NOTES ON A TRANSFORMATION: An Application of Chaos Theory & Depth Psychology (2014): Part XIII – Conclusion

“Believers make liars,” except that, as Jung (1956)[1] reminds us, “Belief is a substitute for a missing empirical reality” (¶666), so believers do not always make liars, but only unverified asserters.[2]

INTRODUCTION

Recently (and currently), I experienced (and continue to experience) a “re-centering”[3] of my identity, by which I mean that patterns and behaviors in my life changed (and continue to change).

Over the course of some fourteen posts (thirteen as it turns out, the number of transformation in the Tarot deck, coincidentally), I have described the various inputs that brought about this change, analyzing them through a lens of chaos theory and Jungian depth-psychology, only in part to further articulate the roots of the change (for myself) and more to provide a descriptive model of the experience that might prove useful (for others). This thirteenth post summarizes the series overall.

CONCLUSION

Laszlo (1991)[4] describes how “the term bifurcation, in its most significant sense, refers to the transition of a system from the dynamic regime of one set of attractors, generally more stable and simpler ones, to the dynamic regime of a set of more complex and ‘chaotic’ attractors” (6); so he uses bifurcation specifically to refer to transformation as I have used it. These bifurcations or transformations have different dynamics, from subtle (smooth and gradual), to catastrophic (abrupt and a product of excessive system stress), to explosive, due to “sudden and discontinuous factors that wrench the system out of one regime and into another” (6). Having settled into  new dynamic regime—a new orbit—the system may fluctuate “between discrete values in the regime (known as a Turing bifurcation), or the system may fluctuate wildly among many values … ( Hopf bifurcation)” (6). Or “the bifurcation may be simply a transitory stage by which the system passes through a regime in order to find a new area of stability, in which case the bifurcation is a “window” to a stable dynamic regime for the system” (6).

Laszlo summarizes this process of transformation generally:

The system proceeds in its stable state along well-formulated trajectories, until one parameter exceeds a threshold limit. At that point, the trajectory forks and the system enters a region of [its operation] where it behaves differently and assumes new and different values. It follows another trajectory, dancing to the tune of new attractors. It is important, however, that in the course of their evolution, [these sorts of] systems describe a trajectory in their [area of operation] marked by a definite pattern. When bifurcation occurs, the fact that we cannot predict the exact trajectory it will take does not prevent us from seeing and predicting basic patterns that the evolving system will display over time (6).

Laszlo’s use of the word ‘predict’ here seems dubiously founded, but an ideological part of his exposition involves the notion that we may not only better describe transformation in the world through chaos theory but also that this better understanding will open a window to some degree of effective intervention by human beings into chaotic dynamics. Again, this seems a wildly premature claim,[5] but if we set that aside, his abbreviated description of the course of transformation encapsulates well enough my longer description in the Chaos Theory sections of this paper.

However, the emergence of the solar hyena itself gives cautionary evidence against Laszlo’s use of the word predict. I have said enough of my autobiography already not to reprise more of it in a summary; rather, the factors themselves involved consisted of:

BEFORE GOING TO THE CONFERENCE:

• The many vicissitudes and experiences in my life that constellate around the symbolic Scorpio/Sagittarius dichotomy, both consciously and (by hypothesis) not
• the figures of atheist as mystic, anarchist as citizen, animal as social presence, and sodomite as human being
• the long, slow, diffuse arc of role-playing hyenas online (as an anthropomorphic hyena) and offline (as a gnoll paladin)
• the broken symmetry of my broken car and loss of income

DURING THE CONFERENCE

• the (seriously playful) re-visitation of the language of spirit guides and other notions gleaned during the spirituality panels,
• my focused examination of and blogging about the Sun card in the Tarot (along with the surrounding Star and Moon and Judgment cards),
• the opportunity of silence and explicit introversion provided by the guided meditation,

I’ve arranged these factors more or less chronologically, to suggest how the old paradigm (the previous dynamic regime) became stressed by the broken symmetry in the middle and then, through the “window” of the dynamics offered at the conference constellated around the symbol of the solar hyena.

In retrospect, it becomes tempting to ascribe a necessity, an inevitability, to the form the symbol took, specifically a solar hyena. But if one would underscore heavily all of the hyenas in the past—especially the gnoll paladin, as a clear sort of “first draft” of the symbol itself—we would have to explain why other creatures that I have played could not or did not get drawn into the critical moment of fusion. It becomes fantastically simple to lose sight of the fortuity that attached all I attach to the hyena in the first place and, had I decided (for instance) that the red panda did a better job of encapsulating what I ascribe to the hyena, then I should have wound up with a solar red panda instead, the argument would go.

But rather than fruitlessly quibbling about this, it seems to me the far more relevant fact revolves around how we (as human beings) organize our past into narratives. If the hyena serves as a kind of repository for all of the attributes I give to it, then that came about because I decided to make that narrative. I entered that idea—that complex—into the ambit of my thinking, and then (of course) it had its own life, in various roleplaying incarnations, &c. In this sense, the hyena has nothing of “a past” about it but exists wholly in the present.

At one point, I would have said, “I smoke, because I’m addicted.” I appeal to some (theoretically) immutable fat in the past, my addiction, s my rational for continuing the addiction now. Instead, I might say, “I smoke, so that I may remain addicted.” And immediately, by throwing my rationale into the future (rather than the past), I already begin to (literally) feel different about smoking. So, if someone in treatment say, “I hate myself, because my mother didn’t love me,” perhaps we might rearrange that: “My mother didn’t love me so that I would hate myself” (or some other kind of transformation. Once again, almost immediately, a different affect comes along with this modified sentence—s palpable a demonstration that what we say matters as one could want, if proof remained necessary.

So, of course those events which organizationally occurred previous to now, i.e., the entire history of the universe back to the beginning of time itself, will conventionally get turned into narratives that use “because”. “I feel this way about hyenas, because …” but the narrative I have about hyenas exists as a factor and influence only in the now, an so I might just as well change the sentence’s claim, “I feel this way about hyenas, so that …”.

The palpable, visceral affect of difference that this alone brings about—try a few sentences on yourself; “I eat because I’m hungry” becomes “I eat so that I my become hungry again”—already points to a significant factor in meaningful change, I suspect. So whyever I decided hyenas mean this or that, the more important emphasis comes not from the “because” of that and rather the “so that”: the purpose to which I intend to put that narrative. And this seems especially true—as addicts might attest—in those cases where the “because” puts us into situations where we feel stuck. We see, in fact, that saying “because” makes us stuck in the first place. It sticks us.

In principle, then, I reject resolutely any rooting around in my childhood for any cause of behavior. Of course, everything within my psyche occurred in a past (not the past); those traces inhabits my psyche as complexes, with arcs of development of their own, but this does not oblige me to say “because” in the face of them.[6] We all know the faultiness of memory, but even if we remember perfectly, I still spin myself a yarn when I say, “Because of this, I do that,” using some past trauma or whatnot as my rational, one might even say excuse.

To say this does not invalidate all of the narratives I have spun out in the above analyses, hunting for threads of living symbols and complexes, and whatnot. Jung’s psychology makes clear that the Self, not the ego-consciousness itself, writes the narratives. I may have named the hyena as a certain kind of sign, but that then developed along its own lines as well. I didn’t name my Scorpion and Centaur as such until the mid-1990s or so, but they’d been wreaking havoc for a long time and then continued to do so under their identified names, along their own lines. &c. What I resist by saying I reject the “because” involves not pretending that the past consists of something I can do nothing about. The idea o original sin simply formalizes the notion in a disgusting an totalizing way. And perhaps this makes clear why Christians so often act like monsters and jack-asses—“I sin, so that I may be forgiven” promises such sensual pleasure even as the excuse for the sin gets thrown back on the past, “I sin, because no man is righteous”.

The history of art (and popular music) shows multiple examples of artists who brought together any number of preexisting cultural forms and tropes and styles, &c., and brewed it into something that changed how we understand what we may do with art and often creates new genres of art in the process: Shakespeare’s articulation of the sonnet, for instance, or Ridley Scott’s (1979)[7] haunted house story in space—thanks massively to HR Giger’s (1979)[8] fantastic work, of course—or the Wachowski’s (1999)[9] visual seduction in The Matrix.[10]

That kind of constellation that transforms a diffuse dynamics of “chaos” into a recognizable “it” in its dynamics describes the effect of the solar hyena’s emergence as well, but instead of functioning in the social world of the public, it offers a “strictly personal” version of aesthetic realization. I would take it as proof—at least at some points in our lives—that the aesthetic impulse itself, art in general, forms a crucial part of the human identity. Schiller seems to speak at great length about aesthetic education, and I see why. The aesthetic impulse represents the personal form of what we know in the social (public) world as art.

Endnotes

[1] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[2] Also, from Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development [of the desire to obtain magical prestige or social influence] is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige (¶239).

[3] One might typically hear “re-centering” but I do not believe that the circle represents the correct geometric metaphor; rather, as in planetary orbits, the ellipse does, which has two foci that influence the course of the orbit. As just one partial illustration of this, I wrote elsewhere:

This elliptical shape changes the characteristic or consequences of the planetary motion, to the point that we experience seasons (in different ways) on the earth. It means the Sun offers the most predominating factor, but that not only do other planets exist, we might actually stand on them at different times, pointing to Jung’s notion of complexes—as alternative personalities (or at least pseudo-personalities within our psyche) as well as rationalizing his sense of possession. Epistemologically, this points not only to a multiplicity of points of view but also to their incommensurability into the bargain; it never boils down only to a difference of semantics, but to a fundamental difference in value-orientation that cannot resolve simplistically. Ethically, that we move relative to two “centers of gravity”—two loci of motion—means not only that we have a radical, existential demand to take responsibility for ourselves but also that the Sun must have obligations as well—we do not merely spin round the Sun, solely or helplessly worshipping it while it owes us nothing more than to just keep on doing what it always does and has. We become in our rights to make demands of it, which the Pueblo people nicely hint at when each morning they venerate the Sun in order to help him up. No simply all-powerful deity, humanity must serve as his alarm clock each day, suggesting that we not only have a duty to do so, for the sake of the whole world, but also a right to. Were it not for our intervention, the Sun might just sleep all day!

