“Symbols are metaphors for the eternal in the forms of the transient.”
Oskar Doering
Well fancy meeting you here, what’s it been, like three years? Well don’t three years look good on us. Like, for real. I’d like to try to jump some life back into this blog as it did the same for me when I started it.
First I want to talk about what I’m always talking about – consciousness and what that is and why it’s important. So what is consciousness? A brief recap: At the most basic level consciousness is awareness. So those trees I talked about are conscious, some flowers turn towards the sun – they are heliocentric. Single celled organisms join together to form colonies to advance into larger organisms. What is all this if not conscious, if not awareness. This is life.
In this way I mean the unconscious is conscious, but it does not have an ego to direct conscious activity, so anything without an ego remains unconscious. The ego directs our consciousness and what we know about ourselves, while the unconscious directs everything else. We are about the only things in life that we’ve found to have a higher functioning ego and we need it! It’s important. What is more important however, is the balance between the two. People who only listen to one side are grossly unprepared for their life because life has both. We need both the ego and what sits below it. Our modern world has split off the conscious ego mind from its roots in the unconscious.
Our unconscious speaks through symbols. A symbol is something that cannot be fully expressed in rational terms, like a sign. A sign tells you something and points to it plainly, like a STOP sign, while a symbol points only to itself. It does not explain itself, you must make the leap to what the image means. In this way they act like a metaphor and you reach beyond it to connect the dots.
Symbols come from the unconscious, they are not devised consciously but just come out of us. They exist collectively for everyone, the symbol of something universal and concrete like a soldier or doctor (or lets say a skull and bones or an owl), or more abstract like the archetype of a trickster or hero. They will look different throughout the thousands of miles and years that we can find them on this earth – but they are essentially the same. While they have different qualities and there are positive and negative versions of each, their core essence will be unchanged. It is Plato’s world of Forms but instead of living in some abstract reality, it exists psychologically within us.
Why does the unconscious use symbols, why does it not speak plainly? Well my way of thinking about it is that it is using as plain a language as possible. Perhaps it’s because both symbols and metaphors use both the right and left parts of the brain. Since it is what our consciousness is built on, it makes sense that it is the most powerful and direct way to break into our consciousness. One of the main conduits of symbols in our life is dreams and the imagination. We so often label this as just “fantasy” and dismiss it, saying that they are just our body reprocessing useless daily information, arguing that fantasy isn’t real and it doesn’t matter. Oh, but it is. And it does.
Our word fantasy is derived from the Greek word phantasia, which means “to make visible, to reveal”, it was a special faculty in the mind for producing poetic, abstract, and religious imagery. So the psychological function of fantasy is to make visible the otherwise invisible dynamics of the unconscious psyche. So we are making our inner world visible with the symbols that our unconscious coats things in.
Ancient people saw phantasia as the organ by which the divine world spoke to the human mind. The idea that fantasy or imagination are “not important” is simply a stunted outlook, humans depend on the imagination for creativity, philosophical and religious functioning. This is where all art comes from and where we find meaning. Without it, we would just be a robot designed to be neurotic.
Our imagination is a direct conduit to our unconscious, inspiration speaks through it. We can also see the symbols inherent in life with our imagination. But why is this important, besides like, art and stuff?
Well our unconscious puts things into our consciousness that we need to see. It knows the things that hold us back, things we long for, and reasons we tell ourselves we can’t get them. Our unconscious tries to show us not just our problems but our solutions in one fell swoop. Holding this and reaching for more consciousness, looking at our fears and hopes and saddling up anyway is in my belief, the reason for life. Jung calls this act of self-fulfillment individuation, but lets talk more about that in another post.
If our unconscious speaks through symbols, how can we hear them? Well first we must listen to ourselves, we must be able to quiet our mind to where we can hone in on our intuition – the pulls on our heart, mind, and soul. This has revolutionized my life since my last post, and I find that my life has become so much richer and deeper from it.
I want to get into how to notice this in our waking life, but first I figure we should get into what I first knew Jung for – dreams. So the next post that will be coming shortly is about finding a fairly simple way to interpret dreams, see what the unconscious is trying to show us. The unconscious will show you these things either voluntarily or involuntarily, so let’s try to see these things before we are blindsided by them.
Pictures by the Gentleman