Nigredo
Shadow Reflections
The Grail 's Wasteland of Despair & Delusion;
Today's Wasteland is the persistent vision
of dystopian and post-apocalyptic futures.
"He who was living is now dead,
We who were living are now dying"
When you see your matter going black, rejoice, you are at the beginning of the work.
-- Rosarium Philosophorum
Nigredo is the dark state, and is considered the most difficult and negative operation of the alchemical process. It is the shadow of the sun. Putrefactio, and Mortificatio are two different aspects of the Nigredo. Putreficatio means rotting, and Mortificatio means killing, hence it is associated with death. In dreams figures like the dismembered Osiris usher in a rebirth. In all religions associated with agricultural renewal, the rotting and death comes first. The dead king may be buried in the fields to promote furtility.
Psychotherapy and Alchemy VI. Mortificatio — Edward F. Edinger
… the alchemical opus has three stages: nigredo, albedo, and rubedo: the blackening, the whitening, and the reddening. This paper is concerned with the first of these, the nigredo, or blackening, which belongs to the operation called mortificatio.
The two terms, “mortificatio” and “putrefactio,” are overlapping ones and refer to different aspects of the same operation. Mortificatio has no chemical reference at all. Literally it means “killing” and hence will refer to the experience of death. As used in religious asceticism it means “subjection of the passions and appetites by penance, abstinence, or painful severities inflicted on the body.” (Webster) To describe a chemical process as mortificatio is a complete projection of a psychological image. …
Experiencing the Mortificatio:
Jung on Grief, Grieving and Mourning
No new life can arise, say the alchemists, without the death of the old. They liken the art to the work of the sower, who buries the grain in the earth: it dies only to waken to new life. -- Jung (1946)[1]
… When a person dies, the feelings and emotions that bound his relatives to him lose their application to reality and sink into the unconscious, where they active a collective content that has a deleterious effect on consciousness…. a persistent attachment to the dead makes life seem less worth living, and may even be the cause of psychic illnesses. The harmful effect shows itself in the form of loss of libido, depression, and physical debility…. -- Jung (1920)[2]
… thinking which is a mere equation,… is the working of the intellect. But besides that there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are… inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. … One of these primordial thoughts is the idea of life after death. … The ancient athanasias pharmakon, the medicine of immortality, is more profound and meaningful than we supposed. --Jung (1930)[3]
Mortificatiois experienced as defeat and failure. Needless to say, one rarely chooses such an experience. It is usually imposed by life, either from within or from without…. -- Edinger (1985)[4]
Mourning is caused by the loss of an object or person who was carrying an important projected value. In order to withdraw projections and assimilate their content into one’s own personality it is necessary to experience the loss of the projection as a prelude to rediscovering the content or value within. Therefore, mourners are fortunate because they are involved in a growth process. They will be comforted when the lost projected value has been recovered within the psyche. --Edinger (1992)[5]
Meanings and Etymologies
“Grief” and its verb “grieve” come from the Latin gravis, “heavy, weighty” and its verbal form, gravare, “to burden or cause to grieve.”[6] When we grieve we are burdened, weighed down with sorrow and a sense of loss. “Mourn” has its origins in the Old English murnan, “to mourn, to be anxious.”[7] When we mourn we feel anxiety in the sense of angst,[8] anguish, the foreclosure of possibilities, the loss of the future we assumed we had with friend or family member.
Some psychologists claim that grief is not the same as mourning: Grief is passive, while mourning is active.[9] We grieve, feeling burdened inwardly. We mourn, manifesting a wide range of reactions in outer life, e.g. waves of forgetfulness, sadness, loneliness, regret, “magical thinking” (that we might turn back the clock or the calendar) and inconsolability, along with emotional lability, surprising responses to life situations, the upsurge of old memories we thought we had let go of long ago, even concern that we might be losing our minds.[10]
All of these inward feelings and outer forms of mourning are aspects of a key archetype we all experience repeatedly in life—what the medieval alchemists called the mortificatio.[11]What’s meant by “archetype” and “mortificatio”? As the concept of “archetype” and the specific archetype related to grief and mourning are central to our topic, we must discuss them in some depth.
Putrefactio conflates two Latin words: puter and facere, lit. “to make something rotten or putrid.”[20] When we are experiencing the archetype of the putrefactio we often have dreams of overflowing toilets, or toilets out of order, walking through piles of feces or rotten messes[21]—not pleasant images. Something in life has rotted, lost its energy, needs to be thrown out. The most vivid example in domestic life is the necessary periodic cleaning-out of the refrigerator, but putrefactio situations occur in less tangible forms also, in life situations that require us to take action to clean out old attitudes, beliefs that are sapping our energy, or relationships that have lost their vitality.
