“There was once a queer old man who
lived in a cave, where he had sought refuge from the noise of the villages. He
was reputed to be a sorcerer, and therefore he had disciples who hoped to learn
the art of sorcery from him. But he himself was not thinking of any such thing.
He was only seeking to know what it was that he did not know, but which, he
felt certain, was always happening. After meditating for a very long time on
that which is beyond meditation, he saw no other way of escape from his
predicament than to take a piece of red chalk and draw all kinds of diagrams on
the walls of his cave, in order to find out what that which he did not know
might look like. After many attempts he hit on the circle. “That’s right,” he
felt, “and now for a quadrangle inside it!” –which made it better still. His
disciples were curious; but all they could make out was that the old man was up
to something, and they would have given anything to know what he was doing. But
when they asked him: “What are you doing there?” he made no reply. Then they
discovered the diagrams on the wall and said: “That’s it!” –and they all
imitated the diagrams. But in so doing they turned the whole process upside
down, without noticing it: they anticipated the result in the hope of making
the process repeat itself, which had led to that result. This is how it
happened then and how it still happens today.”
Jung
spent a good part of his life trying to explain what the individuation process
looked like. Self Knowledge, he said, is one of the most difficult and exacting
of the arts. As a creative psychological process, as a spiritual art, he
likened it to alchemy. Using the metaphor of gold making, he drew his own
diagrams on the inside of his cave. He created his truth, his story, while
holding the tension between the personal and the archetypal. He left us
portraits and maps.
Truth, Jung said, needs a
language that alters with the spirit of the times. Each person’s story, it
seems to me, contributes to that venture. There are of course the gifted, whose
creativity appears, while not without work, as instinctual as the spider’s
web-making, or The Red Book of Jung, or the horn-playing of Myles. Here
meaning is not found in explanation but in essence. Art and archetype appear as
one.
And then there are the rest
of us. Like the mythical Psyche, we rely on the aid of the ants that arrived in
her story to assist in the task of sorting through inextricable minutiae. These
tiny creatures that in the song we sing to our children, “go down into the
earth to get out of the rain,” are social insects. In the myth, they are the
agents of Eros. It is Eros, Psyche’s lover, that principle of relatedness and
self-care, that mystery within every psyche, which we await when creativity
eludes us.
Through the lens of Jungian
psychology, our self-portraits employ our efforts to portray our deepest
truths, claim our shadows, and celebrate our daily lives in the service of what
Jung called the Self, or the image of the divine within. There is no formulaic sequencing of
how many times and ways one must fall apart and come together, no necessary
pacing on this journey toward wholeness. Whether we descend and ascend with
revelatory intensity, or crawl like a snail, or simply sit, the way my father
often did, the way I love to do, we become who we are.
I believe, one way or
another, we are all laboring with the birth of our world’s ever-emerging
consciousness. Our self-expressions appear in our faces and in our eyes.
Sometimes we write them. Or sing them, or dance them, or paint them. We laugh
them. Weep them. Pray them. And dream them.
In the modern allegorical
love story of Avatar, the feminine Natiri says, “I see you,” to her beloved
masculine counterpart, Jake. “I see you,” he replies.
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