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Chrysalis: Am I really?

Then Sunrise kissed my Chrysalis— And I stood up—and lived— —Emily Dickinson.

I was three years old when I made the most important psychological discovery of my life. I discovered that a living creature, obeying its own inner laws, moves through cycles of growth, dies, and is reborn as a new creation.

One day I was smoking my corncob bubblepipe helping my father in the garden. I always enjoyed helping him because he understood bugs, and flowers, and where the wind came from. I found a lump stuck to a branch, and Father explained that Catherine Caterpillar had made a chrysalis for herself. We would take it inside and pin it on the kitchen curtain. One day a butterfly would emerge from that lump.

Well, I had seen magic in my father's garden, but this stretched even my imagination. However, we carefully stuck the big pins through the curtain, and every morning I grabbed my doll and pipe and ran downstairs to show them the butterfly. No butterfly! My father said I had to be patient. The chrysalis only looked dead. Remarkable changes were happening inside. A caterpillar's life was very different from a butterfly's, and they needed very different bodies. A caterpillar chewed solid leaves; a butterfly drank liquid nectar. A caterpillar was sexless, almost sightless, and landlocked; a butterfly laid eggs, could see and fly. Most of the caterpillar's organs would dissolve, and those fluids would help the tiny wings, eyes, muscles and brain of the developing butterfly to grow. But that was very hard work, so hard that the creature could accomplish nothing else so long as it was going on. It had to stay in that protective shell.

I waited for that sluggish glutton of a caterpillar to change into a delicate butterfly, but I secretly figured my father had made a mistake. Then one morning my doll and I were eating our shredded wheat when I sensed I was not alone in the kitchen. I stayed still. I felt a presence on the curtain. There it was, its wings still expanding, shimmering with translucent light—an angel who could fly. Its chrysalis was empty. That mystery on the kitchen curtain was my first encounter with death and rebirth.

Years later I discovered that the butterfly is a symbol of the human soul. I also discovered that in its first moments out of the chrysalis the butterfly voids a drop of excreta that has been accumulating during pupation. This drop is frequently red and sometimes voided during first flight. Consequently, a shower of butterflies may produce a shower of blood, a phenomenon that released terror and suspicion in earlier cultures, sometimes resulting in massacres. Symbolically, if we are to release our own butterfly, we too will sacrifice a drop of blood, let the past go and turn to the future.

It is the twilight zone between past and future that is the precarious world of transformation within the chrysalis. Part of us is looking back, yearning for the magic we have lost; part is glad to say goodbye to our chaotic past; part looks ahead with whatever courage we can muster; part is excited by the changing potential; part sits stonestill not daring to look either way. Individuals who consciously accept the chrysalis, whether in analysis or in life's experience, have accepted a life/death paradox, a paradox which returns in a different form at each new spiral of growth. In T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," one of the kings, having returned to his own

country, describes his experience in Bethlehem:

....so we continued And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory. All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

If we accept this paradox, we are not torn to pieces by what seems to be intolerable contradiction. Birth is the death of the life we have known; death is the birth of the life we have yet to live. We need to hold the tensions and allow our circuit to give way to a larger circumference.

People splayed in a perpetual chrysalis, those who find life "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable"2

or, to use the modern jargon, "boring," are in trouble. Stuck in a state of stasis, they clutch their childhood toys, divorce themselves from the reality of their present circumstances, and sit hoping for some magic that will release them from their pain into a world that is "just and good," a make-believe world of childhood innocence. Fearful of getting out of relationships that are stultifying their growth, fearful of confronting parents, partners or children who are maintaining infantile attitudes, they sink into chronic illness and/or psychic death. Life becomes a network of illusions and lies. Rather than take responsibility for what is happening, rather than accept the challenge of growth, they cling to the rigid framework that they have constructed or that has been assigned to them from birth. They attempt to stay "fixed." Such an attitude is against life, for change is a law of life. To remain fixed is to rot, particularly if it be in the Garden of Eden.

Why are we so afraid of change? Why, when we are so desperate for change, do we become even more desperate when transformation begins? Why do we lose our childhood faith in growing? Why do we cling to old attachments instead of submitting ourselves to new possibilities—to the undiscovered worlds in our own bodies, minds and souls? We plant our fat amaryllis bulb. We water it, give it sunlight, watch the first green shoot, the rapidly growing stock, the buds, and then marvel at the great bell flowers tolling their hallelujahs to the snow outside. Why should we have more faith in an amaryllis bulb than in ourselves? Is it because we know that the amaryllis is living by some inner law—a law that we have lost touch with in ourselves? If we can allow ourselves time to listen to the amaryllis, we can resonate with its silence. We can experience its eternal stillness. We can find ourselves at the heart of the mystery. And in that place, the place of the Goddess, we can accept birth and death. The exquisite blossom will die, but if the bulb is given rest and darkness, another bloom will come next year.