Closely connected to putrefactio situations is the mortificatio. The Latin means literally “to make (facere) a death (mors, mortis).”[22] Rarely do we “make” death: It befalls us. Nature does it, taking away friends, family, and, eventually, our own lives.[23] The mortificatio is the most negative of the alchemical “operations,” and the most painful to experience. Jung and his followers, however, recognize that the mortificatio is also an essential part of the opus, or work of life, the phase that is prior to rebirth, a time of life that is full of torment, to be sure, but at the same time contains a “secret happiness”[24] lying in the unconscious.
http://jungiancenter.org/essay/experiencing-mortificatio-jung-grief-grieving-and-mourning
FERMENTATION - MORTIFICATION - PUTREFACTION
Putrefactio and mortificatio usually refer to two different aspects of the same stage in the alchemical process and are both connected to death. Fermentation is often confused here too, so let's discuss all three. Putrefactio and mortificatio are not considered alchemical processes but rather the inevitable result of various operations on substances which are deemed necessary for transformation to occur. Mortificatio is represented as a form of torture or
mutilation, as in the Passion of Christ and the death and mutilation of Osiris and is a feeling we all have experienced more than once in our lives.
Decapitation, another form of separation, is a mortificatio which signals that the ego must be separated from the archetypal psyche in order to transcend. We must separate the ego from the collective unconscious, from the energies that initially gave it form, and learn to discriminate within non-duality, without projecting or choosing one side over another.
Edward F. Edinger describes mortificatio of the king or sun at the archetypal level as “the death and transformation of a collective dominant or ruling principle.” Here is where we must slay our dragons and look for what can redeem us. The image of God, soul, self needs to be connected back to the ego consciousness before we can reach any wholeness.
Fermentation always implies a transformation that occurs with the introduction of another substance, such as the organic materials inherent in putrefaction. Every time we endure any of these three psychological states, we are in a nigredo, usually enduring loss of psychic energy, the complete deflation of the ego, feeling souless, in a state of spiritual death.
The three mental states -mortification, putrefaction and fermentation- dark stages of the soul - provide the seeds for rebirth and transformational growth.
-- Rosarium Philosophorum
Nigredo is the dark state, and is considered the most difficult and negative operation of the alchemical process. It is the shadow of the sun. Putrefactio, and Mortificatio are two different aspects of the Nigredo. Putreficatio means rotting, and Mortificatio means killing, hence it is associated with death. In dreams figures like the dismembered Osiris usher in a rebirth. In all religions associated with agricultural renewal, the rotting and death comes first. The dead king may be buried in the fields to promote furtility.
Psychotherapy and Alchemy VI. Mortificatio — Edward F. Edinger
… the alchemical opus has three stages: nigredo, albedo, and rubedo: the blackening, the whitening, and the reddening. This paper is concerned with the first of these, the nigredo, or blackening, which belongs to the operation called mortificatio.
The two terms, “mortificatio” and “putrefactio,” are overlapping ones and refer to different aspects of the same operation. Mortificatio has no chemical reference at all. Literally it means “killing” and hence will refer to the experience of death. As used in religious asceticism it means “subjection of the passions and appetites by penance, abstinence, or painful severities inflicted on the body.” (Webster) To describe a chemical process as mortificatio is a complete projection of a psychological image. …
Experiencing the Mortificatio:
Jung on Grief, Grieving and Mourning
No new life can arise, say the alchemists, without the death of the old. They liken the art to the work of the sower, who buries the grain in the earth: it dies only to waken to new life. -- Jung (1946)[1]
… When a person dies, the feelings and emotions that bound his relatives to him lose their application to reality and sink into the unconscious, where they active a collective content that has a deleterious effect on consciousness…. a persistent attachment to the dead makes life seem less worth living, and may even be the cause of psychic illnesses. The harmful effect shows itself in the form of loss of libido, depression, and physical debility…. -- Jung (1920)[2]
… thinking which is a mere equation,… is the working of the intellect. But besides that there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are… inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. … One of these primordial thoughts is the idea of life after death. … The ancient athanasias pharmakon, the medicine of immortality, is more profound and meaningful than we supposed. --Jung (1930)[3]
Mortificatiois experienced as defeat and failure. Needless to say, one rarely chooses such an experience. It is usually imposed by life, either from within or from without…. -- Edinger (1985)[4]
Mourning is caused by the loss of an object or person who was carrying an important projected value. In order to withdraw projections and assimilate their content into one’s own personality it is necessary to experience the loss of the projection as a prelude to rediscovering the content or value within. Therefore, mourners are fortunate because they are involved in a growth process. They will be comforted when the lost projected value has been recovered within the psyche. --Edinger (1992)[5]
Meanings and Etymologies
“Grief” and its verb “grieve” come from the Latin gravis, “heavy, weighty” and its verbal form, gravare, “to burden or cause to grieve.”[6] When we grieve we are burdened, weighed down with sorrow and a sense of loss. “Mourn” has its origins in the Old English murnan, “to mourn, to be anxious.”[7] When we mourn we feel anxiety in the sense of angst,[8] anguish, the foreclosure of possibilities, the loss of the future we assumed we had with friend or family member.
