Jung wrestles with the prince of the Casbah

I accustomed myself to living always on two planes simultaneously, one conscious, which attempted to understand and could not, and one unconscious, which wanted to express something and could not formulate it any better than by a dream.

The voice is that of Jung, reflecting late in life on his early travels (in 1920) in North Africa, where he was fascinated to find himself among people whose language he did not know, whose culture was initially utterly foreign to him, and who had a very different relationship to their bodies and their emotions (he thought) than Northern Europeans.
     He felt that beyond surface differences he was dealing with a different collective spirit, a spirit of the land itself. He told himself that his feelings were more than a tourist's projections, that there was something out there, a spiritus loci that he needed to explain to himself and eventually to others. He had deeply emotional reactions to everyday scenes: to the buzz of Arab conversation in the casbah in Algiers, to a haughty, magnificent rider on a black mule hung with silver, to Arab men walking hand-in-hand at an oasis in the Sahara, to the sudden riot of color and noise of a market setting up in the early morning.
    He feared that he was falling "under the spell of the primitive", that he had been "psychically infected", a condition he saw reflected in his body when he succumbed to a form of infectious enteritis.
    He began to fear that his rational mind and identity might be overwhelmed by what "primitive" peoples called ghosts and spirits. He had read Inside Australia, a 1912 book about Aboriginal beliefs and customs by anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen. His imagination was seized by the reported Aboriginal belief that the ancestral spirits of the land lie in wait for newcomers, and can reincarnate themselves through their progeny. Jung returned this idea again and again. In his essay "Mind and Earth", he wrote that "Certain Australian Aboriginals assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor spirits who reincarnate themselves in the new-born. There is a great psychological truth in this."
    In North Africa, Jung wrestled with the sense that there was something wild and primal and "barbaric" that could take possession of him now, not in a future generation. He was moving towards a theory of the "objective reality of the psyche", about how just as each of us has a world within, the world outside us is full of spirit, for good or otherwise. But more immediately, he was groping for a way to stay in balance, to master and integrate archetypal forces that threatened to overwhelm him.
    In Tunis in 1920, it was a dream that was his mentor and his proving-ground, as was so often the case in his life. Jung dreamed he was in an Arab city with a casbah whose walls formed a perfect square, with a gate on each side, and a moat around (an unlikely element in a North African city). He stood before a wooden bridge leading to a dark, arched portal.             Eager to explore, he stepped onto the bridge. At the mid-point, he was challenged by "a handsome, dark Arab of aristocratic, almost royal bearing". This prince of the casbah attacked him. They fought and fell through the railing of the bridge together. The dark prince tried to force Jung's head under water to drown him, but Jung resisted. "No, I thought, this is going too far." He succeeded in pushing his assailant's head under water. "I did so although I felt great admiration for him. I had no intention of killing him. I wanted only to make him unconscious and incapable of fighting."

     After this struggle, the scene changed and the adversary reappeared as as a companion. They stood together in a vaulted octagonal room in the center of the citadel. Everything was white, simple and beautiful. On the floor below him, Jung discovered an open book with black letters written in splendid calligraphy on milky-white parchment. He was reminded of the Uigurian script of western Turkestan, familiar to him from the Manichean fragments of Turfan  "I did not know the contents, but nevertheless I had the feeling that this was 'my book', that I had written it."
     He told the young prince that now he had overcome him, he must read the book. The prince resisted, but Jung overcame him again, this time with kindness and patience.
     Recalling this turning-point dream in his later years, as he dictated the materials for Memories, Dreams, Reflection, Jung analyzed it in terms that today sound almost stereotypically "Jungian" and yet go beyond. The shape of the casbah or citadel is a perfect mandala, within which the dreamer is journeying to the center of the self. The adversary on the bridge is a "shadow", but in a larger sense that is often understood when that term is used. The Arab prince is "not the personal shadow, rather an ethnic one associated not with my persona but with the totality of my personality, that is, with the self. As master of the casbah, he must be regarded as a kind of shadow of the self."
    In his own view, Jung's struggle with the dark prince - like Jacob's struggle with the dark angel - was more than a battle with a denied or suppressed aspect of his ordinary personality. It was a contest in which consciousness, awakened to the power and allure of a previously unrecognized archetype, is challenged to fight in order to befriend.
     

