Through a Jungian Lens

Today’s photo is not exactly what I had in mind for today’s post, but it will have to do as the photo I want to place here doesn’t exist – can’t exist.  The best I can do is to allow the idea of woman and the colour blue to be present and hope in some way that the intent is good enough as an image.

The following is my dream from last night, the shift from July 11th to July 12th, 2010.  As readers here are already know, I don’t post my dreams as this place isn’t a place of analysis.  However, the dream will presented because of a need I feel with regards to the dream, what I feel is perhaps an “archetypal” dream.  Now typically I don’t remember dreams anymore, in fact I deliberately leave them alone in order to see what stays and what disappears as wakefulness takes over from sleep.  Today, I remembered this dream upon waking.  Since I was travelling to my home from the USA, a ten-hour drive, I allowed the dream an opportunity to slip away.  Yet now, twelve hours after waking, the images are still burnt into my brain, demanding that I pay attention.  So in order to honour this, I will allow the dream to speak.

. . . I am with my partner and it seems/feels like we are going to play golf.  However, the scene is unexpected and I don’t have the necessary equipment for the game.  I turn back, leaving my partner in order to get the equipment needed.  As I retrace my steps finding myself somehow in unfamiliar territory, I am met by two men,  I know that these men have evil in mind.  As they hold me, I see a woman appear before my eyes, a woman who doesn’t have natural flesh tones.  Rather, she appears to be injured, damaged.  I come to know that she is dis-spirited – libido is almost fully absent.  She is laying on her side on the road without clothing, a blue-ghost of a woman.  From the left side, a young female child approaches on hands and knees.  She looks at the blue woman as though talking to her but no words are spoken or heard.  I knew what the child was asking for in her silence, she was asking for the blue woman to open her legs and expose her vulva.  The girl-child crawls to her and begins to place a kiss on the blue woman’s nether lips . . . and immediately the scene shifts and I feel the men’s grip tightening on my, holding me down so that the blue woman can rape me . . . I know I have been raped, but not by the blue woman . . . now, I am broken, as dis-spirited as the blue woman . . . I make my way to what appears to be the banquet following the golf game.  My partner is with another man.  She knows that I was with the blue woman and now she is angry with me as though I was a traitor.  Her appearance is hard and stone-like.  I can go no closer, there is no going back to the way things were . . .

What does this dream mean to me?   First, it didn’t take me long to realize that this blue woman was Goddess the Mother, the consort of God the father.  This wasn’t a simple, personal inner image of anima. For some reason, God the Mother decided to talk with me.  For me, there is no doubt that in our modern world, the feminine has been raped to the point of near death.  As I listen to the voice of our planet as it expresses its pain, as I see the hurt in all sets of eyes that I meet, I know the truth of this.  I know that our time to make changes in order to save the planet, to save our souls is very limited.  The goddess allowed me to feel her pain, to suffer her rape.  And so I am left to somehow to do something.

I know the power of my shadow, the collective shadow, the hate, the anger, the control, the destructive tendencies of chaos.  I know the positive aspects of the masculine as well.  And this gives me hope that at least I can choose.  I know the faces of my personal anima, her beauty and softness and promise as well as her dark side within me and in the world.  And I can choose which aspects of the masculine and the feminine within myself are to be honoured.  But, so what!

Now what?  I guess it is time for me to do my part to save the world.  It is as simple as that.  I know, many will discount these words as babbling.  It has to start somewhere.  I know that I am not the only one who will be busy with this work of finding a new myth to replace the masculine myths of the three deities – Yahweh, God and Allah – with a new myth that includes the feminine, includes shadow and includes the earth.

One of the things I love about sunset photos is how they bring out a sense of something bigger than being human.  If there is a visible face for God, then this must be part of that visibility.  In thinking about this visibility, I can also glimpse it at dawn but have problems catching glimpses of this face during the middle of the day when sunlight glares, almost making it impossible to see beyond the edges, or at night when again the edges disappear into darkness.

Perhaps it isn’t just me . . . If I think about it, throughout human history it has been the children as well as the elders who have had the most contact with the numinous that best approaches the sense of God and godliness.  Children and the dawn, elders and the sunset:  it fits, doesn’t it?  Regardless, the pull to view life within a religious frame is there, a natural part of being human.  With children the pull to religious is unintentional and soon fades as life drags them into the fullness of being present in life.  With our elders, intention is everything.  Many elders resist the pull to a religious frame in an attempt to keep the specter of death away.  John Dourley, a Catholic priest as well as Jungian analyst who says that with human maturation is a corresponding spiritual maturation.  Dourley goes on to state:

“Jung suggests that the process of individuation culminates in the experience of personal integration and universal relatedness, which certainly is religious.” (Dourley, A Strategy For a Loss of Faith, p. 52)

For me, this idea of a “personal integration” along with a “universal relatedness” makes the process of individuation one that is more palatable than simply having an “I” focus.  For me, the problem of living in a “me” world is one in which “other” has no value.  When “other” has no value, then there is no value outside of “self.”  And we see the problems that this creates as our collective societies rape the earth and their neighbours in hopes of gaining something of value for “us,” in particular, “me.”  It is this “me-ness” attitude that would reduce a sunset to some profit margin or else find a better way to use one’s time than to enjoy a meditative moment, a religious moment where I become one with the universe; and I become responsible and accountable for my part in that universe.