Some psychologists claim that grief is not the same as mourning: Grief is passive, while mourning is active.[9] We grieve, feeling burdened inwardly. We mourn, manifesting a wide range of reactions in outer life, e.g. waves of forgetfulness, sadness, loneliness, regret, “magical thinking” (that we might turn back the clock or the calendar) and inconsolability, along with emotional lability, surprising responses to life situations, the upsurge of old memories we thought we had let go of long ago, even concern that we might be losing our minds.[10]
All of these inward feelings and outer forms of mourning are aspects of a key archetype we all experience repeatedly in life—what the medieval alchemists called the mortificatio.[11]What’s meant by “archetype” and “mortificatio”? As the concept of “archetype” and the specific archetype related to grief and mourning are central to our topic, we must discuss them in some depth.
Putrefactio conflates two Latin words: puter and facere, lit. “to make something rotten or putrid.”[20] When we are experiencing the archetype of the putrefactio we often have dreams of overflowing toilets, or toilets out of order, walking through piles of feces or rotten messes[21]—not pleasant images. Something in life has rotted, lost its energy, needs to be thrown out. The most vivid example in domestic life is the necessary periodic cleaning-out of the refrigerator, but putrefactio situations occur in less tangible forms also, in life situations that require us to take action to clean out old attitudes, beliefs that are sapping our energy, or relationships that have lost their vitality.
Closely connected to putrefactio situations is the mortificatio. The Latin means literally “to make (facere) a death (mors, mortis).”[22] Rarely do we “make” death: It befalls us. Nature does it, taking away friends, family, and, eventually, our own lives.[23] The mortificatio is the most negative of the alchemical “operations,” and the most painful to experience. Jung and his followers, however, recognize that the mortificatio is also an essential part of the opus, or work of life, the phase that is prior to rebirth, a time of life that is full of torment, to be sure, but at the same time contains a “secret happiness”[24] lying in the unconscious.
http://jungiancenter.org/essay/experiencing-mortificatio-jung-grief-grieving-and-mourning
FERMENTATION - MORTIFICATION - PUTREFACTION
Putrefactio and mortificatio usually refer to two different aspects of the same stage in the alchemical process and are both connected to death. Fermentation is often confused here too, so let's discuss all three. Putrefactio and mortificatio are not considered alchemical processes but rather the inevitable result of various operations on substances which are deemed necessary for transformation to occur. Mortificatio is represented as a form of torture or
mutilation, as in the Passion of Christ and the death and mutilation of Osiris and is a feeling we all have experienced more than once in our lives.
Decapitation, another form of separation, is a mortificatio which signals that the ego must be separated from the archetypal psyche in order to transcend. We must separate the ego from the collective unconscious, from the energies that initially gave it form, and learn to discriminate within non-duality, without projecting or choosing one side over another.
Edward F. Edinger describes mortificatio of the king or sun at the archetypal level as “the death and transformation of a collective dominant or ruling principle.” Here is where we must slay our dragons and look for what can redeem us. The image of God, soul, self needs to be connected back to the ego consciousness before we can reach any wholeness.
Fermentation always implies a transformation that occurs with the introduction of another substance, such as the organic materials inherent in putrefaction. Every time we endure any of these three psychological states, we are in a nigredo, usually enduring loss of psychic energy, the complete deflation of the ego, feeling souless, in a state of spiritual death.
The three mental states -mortification, putrefaction and fermentation- dark stages of the soul - provide the seeds for rebirth and transformational growth.
This dissolution of the darkness also dissolves the picture which we have made of ourselves. --Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, Page 111.
But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 6.
Our present material consists of that which touches the ego, the individual or Self reaches far beyond this, it is only in the evening of life that we can say who we really are. ~ Carl Jung, Lecture VI 2June1934, Page 110.
You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 375.
What do you think of the essence of Hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244
There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.
To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the “thorn in the flesh” is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.” ~ C. G. Jung, CW, Vol. 12, para. 208.
"The first state is the hidden state, but by art and the grace of God it can be transmuted into a second, manifest state. That is why “the prima materia sometimes coincides with the idea of the initial stage of the process, the nigredo. It is then the black earth in which the gold or the lapis is shown like the grain of wheat. It is the black...~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy. Page 312.
My soul leads me into the desert, into the desert of my own self. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235.
My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light. Carl Jung, MDR, Page 88.
Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other. ~Carl Jung; CW 7; Page 53; Para 78.
As for the nigredo, it is certain that no one is redeemed from a sin he not committed, and that a man who stands on a peak cannot climb it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 32-35.
“The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.” ~ Joseph Campbell
The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. When everything is lost,
and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.
--Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
Only when we bear our situation and accept our depression will it be possible for us to change internally. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
In the process of individuation, too, new contents can announce themselves in this devouring form and darken consciousness; this is experienced as a depression, that is to say, as being pulled downward. ~Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.
Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it.
But in the long run, it comes back on us.
You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love.
That is the question-whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, Pages 1473-1474.
Better to feel the weight of the earth too much than to hang out over the edge of it.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 373-374.
The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. When everything is lost,
and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.
--Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
Only when we bear our situation and accept our depression will it be possible for us to change internally. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
In the process of individuation, too, new contents can announce themselves in this devouring form and darken consciousness; this is experienced as a depression, that is to say, as being pulled downward. ~Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.
Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it.
But in the long run, it comes back on us.
You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love.
That is the question-whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, Pages 1473-1474.
Better to feel the weight of the earth too much than to hang out over the edge of it.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 373-374.
"Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling,
but only from experiencing them to the full." -Carl Jung.
The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.
In the Middle Ages the flight to the spiritual world was still necessary. It was meaningful then to want to live spiritually and give little attention to the material, for meaning was directed towards the spirit. But it is meaningful today to want to descend with dignity to the chthonic world. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 47.
...real liberation does not come from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only by experiencing them fully. ~Carl Jung; A study in the process of individuation; CW 9i; Picture 8. 451 p. (p. 335-337).
The unconscious can also express itself through a depression.
People so spoilt by success that they are no longer accustomed to struggle for it, must sometimes suffer disaster in order to wake up: otherwise life is too easy for them.
They are too comfortable and they have to pay for it somehow.
Many are plagued by chronic ailments or intermittent depressions because fate does not torment them in other ways.
Chronic illness or depression is then directly meaningful. They are mechanisms, to be sure, but so long as people are enslaved by these mechanisms they are saved from a more cruel fate.
There are some patients the analyst must even treat emotionally, and he must not allow certain other patients to exploit him. He can talk very openly and sternly to these and even respond emotionally to them. Such people enslave others.
They must be shown that they have a desire to dominate: they must be told the truth.
People of this kind are subject to depression because they want to rule others but cannot manage to. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 15.
Only when we bear our situation and accept our depression will it be possible for us to change internally. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
In the process of individuation, too, new contents can announce themselves in this devouring form and darken consciousness; this is experienced as a depression, that is to say, as being pulled downward. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
Depression is not necessarily pathological. It often foreshadows a renewal of the personality or a burst of creative activity. There are moments in human life when a new page is turned. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, par. 373.
Since the depression was not manufactured by the conscious mind but is an unwelcome intrusion from the unconscious, the elaboration of the mood is, as it were, a picture of the contents and tendencies of the unconscious that were massed together in the depression. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 82.
Often, however, we find cases where there is no tangible mood or depression at all, but just a general, dull discontent, a feeling of resistance to everything, a sort of boredom or vague disgust, an indefinable but excruciating emptiness. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 83.
Youthful longing for the world and for life, for the attainment of high hopes and distant goals, is life's obvious teleological urge which at once changes into fear of life, neurotic resistances, depressions, and phobias if at some point it remains caught in the past, or shrinks from risks without which the unseen goal cannot be attained. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 406.
When we suffer from lack of psychic energy, we say we have a depression or an inhibition, not realising that part of our mental hierarchy has one away beyond our control, that we have, in fact, lost our soul. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 13.
Depressions always have to be understood teleologically. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 14.
but only from experiencing them to the full." -Carl Jung.
The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.
In the Middle Ages the flight to the spiritual world was still necessary. It was meaningful then to want to live spiritually and give little attention to the material, for meaning was directed towards the spirit. But it is meaningful today to want to descend with dignity to the chthonic world. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 47.
...real liberation does not come from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only by experiencing them fully. ~Carl Jung; A study in the process of individuation; CW 9i; Picture 8. 451 p. (p. 335-337).
The unconscious can also express itself through a depression.
People so spoilt by success that they are no longer accustomed to struggle for it, must sometimes suffer disaster in order to wake up: otherwise life is too easy for them.
They are too comfortable and they have to pay for it somehow.
Many are plagued by chronic ailments or intermittent depressions because fate does not torment them in other ways.
Chronic illness or depression is then directly meaningful. They are mechanisms, to be sure, but so long as people are enslaved by these mechanisms they are saved from a more cruel fate.
There are some patients the analyst must even treat emotionally, and he must not allow certain other patients to exploit him. He can talk very openly and sternly to these and even respond emotionally to them. Such people enslave others.
They must be shown that they have a desire to dominate: they must be told the truth.
People of this kind are subject to depression because they want to rule others but cannot manage to. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 15.
Only when we bear our situation and accept our depression will it be possible for us to change internally. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
In the process of individuation, too, new contents can announce themselves in this devouring form and darken consciousness; this is experienced as a depression, that is to say, as being pulled downward. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
Depression is not necessarily pathological. It often foreshadows a renewal of the personality or a burst of creative activity. There are moments in human life when a new page is turned. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, par. 373.
