seizing reality that deplete: so they are possessed by the desire of things, rather than having the desire as an " image " and " expression " of the soul. It's the images that make the reality understand. Owning the world, and not its image, is equivalent to it, because its soul is " poor " and " indigent ". the " things " Deplete even if the material wealth they offer is consistent; the result of having, To put it bluntly, it's to make your soul sick.

Since the richness of the soul is made of images, its loss is risky: the insatiable greed leads to madness; only inside it is possible to find it; it is the images to be its true wealth and those who walk in the path of its knowledge is Already An Alchemist. Those who do not feed the soul of images, as well as not being wise, raise devils and dragons in their hearts. With the image image of the psychic enemies to be free from the descent into the world of the soul, Jung shows how to grasp the essence of the psyche, which speaks for symbols: Decodificandoli, the seed produces the tree of life. Instead of continuing with full success in the world, he now finds the strength to give voice to sweet inner research, and with the spirit of time which, despite the blunder of appearances, is invaded by fragility and inconsistency.

godtrauma http://gregmogenson.com/GOD%20intro.pdf