Insecurity lies at the heart of the fear of change. Individuals who recognize their own worth among those they love can leave and return without fear of separation. They know they are valued for themselves. Our computerized society, fascinating and efficient as it is, is making deeper and deeper inroads into genuine human values. A machine, however intricate, has no soul, nor does it move with the rhythms of instinct. A computer may be able to vomit out the facts of my existence, but it cannot fathom the subterranean corridors of my aloneness, nor can it hear my silence, nor can it respond to the shadow that passes over my eyes. It cannot compute the depth and breadth and height of the human soul. When society deliberately programs itself to a set of norms that has very little to do with instinct, love or privacy, then people who set out to become individuals, trusting in the dignity of their own soul and the creativity of their own imagination, have good reason to be afraid. They are outcasts, cut off from society and to a greater or lesser degree from their own instincts. As they work in the silence of their cocoon, they often think they are crazy. They also think they would be crazier if they gave up their faith in their own journey. Like the chrysalis pinned to the kitchen curtain, Blake's proverb is pinned to their study wall: "If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise."

Courage to stand alone, to wear the "white plume" of freedom, has been the mark of the hero in any society. Standing alone today demands even more courage and strength than it did in former cultures. From infancy, children have been programmed to perform. Rather than living from their own needs and feelings, they learn to assess situations in order to please others. Without an inner core of certainty grounded in their own musculature, they lack the inner resources to stand alone. Pummelled by mass media and peer group pressures, their identity may be utterly absorbed by collective stereotypes. In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad[1]men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism. Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is exploited.

Without recognized rites, members of a society are not sure who they are within the structure. Children who have fumbled their way through puberty find themselves in adolescence raging for independence, at the same time furious when asked to take responsibility. Boys who have never been separated from their mothers and are fearful of their fathers cannot make the step into adult manhood. Girls who have lived in the service of their driving masculine energies are not going to forsake their P.P.F.F. (Prestige, Power, Fame and Fortune) for a sense of harmony with the cosmos. Even the rites of marriage are confusing. Unwed couples who have lived together for years may eventually believe that "marriage isn't going to make any difference," and then be genuinely confused when sexual difficulties do develop after the vows are spoken. Arriving at middle age is agony for those who cannot accept the mature beauty of autumn. They see their wrinkles hardening into lines, and new liver spots appearing every day, without the compensating mellowing in their soul. Without the rites of the elders, they cannot look forward to holding a position of honor in their society, nor in most cases will they treasure their own wisdom. For some, even the dignity of death dare not be contemplated.

The undercurrent of despair in our society is epitomized in a German word that first appeared in English in 1963, and is now incorporated into the Oxford English Dictionary (Supplement, 1985). It is torschlusspanik, (pronounced tor¬shluss-panic), defined as "panic at the thought that a door between oneself and life's opportunities has shut." Words enter a language when they are needed, and torschlusspanik has arrived. The doors that were once opened through initiation rites are still crucial thresholds in the human psyche, and when those doors do not open, or when they are not recognized for what they are, life shrinks into a series of rejections fraught with torschlusspanik: the graduation formal to which the girl was not invited; the marriage that did not take place; the baby that was never born; the job that never materialized. Looking back, we recognize that it was often not our choice that determined which door opened and which door shut. We were chosen for this, rejected for that.

Torschlusspanik is now a part of our culture because there are so few rites to which individuals will submit in order to transcend their own selfish drives. Without the broader perspective, they see no meaning in the rejection. The door thuds, leaving them bitter or resigned. If, instead, they could temper themselves to a point of total concentration, a bursting point where they could either pass over or fall back as in a rite of passage, then they could test who they are. Their passion would be spent in an allout positive effort, instead of deteriorating into disillusionment and despair. The terror behind that word torschlusspanik is what drives many people into analysis—the last door has shut, the last rejection has taken place. No door will ever open again. Nothing means anything.