Since the depression was not manufactured by the conscious mind but is an unwelcome intrusion from the unconscious, the elaboration of the mood is, as it were, a picture of the contents and tendencies of the unconscious that were massed together in the depression. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 82.
Often, however, we find cases where there is no tangible mood or depression at all, but just a general, dull discontent, a feeling of resistance to everything, a sort of boredom or vague disgust, an indefinable but excruciating emptiness. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 83.
Youthful longing for the world and for life, for the attainment of high hopes and distant goals, is life's obvious teleological urge which at once changes into fear of life, neurotic resistances, depressions, and phobias if at some point it remains caught in the past, or shrinks from risks without which the unseen goal cannot be attained. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 406.
When we suffer from lack of psychic energy, we say we have a depression or an inhibition, not realising that part of our mental hierarchy has one away beyond our control, that we have, in fact, lost our soul. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 13.
Depressions always have to be understood teleologically. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 14.
"Despair" Alex Grey
“Although the attributes of Christ (consubstantiality with the Father, co-eternity, filiation, parthenogenesis, crucifixion, Lamb sacrificed between opposites, One divided into Many, etc.) undoubtedly mark him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of the archetype.
The other half appears as the Anti-Christ. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that he consists of its dark aspect. Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Savior crucified between two thieves.
This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites." ~Carl Jung
"It was during Advent of the year 1913--December 12, to be exact-- that I resolved upon the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way at my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths. I could not fend off a feeling of panic. But then, abruptly, at not too great a depth, I landed on my feet in a soft, sticky mass. I felt great relief, although I was apparently in complete darkness. After a while my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, which was rather like a deep twilight. Before me was the entrance to a dark cave..."
--C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams,Reflections, pag.219
The other half appears as the Anti-Christ. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that he consists of its dark aspect. Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Savior crucified between two thieves.
This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites." ~Carl Jung
"It was during Advent of the year 1913--December 12, to be exact-- that I resolved upon the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way at my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths. I could not fend off a feeling of panic. But then, abruptly, at not too great a depth, I landed on my feet in a soft, sticky mass. I felt great relief, although I was apparently in complete darkness. After a while my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, which was rather like a deep twilight. Before me was the entrance to a dark cave..."
--C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams,Reflections, pag.219
"One must be utterly abandoned to God; nothing else matters, but fulfilling God's Will."
--Carl Jung, 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections'.
Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light. --C.G. Jung
"If everything is or can go wrong; its opposite should also populate the mind, i.e. the optimism. This would be sure to have built-in tools to safely exit the psychic state of chaos, making sure that States of dismay are inserted with internal layout to change something. The only remaining possible is this inexorable life factor. There is no human being sentenced previously to a pathological state; and no wish to praise fools, all without any exception have own resources to cope with their adversity." ~C. G. Jung
What do you think of the essence of Hell?
Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. Hell is when you can no longer attain what you could attain.
Hell is when you must think and feel and do everything that you know you do not want. Hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to, and that you yourself are responsible for it.
Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful.
But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell.
~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 244.
In his latest revelations, Pope Francis said:
"Through humility, soul searching, and prayerful contemplation we have gained a new understanding of certain dogmas. The church no longer believes in a literal hell where people suffer. This doctrine is incompatible with the infinite love of God. God is not a judge but a friend and a lover of humanity. God seeks not to condemn but only to embrace. Like the fable of Adam and Eve, we see hell as a literary device. Hell is merely a metaphor for the isolated soul, which like all souls ultimately will be united in love with God.”
At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings.
You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness / you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs.
Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life.
If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race.
There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment.
How can you become if you never are?
Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become.
If you live the common life at your lowest reaches, then you become aware of your self.
If you are on your heights, then you are your best, and you become aware only of your best, but not that which you are in the general life as a being.
What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is at its strongest. For we imagine that we know what we are as developing beings, and even more so, the less we want to know what we are as beings.
Because of that we do not love the condition of our being brought low; although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge
of ourselves. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 266.
--Carl Jung, 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections'.
Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light. --C.G. Jung
"If everything is or can go wrong; its opposite should also populate the mind, i.e. the optimism. This would be sure to have built-in tools to safely exit the psychic state of chaos, making sure that States of dismay are inserted with internal layout to change something. The only remaining possible is this inexorable life factor. There is no human being sentenced previously to a pathological state; and no wish to praise fools, all without any exception have own resources to cope with their adversity." ~C. G. Jung
What do you think of the essence of Hell?
Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. Hell is when you can no longer attain what you could attain.
Hell is when you must think and feel and do everything that you know you do not want. Hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to, and that you yourself are responsible for it.
Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful.
But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell.
~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 244.
In his latest revelations, Pope Francis said:
"Through humility, soul searching, and prayerful contemplation we have gained a new understanding of certain dogmas. The church no longer believes in a literal hell where people suffer. This doctrine is incompatible with the infinite love of God. God is not a judge but a friend and a lover of humanity. God seeks not to condemn but only to embrace. Like the fable of Adam and Eve, we see hell as a literary device. Hell is merely a metaphor for the isolated soul, which like all souls ultimately will be united in love with God.”