Murphy (1991)* puts this another way: “The struggle is not to abolish any type of centering, but to recognize the relative nature of centers and their dynamic relationship with margins” (51).

*Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[4] Laszlo, E. (1991). The age of bifurcation: understanding a changing world. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach.

[5] And thus a dangerous one. Already the economic technocrats flounder blindly in the dark at the “helm” of the economy. It might seem like a random policy change could turn out as effective as one supposedly rationally arrived at. One senses that attempting to apply chaos theory at the scale of whole human systems would result more in chaos, in the popular and undesirable sense.

[6] If only it were always so simple, of course.

[7] Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation., Shusett, R., O’Bannon, D., Carroll, G., Giler, D., Hill, W., Scott, R., Skerritt, T., Weaver, S., Cartwright, V., Stanton, H. D., Hurt, J., Holm, I., Kotto, Y., Vanlint, D., Rawlings, T., Goldsmith, J., Brandywine (Firm)., & Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, I. (2003). Alien. Director’s cut. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

[8] Giger, HR (1989). Giger’s alien.

[9] Warner Bros., Reeves, K., Fishburne, L., Village Roadshow Pictures., & Silver Pictures. (1999). The Matrix. Burbank, Calif.: Warner Home Video.

[10] How delightful I’d find it to have someone get irked I’d like Shakespeare, Alien and The Matrix—my point remained only to show how  form or genre may pop into focus in the general imagination.

NOTES ON A TRANSFORMATION: An Application of Chaos Theory & Depth Psychology (2014): Part XII – Complexes & Persona

“Believers make liars,” except that, as Jung (1956)[1] reminds us, “Belief is a substitute for a missing empirical reality” (¶666), so believers do not always make liars, but only unverified asserters.[2]

INTRODUCTION

Recently (and currently), I experienced (and continue to experience) a “re-centering”[3] of my identity, by which I mean that patterns and behaviors in my life changed (and continue to change).

Over the course of some fourteen posts, I will describe the various inputs that brought about this change, analyzing them through a lens of chaos theory and Jungian depth-psychology, only in part to further articulate the roots of the change (for myself) and more to provide a descriptive model of the experience that might prove useful (for others). As such, everything autobiographical in this post I consider trivial; its significance resides only in its illustrative value for you (the reader) and for the model.

This twelfth post continues the exposition of Jungian depth psychology and relates complexes and the person to my notion meaningful change or transformation.

Complexes & the Persona

This provides a rather apt segue to Jung’s notion of complexes. Having read a lot of Jung, I have strayed across this notion many times, but I have yet to read (I believe) his more formal articulations of the notion. In fact, in his earliest psychiatric work, he begins to sketch out the way complexes intrude on consciousness during word-association tests. In his ongoing work, as he encountered again and again similar structural presences in his clients and patients, he gradually elaborated the most determinative of these as archetypes. And at the time when I originally wrote this, I’d yet to finish the papers collected in his Experimental Researches, which includes a 1911 paper “On the Doctrine of Complexes”. My reply to that book (see here) consists largely of tracing the development of this notion of the complex.

To put this all too briefly, one may analogize how complexes “live” in the personal unconscious while archetypes “live” in the collective unconscious. Critics of Jung want to get ontological about this, but his proposal here serves simply to maintain a distinction in human experience between the sort of hijacking moodiness or possession that complexes affect in us compared to the sometimes earth-shattering or psychosis-inducing eruption of archetypal material. When I tried to quit smoking and found myself harassed (by a pat of myself) into having a cigarette or, more strangely still, when habit would have me simply light a cigarette and start smoking it without even noticing, we can ask the question, “Who lit the cigarette?” It (literally) feels inaccurate to say “I” did, especially as I want to quit smoking. Those who have wrestled with addiction know very well this apparent “other” who from time to time hijacks the would-be recoverer’s will. Or those who drive home when completely blacked out; again, “Who drove home?” In even more extreme cases, multiple personalities and fugue states may go on for days, weeks, or even years. On a much more mundane level, again, we pop out of bed, ready to take on the world, and then four hours later remain still in our underwear watching kitten videos on the Internet; here again, who intervened on our committed desire to make a difference in the world that day?

Again, to discuss whether complexes have some sort of ontologically autonomous existence apart from us bogs down in unnecessary controversies. Jung proposes this language as a way to understand  human experience. I doubt that he would have ever morally excused someone’s actions simply because they issued from a complex; complexes don’t get you off the hook, no more than being blacked out while driving will get you off the hook if you run over someone, but it does mitigate or moderate the consequences.  If you say something that activates one of my complexes and I snap at you, I still get to bear the consequences of that, though you might show kind enough to take into account that my mood made me (regrettably) react like I did. Some framing terminology (from here) may help:

Affect-ego: the modification of the ego or “I” by an emerging strongly toned complex. With painful feelings the modification can bring about a restriction, a withdrawal of many parts of the normal ego.

Complex (or “feeling-toned complex”): from a term borrowed by the German psychologist Zeihen and used by Eugen Breuer, then Jung and Freud: a cluster of emotionally charged associations, usually unconscious and gathered around an archetypal center (and so a blend of environment and disposition). Repressed emotional themes. Complexes were first noticed by Aristotle, who in his Psyche called them part-souls, and behave like little personalities (and have unconscious fantasy systems), often even after partially incorporated into awareness. A more powerful complex will either blend with one less powerful or replace it, and its constellating power corresponds to its energy value. [4]

Complexes are the contents of the personal unconscious, whereas archetypes, their foundations, are those of the collective unconscious. Complexes, found in healthy as well as troubled people, are always either the cause or the effect of a conflict. The complex arises from the clash between the need to adapt and constitutional inability to meet the challenge.[5]

Ego: the conscious self; the “I”; the central, experience-filtering complex of consciousness (in contrast to the Self, the central complex of the collective unconscious)–and the most stable complex because it’s grounded in the body sensations. A relatively permanent personification. The most individual part of the person. The ego divides into the ectopsyche and the endopsyche. It’s an object in consciousness as well as a requirement for it. Its two main constituents are bodily sensations and memory.

What I want to emphasize here involves the self-evident notion from the above of the multiplicity of complexes.  Thus one arrives at the notion in Moore’s (1982)[6] The Planets Within or Jean Shinoda Bolen’s (1984)[7] Goddesses in Everywoman and (1989)[8] Gods in Everyman, even as these seem more like archetypes than Aristotle’s little personalities. If one risks godlikeness (as described above in the section on “Archetypal Emergence”) in the identification of one’s ego with archetypal material, with complexes identification tends to get experienced as possession.[9]

It seems helpful to connect the sorts of factors listed above with Jung’s notion of complexes, or at least the parts that proceed the period of symmetry breaking.  Doubtless, the most embodied complexes in this sense involve those listed as the figures of atheist as mystic, anarchist as citizen, animal as social presence, and sodomite as human being—all of which in some way fly under the banner of a sentence I read as a closeted sophomore in high school in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground: “man does things against his self-interest in order to maintain his identity” .[10] One could just say the Scorpio itself already symbolizes this arch-contrarian in me but the Centaur has his stubbornness as well. More discrete from myself, on the one hand, and yet also for that reason more developed, on the other, all of the major and minor roleplaying characters I have run round in my head aggregate to themselves and thus also form to some extent complexes as well. Certainly, in its own way, the evolution from the first major character I developed as an adult for roleplaying (Bronwyn) to the figure ultimately of the gnoll paladin serves as its own pseudo-autobiography as well.

And so, similarly, when I began to wear a snow leopard tail in public, this at least theoretically asserted the possibility of manifesting more than one identity. I explicitly imagined that, at time, having a “snow leopard” response as an alternative to whatever I would have otherwise uttered or come up with would mark an additional piece of social flexibility for myself. However, just as one discovers rather than invents symbols, I may have mistaken this change in my persona to develop into something like a complex, which did not happen. No more, then, in a similar way does adding a hyena tail to my (new) now leopard necessarily presage more than a change in my persona. It functions like the sort of addition of tails that the Japanese kitsune exhibits in folk-lore: growing (or obtaining) a new tail each time it experiences a  significant spiritual experience.

Endnotes

[1] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[2] Also, from Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development [of the desire to obtain magical prestige or social influence] is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige (¶239).

[3] One might typically hear “re-centering” but I do not believe that the circle represents the correct geometric metaphor; rather, as in planetary orbits, the ellipse does, which has two foci that influence the course of the orbit. As just one partial illustration of this, I wrote elsewhere:

This elliptical shape changes the characteristic or consequences of the planetary motion, to the point that we experience seasons (in different ways) on the earth. It means the Sun offers the most predominating factor, but that not only do other planets exist, we might actually stand on them at different times, pointing to Jung’s notion of complexes—as alternative personalities (or at least pseudo-personalities within our psyche) as well as rationalizing his sense of possession. Epistemologically, this points not only to a multiplicity of points of view but also to their incommensurability into the bargain; it never boils down only to a difference of semantics, but to a fundamental difference in value-orientation that cannot resolve simplistically. Ethically, that we move relative to two “centers of gravity”—two loci of motion—means not only that we have a radical, existential demand to take responsibility for ourselves but also that the Sun must have obligations as well—we do not merely spin round the Sun, solely or helplessly worshipping it while it owes us nothing more than to just keep on doing what it always does and has. We become in our rights to make demands of it, which the Pueblo people nicely hint at when each morning they venerate the Sun in order to help him up. No simply all-powerful deity, humanity must serve as his alarm clock each day, suggesting that we not only have a duty to do so, for the sake of the whole world, but also a right to. Were it not for our intervention, the Sun might just sleep all day!

Murphy (1991)* puts this another way: “The struggle is not to abolish any type of centering, but to recognize the relative nature of centers and their dynamic relationship with margins” (51).

*Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[4] In his early experimental researches in particular, as the compiler of this website notes, “Jung thought women’s complexes usually simpler and more often erotic than men’s, which focused on work and money.” Jung certainly waxes along these lines in Experimental Researches—not an aspect of his work I have an interest in perpetuating..

[5] The author here adds, “They originate in childhood, and their first form is the parental complex.” This must get framed as a hypothesis, yet another explanatory framework—that our complexes originate in some form from past features. For Freud, this origin and etiology seems to have had an absolute, ontological quality; if Jung takes up the idea, it has more of a phenomenological emphasis. But even in this, In Cirillo and Wapner’s (1985)* very aptly named Value Presuppositions in Theories of Human Development, they point out that even the fundamental idea that we start in some kind of simpler or chaotic state and only gradually “develop” represents an untested hypothesis, that such a presupposition provides a way of thinking about how human beings experience time, but doesn’t automatically provide a priori some reason to assume that earlier represents something inferior, that later represents something superior, that normal development even exists or that we should regard certain kinds of development as abnormal or aberrant. While we might, then, look to the very distant past for clues about our current problems, that very past itself has gotten constituted by us in our now; hence the saying, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood”.

* Cirillo, L, and Wapner, S (1985). Value presuppositions in theories of human development. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.

[6] Moore, T. (1982). The planets within: the astrological psychology of Marsilio Ficino. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books.

[7] Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in everywoman: a new psychology of women. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

[8] Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in everyman: a new psychology of men’s lives and loves. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

[9] Again: by the sort of automatic, unconscious, or habitual action described regarding addiction above, or in the more mundane way as possession by moods and so forth

[10] Memory playing the tricks it does, I have long felt sure this represents the exact sentence as I encountered it that mind-blowing night as I sprawled in a cooling bathtub reading the book all at one go, but in fact I cannot locate this sentence exactly or even exactly where it would fall in the text. A charming thing, given how vividly I remember the actual experience of reading the book.

NOTES ON A TRANSFORMATION: An Application of Chaos Theory & Depth Psychology (2014): Part XI – Psychoid Effects

“Believers make liars,” except that, as Jung (1956)[1] reminds us, “Belief is a substitute for a missing empirical reality” (¶666), so believers do not always make liars, but only unverified asserters.[2]

INTRODUCTION

Recently (and currently), I experienced (and continue to experience) a “re-centering”[3] of my identity, by which I mean that patterns and behaviors in my life changed (and continue to change).

Over the course of some fourteen posts, I will describe the various inputs that brought about this change, analyzing them through a lens of chaos theory and Jungian depth-psychology, only in part to further articulate the roots of the change (for myself) and more to provide a descriptive model of the experience that might prove useful (for others). As such, everything autobiographical in this post I consider trivial; its significance resides only in its illustrative value for you (the reader) and for the model.

This eleventh post continues the exposition of Jungian depth psychology and relates Jung’s notion of the psychoid level or effect to my notion meaningful change or transformation.

Psychoid Effects

Below, I sketch out to some extent what Jung means by psychoid (pronounced “sigh-koid” not “psycho-id”), but for the purpose of this paper I mean for it to point at that complex intersection where the activity of the body affects the activity of the mind. This specifically shows up in details during the guided meditation (described below). From a useful glossary of Jung’s terms (from here):

psychoid: neither psychological nor physical, but similar to, and transcending, both.

At bottom this psychoid layer fuses with physical processes and (includes) the sympathetic nervous system, which experiences from within as opposed to the cerebrospinal system, which senses outer things and maintains the ego. In fact, Jung thought the sympathetic system a deeper, wider, and more embracing psyche than the cerebrum’s cortical fields and less exposed to the endocrine system. The highest differentiation of the collective unconscious is the ego, a relatively new combination of ancient elements.

A tremendous amount of historically philosophical weight actually bears down on this “moment” insofar as it attempts to identify the relationship between body and mind, i.e., how does one “get” to mind from body. Plato tried to solve the problem with demiurges, but this only defers the problem, as no shortage of skepticism has demonstrated; positivists, actually destroying their own argument by assuming on pragmatic grounds that their belief in objective reality “is true”, breezily ignore this fact. Jung’s philosophical position as a phenomenologist—surely one of the most important features of his psychology—permits him to assume (in the manner of Kant) the fact of objective reality as an untestable hypothesis, which probably means one shouldn’t use the word hypothesis at all—does an untestable hypothesis lose its status as a hypothesis?. Consequently, the beginning of any empirical investigation can only take the activity we, from the standpoint of an embodied cognitive observer, declare “biological activity”. For a self-defeating positivist, no quotation marks get used; they will speak about “the brain” as a true (objective) fact and thus guarantee, if nothing else, that what they say “is false”—a useful assumption, no doubt, but still false. With the term psychoid, Jung keeps in mind that what we call “body” and what we call “mind” already emerge from some nonsynthetic (or pre-analytic) “thing” on the same grounds that Korzybski describes the world—of knives, tables, forks, &c—as the unspeakable world. This involve no mystification at all; only our utter indoctrination that what we see and what “is” “are” identical allows us to perpetuate the such a  lie.

Screwy as this might sound, both Wolfgang Pauli and Erwin Schrödinger have expressed similar ideas in the realm of quantum physics. Pauli gets mentioned here in a context of Jung’s notion of the unus mundus, or “one world” (from here):

Unus mundus: “one world” — the physical-psychological, transcendental, “third thing” continuum underlying all existence. Metaphysical equivalent of the collective unconscious. Mercurius. Original, nondifferentiated unity of the world, where all is connected. In the view of Jung and physicists like Wolfgang Pauli, the collective unconscious, a psychoid realm somewhere between physical and mental reality, underlies both, manifesting in one reality as the psyche and in the other as quantum operations and the physical reality built up from them. (Beyond this concept, hinted at earlier but described in Jung’s book Mysterium Coniunctionis as the final stage of alchemy, where body, spirit, and soul unite with it, Jung felt he couldn’t go. It meant a perfect synthesis of conscious with unconscious.).

Nichols (1980)[4] cites Schrödinger’s an Jung’s explicit statements on the matter:

[SCHRÖDINGER] … inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. … If we decide to have only one sphere, it has got to be  psychic one, since that exists as a given for all experience. … if, without involving ourselves in obvious nonsense, we are going to be able to think in a natural way about what goes on in a living, feeling, thinking being … then the condition for our doing so is that we think of everything that happens as taking place in our experience of the world, without ascribing it to any material substratum as the object of which it is an experience; a substratum which would in fact be wholly and entirely superfluous.

[JUNG] The uniqueness of the psyche is of a magnitude that can never be made wholly real, but can only be realized approximately, though it still remains the absolute basis for all consciousness. The deeper “layers” of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. “Lower down”—that is to say, as they approach the autonomous functional systems—they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e., in the chemical bodies. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence “at bottom” the psyche is simply “world”.

Of course there is little or no hope that the unitary Being can ever be conceived, since our powers of thought and language permit only of antinomian statements. But this much we do know beyond all doubt, that empirical reality has a transcendental background … The common background of microphysics and depth-psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental (quoted in Nichols, 363–4).

Leaving aside these massive epistemological and philosophical issues, some details from the guided meditation at the time when the vision actually appeared may also play a role.

I enjoy and have benefited previously from group (silent) contemplative meditation, where the “method” involved “re-centering” on a particular word if a distraction occurs. This involves in a sense keeping one’s attention on “nothing” and not becoming “distracted” by passing thoughts, affects, external noises, &c. I specifically mention attention and distraction here to refer back to the earlier section of this paper on attention and distraction.

In the case of the guided meditation, of course, the person leading the meditation necessarily intruded again and again at various intervals with whatever next bit of the “guiding” he meant to provide. But not only did this cause a recurrent intrusion, which I applied my usual “re-centering” approach to each time, I also found the content of the guided meditation itself annoying.[5] At the beginning, I specifically rebelled against the meditative “direction” he suggested, but then (because I wanted to “let go” and simply “re-center” per my normal meditative habit), I stopped paying attention to the words he said; I could still hear the sound of his voice though, of course.

I had seated myself on an axis perpendicular to the leader of the guided meditation; in other words, my right ear pointed directly at him, and as he spoke, the intrusion of his voice—simply the sound of his voice—seemed to go quite literally right into my ear, and more than once that sound had a quality much like throwing a large rock into a pond. The “pool” of my mind kept getting “sloshed” by simply the sound of his voice. And those literal disturbances seemed to comprise the most immediate cause or prompt for the emergence of the imagery that suddenly appeared to me.[6]

Jung (1907),[7] citing a very extensive study by Zoneff and Meumann (1900),[8] summarizes some of the effects of various stimuli on the respiratory function (breathing).[9] Jung praises this work but cites a number of criticisms of it and provides some of his own. With that grain of salt in mind, we might read the excerpt of Jung’s summary as it relates (perhaps) to the context of my seated meditation, with more regulated breathing, and me attempting to keep my attention on “nothing” while having the (unpleasant) intrusion of the guided meditator’s voice recurring. For example, he summarizes that Zoneff and Meuman found that “Complete inhibition [of breathing] was found more often in attention to sensory than to intellectual stimulation” (¶1058); in other words, one seems more likely to hold one’s breath when attending to sensory (external) distractions or stimuli than to intellectual (internal) distractions or thoughts. Further:

In relation to pleasant and unpleasant stimuli, [Zoneff and Meumann] conclude that all pleasant sensations cause shallowing and acceleration of the breathing, and all unpleasant sensations deepening and slowing of respiration, or, in other words, that the former diminish and the latter increase respiratory function. … In experiments with concentration of attention on stimulus and sensation, attention strengthened the effects of both pleasant and unpleasant feelings upon the curves (¶1058).

