Uncovering YOUR path

Yesterday, Chiron stationed direct, having been retrograde since July 26. Why does this matter? Well, Chiron retrogrades draw our energy inward, orbiting around deep-seated wounds that are ripe for healing. Now that Chiron is direct, this energy spirals outward, seeking expression.

Inner currents of healing want to be translated into action.

✨ And with sparkly new year energy at our disposal, now is the perfect time…but how do we know which actions to take?

What is your inner voice urging you to do?

I came across a fascinating passage in Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness that sheds light on how the unconscious processes information. 🧠 Like any relationship, understanding how someone communicates helps us bridge the gap—in this case, between ego and unconscious.

Let’s break the passage into chunks, starting with…

“The form of representation peculiar to the unconscious is not that of the conscious mind. It neither attempts nor is able to seize hold of and define its objects in a series of discursive explanations, and reduce them to clarity by logical analysis.”

The mainstream misconception of the unconscious is that it’s the absence of thinking. It’s the inert backdrop to the allegedly more important conscious processes. But Neumann is setting us up for an exploration of the unconscious’ very unique way of understanding itself and the world…

“Symbols gather round the thing to be explained, understood, interpreted. The act of becoming conscious consists in the concentric groupings of symbols around the object, all circumscribing and describing the unknown from many sides.”

📞 Hold the phone—this is fascinating! So, instead of breaking the object of thought down into smaller bits, the unconscious groups relevant symbols around it, all in service of understanding the object’s multifaceted nature.

This is a damn good description of a dream. Let’s say the object of thought is my relationship to my grandma. My ego might examine past interactions, trying to deduce the nature of our relationship based on things said and done (and things unsaid and not done). The ego might compare this material with things I’ve been taught and interactions I’ve had with other people, trying to figure out if one is “better” or “worse.”

In short, the ego uses a series of evaluations motivated by the underlying concern: is this safe or dangerous? 🔍 This makes sense, given that the ego’s primary function is to keep us alive so it can live to think another day. But if we’re truly wanting to understand something, this perspective is extremely limited.

Contrast the ego’s method to a dream I had…

…a dream which, on the surface, didn’t appear to be about my grandma at all. The super condensed version: I went to an artist’s retreat where the woman in charge gave me a tour of the available supplies, but none were what I needed for my sculpting. They were all pre-packaged craft kits, still in plastic wrapping. The woman asked if I wanted to continue the tour or start working on my art, and she got testy when I chose the latter.

📖 Through interpreting this dream, I mapped connections between my relationship with my grandma (and specifically, the values and “rules” I absorbed from that connection) and my ability to support myself as an artist. I was shown different thoughts and behaviors that obstruct my creative process versus those that support it.

There was much more to the dream that we don’t have room to cover, but suffice it to say, the “concentric groupings of symbols” presented by the dream gifted me with startlingly useful insights that the ego would’ve been hard-pressed to obtain on its own.

Let’s pick up with Neumann’s passage…

“Each symbol lays bare another essential side of the object to be grasped, points to another facet of meaning. Only the canon of these symbols congregating about the center in question, the coherent symbol group, can lead to an understanding of what the symbol is trying to express.”

This bit—“the coherent symbol group”—is a key reason dream dictionaries are fairly useless when it comes to plumbing the depths of a dream. Your psyche has assembled a coherent symbol group whose meaning exists in the connections between the symbols.

If you take a single element, such as your teeth falling out 🦷 and routinely equate this to, perhaps, a fear of aging, you’re viewing the symbol in isolation instead of honoring the vital narrative context. This is akin to assuming the meaning of the word “season,” irrespective of context. It might mean “Don’t forget to season your soup!” or it could be saying, “Fall is obviously the best season!”

The fact that the unconscious, not the ego, assembles these symbols with the aim of deepening our understanding brings us back to our original question, which is: how do we hear our inner voice and know which action steps it’s urging us to take?

Something I see frequently on the Internets is the idea that you can consciously choose an archetype…

…say, the Great Mother or Money or the Magician—and use that to manifest stuff, heal wounds, etc. Said another way, this method claims we can choose an archetype, and this will illuminate the best path forward.

Whether this works or not I can’t say (it hasn’t been terribly effective for me), but it’s based on a conception of archetypes that’s quite different from Jung’s—a conception that Neumann echoes in the passage we’ve been exploring.

I could talk about archetypes until the end of time, but I’ll stick to the essentials here. If we think in terms of an energy gradient that moves from higher to lower levels, that flow undeniably travels from the archetypes, which are massive, into the symbols these archetypes empower, much like an aquifer feeding a smaller stream. 🌊 The reason archetypes are so potent is because they’re fed by aquifers that are so much bigger than the ego.

And yet, not all archetypes speak to everyone equally.