Another reason for fearing the chrysalis lies in our cultural loss of containers. Our society's emphasis on linear growth and achievement alienates us from the cyclic pattern of death and rebirth, so that when we experience ourselves dying, or dream that we are, we fear annihilation. Primitive societies are close enough to the natural cycles of their lives to provide the containers through which the members of the tribe can experience death and rebirth as they pass through the difficult transitions. To quote from the classic Rites of Passage by Arnold van Gannep:

In such societies every change in a person's life involves actions and reactions between sacred and profane—actions and reactions to be regulated and guarded so that society as a whole will suffer no discomfort or injury. Transitions from group to group and from one social situation to the next are looked on as implicit in the very fact of existence, so that a man's life comes to be made up of a succession of stages with similar ends and beginnings: birth, social puberty, marriage, fatherhood, advancement to a higher class, occupational specialization, and death. For every one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined.... In this respect man's life resembles nature, from which neither the individual nor the society stands independent.

Through their initiation, for example, boys are recognized as responsible adult men. They are cut off from their mothers, trained as warriors, instructed in the culture of their tribe.

For girls, the meaning of puberty rites is somewhat different. Here I quote from Bruce Lincoln's Emerging from the Chrysalis:

Rather than changing women's status, initiation changes their fundamental being, addressing ontological concerns rather than hierarchical ones.

A woman does not become more powerful or authoritative, but more creative, more alive, more ontologically real. ... The pattern of female initiation is thus one of growth or magnification, an expansion of powers, capabilities, experiences. This magnification is accomplished by gradually endowing the initiand with symbolic items that make of her woman, and beyond this a cosmic being. These items can be concrete, such as clothing or jewelry, or they can be nonmaterial in nature, such as songs chanted for the woman-to be, myths repeated in her presence, scars or paintings placed upon her body.

The scarification is meant to provide an experience of intense pain and an enduring record of that pain. The person is rendered unique. Through this magnification, the woman "steps into the cosmic arena: she is given the water of life, with which she nourishes the cosmic tree."

Such primitive rituals did not change the way people lived. They gave meaning to life. By means of ritual, relationship to the unchanging, archetypal aspects of existence was affirmed and renewed. What would otherwise have been boring drudgery or torschlusspanik was invested with a meaning that transcended animal survival. Through ritual, human activity was connected to the divine.

In more sophisticated societies, the church and the theater became ritual containers. Within the safety and the confines of the Mass, for instance, the individual could surrender to God and experience dismemberment and death, descent into Hell and resurrection of the spirit on the third day. One could experience the magnification of one's own spirit by experiencing oneself as sacrificer and sacrificed. Like the primitive, the participant left the ritual with enhanced meaning, with a profound sense of belonging to a cosmos and to a community that respected that cosmos.

The theater also provided a ritual container, a public chrysalis. The plays dealt with archetypal realities. On the stage, men and women saw their own psychological depths enacted and were thus encouraged to reflect on their own human situation.

We have lost our containers; chaos threatens. Without rituals to make a firm demarcation between the profane and the sacred, between what is us and what is not us, we tend to identify with archetypal patterns of being—hero, Father, Mother, etc. We forget that we are individual human beings; we allow ourselves to be inflated by the power of the unconscious and usurp it for our own. And we do this not knowing what we do and that we do it. Liberated from the "superstitious" belief in gods and demons, we claim for ourselves the power once attributed to them. We do not realize we have usurped or stolen it. How then do we explain our anxiety and dissatisfaction? Power makes us fearful; lack of it makes us anxious. Few are satisfied with what they have. Despite our socalled liberation from gods and demons, few can live without them. Their absence makes nothing better. It may even make everything worse.

If, for example, a child has acted as buffer between his parents, he may fear his home will disintegrate if he ceases to act as intermediary. Without realizing it, he has assumed the power of the savior in his small world. When as an adult his boundaries are widened, he will tend to take on that archetypal role wherever he goes. He will also suffer guilt when he fails. He may even suffer guilt for being unable to make it snow when his family has planned a skiing weekend. Such hubris is seen as ludicrous once it is brought to consciousness, but, without consciousness, depression and despair fester inside. "I should have been able to do something. I failed," Instead of leaving other people's destiny to them and accepting his own, he attempts to take responsibility for Fate and feels inadequate when the door thuds. The resulting guilt can quickly switch to rage, rage that resonates back to the powerless childhood. "What do you expect of me? I can't do it. Get off my back. Carry your own load. LEAVE ME ALONE."

Many people, for example, think life is a meaningless merry-go-round if they are not being transported by love like Prince Charles and Lady Diana, or living for a cause like Mother Theresa, or dying for a dream like Martin Luther King. They measure their standard of behavior by comparison with figures who carry immense archetypal projections—Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Michael Jackson. A mask ceases to be a mask. Instead, with the help of dyes and surgery, the mask becomes the face. Cosmetics are identity or character or Fate. By identifying with an archetype instead of remaining detached from it, they turn life into theater and themselves into actors on a stage, thus falling prey to demonic as well as angelic inflation. Without the container, they confuse the sacred and profane worlds.