If unpleasant sensations increase the respiratory function (breathing) and concentration of attention on (even unpleasant) stimuli strengthens the effect of those feelings, then maybe this played some kind of role as well. Of course, to attempt to link these findings to a circumstance of guided meditation remains highly tenuous, particularly in how such meditation—and this one in particular—began with directing attention to one’s breathing. All that might get tantalizingly inferred involves the possible intersection of breathing, attention, and the heightened affect associated with stimuli, which might then have further prepared the ground for the emergence of the solar hyena.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I began the meditation in a somewhat sleepy frame of min. I did not fall asleep, but I may have been already closer to the sort of frame of mind that supports the appearance of visual imagery. On the other hand, I tend not to get visual material of such a striking quality—I refer to all there images I saw, not just the solar hyena—when meditating. At a place called Universe of You, at one time in San Rafael, California, they had a set up with sound and flashing goggles designed to “attune” your alpha, delta, and whatever waves, and sitting in that environment for an hour could definitely spark visualizations, but that approach, while “relaxing”, also distinctly and continuously bombarded my (closed) eyes and open ears. The experience seems nothing like contemplative meditation, which aspires to the opposite. Also, that the imagery came so early in the meditation surprised me—I had yet to “get into it” so to speak—but perhaps this simply mirrors the sort of half-consciousness one has just as one begins to rift off to sleep, where the lingering half-consciousness easily registers whatever psychic activity the sleeping portions of the mind start to churn out.

I mention this all primarily only also to acknowledge that breathing has for unknown numbers of centuries played a key role in meditation and thus like supplies a factor in meditation’s at times visionary qualities. Researchers have shown that oxygen deprivation,[10] as also sleep deprivation, can contribute to altered states of consciousness, so a sufficient variance from one’s norm (or factors operating in tandem) might play an additional causal factor in the emergence of archetypal material or symbols, like the solar hyena.

Endnotes

[1] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[2] Also, from Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development [of the desire to obtain magical prestige or social influence] is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige (¶239).

[3] One might typically hear “re-centering” but I do not believe that the circle represents the correct geometric metaphor; rather, as in planetary orbits, the ellipse does, which has two foci that influence the course of the orbit. As just one partial illustration of this, I wrote elsewhere:

This elliptical shape changes the characteristic or consequences of the planetary motion, to the point that we experience seasons (in different ways) on the earth. It means the Sun offers the most predominating factor, but that not only do other planets exist, we might actually stand on them at different times, pointing to Jung’s notion of complexes—as alternative personalities (or at least pseudo-personalities within our psyche) as well as rationalizing his sense of possession. Epistemologically, this points not only to a multiplicity of points of view but also to their incommensurability into the bargain; it never boils down only to a difference of semantics, but to a fundamental difference in value-orientation that cannot resolve simplistically. Ethically, that we move relative to two “centers of gravity”—two loci of motion—means not only that we have a radical, existential demand to take responsibility for ourselves but also that the Sun must have obligations as well—we do not merely spin round the Sun, solely or helplessly worshipping it while it owes us nothing more than to just keep on doing what it always does and has. We become in our rights to make demands of it, which the Pueblo people nicely hint at when each morning they venerate the Sun in order to help him up. No simply all-powerful deity, humanity must serve as his alarm clock each day, suggesting that we not only have a duty to do so, for the sake of the whole world, but also a right to. Were it not for our intervention, the Sun might just sleep all day!

Murphy (1991)* puts this another way: “The struggle is not to abolish any type of centering, but to recognize the relative nature of centers and their dynamic relationship with margins” (51).

*Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[4] Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey. New York: S. Weiser.

[5] Why so does not matter much.

[6] I had, in fact, three striking images appear—the solar hyena being the third.

[7] Jung, C. G. (1981). Experimental researches. (Collected Works, vol. 2) 1st Princeton/Bollingen paperback printing, with corrections. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[8] Zoneff, P., and Meumann, E. (1903). Über Begleiterscheinungen psychischer Vorgänge im Athem und Puls. In W. Wundt (1883–1902, ed.). Philosophische studien 18, pp. 1–113. Leipzig: W. Engelmann.

[9] In the interests of thoroughness, I provide the entire passage from Jung here:

the effects of voluntary attention and pleasant and unpleasant impressions upon the breathing and pulse. They found that as a rule attention produced acceleration of the breathing, especially at the end of the stimulation, and in addition to acceleration the breathing might become more shallow or be inhibited. This inhibition may appear as shallow or and more rapid breathing, or there may be a partial or complete standstill of the respiration, which is greater in direct proportion to the degree of attention. Complete inhibition was found more often in attention to sensory than to intellectual stimulation. There were variations in the results in different individuals. There were fluctuations in the curves which they considered as being due to fluctuations in attention. In relation to pleasant and unpleasant stimuli, they conclude that all pleasant sensations cause shallowing and acceleration of the breathing, and all unpleasant sensations deepening and slowing of respiration, or, in other words, that the former diminish and the latter increase respiratory function. In experiments with diversion of the attention together with stimulation, they found that emotional effects upon breathing and pulse ceased. In experiments with concentration of attention on stimulus and sensation, attention strengthened the effects of both pleasant and unpleasant feelings upon the curves (quoted in Jung, ¶1058).

[10] For a not very interesting but obviously conclusive example of this, see: Edwards, D., Harris, J. A., & Biersner, R. (1976). Encoding and decoding of connected discourse during altered states of consciousness. Journal Of Psychology, 92(1): 97.

NOTES ON A TRANSFORMATION: An Application of Chaos Theory & Depth Psychology (2014): Part X – the Self as a Solar Hyena

“Believers make liars,” except that, as Jung (1956)[1] reminds us, “Belief is a substitute for a missing empirical reality” (¶666), so believers do not always make liars, but only unverified asserters.[2]

INTRODUCTION

Recently (and currently), I experienced (and continue to experience) a “re-centering”[3] of my identity, by which I mean that patterns and behaviors in my life changed (and continue to change).

Over the course of some fourteen posts, I will describe the various inputs that brought about this change, analyzing them through a lens of chaos theory and Jungian depth-psychology, only in part to further articulate the roots of the change (for myself) and more to provide a descriptive model of the experience that might prove useful (for others). As such, everything autobiographical in this post I consider trivial; its significance resides only in its illustrative value for you (the reader) and for the model.

This tenth post continues the exposition of Jungian depth psychology and addresses the specific symbol of the solar hyena to my notion meaningful change or transformation.

The Self as Solar Hyena

I intend, or suspect, this may prove the most gratuitous or personal portion of these notes, but at some point it seems vitally necessary to get specific about the specific symbol—the specific archetypal material that emerged, and that I have since engaged in different ways that it becomes a sign integrated into my consciousness.

Jung treated the Self as a composite of consciousness and the Unconscious. Conventionally speaking, within the conscious portion of the Self, the ego-consciousness serves as the at least theoretical seat of one’s will, but there exist there also any number of other “complexes,” which I intend to discuss more below. In Jung’s (1979)[4] Aion and (1956)[5] Mysterium Coniunctionis, he specifically delves into the phenomenology and the representation of the Self in the symbolism of alchemy. He speaks of it extensively and everywhere, specifically with respect to transformation in (1962)[6] Symbols of Transformation. [7]

Although the circle may offer the most elementary symbol of the whole Self, when crossed by two lines that divides it into quarters, this adds a significant piece of information. And then beyond that, the further articulations of lines and curves in the mandala itself becomes a more “fully formed” edition of the symbol—one that has in many places become a sign, and thus entered into human consciousness as an input (a return) to the Unconscious, and not only an output of it.

I do not wish to bog down in trivia, but at least for myself to better understand why this transformation came about—and hopefully in the process of that investigation to uncover patterns or mechanisms that you might find of use—I cannot avoid digging into my autobiography,  though not in any systematic or chronological way.

In the section on chaos theory, I identified that a sufficient sharp shock to one’s routine may bifurcate into a state of chaos. For me, this involved a large car expense and breakdown and the loss of my income. Somewhere Jung asserts that if we disregard our one-sidedness too long, then we may begin to experience events from the  “outside world” that take the place of the more “gentle” reminders of dreams (and then nightmares) attempting to offer us the complementary re-balancing. This represents one of Jung’s weirder (or perhaps simply daffier) ideas, not nearly quite as compelling or unsettling as the notion that our psyches actually extend beyond our bodies and out some distance around us. I do not intend to try to rationalize or even defend this notion; rather, I would point to the question whether thinking of those events as manifestations of my one-sidedness might further illuminate the roots of the transformation that eventually happened. Because any answers only apply to me personally, simply to pose the question already underlines this idea enough without further specifics.

As a matter from the very distant past that feels related, my birthday falls on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius (22 November, the anniversary of JFK’s assassination). Quite apart from any useless question whether astrology “is true or not,” I find it illuminating to divide my life into periods governed, first by the scorpion, later by the centaur—in both cases the governorship of each thwarted and brought low by the other. This symbolized but very palpable distinction in myself that I can attach to intuition and intellect, respectively, usually manifested in the form of a battle—the Scorpion and the Centaur did not cooperate, except when I would do Tarot card readings. And at the time of the appearance of the solar hyena, I had been commenting on a (Jungian) commentary on the Tarot for several months; more specifically, I had written the commentary on the Sun card the day before the solar hyena appeared, one day after my birthday.

I can imagine Jung confidently declaring a case for synchronicity here, but I have no trouble seeing something more like a deliberate stewing that plays on dominant mythologies in my life: the division of my birthday, the split between “reason” and “intuition” (which has its own long arc or articulation in my life), and like things. Having blogged about the Sun card, I thus (accidentally) provided myself with the very thing around which the solar hyena might constellate. And the vision occurred during a guided mediation, when I deliberately set aside my “conscious” thinking to let the light of the Self shine through instead.

Not that I could have predicted this; like a good plot twist in  movie, it seems rather inevitable in retrospect, especially the delightful fat of occurring the day after my birthday. It occurred as well during what amounts to a vacation, a period away from home, and one that amounted to a deliberate and gratuitous expense in the face of my loss of income. The vacation took place “among my people” (at a conference), the type of which I’d not (to my sadness) been to in some years but one that I had never (to my anticipation) attended previously. There, rather than attend my usual panels on writing—my previous habit—I “somehow” decided to attend the “spirituality” panels instead. In rooms full of people who identified as having spirit guides, I engaged that terminology (i.e., I took it seriously in the terms it offered, just as when I do tarot card readings I take the premises of its system to heart). In all of this, I created a very large space of atypicality for myself—of location, of thought pattern—and that too may have helped pave the way for the emergence of the symbol.