At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings.
You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness / you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs.
Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life.
If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race.
There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment.
How can you become if you never are?
Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become.
If you live the common life at your lowest reaches, then you become aware of your self.
If you are on your heights, then you are your best, and you become aware only of your best, but not that which you are in the general life as a being.
What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is at its strongest. For we imagine that we know what we are as developing beings, and even more so, the less we want to know what we are as beings.
Because of that we do not love the condition of our being brought low; although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge
of ourselves. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 266.
"Homo Melancholicus" by Agostino Arrivabene (2013 oil on brass)
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?
That is the telling question of his life.
Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty.
The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life.
He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy.
If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Chapter "On Life After Death.”
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?
That is the telling question of his life.
Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty.
The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life.
He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy.
If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Chapter "On Life After Death.”
Hades and Persephone seated in the underworld on a throne in the form of an eagle's head with Cerebus before them. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France
“There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul,
a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.”
― Hazrat Inayat Khan
“The principle aim of psychotherapy is not to transport the patient to an impossible state of happiness, but to help them acquire a steadfastness and philosophic patience in face of suffering. Life demands for its completion and fulfillment a balance between joy and sorrow. But because suffering is positively disagreeable, people naturally prefer not to ponder how much fear and sorrow fall to the lot of man.” --Carl Jung; Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life’
"At the age of eighty, Jung received a visit from a former student, now seventy years old, who wanted to question him about the death and the possibility of another life. He said," On her deathbed will not be of great help to remember the one in which I believe: you might have your own idea on the issue. " It was an explicit an invitation to address the problem in first person and pay attention to dreams."
M-L von Franz, Near death archetypal experiences.
a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.”
― Hazrat Inayat Khan
“The principle aim of psychotherapy is not to transport the patient to an impossible state of happiness, but to help them acquire a steadfastness and philosophic patience in face of suffering. Life demands for its completion and fulfillment a balance between joy and sorrow. But because suffering is positively disagreeable, people naturally prefer not to ponder how much fear and sorrow fall to the lot of man.” --Carl Jung; Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life’
"At the age of eighty, Jung received a visit from a former student, now seventy years old, who wanted to question him about the death and the possibility of another life. He said," On her deathbed will not be of great help to remember the one in which I believe: you might have your own idea on the issue. " It was an explicit an invitation to address the problem in first person and pay attention to dreams."
M-L von Franz, Near death archetypal experiences.
Existential depression is a depression that arises when an individual confronts certain basic issues of existence. Yalom (1980) describes four such issues (or “ultimate concerns”)–death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. Death is an inevitable occurrence. Freedom, in an existential sense, refers to the absence of external structure. That is, humans do not enter a world which is inherently structured. We must give the world a structure which we ourselves create. Isolation recognizes that no matter how close we become to another person, a gap always remains, and we are nonetheless alone. Meaninglessness stems from the first three. If we must die, if we construct our own world, and if each of us is ultimately alone, then what meaning does life have?
Why should such existential concerns occur disproportionately among gifted persons? Partially, it is because substantial thought and reflection must occur to even consider such notions, rather than simply focusing on superficial day-to-day aspects of life. Other more specific characteristics of gifted children are important predisposers as well.
http://theunboundedspirit.com/existential-depression-in-gifted-children/
Why should such existential concerns occur disproportionately among gifted persons? Partially, it is because substantial thought and reflection must occur to even consider such notions, rather than simply focusing on superficial day-to-day aspects of life. Other more specific characteristics of gifted children are important predisposers as well.
http://theunboundedspirit.com/existential-depression-in-gifted-children/
Into this dark night souls begin to enter when God draws them forth from the state of beginners—which is the state of those that meditate on the spiritual road—and begins to set them in the state of progressives —which is that of those who are already contemplatives—to the end that, after passing through it, they may arrive at the state of the perfect, which is that of the Divine union of the soul with God.
Wherefore, to the end that we may the better understand and explain what night is this through which the soul passes, and for what cause God sets it therein, it will be well here to touch first of all upon certain characteristics of beginners (which, although we treat them with all possible brevity, will not fail to be of service likewise to the beginners themselves), in order that, realizing the weakness of the state wherein they are, they may take courage, and may desire that God will bring them into this night, wherein the soul is strengthened and confirmed in the virtues, and made ready for the inestimable delights of the love of God. And, although we may tarry here for a time, it will not be for longer than is necessary, so that we may go on to speak at once of this dark night. --Opening to St. John of the Cross "Dark Night of the Soul"
Wherefore, to the end that we may the better understand and explain what night is this through which the soul passes, and for what cause God sets it therein, it will be well here to touch first of all upon certain characteristics of beginners (which, although we treat them with all possible brevity, will not fail to be of service likewise to the beginners themselves), in order that, realizing the weakness of the state wherein they are, they may take courage, and may desire that God will bring them into this night, wherein the soul is strengthened and confirmed in the virtues, and made ready for the inestimable delights of the love of God. And, although we may tarry here for a time, it will not be for longer than is necessary, so that we may go on to speak at once of this dark night. --Opening to St. John of the Cross "Dark Night of the Soul"
T. H. White wrote in The Once and Future King about young Arthur's depression, his dark night of the soul. He sought counsel from his mentor Merlin, the magician. Merlin tells Arthur, "The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies. You may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins. You may miss your only love. You may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it, then: To learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you."
“Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love – somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them. Problems sustain us; maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without problems – completely tranquilized. There is a secret love hiding in each problem”. [James Hillman]
"This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them." ~Carl Jung; The Psychology of the Unconscious .
Libido:
Psychic energy in general.
Libido can never be apprehended except in a definite form; that is to say, it is identical with fantasy-images. And we can only release it from the grip of the unconscious by bringing up the corresponding fantasy-images.["The Technique of Differentiation," CW 7, par. 345.]
Jung specifically distanced his concept of libido from that of Freud, for whom it had a predominantly sexual meaning.
All psychological phenomena can be considered as manifestations of energy, in the same way that all physical phenomena have been understood as energic manifestations ever since Robert Mayer discovered the law of the conservation of energy. Subjectively and psychologically, this energy is conceived as desire. I call it libido, using the word in its original sense, which is by no means only sexual.["Psychoanalysis and Neurosis," CW 4, par. 567.]
[Libido] denotes a desire or impulse which is unchecked by any kind of authority, moral or otherwise. Libido is appetite in its natural state. From the genetic point of view it is bodily needs like hunger, thirst, sleep, and sex, and emotional states or affects, which constitute the essence of libido.["The Concept of Libido," CW 5, par. 194.]
In line with his belief that the psyche is a self-regulating system, Jung associated libido with intentionality. It "knows" where it ought to go for the overall health of the psyche.
The libido has, as it were, a natural penchant: it is like water, which must have a gradient if it is to flow.["Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth," ibid., par. 337.]
Where there is a lack of libido (depression), it has backed up (re-gressed) in order to stir up unconscious contents, the aim being to compensate the attitudes of consciousness. What little energy is left resists being applied in a consciously chosen direction.
It does not lie in our power to transfer "disposable" energy at will to a rationally chosen object. The same is true in general of the apparently disposable energy which is disengaged when we have destroyed its unserviceable forms through the corrosive of reductive analysis. [It] 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, of the possibilities rationally presented to it. 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.["The Problem of the Attitude-Type," CW 7, par. 76]
The analytic task in such a situation is to discover the natural gradient of the person’s energy.
What is it, at this moment and in this individual, that represents the natural urge of life? That is the question.["The Structure of the Unconscious," ibid., par. 488.]
"This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them." ~Carl Jung; The Psychology of the Unconscious .
Libido:
Psychic energy in general.
Libido can never be apprehended except in a definite form; that is to say, it is identical with fantasy-images. And we can only release it from the grip of the unconscious by bringing up the corresponding fantasy-images.["The Technique of Differentiation," CW 7, par. 345.]
Jung specifically distanced his concept of libido from that of Freud, for whom it had a predominantly sexual meaning.
All psychological phenomena can be considered as manifestations of energy, in the same way that all physical phenomena have been understood as energic manifestations ever since Robert Mayer discovered the law of the conservation of energy. Subjectively and psychologically, this energy is conceived as desire. I call it libido, using the word in its original sense, which is by no means only sexual.["Psychoanalysis and Neurosis," CW 4, par. 567.]
[Libido] denotes a desire or impulse which is unchecked by any kind of authority, moral or otherwise. Libido is appetite in its natural state. From the genetic point of view it is bodily needs like hunger, thirst, sleep, and sex, and emotional states or affects, which constitute the essence of libido.["The Concept of Libido," CW 5, par. 194.]
In line with his belief that the psyche is a self-regulating system, Jung associated libido with intentionality. It "knows" where it ought to go for the overall health of the psyche.
The libido has, as it were, a natural penchant: it is like water, which must have a gradient if it is to flow.["Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth," ibid., par. 337.]
Where there is a lack of libido (depression), it has backed up (re-gressed) in order to stir up unconscious contents, the aim being to compensate the attitudes of consciousness. What little energy is left resists being applied in a consciously chosen direction.
It does not lie in our power to transfer "disposable" energy at will to a rationally chosen object. The same is true in general of the apparently disposable energy which is disengaged when we have destroyed its unserviceable forms through the corrosive of reductive analysis. [It] 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, of the possibilities rationally presented to it. 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.["The Problem of the Attitude-Type," CW 7, par. 76]
The analytic task in such a situation is to discover the natural gradient of the person’s energy.
