Continued from Part Three

I know these posts, so far, have been intense. The picture painted by Carl Jung and his Jungian successors of our linked internal and external lives is a detailed and vivid one. We began by looking at the Shadow, that suppressed ‘mind’ of parts of our psychological self (psyche) that have been pushed, by conditioning, society and personal choice, from our everyday lives. Censored might be a good word to describe their fate… or exiled, perhaps.

By way of a more gentle read, this post will set the scene for the space in which the relevance of Jungian thought is unrivalled in all of psychology – the Unconscious.

The Shadow lives in the unconscious, but so do many other energy patterns waiting to play their parts in our life’s story…

The unconscious is very much present in our lives, and might be said to ride alongside us, in quiet presence… until it interacts, often without our knowing. We think of such things as distant, as though there is depth to the place of the unconscious. In fact, we can easily see how close the unconscious psyche is to our ‘normal’ state by reference to a simple example. Imagine I am playing a game of tennis. I swing my arm back to take the forehand to win the point, but just at that moment, a family member calls to me from the side of the court. My conscious attention is diverted to this ‘high-priority’ interrupt. The relative is simply delivering an unfortunately-timed hello, so, smiling in acknowledgment, my alerted attention is relaxed.

But while the head turns to acknowledge the arrival of the family member, the arm continues its arc. In what seems like a fraction of a second, I re-engage my consciousness with the court to find the ball, bouncing inside the baseline and winning the point.

I nod, sheepishly, at the person across the net. The opponent may have grounds for thinking I am showing off! What’s really happened is that my unconscious, ‘shadowing’ me and able to take over from its normally recessed position, has helped my body to complete the desired action.

Have you ever been lost in an extended creative thought on a car journey home and arrived at your dwelling with no active memory of the last mile? It’s not an ideal way to drive, but our ‘autopilot’ has got us home, safely, once our primary attention wandered…

From these examples we can see that our initial ‘dark’ picture of the personal unconscious may be far short of both its capabilities and its intentions… To get the whole picture, we need to begin with Carl Jung’s radical view (for a psychologist) of the place of consciousness in the story of the universe.

Jung was a religious man in the widest sense, though he often ridiculed the actions of the church. Today, we might call him a ‘mystical psychologist’, but, back in the early years of the last century, mysticism was little known outside of academic circles. His professional work led him to see the unconscious as the real source for all human consciousness. In the unconscious, he saw the origins of our capacity for all awareness, orderly thought, reasoning and feeling. In short, that the unconscious was the original mind of the human species; a matrix of energy that took millions of years to develop a body, then a conscious mind – a stage very different from just awareness…

Jung saw this as a creative force at work in all nature. He envisaged every element of our complex consciousness being born in the unconscious before reaching for the full ‘light’ of human consciousness. Indeed, it might be said that the latter stage created the human…

Put another way, the vast unconscious ‘self’ of nature has slowly made a part of itself conscious. He believed that mankind had a unique potential to carry the evolution of the universe forward – such was the preciousness of consciousness.

Each of us has the capability of reliving the entire history of life and its associated ascent to self in one lifetime. When we do this, we connect with that which gave us life and that which can take us so much farther than we know.

To do this requires that mankind understands this vision – gaining power and inspiration from it; and reconciling the unconscious with the conscious. Modern society created science; and science, having given us so much, superficially, has, tragically and unknowingly, cut us off from the very practices which facilitated integration with the reservoir of the unconscious, branding them superstition… Many of them may have been so, but their origin and essence was from a much deeper wisdom than we commonly possess, now.

The plan for our individual potential in this lifetime is contained in the unconscious. We need to work with our own unconscious to realise this. In the course of that work, we will find a vast reservoir of energy and insight waiting for us, just below the surface…

Having shown in the first three posts the power of one element of the unconscious – the Shadow – to affect our conscious lives, we must now venture deeper into the map of the unconscious and its interactions with what we consider to be ‘us’. In this place of liminal energy, we will find keys to our future.

Next week, we will look at the nature of what Jung called ‘the inner life’, and explore more deeply the relationship with our usually quiet companion who is capable of winning our tennis point and driving our car…

Other parts in this series:

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, this is Part Four.

©Copyright Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.