I state as a categorical fact that the sensation accompanying the vision of the solar hyena (as a symbol of integration) did “re-center” me and did “en-lighten” me and did bring a sense of lessened, if not removed, tension between “my two halves” (symbolized as the Scorpion and the Centaur). To write this still, even now, causes a welling of emotion in me, which I find odd in a sense. Did I give up hoping such integration could ever occur? I never found myself longing for it in a conscious sense. I noted that my Scorpion and Centaur got along infamously, except when cooperating over a deck of Tarot cards, but I can’t think of ever seriously hoping they’d work out their differences. In the second major crisis between them back in 1992, this eventually led by a spectacularly circuitous but also tragic route to my own realization that I should call myself, however awkwardly, a mystical atheist or an atheist mystic. For the purpose of these notes, this amounts to an intellectual realization of the union the two categories might affect, but it did not make me into one. In a nutshell, it taught me that the “argument” between my Scorpion and my Centaur over which “was right” could never get settled and didn’t even make sense as a question. The two simply had to admit, much as they could not make sense of one another, that the other’s autonomy and point of view had a legitimacy beyond their ability to grasp.

But that still left them regarding each other from opposites sides of the table. With the solar hyena, they merged.

Once again, even to write this causes me to feel deeply moved. Except that I refuse to let fear or embarrassment have any say about this, it could well feel embarrassing to admit this so plainly in a blog.[8] But also, the sheer unlikeliness of this reaction seems curious to me and makes me more ready to admit it. I wouldn’t think it could comprise a meaningful sentence to me (much less such  meaningful one) to simply think “I am whole” but it seems to work out that way. And this, in any case, points to what Jung iterates no shortage of times, about the experience of the Self in its totality.

As for why the face in the sun emerges as a hyena, the details of that trace seem much better sketched out and so that much more plentiful. The two main threads involve role-playing (online) and various appreciation of hyenas as creatures—the roleplaying of others I encountered leading to “research” (Wikipedia reading) into hyenas, &c, in a mutually reinforcing feedback.

I have role-played for a long time, and have sought out various online places to do so. I did not originally seek out to play anthropomorphic characters, but I found such online, so play them I did: cats and dogs primarily. After too many characters and what I referred to as a mid-life crisis, I settled on only two: an unassuming Vietnamese dog and a snow leopard. However, already some dim part of me liked anthropomorphic hyenas, as I had seen them played online, and I created one—definitely a very rough first draft, if you will—and a character who didn’t get a lot of air time in any case. Later, as a sort of second draft attempt, I more or less sloppily merged the dog and the snow leopard to make a white hyena with purple spots.

Assuredly, the Vietnamese dog and the snow leopard (both from the far East, one might note) were wildly dissimilar, except for the shared trait of a very good-natured optimism and happiness. I did not think of them a emblematic of the Scorpion and Centaur, and in fact the fit remains poor if I try to make it, but their polar opposition of behavior (except for their cheerfulness) definitely reproduces the polar opposition of the Scorpion and the Centaur. Of course, also, snow leopards dwell in the cold of the high mountains, and Vietnamese dogs (tend to live) in the heat of the city (amongst other people) often near sea level. Their union in the white hyena with purple spots, however, seems not to have resulted in a very satisfying mix, even if while one finds hyenas sometimes described as a mix of cat and dog that really doesn’t originate in either. In particular, the white hyena seemed very shy in demeanor, which definitely does not reflect the demeanor of the dog or snow leopard.

As an aspect of defamiliarizing social identity in the world—I hang out with people who clown professionally and not; so wearing clown noses as a social intervention has a whole politics for me—I took to wearing a (snow leopard) tail all the time. At the recent conference, I finally replaced my now very worn out tail. And because I found one, I got a (spotted) hyena tail as well, and rather than pick between which one to wear, I started wearing both. One day later, the solar hyena arrived.

To specifically track why the Sun merged with a Hyena would involve way too many details. I have long found myself drawn to certain kinds of pariahs, specifically those who seem vital to culture but who remain scorned, feared, or hated nonetheless. In Christian mythology, the figures of Judas and Lucifer occupy this position; in Norse mythology, Loki. In Othello, Iago’s complaint certainly warrants more serious consideration than declaring him unmotivated evil, even if his response to his complaint eventuates in an atrocity. Hyenas, in the European and African folklore about them alike, occupy a similar position. Sometimes, they get dismissed merely as brute beasts, but even then one notes that culture can’t stop speaking about them. In other folk stories, they take on the threat of Lucifer or Loki, and their acknowledged dreadfulness clearly comes with a measure of respect.[9]

But the most salient crime of the hyena, at least in the European folk-tale, involves its hermaphroditism. Mistaken as inherently magical beings—and terrifying for that reason—they manifest in East African folk tales in stories about were-hyenas, the African forebear of the were-wolf, the man-wolf. However, all of this hysteria hardly applies. I do not want to say that the culture misunderstand the hyena, though it seems the case as well. The experience of the hyena amounts (as far as humans go) to radical otherization. My own sense of alienation (from childhood on), my sense of isolation, &c, constellates around the bewilderingness of this; why do so many people react to me this way, so to speak. THE feeling of misunderstanding usually presupposes that someone listened first; I found myself more isolated from the world than that—no one listened.

This relates, no doubt, to my non-heteronormative identification. I grew up both isolated but also singularly daft about the existence of other not-heterosexual people. I believed I alone felt the way I did, and that persisted for a rather embarrassingly long period of time (into college). So in particular the notion of the hyena as gender non-normative positions it to capture my attention. Like Scorpios, with their (not usually deserved) reputation for magic and morbidness, the hyena suffers similar from the human aversion to certain kinds of dark nooks and crannies. For someone who felt woefully not served by culture, to the extent that the hyena seems the very paragon of anti-culture (as conceptualized by culture, of course), this too makes it an appealing pillow for my (Scorpio) soul to alight upon. In their reputation for filthiness, vulgarity, and nihilism (that laugh of theirs), part of me wants nothing more than to utterly wallow in the mud of such a “high” opinion held by a benighted culture—if society hates you, you know you must be doing something right—and people who have suffered through racial oppression may well sense a resonance there—because of course the truth of the reputation falls very short of that.

Again, one might feel tempted to describe Lucifer, Iago, and Judas—my childhood heroes, in a sense—as misunderstood, but that misses the point. All of them—as I read them—simply want recognition in their own terms, not as culture-destroying rebels, but simply as yet another manifestation of a sapient being, more simply, as a nonconformist. In relationships I have had, I tell my partners, “The only way I can truly be faithful to you is if you tell me I can sleep with whoever I want.” And the punch line, if you will: give me that permission, and I do behave faithfully. This does not arise in me from mere perversity; if you tell me I must remain faithful, then I no longer know if I choose to remain faithful or if I (or you) have extorted that faithfulness. And if I remain faithful to you on the basis of extortion, then that provides me no legitimate grounds for a relationship.

So when Lucifer (the atheist) says, “I want to assert in public that god does not exist,” this serves less to annihilate religion in general and more to invite a broader consciousness and thus a social plurality of people concerning the experience of spirituality. So too, when Iago (the homosexual) says, “I want to assert in public my erotic affection for Othello,” this serve less to demand the humiliation of all heteronormative modes of sexuality (to say nothing of tribally prejudicial prohibitions on interracial relationship) and more to invite a broader consciousness in people concerning the possibilities of sexuality. So also when Judas (the anarchist) says, “I want to assert in public that culture may be transformed,” this serves less to demand complete destruction of all traditions from all time and more to invite a broader consciousness in people concerning the possibilities of human sociability. Each figure ask simply for culture to say yes to these requests, rather than to react (again) with the familiar fear-ridden, narrow-minded (and thus self-righteously overbearing) no.

I have mentioned various online roleplaying attempts with hyenas; I had offline ones as well, or attempts at least. I had several times attempted to arrange D&D games with housemate and whatnot, where I could play a gnoll paladin, a gnoll being one of a hyena-like race (as pestiferous and vulgar as orcs) in the D&D multiverse, and a paladin being a holy warrior of a god, literally the knight in shining armor type, and generally a shining paragon of virtue. Conceptually, then, a gnoll paladin represents an adequate embodiment and anticipation (in a concrete sense) of the solar hyena. But it also attaches to what I described in the previous paragraph. Here, if the gnoll paladin says, “I want to assert in public that prejudice against appearances shows your blindness,” this serves less to demand the erasure of all difference in people and more to invite a broader consciousness in people of what constitutes the human in the first place. If we push this far enough, it means also a recognition of all forms of life as sentient—something already factually the case—but that we might address and be addressed by as sapient as well. Snyder (1974)[10] wrote:

What we must find a way to do, then, is incorporate the other people–what Sioux Indians called the creeping people, and the standing people, and the flying people, and the swimming people–into the councils of government. This isn’t as difficult as you might think. If we don’t do it, they will revolt against us.  They will submit non-negotiable demands about our stay on the earth. We are beginning to get non-negotiable demands right now from the air, the water, the soil (108)

Murphy (1991),[11] describing the possibilities of a radical ecofeminism, writes:

When a person cries out in pain, is it volitional? When selenium poisons ground water, causes animal deformities, and reduces the ability of California farmers to continue to overcultivate through irrigation land with little topsoil, are these signs that we can read? And in reading such signs and integrating them into our texts, are we letting that land speak through us or re we only speaking for it? ¶ Nonhuman others can be constituted as speaking subjects rather than merely objects of our speaking, although even the latter is preferable to silence (50).

If emotion and instinct arise from historical natural influences on the evolution of the species, then their exertions on our behavior, their entering into our consciousness, are a form of the natural world speaking to us through signs that our consciousness renders verbally (48).