We are the descendants of Freud and Jung, and while poets and madmen had free access to their unconscious before those two giants, the world of the archetype is now an open market for the general populace without any ritual containment. If we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life. We are possessed, and possession acts as a magnet on unconscious people in our environment. Everyday life becomes a dangerous world where illusion and reality can be fatally confused.

A life that is being truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual. Psychoanalysis can speed up that process. Sometimes people experience themselves as caterpillars crawling along. Externally, everything seems fine. Some deep intuitive voice, however, may be whispering, "It's not worth it. There's nobody here. I need a cocoon. I need to go back and find myself." Now, they may not quite realize that when caterpillars go into cocoons, they do not emerge as high-class caterpillars, and they may not be prepared for the agony of the transformation that goes on inside the chrysalis. Nor are they quite prepared for the winged beauty that slowly and painfully emerges, that lives by a very different set of laws than a caterpillar. Even more confounding is the fact that friends and relations who may be quite happy caterpillars have no patience with a silent, hard-edged chrysalis that is all turned in on itself—"selfish, lazy, self indulgent." And they have even less patience with a confused butterfly who hasn't adjusted to the laws of aerodynamics.

Still, it is amazing how often other caterpillars, inspired by butterflies, sacrifice their landlubber condition, make their own chrysalis and find their own wings. Jung writes that coming to consciousness is "the sacrifice of the merely natural man, of the unconscious, ingenuous being whose tragic career began with the eating of the apple in Paradise.

The chrysalis is essential if we are to find ourselves. Yet very little in our extroverted society supports introverted withdrawal. We are supposed to be doers, taking care of others, supporting good causes, unselfish, energetic, doing our social duty. If we choose to simply be, our loved ones may automatically assume we are doing nothing, and at first we may feel that way ourselves. We begin to look at our primeval muck as it surfaces in dreams. All hell starts to break loose inside, and we wonder what's the point of dredging up all this stuff. We argue with ourselves: "I should be out there doing something useful. But the truth is I can't do anything useful if there's no I to do it. I can't love anyone else, if there's no I to do the loving. If I don't know myself, I cannot love myself, and if I do not love myself, my love of others is probably my projected need of their acceptance. I am putting on a performance in order to be loved. I fear rejection. If nobody loves me, I won't exist. But who are they loving? Who am I?"

That is what going into the chrysalis is all about—undergoing a metamorphosis in order one day to be able to stand up and say I am. The gnawing hunger, the incessant yearning at the core of many lives, began at birth, or perhaps even in utero. In order to survive in a demanding environment where one or both parents projected their unlived dreams (or nightmares) onto their children, the infants gave up trying to live their own lives. As little human beings with needs and feelings of their own, they were rejected. Their mystery was never considered, and so they grew up automatically thinking in terms of other people's response. In other words, they developed a charming persona, a mask they created with infinite care—a mask that, as adults, may be at once their greatest blessing and greatest curse. Outwardly they may be brilliantly successful, but inwardly empty. They cannot understand why their intimate relationships repeatedly end in disaster, a pattern they recognize but can do nothing to stop. They dream they are actors, the spotlight is on them, but they cannot remember what play they are in, let alone what their lines are. If their ego is barely formed, they may not even appear in their own dreams, or may recognize themselves as objects or little animals.

It is important to point out, however, that we all need several personas, that is, the right mask for the right occasion. Jung was once lecturing on the topic when a student accused him of being hypocritical if he used a persona. Jung said that he had just had a fight with his wife, and he was still angry, but that anger had nothing to do with the students, nor with their reason for getting themselves to the Institute that morning. It was neither fair to himself nor to them to show that anger there. However, he said, he intended to finish the fight when he went home. The point is that we must be conscious enough to know when we are using a persona and for what reason. Otherwise we easily identify with a particular persona, which obliges us to repress our genuine feelings and prevents us from acting on them at the right time and place. The persona is necessary because people at different levels of consciousness respond to a situation with very different antennae. Naively or deliberately, making oneself vulnerable to psychic wounding without good reason is foolish. To be wary of casting pearls before swine is not conceit but plain common sense.