For instance, if you’re not a Christian, the symbol of the cross might fall flat, despite how powerful its underlying archetypes are, but when an archetype resonates, we have what Jung calls a “numinous experience.” The archetype lights up conscious and unconscious contents like a psychic Christmas tree 🎄 and we feel alive on steroids. Along with awe, we might experience a deeper sense of purpose and connection to self and the world.

These encounters can be deeply healing, and this is what, I think, the mainstream Internets conception of archetypes is trying to get at. The problem is that our ego isn’t the savviest at choosing which archetypes we need in any given moment—at least, not without the input of the unconscious.

Say you’re trying to heal ancestral money wounds…

…so you choose a deity related to prosperity and start making offerings. 💰 Now, you might get lucky and stumble upon an archetypal channel that really does it for you—in other words, a channel that activates the precise energy your psyche needs to heal. But far more likely is that the ego’s understanding is super limited, or even at odds with what the unconscious requires to unlock pathways of healing.

Remember what Neumann says about the unconscious’ approach to understanding? It gathers relevant symbols around the thing to be understood. Notice, this is not the ego imposing symbols. This is a process directed by the unconscious.

Going back to the ancestral money wound example, with self-reflection, we can come to know what our ego thinks about this issue, more or less, and this can work wonders in terms of healing. Often, though, this isn’t enough, and we might find it difficult to translate these insights into real-world change. Perhaps we’re unclear which actions to take, or we have clarity, but our energy seems resistant to flowing in that direction. What gives?

Let’s turn to Jung himself, exploring how the tug-of-war between ego and unconscious can undermine our best intentions for change. This is from Collected Works 7:

“It has become abundantly clear to me that life can flow forward only along the path of the gradient. But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind.”

If we restrict ourselves to the ego’s POV, we develop what Jung calls “one-sidedness.” The ego has a definite idea of what the problem is and how to fix it, and if things aren’t working out as promised, it’s not the ego’s fault! 😑 It might search for someone or something to blame, but you can be sure that it won’t seek out information that contradicts what it already knows. This disruption must come from the unconscious.

To be sure, our ego might stumble upon this unwanted information—or perhaps someone in our lives will try to show another side to things—but the ego, nine times out of ten, will resist with a fiery passion. It will develop all manner of arguments to disprove the opposition so it can return to business as usual, even if that means staying trapped in an unwanted situation.

“But the repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible. The conscious mind…seeks its unconscious opposite, perhaps without being aware of it, lacking which it is doomed to stagnation, congestion, and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites.” (para. 78)

I could unpack this section for days, because I’m fascinated by the tension between opposites, but suffice it to say: Without the input of the unconscious, things grind to a halt. 🛑 In fact, if we’re experiencing the sensation of spinning our wheels or feeling like we’ve tried everything yet nothing’s working, there’s a very good chance the unconscious’ invite to the party has been misplaced in the mail.

This also says something vitally important about the nature of meaningful change: It does not come about through sheer will power. This isn’t solely a matter of choosing our course simply because the ego thinks this is what we ought to do.

If we go this route, Jung writes:

“This energy…can at best be applied voluntarily for only a short time. But in most cases it refuses to seize hold, for any length of time…Psychic energy is a very fastidious thing which insists on fulfillment of its own conditions. However much energy may be present, we cannot make it serviceable until we have succeeded in finding the right gradient.” (para. 76)

This speaks to consciously choosing a healing archetype that the unconscious doesn’t care one whit about or insisting on a plan of action without unconscious buy-in. These efforts are destined to run out of steam, sooner or later.

Jung asks, “What is it, at this moment and in this individual, that represents the natural urge of life? That is the question.” (para. 488)

Notice, he’s not asking, “What might people, in general, do in this situation?” This is a deeply personal inquiry that requires a deeply personal answer. What works for me might spell boredom or misery for you and vice versa.

How do we go about answering this question?

Well, the argument I’ve been making throughout this essay is we must invite the unconscious to the table. Working with your dreams is, hands down, one of the best ways to do this, because your dreams are essentially emails, direct from the unconscious. Why not read them?

(There’s an entire unit on dreamwork in Enchantment Lab if you want step-by-step guidance.)

Another technique I love is ending journal entries with a question. Remember that entry I shared on the Full Moon with the squiggly diagram depicting one of my psychological complexes? Well, at the end of that journal entry, I wrote down a question that naturally arose from exploring this material: “What are some practical ways I can interrupt this pattern?”

I didn’t get an answer immediately, but posing the question set my unconscious to work. I’ll typically have dreams or synchronicities that point me in useful directions, and symbols in my dreams can also lead to archetypal images, such as Crow or the Fates, that I can work with in waking life. As opposed to symbols chosen purely by the ego, these dream-sanctioned images carry numinous, healing energy.

To wrap up this very long essay, the energetic currents are in your favor to translate inner healing into outer-world change. So…happy New Year! 🌟💖