This at least may help to illuminate to some extent why the imagery may have appeared as a hyena: culturally, the hyena remains marginalized and rejected as anti-cultural (as also the gnoll) but the hyena as an animal also represents another human prejudice, our nonrecognition of the “animal” world (the world of all living systems) as also present in the world and with its own demands.  The arrogant dispensation by YHVH to give humankind (or perhaps only Adam) dominion over the world gets shown by the sapient hyena as yet one more tacit slavery. Murphy cites one author who “argues that the domination of man over woman is the prototype for other forms of domination” (43), an argument Lerner (1986)[12] advanced some time ago as well. However, one sees from this that the child and “nature” broadly conceived provide earlier prototypes for domination.

Endnotes

[1] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[2] Also, from Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development [of the desire to obtain magical prestige or social influence] is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige (¶239).

[3] One might typically hear “re-centering” but I do not believe that the circle represents the correct geometric metaphor; rather, as in planetary orbits, the ellipse does, which has two foci that influence the course of the orbit. As just one partial illustration of this, I wrote elsewhere:

This elliptical shape changes the characteristic or consequences of the planetary motion, to the point that we experience seasons (in different ways) on the earth. It means the Sun offers the most predominating factor, but that not only do other planets exist, we might actually stand on them at different times, pointing to Jung’s notion of complexes—as alternative personalities (or at least pseudo-personalities within our psyche) as well as rationalizing his sense of possession. Epistemologically, this points not only to a multiplicity of points of view but also to their incommensurability into the bargain; it never boils down only to a difference of semantics, but to a fundamental difference in value-orientation that cannot resolve simplistically. Ethically, that we move relative to two “centers of gravity”—two loci of motion—means not only that we have a radical, existential demand to take responsibility for ourselves but also that the Sun must have obligations as well—we do not merely spin round the Sun, solely or helplessly worshipping it while it owes us nothing more than to just keep on doing what it always does and has. We become in our rights to make demands of it, which the Pueblo people nicely hint at when each morning they venerate the Sun in order to help him up. No simply all-powerful deity, humanity must serve as his alarm clock each day, suggesting that we not only have a duty to do so, for the sake of the whole world, but also a right to. Were it not for our intervention, the Sun might just sleep all day!

Murphy (1991)* puts this another way: “The struggle is not to abolish any type of centering, but to recognize the relative nature of centers and their dynamic relationship with margins” (51).

*Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[4] Jung, C. G. (1979). Aion: researches into the phenomenology of the self. 1st Princeton/Bollingen paperback print. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[5] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[6] Jung, C. G. (1962). Symbols of transformation: an analysis of the prelude to a case of schizophrenia. New York: Harper.

[7] For better or worse, i.e., more effective or less effective, I have yet to read Aion and Symbols of Transformation—perhaps a charming or damning but either way essential elision in my reading of Jung’s work!

[8] I could console myself with minimal readership!.

[9] All of this links very much with the supposed notorious and generally undeserved reputation of Scorpios as well.

[10] Snyder, G. (1974). Turtle island. New York: New Directions.

[11] Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[12] Lerner, G (1986). The creation of patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press.

NOTES ON A TRANSFORMATION: An Application of Chaos Theory & Depth Psychology (2014): Part IX – Archetypal Emergence

“Believers make liars,” except that, as Jung (1956)[1] reminds us, “Belief is a substitute for a missing empirical reality” (¶666), so believers do not always make liars, but only unverified asserters.[2]

INTRODUCTION

Recently (and currently), I experienced (and continue to experience) a “re-centering”[3] of my identity, by which I mean that patterns and behaviors in my life changed (and continue to change).

Over the course of some fourteen posts, I will describe the various inputs that brought about this change, analyzing them through a lens of chaos theory and Jungian depth-psychology, only in part to further articulate the roots of the change (for myself) and more to provide a descriptive model of the experience that might prove useful (for others). As such, everything autobiographical in this post I consider trivial; its significance resides only in its illustrative value for you (the reader) and for the model.

This ninth post continues the exposition of Jungian depth psychology and archetypal emergence to my notion meaningful change or transformation.

Archetypal Emergence

In Jung’s (1966)[4] Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (written toward the beginning of the twentieth century and subsequently revised more than once), he provides a detailed exposition of the experience of the emergence into consciousness of archetypal material. And for the sake of accuracy, we need some distinctions here.

Jung hypothesizes archetypes as an explanatory term; he does not insist on their actuality. Thus, one might always put the word archetypes in quotation marks. Thus, whatever we experience as an emergence in consciousness—whether auditory, visual, tactile, or any other sense either identified or not—constitutes an embodiment of the archetype, not the archetype itself. In some cases, this archetypal material comes also with a symbolic resonance; most doesn’t. as Watts makes clear in his presentation, we may claim exactly the same and only the same about all objects: knives and forks, table and chairs, &c. We hypothesize objects, on an analogy with archetypes, because the hypothesis seems to get some helpful intellectual work done. And what appears in our consciousness, then, represents an embodiment of that object—whether as an image, a smell, a taste, a combination, and so forth.

Nothing spooky or weird obtains from this—it offers simply a garden variety phenomenology that, like all phenomenology, honestly enough admits that a description of an experience “isn’t” identical with that experience. This doesn’t stop most of us, however, from mistaking the fact that our hypothesis proves pragmatic and useful tells us nothing as to whether that hypothesis “is true”.

But however the finer points of this debate get derailed in a world addicted to objective truth and naïve realism, we might still attend to  very key moment in this process. That my consciousness experiences (archetypal) objects only in their embodiments, we would have to identify the mechanism that generates these embodiments. The unimaginative—or simply lazy—answer mounts, of course, to the mind; Jung, with characteristic attentiveness, identifies a psychoid “level” that attempts to bridge the gap between the world external to each individual’s perception, which he seems never to have denied being, and its re-presentation in the self-aware part of the psyche.[5] The psychoid level represents for Jung at least in part the biological substrate of the mind but its exact relationship to the unconscious itself cannot, of course, get determined, even if we wanted to. So the distinction between archetype, as a structure of experience, and the psychoid aspect, as a structuring of experience, remain distinct only for the sake of discussing very fine-grained details.

An especially salient point about this archetypal material, this presence in self-aware consciousness generated (by hypothesis) “from” archetypes “by” a psychoid psychic process, involves the objective character of the experience. What we encounter in our self-aware consciousness—in Sartre’s reflective consciousness—appears to us unbidden, in a form we had no hand in the creation of. This comes across obviously enough with the symbol of the solar hyena—I do not experience it as if I invented it—but the point applies just as much to all objects of experience: knives and forks, tables and chairs, &c.

So, insofar as this embodiment of archetypal material has gotten embodied at all, it therefore does not show us the archetype itself. At the same time, the representation itself has (or can have) such an enormous sense of presence that it readily seems to present the symbol. This distinction matters, because a difference prevails between (1) the structure of the experience itself, as an archetype, (2) the specific embodiment of that structure of experience, which I experience objectively, and (3) the name or label or description that I give to that specific embodiment of that structure of experience.

Typically, we overlook the middle step. Instead, we say things like, “I see the world, and I name it” when in fact the process involves three steps: (1) the experience itself, a priori, before I perceive it, (2) my self-awareness of that experience, which my consciousness constructs and presents to me, objectively, in the form of it that I encounter, and (3) the name, label, or description I give to that construction.

I dwell on these three steps only to show that Jung’s explanatory framework already encompasses these three steps. Step 1 he hypothesizes as within the unconscious; step 2 involves the manifestation of (archetypal) material to our self-awareness (in dramatic cases, as explored in this paper, as a symbol); step 3 involves our identification of the symbol, or naming of it, which gradually makes it into a sign. And, in fact, this making into a sign involves the larger process of integration Jung brings to our encounter with symbols but, again, this jumps ahead in the exposition. Still, we may see how the process runs from the unknown unknown (the unconscious), to the known unknown (the symbol), to the unknown known (as we come to grapple with the still unexplored symbol in an analytical, integrative sense), and finally the known known (as a sign, that has become a part of our psychic activity).

In the broadest sense, all material that issues out of the unconscious—more precisely, psychic material we encounter as a presence in consciousness, which we hypothesize as originating in the unconscious—runs through this four-fold process, more or less quickly. Jung found himself often concerned with archetypal material that affected the quality of life of his patients, and very often this material appeared in the form of a symbol. I want to stress, again, that symbolic material does not only appear in visual form, but my manifest as sound, smells, impulses, intuitions, words, &c. If I keep referring only to symbols—as one type of experience of archetypal material—I do so only because that provides the focus of these notes, even as it helps to have a broader context for them.

Most archetypal material seems to wash up—like dreams—only to disappear again into oblivion without a trace. Whether those operations serve some (still unknowable) purpose, when this material comes to dominate our consciousness in a problematic way—leading even to psychosis, when severe enough—then it becomes helpful to have some sense why this stuff comes from.

Although, in the present example of the solar hyena, the symbol seems to have served more as the lightning rod, the focus around which numerous incoming threads constellated. This suggests an interesting sense for the typically seen “arms” of the sun; we imagine them usually as radiating outward, but perhaps we should (also) imagine them as spiraling inward. Very often we see two kinds of arms on the sun—greater and lesser ones—and perhaps this captures the dual directionality; we may certainly take it as such. The astrophysical origin of stars, in any case, begin by a gravitational inwardness, a massive accretion of material that finally, when it reaches a sufficient mass, detonates, and finally becomes visible. And event hen, over the daily life of the star, the tension of inward and outward plays continuously, the whole shape of the sun consisting ultimately of the opposed tensions of gravitational collapse and explosive radiation. So we might—perhaps overextending the metaphor—imagine dreams like solar flares from a black sun, rising up in great arcs only to fall back into the interior again,  few wisps of its heat and some matter hurled out into the space.[6] Whether the archetypal material deranges or arranges becomes partly a matter of degree and partly a matter of how much we can accommodate in our lives. The very narrow social ambit for many of the women Jung saw may not have permitted enough “wiggle room” for archetypal material that manifested so that it expressed itself, or got taken as expressing, a neurosis. &c.

