The night of my birthday in 1988. I
entered the rooms of a tailor in Manhattan. I wanted to have a new suit made
but did not like the fabrics he had in stock. When I left the tailor’s shop,
the city was different. There was the sense that hidden things were pulsing
behind the scenes. Still bent on new clothes, I entered the menswear section of
an upscale department store. I pulled a suit off the rack. It fitted perfectly
and the price was right. It seemed to have pinstripes. When I looked at the
label, it read “Shamanic.”
Now
aware I was dreaming, I examined the pattern more closely. The “pinstripes”
were actually minute designs, a magical language I could not yet translate. The
collar was unusual. I realized it was animal fur. My first impression, of a
pinstriped “power” suit, was an illusion. I had chosen a power suit of a
different kind: a shaman’s outfit, of skins and furs with magical charms.
I
dreamed I was among ancient shamans in Europe. Some of these shamans boasted
that they had the power of the “taurs,” but their powers were limited. They
wanted knowledge from me that they did not have, but I turned away from them
because it seemed that they wanted power for self-aggrandizement and to make
war on the people over the next hill. I found an old man who looked like Jung,
smoking a pipe and carefully laying one stone on another.
I turned back to Jung. In the midst of a midlife crisis that
I came to understand was a process of shamanic ordeal and initiation, recently
relocated to a farm in rural New York, I was in urgent need of a guide. I had
discovered Jung in high school and devoured many volumes of his Collected Works when I was an undergraduate, though I
probably failed to digest the most difficult passages. In the midst of the psychic
storms of 1987–1988, I turned to Jung again, to see how he made sense of his
own “confrontation with the unconscious.” My main source was Memories, Dreams, Reflections, his
life story as recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, based on conversations he
began when he was eighty-one.
His great life crisis began in 1912, after
his break with Freud. For several years, he lived in a house of the spirits.
The contents of his dreams and visions seemed to be spilling over into his
physical life, producing poltergeist-like phenomena and apparitions that his
children could see. Night after night, he descended into a dark and thrilling
Underworld where he met mythic characters who seemed to him to be entirely real
and transpersonal. He often felt he was under an avalanche of psychic events,
“as if gigantic stones were tumbling down upon me.” His survival required him to draw on a
“demonic strength” that brilliant, mad
Nietzsche had lacked.
He kept seeing patients but stopped
lecturing at the university and ceased publishing for three years, no longer
confident that he could make sense of things for other people. He had no mentor
now, in the ordinary world. He sought stability through his family, his
continuing work with clients, through painting, and through “hewing stone,”
building a miniature stone village that he thought he was making in
collaboration with his eleven-year-old self.
He realized that he had to reclaim
beginner’s mind. He said to himself, “Since I know nothing at all, I shall
simply do whatever occurs to me.” Then he took the shaman’s plunge. “I
consciously submitted myself to the impulses of the unconscious.”
Central to Jung’s ability to restore his
inner compass was his daily recording of dreams. After his break with Freud and his theory, Jung's main preoccupation was to set down an unedited, uncensored chronicle of his
experiences. “Dreams are the facts from which we must proceed.” This was one of his central discoveries, and
it is one of the most helpful statements that has ever been made about dreams
and dreamwork. Let’s start with the facts of the dream, leaving aside theory until we
have recovered as much of the experience as possible.
This was confirmation for
me of the method I was obliged to improvise in my own time of testing. I
journaled my dreams and visions as exactly as possible, giving each a title and
noting the time and duration of each experience. I most required clarity when
my experiences rebuffed interpretation and linear thinking. I found it
essential to disentangle the reports of inner adventures from other material so
that their nature and content were not blurred. I underlined Jung’s statement
that “otherwise the material would have trapped me in its thicket, strangled me
like jungle creepers” and put a big check mark in the margin. Exactly right.
In his storms of emotion, Jung sought to
let images take form. Images gave him a way to work with the raw power of
emotion rather than being torn apart by it. He was learning how to harvest
images and rework them through what he later called “active imagination” in the
laboratory of his own psyche.
He recorded the facts of his inner
experiences even when he found the content nonsensical, repugnant, or freakish.
In this way, he hoped that instead of being drowned by the contents of his
inner life, he would gain a means of navigation.
He felt himself pulled into the Underworld.
Instead of resisting, he let himself drop and began a harrowing journey of
Underworld initiation, played out over years rather than hours, reminiscent of
the shaman’s path of tests and ordeals. In this time, he found an agreed form
for an inner guide: an old man with the horns of a bull and wings of kingfisher
blue that he named Philemon. “It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the
reality of the psyche.”
Near the end of his life, Jung observed, “All
my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and
dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I
accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first
only in the form of emotions and images.”
He had had a plan for his life, to become a
professor and pursue a scientific line that had seemed clear to him. “But then,
I hit upon this stream of lava, and the heat of its fires reshaped my life.” What overthrew his plans and expectations also
gave him the prima materia for a
greater life work. “That was the primal stuff which compelled me to work upon
it, and my works are a more or less successful endeavor to incorporate this
incandescent matter into the contemporary picture of the world.”
I felt immense affinity for the great dream shaman of the West who spoke those words, and took comfort and courage from his
example. I felt the deep truth of his ringing assertion that “anyone who takes
the sure road is as good as dead,” and spoke those words aloud as I walked with
my dogs to the old white oak behind my farmhouse and scrambled up the slippery
banks of the creek to the highest of the waterfalls.
Jung labeled his years of psychic struggle and self-healing his "confrontation with the unconscious". I liked the relative mildness of this term, barely hinting at the tremendous raw power of the energies that raced through our psyches like wild bulls. My own confrontation with the unconscious gave me the material for more than a dozen books and put me on the road of a dream teacher, for which there was no career track in my culture.
Image: Bull of Lascaux