Art: Henry Ossawa Tanner, "Gate of the Casbah" (1914)

My second shadow

3:00 a.m. 

A malleable time, when I am often wandering between the worlds. As I walk into a neighborhood park, my shadow walks before me. A second shadow walks right behind. Who is there? I turn, and recognize the second shadow is also my own. 

    A deliciously shiverish moment, especially since I had been thinking about Egyptian forms of the the double and the multiple self.   

    I look up at the moon, and the street lamp behind me, and my rational mind concludes that their twin effect produced my twin shadows. Still, I wonder where my energy double may have been traveling in the borderlands tonight.

photo by RM

Dreaming yourself in a different body

Have you dreamed of being in the situation and seemingly the body of another person?
    Maybe you looked in a mirror and saw a quite different face. Maybe, as you left the dream, you noticed you were wearing clothes of the opposite sex (and are not a cross-dresser). Maybe you weren't aware that you were not your regular self until you tried to figure out the who, what, when, where of what was going on in the dream.
    Experiencing things with the perspective and senses of another person is a common experience for psychic dreamers, which frequently requires them to pause and ask: who am I in this dream? This kind of transference is especially common, by my observation, among women who are closely related, as mother-and-daughter, sisters, intimate friends, They wake with information that may be disturbing or delightful, and then have to check on whether the details are actually from another's person's life and imminent future.
     In dreams, we enter parallel lives in which we are traveling roads abandoned or not taken on our current event tracks. We also enter the lives and apparently the bodies of characters who are quite different from our present selves. In this way, we learn about our family of personalities connected across time and place within the multidimensional self. We gain insight into past life dramas - whether they belong to an ancestor or a previous incarnation of our spirit - that are relevant to our present life choices.
    Of course, dreams in which we inhabit different identities reveal different aspects of our personalities, including the ones Jung called the shadow and the anima or animus. Yet the experiences can also be transpersonal.
    Such "body-hopping" experiences can also expand our humanity. They open the locks between different kinds of people and different levels of society. As a mere man, I am grateful for dream adventures in which I find myself in a woman's body. As a white man from a fairly privileged background, I am grateful for dream experiences that take me inside the life situations of people of different ethnicity in far less privileged circumstances. As an Anglo whose three countries of residence - Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States - have not been invaded or occupied in recent generations, I am grateful for dream episodes in which I am in the situation of a person seeking to survive under conditions of war and occupation.
     I am smiling now as I remember one of my most entertaining, and increasingly relevant, nights of body-hopping dreams.
     More than 20 years ago, I found myself, in a dream sequence that became lucid, in a series of unfamiliar bodies. In the first episode, I am in the body of a black basketball player. I enjoy the things he can do with his magnificent athletic body, and his very active sex life. Then, as an unpleasant scene involving racial bigotry is starting to develop, an inner voice warns, "Get out before you succumb to his rage."
    I blink my eyes. In the next instant, I am in a very different body. It belongs to a prosperous middle-aged white guy in plaid pants who is playing golf with his buddies at a Midwestern country club, The scene makes me think of Dan Quayle. It is heaven to the golfer, hell to me. I scream inwardly, Get me out of here!
    Now, in the climactic scene, I am in the body and situation of an eccentric, independent scholar of a certain age. He is free to purchase any book he likes and add it to his three-floor home library. He is weaving mental connections between different cultures and practices beyond what anyone has done before. He is highly respected by those who read him and attend his classes, but he remains very human, even humble.
    I like his life. I don't like the pains he feels in his legs. What happened to his right knee? What is that occasional stabbing pain in his left heel?
    Still, I'll take his life over the others, any day.
    Twenty years later - seven years since I injured my right knee, a year since bursitis in my left heel was diagnosed - I recognize I am in the body of that eccentric scholar. It does not take higher math to count the three floors of the home library that is now mine. When you find yourself in another body in a dream, don't dismiss the chance that it is a body that you will some day occupy.

