Uncharted Territories - Explorations In Creativity and Psyche
On the Self and creativity.
I have recently taken to reading and listening to Carl Gustav Jung, a man of exemplary stature in psychology. He not only wrote more in his lifetime than most dream of, but he put into practice what he preached: the uncovering of the human psyche.
I first discovered his material when I got my hands on a particular Chinese text called the I Ching, and it was Jung who wrote the foreword for it, which discussed synchronicity, one of his most important ideas. It was then that I departed on the path to discover my darkness and the deeper truths that lie within it.
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”-Jung
This quote is very much relevant where I have observed the general darkness in the world run amok with all kinds of tragedies and accidents. Indeed, if you ask certain traditions, we live in the Age of Darkness right now, where everything will just get worse.
Because it is the things we have hushed up, repressed, and dismissed that we should be concerned most about. Raising awareness of them, we become better for it. I can think of a child who has gone through a major traumatic experience, who then grows up and gets into a serious bind because they did not deal with it.
Speaking from experience, I can say that nothing is more explosive than the pent-up feelings one has bottled inside oneself for a lifetime. It was Jung who showed me the value of facing them. Not only is it paramount in overcoming the blocks in one’s mind, it can create newfound energy and lead to a massive acceleration of one’s creativity.
My intention is to study eight of his books, and hopefully get some insight into not only my personal problems but to find that energy and some synthesis in my own writings. I do not have any deadlines, but I am hoping to finish a few of them by the end of the year.
Jung’s most seminal concept is, of course, the collective unconscious, which is the “sea” or shared subconscious experiences of various societies that are inherited through memory and history. It contains the archetypes, or innate tendencies or universal prototypes for ideas that may manifest in dreams, myths, and behaviors across cultures.
The reader might be familiar with lots of them without even knowing it. Archetypes such as the Hero, the Mother, the Sage, and the Fool are universal attributes of our psyche that can appear across art, literature, and other media. I have used many of them personally for a long time before I had any idea what they were. I believe that the Hero’s Journey is a metaphysical story woven into life itself.
That would certainly explain all the monotony in the movies we watch and the books we read these days. Because there would be only one story when it all is boiled down, which is true in most story-telling. All one needs for the journey are obstacles and overcoming them.
As I have not yet taken a deeper dive into his material, I cannot say but a few points for the rest of the article. The first is the Persona, second, the Shadow, and the third is the Self, and last, how I am going to use them in my work.
The Persona is the “mask”, we put on when we deal with people. It may change depending on the person or the situation. The purpose of it is self-protection and putting on a show consciously for others, so that it becomes our role temporarily.
The Shadow, which is another archetype, is its “opposite”, of everything we have repressed and put out of our immediate conscious attention deemed as undesirable. It is every influence society has on us, and even our own instincts, that we deny. And denial of it will only lead to problems.
The Self, another archetype, is the totality of the human psyche. It is characterized by wholeness and integration. Where one has reconciled both of their sides, the light and the dark, and become “fully human.” And one does it by integrating their Shadow completely into who they are.
Now, what I am trying to find here are parallels to my idea of “the mediator” between our “tip conscious experience”, and the divinity or ultimate reality. I think the psyche could be just that. Jung argued the psyche holds a depth of vastness, and that there is nothing that cannot be drawn from it on the mental level. And indeed, he also shows how the religious experiences people manifest can result from the psyche.
I am not disclosing this as saying that the psychological level is the final reality of being by any means. But it seems to be the root of most of mental phenomena. I know there are people out there who do not regard psychology as a science but an art, and I would agree with them. However, I also think that because it is an art, it is for that reason expressive, and if I know anything about expression, is that it is limitless.
Therefore, one’s creativity, if unlocked properly through this integration, could change the world entirely, in the way we see and react to it. We create our reality, here and now. If Jung has taught me anything, it is that the human capacity to imagine and create goes much deeper than most people realize. That requires, if even for a moment, that we stop picturing those beings of light and instead take a jump into the uncharted territory of the dark: ourselves.
L.