My desire here rests more to speak of why the circumstance of transformative change comes about and less to describe how in specifically Jungian terms, but it seems some amount of how must creep in. Jung ascribes, for instance, a complementary operation to the Unconscious. If we become too one-sided in our approach to daily life—Jung goes into considerable detail about varieties of this, but for this paper it suffices just to imagine that we become too much routinized in some way—then the Unconscious will (may) manifest a counterweight to offset that one-sidedness. It seems, in general, only in cases of a great deal of one-sided neglect might some sort of major (visionary) form of archetypal material manifest—so that cases Jung saw (and experienced himself) will tend to fall into this major category.

In these relatively critical experiences, Jung (1966)[7] noted the consequences of identifying one’s ego consciousness with the archetypal material (the symbol) as inflation or godlikeness; as Noll (1994)[8] puts it correctly in his dubious book, “Attempts to ‘annex’ contents of the unconscious, especially the impersonal unconscious, enlarge and bloat the individual personality, leading to a state of subjective ‘godlikeness’” (222)—except I can imagine Jung taking issue with the term subjective.[9] One of my summaries and discussion of this runs:

This notion that Christ’s passion is my passion, that Christ’s persecution is my persecution, that Christ’s suffering is my suffering, points to what Jung means by inflation or ‘godlikeness’. Jung maintains that when we become too one-sided in our psychic life, or potentially through any other type of significant psychic disequilibrium, then the unconscious may offer up compensatory imagery out of the unconscious. And like all material that issues out of the unconscious, it comes freighted with archaic elements that tend for that reason to have a charge of fascination or numinousness. Confronted by this, we may as one strategy attempt to avoid or repress the material, which tends only to reset the clock on its later manifestation, perhaps in a more virulent or neurotic form. Alternatively, the analysand may identify her ego-consciousness with this material in all of its archaisms. As a solution to disequilibrium, Jung did not see this as providing a final resolution or integration of the material, since whatever originating one-sidedness had called up such compensating material in the first place, merely to embrace this compensation takes off the table whatever was held (by one’s ego-consciousness) to be important previously.

Moreover, while possessed by this now-conscious embodiment of compensating unconscious material, we will tend to experience ego-inflation, precisely because the unconscious material is, by definition, transpersonal. Although embodied in consciously limited imagery, the significance it points to stands larger than the individual, and thus Jung refers to this inflation as godlikeness. While often certainly uplifting and visionary, Jung still insists it can’t go on forever, being simply a different disequilibrium than whatever brought it about in the first place, so that one might anticipate an eventual (ironic) compensatory puncturing—either experienced directly by the person or by his or her growing loneliness as all of the cultic followers leave in disillusioned disgust. At that point, only the truest true believers or those most capable of being cowed into submission would remain. The process of individuation, by contrast, involves incorporating this fascinating, numinous material into one’s ego-consciousness rather than allowing it dominate (to possess) one’s ego consciousness.

For Jung, identification of ego-consciousness with archetypal material provided a stop along the way to integration. Elsewhere, in books I’ve yet to read, Jung discusses the transcendent function, which (as the name implies) must somehow transcend archetypal material as it presents itself. Thus, we have three general forms of address we might make to archetypal material that impinges loudly enough on ego-consciousness that we feel forced to address it: repression (forgetting), integration, and transcendence, however that works.

Again, my object in this does not involve explicitly shoe-horning the how of this into the chaos theory mold, but to characterize the why (as an explanation of psychic activity that lays the foundation for transformative change). Of course, most people who visited Jung did so under the duress of oppressive archetypal material,[10] but might we try to poke or prod the Unconscious in some way? More precisely, can we deliberately harness or prompt these mechanisms, either for one’s own individuation or in service of the individuation of others (via Art). To ask this seriously jumps the gun, but I want to remember it as part of the broader context of these notes generally.

Endnotes

[1] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[2] Also, from Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development [of the desire to obtain magical prestige or social influence] is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige (¶239).

[3] One might typically hear “re-centering” but I do not believe that the circle represents the correct geometric metaphor; rather, as in planetary orbits, the ellipse does, which has two foci that influence the course of the orbit. As just one partial illustration of this, I wrote elsewhere:

This elliptical shape changes the characteristic or consequences of the planetary motion, to the point that we experience seasons (in different ways) on the earth. It means the Sun offers the most predominating factor, but that not only do other planets exist, we might actually stand on them at different times, pointing to Jung’s notion of complexes—as alternative personalities (or at least pseudo-personalities within our psyche) as well as rationalizing his sense of possession. Epistemologically, this points not only to a multiplicity of points of view but also to their incommensurability into the bargain; it never boils down only to a difference of semantics, but to a fundamental difference in value-orientation that cannot resolve simplistically. Ethically, that we move relative to two “centers of gravity”—two loci of motion—means not only that we have a radical, existential demand to take responsibility for ourselves but also that the Sun must have obligations as well—we do not merely spin round the Sun, solely or helplessly worshipping it while it owes us nothing more than to just keep on doing what it always does and has. We become in our rights to make demands of it, which the Pueblo people nicely hint at when each morning they venerate the Sun in order to help him up. No simply all-powerful deity, humanity must serve as his alarm clock each day, suggesting that we not only have a duty to do so, for the sake of the whole world, but also a right to. Were it not for our intervention, the Sun might just sleep all day!

Murphy (1991)* puts this another way: “The struggle is not to abolish any type of centering, but to recognize the relative nature of centers and their dynamic relationship with margins” (51).

*Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[4] Jung, C. G. (1966). Two essays on analytical psychology. 2d ed., rev. and augmented. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[5] Phenomenology in general wrangles over the question of “out there” less than positivism and skepticism (i.e., naïve realism) do, but it does have its history. As far as the debate between positivism and skepticism, Korzybski’s useful remark sheds some important light. “There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking” (attributed here)

[6] Perhaps more exactly, we misunderstand the true arrangement because we do not think of the sun as “in” the unconsciousness of space, the Sun itself already embodying a massive outpouring from the limitlessness darkness of the Unconscious that provided the seed for the Sun in the first place, the fruitful chaos. Some sense of this “larger picture” may lurk a bit in the notion of the black sun, which provides a “negative image” of the astrophysical circumstance: a black sun against a limitless field of space (as light).

[7] Jung, C. G. (1966). Two essays on analytical psychology. 2d ed., rev. and augmented. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[8] Noll, R. (1994). The Jung cult: origins of a charismatic movement. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[9] That godlikeness originates in an identification with archaic (collective) material out of the Unconsciousness suggests that it may more seem “transpersonal” than “subjective”. It may miss a key element of the experience of people in mental health wards who identified with Jesus to describe it as “subjective” rather than “universal” (i.e., transpersonal).

[10] If not out and out neurosis or psychosis.

NOTES ON A TRANSFORMATION: An Application of Chaos Theory & Depth Psychology (2014): Part VIII – Symbol & Sign

“Believers make liars,” except that, as Jung (1956)[1] reminds us, “Belief is a substitute for a missing empirical reality” (¶666), so believers do not always make liars, but only unverified asserters.[2]

INTRODUCTION

Recently (and currently), I experienced (and continue to experience) a “re-centering”[3] of my identity, by which I mean that patterns and behaviors in my life changed (and continue to change).

Over the course of some fourteen posts, I will describe the various inputs that brought about this change, analyzing them through a lens of chaos theory and Jungian depth-psychology, only in part to further articulate the roots of the change (for myself) and more to provide a descriptive model of the experience that might prove useful (for others). As such, everything autobiographical in this post I consider trivial; its significance resides only in its illustrative value for you (the reader) and for the model.

This eighth post introduces the exposition of Jungian depth psychology and relates the distinction of symbols and signs to my notion meaningful change or transformation.

DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY

The foregoing—wrapped in chaos theory but keeping very much in mind the spirit of cybernetics—attempts to describe how transformation, or meaningful change, may come about, specifically in its abrupt or sudden variety. The explanatory framework it offers at length does not theorize about human experiences but attempts to describe events that have and do happen to people, in the same way that Jung’s empiricism did not doubt the symptoms his patients at the psychiatric asylum he worked at reported, even if occasionally he would ferret out a malingerer.

With this section, however, I venture more into why such an (abrupt) transformation, or meaningful change, comes about in the first place. In this, we have everything to do with hypothetical explanatory frameworks, and again this time in the same spirit as Jung’s theorizing about the operations of the unconscious. We have here, ultimately, Kant’s notion that the explanatory idea itself, provable neither as true or false, nevertheless offers helpful consequences if we assume it.

Symbol & Sign

Jung distinguishes symbol from sign, and Nichols (1980) provides a useful summary starting point for this:

Nichols (1980)[4] does throw down one bit of a gauntlet, when she summarizes Jung’s distinction between sign and symbol:

A sign, [Jung] said, denotes a specific object or idea which can be translated into words (e.g., a striped pole means barber shop; an X means railroad crossing). A symbol stands for something which can be presented in no other way and whose meaning transcends all specifics and includes many seeming opposites (7).

People often misunderstood Jung, and Jung had often to reiterate, that by his notion of archetypes he did not propose that “something” “existed” in the unconscious and that those “things” were archetypes; rather, following Kant’s example (and many others), he proposed that hypothesizing the notion of archetypes provided a more helpful way to describe the behavior of the psyche than other explanations. We have something similar in the distinction between symbol and sign.

One might read Jung as making symbols otherworldly or mystical, but in the first place as far as what Jung means by a symbol (1) people do experience them as such, and (2) he proposes to describe them in this way to identify this sort of experience and to distinguish it from our experience of a sign. Thus, Jung (and Nichols in her summary) provides no ooky mystification by insisted that a symbol “can be presented in no way other” (7) and presents a meaning that “transcends all specifics and includes many seeming opposites” (7). To put this another way, if bluntly, if you encounter psychic material in consciousness that one might present another way or whose meaning does not transcend specifics or that contains few if any opposites, then this means nothing more earth-shattering than that the material doesn’t reflect the symbolic.