Photo: Locks by Wanda Burch

Dream mirrors of the Self

One of the most important gifts of our dreams is that they put us in touch with more aspects of ourselves than we have recognized in  what Yeats called our “daily trivial minds.” Among these aspects is the famous Shadow, composed of parts of our selves we have repressed or denied (and tend to project on to others in regular life, till we awaken). But we encounter much more than the Shadow. We encounter a whole family of aspects of ourselves, and as we recognize them and bring them together we become much more than we were.

     We are given the opportunity to claim the imagination and energy of our inner children, the nature-knowing of the ancient shaman within us, the wisdom of the elder, the artist, poet, creator, entrepreneur, hero, dancer, athlete, astronaut inside.

      We also meet our conscience. We are introduced to parts of ourselves that have been broken and are in need of repair. We are given clues to parts of our selves that fled from this body and this life because the pain or shame was too great - or because our dominant personality wimped out on a big dream, settled for a little story and ceased to be any fun for a bright spirit to be around. When we discover such things, we are on the road to healing through soul recovery

       There is more. As we follow these roads, we may rise to a closer acquaintance with the Self beyond all the smaller selves. Call it the Higher Self. Perhaps we are the mirrors in which some part of it is reflected, when our lenses are clear enough.

       I remember a dream that mirrored the relationship between the little self and the Big Self. Here is a brief version:

THE UNFINISHED PORTRAIT OF THE HIGHER SELF

I read in the local paper that an artist is working on a portrait of the Higher Self. Greatly excited, I lead a group to see it. The path spirals up to a studio like an open tower, guarded by magnificent sculpted beasts; great carnelians flash on the back of the stone lion.

     The artist is at work on a tremendous canvas. It rises as high as the tower, perhaps even above the table. At the bottom, he has painted a self-portrait. The figure stands within glowing bands of color. He is as small as a votive candle in proportion to the immensity of the Higher Self that rises above him, visible only as bands of energy that become subtler and subtler as I look up, until there seems to be nothing except a pristine and unblemished expanse of pearly light.

     It seems unlikely that this immense work can ever be finished. But I know, as I merge with the artist and take up the brush, that this is my life's work.

The devil in red lipstick

I leave a workshop or conference group and walk along a country road with a woman who has been eager to have private time with me. She is perhaps in her mid-40s, with very dark or black hair. She has painted her lips an intense crimson. I don't find her particularly attractive, but she is working the attraction of power. She is expensively dressed (dark suit, or similar, with fancy accessories) and presents herself as a person with tremendous connections who could take my work to a whole new level in terms of money and recognition.

She asks me at one point, "Do you still have Cobra-Rattler in you, or do you just do good works for non-profits?" She's goading me to do business with her, propositioning me in a flagrant and sexual way (which may also be part of the agenda).

I tell her I'm going to make a phone call in her presence, so she'll be able to see what and who I value

I call a wonderful editor who is also a good friend, who understands and supports my work. I want to make the woman with the red, red lips understand the depth of my commitment to those who value my work for its own sake, and that I will simply not be distracted from The Work by the seductions of money or power.

Feelings: Satisfied I made the right choice, and did not get caught in this creature's coils.

Reality: Not sure of the location.

The editor friend I call in the dream is someone with whom I have a wonderful creative relationship.

I don't recognize the power-focused woman with the red lipstick. My first associations are with a couple of of "powerful" women who have approached me in recent months, offering ways to money and fame that I have rejected as distractions from my work. I can see that the "devil in red lipstick" could also be a shadow side of myself, since I do essentially spend nearly all my time "doing good works for non-profits" in the sense that money and power are simply not priorities. It's entirely possibe that the dream could also be a rehearsal for a future situation.

I have never heard of a "cobra-rattler". Sounds sexy, and a little sinister. The kundalini force used for a certain purpose?

I proceeded to call the editor friend and told her the dream.This produced a delightful conversation and reaffirmation of values. Dreams help us to navigate by our inner compass, and to avoid being blind-sided by otherwise unexpected events that could throw us-off course. In a workshop this weekend, immediately following my nocturnal encounter with Red Lips, a woman reported a dream in which she was given a compass that always points towards Truth. I was reminded of Lyra's "alethiometer" in The Golden Compass.