As the transformation process goes on, pregnancies and newborn babies frequently appear in dreams. When the conscious ego is able to release repressed psychic energy, or reconnects with unconscious body energy, or makes a decision on its own behalf, that new energy is symbolized as new life. When the psyche is preparing to move onto a new level of awareness, or one's conscious attitude has made a new connection with the unconscious, then dreams may appear where the dream ego, the shadow or the anima is pregnant. Nine months later, so long as the process has not been aborted, there are often dreams of crossing borders, passing over into a new country, moving through subterranean tunnels or actually giving birth (see below, page 158). If the ego maintains the connection, the newborn child is nurtured with soul food. If the ego falters and fails to act on the new energy, the baby may appear mutilated, starving or dead. Or it may simply disappear.

I have found that individuals tend to repeat the pattern of their own actual birth every time life requires them to move onto a new level of awareness. As they entered the world, so they continue to reenter at each new spiral of growth. If, for example, their birth was straightforward, they tend to handle passovers with courage and natural trust. If their birth was difficult, they become extremely fearful, manifest symptoms of suffocating, become claustrophobic (psychically and physically). If they were premature, they tend to be always a little ahead of themselves. If they were held back, the rebirth process may be very slow. If they were breechbirth, they tend to go through life "assbackwards." If they were born by Caesarian section, they may avoid confrontations. If their mother was heavily drugged, they may come up to the point of passover with lots of energy, then suddenly, for no apparent reason, stop, or move into a regression, and wait for someone else to do something. Often this is the point where addictions reappear—binging, starving, drinking, sleeping, overworking—anything to avoid facing the reality of moving out into a challenging world.

Many delightful babies appear in dreams, and just as many little tyrants who need firm and loving discipline. One child, however, is noticeably different from the others. This is the abandoned one, who may appear in bullrushes, in straw in a barn, in a tree, almost always in some forgotten or out-of-the-way place. This child will be radiant with light, robust, intelligent, sensitive. Often it is able to talk minutes after it is born. It has Presence. It is the Divine Child, bringing with it the "hard and bitter agony" of the new dispensation—the agony of Eliot's Magi. With its birth, the old gods have to go.

Since the natural gradient of the psyche is toward wholeness, the Self will attempt to push the neglected part forward for recognition. It contains energy of the highest value, the gold in the dung. In the Bible it is the stone that was rejected that becomes the cornerstone. It manifests either in a sudden or subtle change in personality, or, conversely, in a fanaticism which the existing ego adopts in order to try to keep the new and threatening energy out. If the ego fails to go through the psychic birth canal, neurotic symptoms manifest physically and psychically. The suffering may be intense, but it is based on worshipping false gods. It is not the genuine suffering that accompanies efforts to incorporate the new life. The neurotic is always one phase behind where his reality is. When he should be outgrowing childish behavior, he hangs onto it. When he should be moving into maturity, he hangs onto youthful folly. Never congruent with himself or others, he is never where he seems to be. What he cannot do is live in the now.

Many people are being dragged toward wholeness in their daily lives, but because they do not understand initiation rites, they cannot make sense of what is happening to them. They put on a happy face all day, and return to their apartment and cry all night. Perhaps their beloved has gone off with someone else; perhaps their business has failed; perhaps they have lost interest in their work; perhaps they are coping with a fatal illness; perhaps a loved one has died. Perhaps, and this is worst of all, everything has begun to go wrong for no apparent reason. If they have no concept of rites of passage, they experience themselves as victims, powerless to resist an overwhelming Fate. Their meaningless suffering drives them to escape through food, alcohol, drugs, sex. Or they take up arms against the gods and cry out, "Why me?"

They are being presented with the possibility of rebirth into a different life. Through failures, symptoms, inferiority feelings and overwhelming problems, they are being prodded to renounce life attachments that have become redundant. The possibility of rebirth constellates with the breakdown of what has gone before. That is why Jung emphasized the positive purpose of neurosis. But because they do not understand, people cling to the familiar, refuse to make the necessary sacrifices, resist their own growth. Unable to give up their habitual lives, they are unable to receive new life.

Unless cultural rituals support the leap from one level of consciousness to another, there are no containing walls within which the process can happen. Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem—alone. To ease the meaningless suffering, addictions may develop that are an attempt to repress the confusing demands of the growth process which cultural structures no longer clarify or contain.