If it seems unclear why one should even the about the distinction, the point involves adequately naming a kind of human experience. To experience the symbolic differs from experiencing the signific, and to mistake one for the other detracts from clarity for individuals and may often lay the groundwork for religious or social tyranny, believe it or not, which I will return to below.

First, I would cite my recent experience of encountering a symbol—a piece of inward visual consciousness—that consisted of a sun wheel with the face of a hyena looking straight out of it. To help to visualize this a bit more, if you imagine the typical image of a man in the moon, substitute a sun for the moon, and substitute a hyena’s face for the man’s face, then you have a general idea of what I saw and experienced. I mention my experience of this solar hyena, not simply for its interest in itself (which would amount simply to a piece of autobiography), but more broadly as characteristic of the symbolic encounter itself.

If, prior to this vision, I understood rather abstractly Jung’s and Nichols’s distinction of a symbol apart from a sign, I certainly now have a much concrete instance of experience. Elsewhere, I have detailed some of the sense of the opposites in this symbol as it appeared to me:

[in it] all of the bad parts of the hyena’s reputation (hermaphroditic, culture-threatening, death-worshipping, nemesistic, &c) merge in a union with the Sun’s reputation (cis-gendered, culture-fostering, life-worshipping, benevolentistic, &c). However, this analytical breakdown of the symbol represents of course an only partial engagement with the vision itself, especially since the hyena (and the Sun as well) do not warrant exclusively only the evil/good binaries presented above: the hyena also contributes as much to life (for instance) as the Sun contributes to our destruction, never so much as when it bloats and explodes, devouring the whole Earth in the horizon of its red giant. Jung (1956)[5] noted, “As a totality, the self is a coincidentia oppositorum; it is therefore bright and dark and yet neither” (¶108).

This self-quotation pushes along the discourse I want to describe about the experience of integration that the appearance of this symbol portends—particularly when Jung notes, “As a totality, the self is a coincidentia oppositorum; it is therefore bright and dark and yet neither” (¶108)—but I want to stick for now simply to the notion of a symbol as distinct from a sign.

When I analyze the symbol as I do in the passage above into parts—i.e., into a hyena and a sun—I begin to make a sign out of the solar hyena, and thus simultaneously begin to understand it and misinterpret it simultaneously. In my experience of the solar hyena, when I “see” it (saw it) in my mind, it presented me entirely with its own meaning, but it does not present a meaning that literally translates, in some sort of one-to-one correspondence, into a verbal description.

However, this inexpressibility (of experience) does not only apply to encounters with the symbolic. In his talk “The Totality of Being,” (available here), Alan Watts states plainly, and correctly, that “of course everything  in the world, knives and forks, tables and chair, trees and stones, are indescribable” (1’10” – 1’16”) He cites Korzybski also, who referred to the world as the unspeakable world. And nothing mysterious or strange lies at the root of this, but only the recognition that one’s experience and one’s conscious reflection on that experience differ—that our experience and our description of that experience “are” not identical, even though we continuously act as if they “are”.[6] Thus, we see the world—we experience it—and then say, “That’s a cappuccino cup” or whatnot. We experience a symbol, which embodies simply to a very specific kind of experience, and then say, “That’s a symbol”. Nothing less, nothing more. Plain and simple.[7]

Reflecting back to the previous section on chaos theory, I propose that this kind of symbol can in the right circumstances function as the order parameter, the key variable, a new focus of a strange attractor. However, as noted earlier, when we insert an order parameter, we choose its name, whereas the (objective) presence of the symbol has the organizing function of an order parameter on behavior but it feels more like ‘what it means” originates more with it than us. For some people, this kind of symbol or vision does indeed take on a possessing force—more on this follows in the next section.

But one point I want to make first concerns the role of language in this.

On the one hand, perhaps an overwhelming number of symbols of this type manifest visually, i.e., as visual phenomena that only after the fat might we provide a description (for the sake of ourselves or in order to tell others). Of course, “experience” (the symbol) needn’t appear only in visual form: we may hear things, smell things, seventh-sense things, &c. But what all of such experiences tend to have in common: they seem distinctly non-linguistic; they constitute a ‘something” that we need (or choose) to name.

We encounter a sort of ad nauseam here. In order for me to tell you about the symbol I experienced, which for brevity I will refer to as a “solar hyena,” I must represent the thing, and language will often serve as a first resort or such cases. I could draw a picture, and Jung very early on encouraged his patient to resort to visual representations along with verbal descriptions in order to come to grips with their archetypal material (the symbols). But of course, even to “describe the experience to myself” will seem to require language. I don’t need to “draw a picture” of it, since I already have the vision (or the experience) of the symbol in the first place,[8] and in some way it seems even to recognize (to re-cognize) the symbol itself “as” a “sun” and “as” a “hyena” already presupposes something very like language at least.

One might try to further tease out the details of this seemingly ultra-rapid switching from experience to description of experience and so on, but that again seems to lead to an infinite regress. Nonetheless, the dominant right brain/left brain premise most all of us know, which of course has lately started to disarticulate and come apart more and more, provides a major source of confusion here. For one, language in the twentieth century became a master metaphor for consciousness. [9] Thus we have those locutions that always irk me like the language of film, the language of dance, even body language.

When I encounter these glib phrases, I feel moved to ask, “Pardon me, but what, if film has a language, do the gerunds of film consist of? Could you, if you please, decline the plié, or conjugate the shrug.” Countering glibness with glibness, the failure of Chomsky’s universal grammar should signal (perhaps did signal, but the zombies of academic inertia weren’t about to give up just for being dead) an end to this metaphorical overgeneralization. [10]  But even if not, we may more generously understand that film, dance, and the body have their own means of expression (often not representable in language), and that language itself then constitutes just one of many means of expression.  We like to pretend it seems that other means of expression may always get (adequately) represented in language, as if an interpretive dance for the preamble of the US Constitution may never. To privilege language, of course, simply lays a foundation for the latest iteration(s) of the totalitarian state, giving rise (shall we insist) to the peculiar forms it did in the twentieth century: whether in Social Democratic Germany, Soviet Russia, Zionist Israel, or the neoliberal United States.

Recognizing this, we may understand that words must once have functioned more nearly like, if not identically like, symbols. The mystic expostulation in the beginning was the Word certainly points to a numinousness of meaning that goes beyond any banal sign. And just as any symbol might (or must) suffer the fate of turning into a (mere) sign for the pragmatic end of communication and human commerce in the better sense of the word, then we might certainly understand as well that some verbal representations in language (written or spoken) will attempt to “keep” or “honor” the numinousness of the thing described.

As an illustration, when writing poetry I tend to insist on making a kind of sense, but when attempting some poetry in light of Russian metaphysical works, I found myself writing “visually” and feeling quite certain I’d gotten it right, even if I remained not at all so certain what it might mean. I felt I could have paraphrased the poems, if asked—and even felt obligated, as the poet, to do so. To the extent that one cannot invent a symbol—one may only discover and/or represent it—I felt my project sought to represent symbolic material, but specifically in language.

In one sense, this offers up one of poetry’s oldest platitudes (or strengths), but what the project disclosed to me involved a realization of the originally symbolic numinousness of words themselves. Something like “word” could resonate just as much as my solar hyena but also just as much as “solar hyena”. Another phrase I stumbled across long ago that shimmers like this: tangible oranges.

Again, I may simply suffer from too much socialization that symbols “are” visual and words “are” only descriptive, that they speak about rather than to (or from). In any case, for all of the undeniable domination of the visual where the symbolic arises, it still seems helpful to bear in mind that the symbolic may also emerge through other perceptive organs of sense, including the linguistic sense organ.

Endnotes

[1] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[2] Also, from Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development [of the desire to obtain magical prestige or social influence] is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige (¶239).

[3] One might typically hear “re-centering” but I do not believe that the circle represents the correct geometric metaphor; rather, as in planetary orbits, the ellipse does, which has two foci that influence the course of the orbit. As just one partial illustration of this, I wrote elsewhere:

This elliptical shape changes the characteristic or consequences of the planetary motion, to the point that we experience seasons (in different ways) on the earth. It means the Sun offers the most predominating factor, but that not only do other planets exist, we might actually stand on them at different times, pointing to Jung’s notion of complexes—as alternative personalities (or at least pseudo-personalities within our psyche) as well as rationalizing his sense of possession. Epistemologically, this points not only to a multiplicity of points of view but also to their incommensurability into the bargain; it never boils down only to a difference of semantics, but to a fundamental difference in value-orientation that cannot resolve simplistically. Ethically, that we move relative to two “centers of gravity”—two loci of motion—means not only that we have a radical, existential demand to take responsibility for ourselves but also that the Sun must have obligations as well—we do not merely spin round the Sun, solely or helplessly worshipping it while it owes us nothing more than to just keep on doing what it always does and has. We become in our rights to make demands of it, which the Pueblo people nicely hint at when each morning they venerate the Sun in order to help him up. No simply all-powerful deity, humanity must serve as his alarm clock each day, suggesting that we not only have a duty to do so, for the sake of the whole world, but also a right to. Were it not for our intervention, the Sun might just sleep all day!

Murphy (1991)* puts this another way: “The struggle is not to abolish any type of centering, but to recognize the relative nature of centers and their dynamic relationship with margins” (51).

*Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[4] Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey. New York: S. Weiser.

[5] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press

[6] I cannot really avoid the verb “are” here, because English only allows me to make the point exactly this way using this version of “to be”—but this denote exactly that utterly illegitimate variety of “to be” that Korzybski critiques and rejects.

[7] Alfred North Whitehead reminds us, “Seek simplicity, and distrust it.”

[8] One might say, not entirely uselessly, that my “mind” in fact has indeed already drawn the picture for me out of the unconscious.

[9] One that dovetailed—to say dovetailed suggests a far more felicitous fit than ever occurred in practice—with the metaphor of the min as a computer.

[10] Read Lakoff and Johnson’s (2003)* Metaphors We Live By for more details of how metaphors function, if you like.
* Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by. [New ed.]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.