Through a Jungian Lens

This is an interesting hive that I found on a walk here in Playa Jacó.   I am not sure if these are termites or some sort of new bee.  One thing I can say for sure is that they are busy.  It’s a good thing I have a built-in telephoto lens as I didn’t want to attract their attention.  Watching their frenetic activity I was reminded of friends and acquaintances when they become animated.

Just for example, today in the news there was an article about mail-order brides.  It was an interesting article that looked at two sides of the story.  I mentioned the story in passing to someone and it soon set off a “discussion” that soon took “positions” rather than continuing to look at all sides of the story.  At that point, the discussion ceased to be a discussion between two “conscious” individuals.  Instead of a conversation the exchange of words indicated the presence of complexes.

Of course we all have complexes.  Life would not exist without the presence of complexes within the human psyche.  If anything, it is these complexes which allow us to be unique individuals rather than a mindless collective such as these insects, all working instinctively to perform a set of tasks without question.   Humans somehow are energized by their complexes.

Now a few words from Daryl Sharp on  the subject of complexes:

“Consider the occurrence of meeting someone at a party with a “bee in his bonnet.”  You can be sure that behind the buzzing is a complex.  A person inthe grip of a complex can talk your head off about fishing, music, stamp-collecting, fitness, yoga, psychology, politics, anything, and never wonder if you are at all interested.

Of course, those are relatively benign manifestations of complexes.  More seriously, on a personal level, they are at the root of any and all conflicts, marriages, separations, relationships difficulties of all kinds, not to mention murder, suicide and much more; collectively they spawn wars and every manner of political and religious internecine strife.” (Sharp, Jung Uncorked:  Book Three, 2009, pp 25-26)

Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it?  In thinking about it, I see where I get buzzing around, where there gets to be heat and I take sides.  Sitting back and thinking about it, most times there are no sides that need to be taken.  There are too many “black and white” polarity positions taken when the territory that holds the “black and white” conflict is in full, living colour.  I especially see it in terms of politics.  Begin a conversation about Canadian politics and I am set off.  The heat is turned up and I take a stance of certainty even though I don’t have much of the real background information.  Looking deeper into it, I find the complex, a father-complex, that is at the root.  I don’t do well with authority.  I get the same way when the topic turns to depreciating the masculine in general terms.  Yes, another complex.

Tracking all of this I begin to think that my “self” is nothing more than a collage of complexes.  Well, there is a lot of truth in this thinking.  Becoming aware of the complexes reduces the heat and allows me to sit back and become a calmer person.  And in the second half of life, this is very important.

Continuing on with my earlier post, I have to admit that there are still tan lines.  I didn’t dare as much as I could have in order to cook completely in this alchemical stew.  The fire of the sun was hidden from aspects of my psyche, stuff that I still bury deep within.  Without the sun’s transformational heat which draws out the pale ghosts, I am left incomplete.  Parts of my self are not yet turned into gold, an act of transubstatiation.  I cling to the raw unfinished material as though to a life raft.

Why do I not yet dare to stand fully exposed to the transformational fires?  Fear.  Fear that what I have will be lost, fear that relationship with self and other will be forever changed.  Is this bad?  Not really, but it is about loss, and I don’t know if I am ready to lose the old in order to embrace the new.  Change and loss.

Yet, out of the ashes of the burning a new way of being will emerge, new ways of relation will emerge.   I worry that perhaps this alchemical process will reduce my self so much that there remains only ash.  I worry that I will only be left with loss and be alone, removed from sanity, self and other.  Yet, I know this isn’t true at the deepest level of my being.  Will I be the coward and step off this path of individuation and say “enough is enough” returning to the patterns of habit and relationship that have been the fruit of all efforts so far in this journey?  Can I stop even if I want to?  Or, have the losses and gains already taken place and are only waiting to be acted out in the outer world?  As Rainer Marie Rilke once said in his “Letters To A Young Poet”:

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.