The burning question when one enters analysis is "Who am I?" The immediate problem, however, as soon as powerful emotions begin to surface, is often a psyche/soma split. While women tend to talk about their bodies more than men, both sexes in our culture are grievously unrelated to their own body experience. Women say, "I don't like this body"; men say, "It hurts." Their use of the third-person neuter pronoun in referring to their body makes quite clear their sense of alienation. They may talk about "my heart,'' "my kidneys," "my feet," but their body as a whole is depersonalized. Repeatedly they say, "I don't feel anything below the neck. I experience feelings in my head, but nothing in my heart." Their lack of emotional response to a powerful dream image reflects the split. And yet, when they engage in active imagination with that dream image located in their body, their muscles release undulations of repressed grief. The body has become the whipping post. If the person is anxious, the body is starved, gorged, drugged, intoxicated, forced to vomit, driven into exhaustion or driven to frenzied reaction against self-destruction. When this magnificent animal attempts to send up warning signals, it is silenced with pills.

Many people can listen to their cat more intelligently than they can listen to their own despised body. Because they attend to their pet in a cherishing way, it returns their love. Their body, however, may have to let out an earth-shattering scream in order to be heard at all. Before symptoms manifest, quieter screams appear in dreams: a forsaken baby elephant, a starving kitten, a dog with a leg ripped out. Almost always the wounded animal is either gently or fiercely attempting to attract the attention of the dreamer, who may or may not respond. In fairytales it is the friendly animal who often carries the hero or heroine to the goal because the animal is the instinct that knows how to obey the Goddess when reason fails.

It is possible that the scream that comes from the forsaken body, the scream that manifests in a symptom, is the cry of the soul that can find no other way to be heard. If we have lived behind a mask all our lives, sooner or later—if we are lucky—that mask will be smashed. Then we will have to look in our own mirror at our own reality. Perhaps we will be appalled. Perhaps we will look into the terrified eyes of our own tiny child, that child who has never known love and who now beseeches us to respond. This child is alone, forsaken before we left the womb, or at birth, or when we began to please our parents and learned to put on our best performance in order to be accepted. As life progresses, we may continue to abandon our child by pleasing others—teachers, professors, bosses, friends and partners, even analysts. That child who is our very soul cries out from underneath the rubble of our lives, often from the core of our worst complex, begging us to say, "You are not alone. I love you."

We dare not drop the tensions. In order to widen consciousness, we have to hold both arms on the cross. If we reject one part of ourselves, we give up our past; if we reject the other part, we give up our future. We must hold onto our roots and build from there. Those roots often appear as a psychic home sometimes a summer cottage that the dreamer loves, or the country of his origin, or his ancestors' origin. The longing to go Home must certainly be looked at symbolically, for it is often more than a regressive longing for the security of the womb. It can be the one solid root that goes right through one's life, becoming the point of genuine nurturance for spiritual growth.

Whether we like it or not, one of our tasks on this earth is to work with the opposites through different levels of consciousness until body, soul and spirit resonate together. Initiation rites, experienced at the appropriate times in our lives, burn off what is no longer relevant, opening our eyes to new possibilities of our own uniqueness. They tear off the protective veils of illusion until at last we are strong enough to stand in our own naked truth.

The process is mirrored in dreams, often in images of cooking, cars, cupboards and clothes. The Cinderella work is accomplished in the kitchen. Having brought the wild things of nature in, taken off their feathers, cleaned out their entrails, cooked them and made them accessible to consciousness, the ego stands firm. Mother and Father no longer drive the car. The incessant sorting through actual cupboards and drawers has ceased, and the sorting in dreams has reached a finely differentiated level of detail. What clothes to wear is no longer a constant frustration, and the incongruous shoe combinations have at last settled into pairs that are the same color with the same size heel. Or maybe no shoes at all—just good solid feet on good solid ground. Usually the Self allows the ego time to enjoy this period of experiencing its new strength—perhaps months, perhaps years. Each process in unique, moving at its own appointed pace.

The existence and continuity of the ego is essential to our lives. It is necessary that we experience the person who wakes up in the morning as the same person who fell asleep last night, despite the fact that what took place during the hours of sleep may appear so unrelated to the waking state that it never enters consciousness. One way in which the ego maintains its integrity is to remove from itself everything that does not directly offer it support. It simply excludes or suppresses everything which does not coincide with its conscious understanding of itself.

The danger in such a limited view is that the ego may harden and dry up, just as the earth will harden and dry up if it is not continually replenished with water. The ego needs the nourishment of underground springs. It requires the compensatory life of dreams if its continuity is to move beyond mere survival and perpetuation. In addition to these, it requires direction and purpose. As soon as it gives itself up to a higher goal, however, it is threatened, not only by the fear that it may not be able to achieve it, but by a dawning sense that that higher goal, because of the demands it makes, is the enemy of the ego. In some sense, the ego feels that it may be working against itself. Ultimately, of course, it is, but for a better good.

The goal of human striving in the individuation process is the recognition of the Self, the regulating center of the psyche. That recognition relativizes the ego's position in the psychic structure, and initiates a dialogue between conscious and unconscious. "The only way the Self can manifest is through conflict," writes MarieLouise von Franz. "To meet one's insoluble and eternal conflict is to meet God, which would be the end of the ego with all its blather."

If the ego rejects that conflict, then the goal is contaminated by the ego's desire for more and more power, or wealth, or happiness. The result is ego inflation. According to Jung:

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.

Paradoxically enough, inflation is a regression of consciousness into unconsciousness. This always happens when consciousness takes too many unconscious contents upon itself and loses the faculty of discrimination, the sine qua non of all consciousness.

The inflated ego tends to idolatry. It focuses on a single image, fashions it and worships it. Determined to create that image, it is trapped in profane ritual.

Religiously speaking, all such profane rituals are contained in the worship of the Golden Calf. A fat woman's body image, for example, may be her Golden Calf. No matter how much she thinks she hates it, her rituals are taking place around it. It is this thralldom before her own body image that she may be called upon to sacrifice. The profane worship must be sacrificed to make way for the sacred. The withdrawal from the one operates simultaneously with the entrance into the other. We withdraw as we enter. Withdrawing is entering. Whether we stress the withdrawing or the entering, we are stressing the same thing.

When this process begins, it may be reflected in the dreams by a bell tolling, an alarm sounding or lightning striking. It can also be heralded by physical symptoms. It can be brought on by loss of faith, loss of relationship or the imminence of death. Something almost imperceptible begins to happen. For people watching their dreams, the bell usually tolls some weeks before the actual events occur. In real life we seem to be carrying on as usual, but a very clear inner voice may begin to comment, hinting that things are not as they seem to be. We may find ourselves singing songs that put a very ironic twist on our conscious actions. Our inner clown may be singing, "Put your sweet lips a little closer," to the tune of "Please release me and let me go." If the ego has not sufficient strength and flexibility, it will panic and either regress to its former terrors of annihilation, or regress to its former rigid framework—in either case, refusing to go through the birth canal.

The ego now has to be strong enough to remain concentrated in stillness, so that it can mediate what is happening both positively and negatively. It must hold a detached position, relying now on its differentiated femininity in order to submit, now on its discriminating masculinity in order to question and cut away. Something immense begins to happen in the very foundation of the personality, while consciousness experiences the conflict as crucifixion. Ego desires are no longer relevant. The old questions no longer have any meaning, and there are no answers. There may be a few stricken "why's," but they belong to the order of logic and discipline, and what is taking place is irrational, beyond ego control. The ego on some level knows. It knows that what is happening has to happen. It knows that its personal desires have to be sacrificed to the transpersonal. It knows it is confronting death.

It is a period of throbbing pain. It is King Lear howling on the heath, brought to submission and reunited with the daughter whose truth was her dowry. At last, he says,

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,

The Gods themselves throw incense.

It is Job covered with boils, moving from "Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me" to "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee."

It is Jesus in Gethsemane, sweating blood, moving from "Let this cup pass from me" to "Thy will be done."

A woman during such a period of withdrawal and entry had the following vision:

I was walking by the St. Lawrence one sunny, summer day. I thought I was going Home. Instantly the sky darkened; the earth grew cold. I could not see with my eyes, nor hear with my ears. I was seeing inside, hearing inside. Then I realized I was on ice, floating, suddenly not floating, but being thrust by the power of the current. The ice began to crack. I leaped from one floe to another, the ice cracking in front, behind, beside. I thought I might die in the ice-cold water, or be ground by the grating blocks. And all the time I knew I was being propelled toward the ocean. I just kept jumping and screaming, "Please, God, don't kill me. Not yet. Not this time."

At times like this, Rilke's words can be very reassuring:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and... try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

These situations, whether in analysis or in life, or both, can raise profound religious questions. Is this God confronting me? Was I on the wrong track? Am I being forcibly turned around? Is there some almighty plan that is different from mine? Am I being forced to submit? Should I accept Fate? Do I, in fact, have any free will? Is this God burning away the veils of illusion, or am I facing the devil? Is he making one last stand to cheat me out of my own life?

Psychologically, the questions are equally blistering. Is this the Self demanding a sacrifice? Or is this the real face of the complex that has crippled me all my life? Just when I thought I could be free, there it is to destroy me. Everything I have fought so hard to bring to consciousness is now in question. Why do I suddenly wake up every night at the same time? Why do I feel this searing pain? Why are my hands so weak? Am I really alone? I'm worse off now than I ever was. I'm back in the old pattern. I'm back in the matrix—back in the Garden recognizing the place for the first time. Is this who I really am? Is this who I have been running away from all my life?

Psychologically, the ego, like Lear, Job and Jesus, is penetrating and being penetrated by the archetypal Ground of Being in an effort to bring to consciousness whatever it can of that vast unknown. It experiences another law operating from within, a dawning realization that it has a destiny of its own which must be obeyed. It knows that something new is being born; it has to breathe into the pain and let it be.

Many people in our culture are attempting to suffer these transformations alone, without any ritual container and without any group to support the influx of transcendent power. Like Eliot's Magi, they experience the birth as "hard and bitter agony . . . like Death, our death." They are "no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods."

Without the container and without the group, the aloneness is almost intolerable. The individual ego has to be strong enough to build its own chrysalis in order to create a loving communication with its own inner symbols. Their numinosity brings the confidence and integrity, humor and illumination without which the ego could not survive, let alone expand. A childish ego, primitive and unconscious, cannot maintain a living chrysalis; it wants to project everything, and, tuned to a natural order, it explains what happens by magic. The chrysalis becomes too precious in itself, shellacked with sentimentality. A childlike ego can hold the tension, pull in the projections and ponder the inner mystery. At the transpersonal level, the symbols are simultaneously individual and universal. At that level, none of us is alone. New relationships, bypassing the world of transitory disguise, begin at that depth, and from there relate back to the world in a totally new way.

Hours before he died, Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain, gave a lecture which concluded with a plea for openness to the "painfulness of inner change":

What is essential... is not embedded in buildings, is not embedded in clothing, is not necessarily embedded even in a rule. It is somewhere along the line of something deeper than a rule. It is concerned with this business of total inner transformation.

According to his own account, Merton completed his inner transformation on his Asian journey standing barefoot in the presence of the giant Buddhas of Polonnaruwa in Ceylon. "I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for," he wrote. "I don't know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise."

When Merton asked a Buddhist abbot, "What is the 'knowledge of freedom'?" the abbot replied, "One must ascend all the steps, but then when there are no more steps one must make the leap. Knowledge of freedom is the knowledge, the experience, of this leap."

Voices from the Chrysalis

It's hard for me to trust life. I like to take hold of it, grab it by the neck and put my teeth into it, just to be sure it doesn't get away on me.

I try to see how far I've come, rather than how far I have to go.

Now that I'm contacting my own inner clock, I am so slow. My life is on top of me. The collision of values overwhelms me. Am I wasting my time? I don't know.... I don't know.... this terrible aloneness.

I've always identified with what I'm not. But who am I? My guilt and shame and fear are making me human.

I was always waiting until all the responsibilities were completed, then there would be time for me. How? I never thought about that. I've been so busy doing, I've missed something very important to me. I don't think I was ever a child. I have no recollection at all of being a very young child with any sense of being ME.

I wonder if it takes a holocaust, outer or inner, to help us to realize what is really essential in life.

I lived a smileandgrin, smileandgrin existence. I was dying.

I rage for life. I want so much to be free.

I'm trying to have faith—faith that I will be born.

I'm so off balance. I pray for daily guidance to avoid tripping over things. I can go to sleep when I orient myself to the stars.

The spirit is in the volcano inside. My relationships aren't very good right now, so I go back to work. I'm safe there. But even that isn't perfect.

I'll explode if I have to react to one more thing. I'm pulling back. I'm overwhelmed by the pressures of the outside world and the mounting pressures of the interior world are making me feel actually sick.

Used to feel capable, used to speak and write well. Now I never feel secure because I can't find words.

Am I fighting my destiny or does my destiny require I take a stand?

When I touch into that essence and recognize myself as what I've been running away from, I am humbled.

I'm Miss Compassion, Miss Humanity. I'm a missing piece. I'm also a child of God.

To get rid of one's past one has to forgive—confront and forgive—and move into the present. Forgive oneself too, and God.

I hated my father. I imitated hated myself.

--Marion Woodman en "The pregnant virgin"

#emily dickinson #william blake #carl jung #freud #psychology #archetype #the pregnant virgin #marion woodman #Marie-Louise von Franz #rainer maria rilke #lear #Job #jesus christ #T.S. Eliot #journey of the magi #thomas merton #the seven storey mountain

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