What is it, at this moment and in this individual, that represents the natural urge of life? That is the question.["The Structure of the Unconscious," ibid., par. 488.]
Nigredo, Iona Miller, 1993
The transit from black to white via blue[i] implies that blue always brings black with it. (Among African peoples, for instance, black includes blue;[ii] whereas in the Jewish-Christian tradition blue belongs rather than white).[iii] Blue bears traces of the mortificatio into the whitening. What before was the stickiness of the black, like pitch or tar, unable to be rid of, turns into the traditionally blue virtues of constancy and fidelity. The same dark events feel different. The tortured and symptomatic aspect of mortification—flaying oneself, pulverizing old structures, decapitation of the headstrong will, the rat and rot in one’s personal cellar—give way to depression. As even the darkest blue is not black, so even the deepest depression is not the mortificatio which means death of soul. The mortificatio is more driven, images locked compulsively in behavior, visibility zero, psyche trapped in the inertia and extension of matter. A mortificatio is a time of symptoms. These inexplicable, utterly materialized tortures of psyche in physis are relieved, according to the procession of olors, by a movement toward depression, which can commence as a mournful regret even over the lost symptom: “It was better when it hurt physically—now I only cry.” Blue misery. So, with the appearance of blue, feeling becomes more paramount and the paramount feeling is the mournful plaint (Rimbaud[i] equates blue with vowel “0”; Kandinsky[ii] with the sounds of the flute, cello, double bass and organ). These laments hint of soul, of reflecting and distancing by imaginational expression. Here we can see more why archetypal psychology has stressed depression as the via regia in soulmaking.[iii] The ascetic exercises that we call “symptoms” (and their “treatments”), the guilty despairs and remorse as the nigredo decays, reduce the old ego-personality, but this necessary reduction is only preparatory to the sense of soul which appears first in the blued imagination of depression.
Let us say, blue is produced by a collaboration between Saturn and Venus. According to Giacento Gimma,[iv] an eighteenth-century gemmologist, blue represents Venus, while the Goat, the Saturnian emblem of Capricorn, is blue’s animal. Capricorn, you will recall, extends slowly from the depths to the heights; immense range and immense patience. Where blue brings to Venus a deeper melancholy, and to Saturn a magnanimity (another virtue of blue according to Gemma), it also slows the motion of whiteness, for it is the color of repose (Kandinsky). Thus blue is the retarding factor in the whitening. It is the element of depression, that raises deep doubts and high principles, wanting to settle things fundamentally and get them right in order to clarify them. This effect of blue on white can appear as feelings of service, labor, and disciplined observance of the rules, civil conformities like the blue cross, blue collar and blue uniforms, which figures of these feelings might carry. The effect can also appear in feelings of guilt and conscience.
Once the black turns blue, darkness can be penetrated (unlike the nigredo which absorbs all insights back into itself, compounding the darkness with negative introspections). The shift to blue allows air so that the nigredo can meditate itself, imagine itself, recognize that this very shadow state expresses “the essence of things and their abiding, inherent permanence.” Here is imaginal consciousness affirming its ground.
--James Hillman, Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis
Let us say, blue is produced by a collaboration between Saturn and Venus. According to Giacento Gimma,[iv] an eighteenth-century gemmologist, blue represents Venus, while the Goat, the Saturnian emblem of Capricorn, is blue’s animal. Capricorn, you will recall, extends slowly from the depths to the heights; immense range and immense patience. Where blue brings to Venus a deeper melancholy, and to Saturn a magnanimity (another virtue of blue according to Gemma), it also slows the motion of whiteness, for it is the color of repose (Kandinsky). Thus blue is the retarding factor in the whitening. It is the element of depression, that raises deep doubts and high principles, wanting to settle things fundamentally and get them right in order to clarify them. This effect of blue on white can appear as feelings of service, labor, and disciplined observance of the rules, civil conformities like the blue cross, blue collar and blue uniforms, which figures of these feelings might carry. The effect can also appear in feelings of guilt and conscience.
Once the black turns blue, darkness can be penetrated (unlike the nigredo which absorbs all insights back into itself, compounding the darkness with negative introspections). The shift to blue allows air so that the nigredo can meditate itself, imagine itself, recognize that this very shadow state expresses “the essence of things and their abiding, inherent permanence.” Here is imaginal consciousness affirming its ground.
--James Hillman, Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis
Image: The Knight at the Crossroads by Viktor Vasnetsov
ALAIN MARGOTTON.
THE NIGREDO
Working Through Depression with Alchemy
by Iona Miller, 2/2008
"Right at the beginning you meet the dragon, the chthonic spirit, the devil or, as the alchemists called it, the blackness, the nigredo, and this encounter produces suffering..."
~ Carl Jung
"I am an infirm and weak old man, surnamed the dragon; therefore am I shut up in a cave, that I may become ransomed by the kingly crown...A fiery sword inflicts great torments on me; death makes weak my flesh and bones...My soul and my spirit depart; a terrible poison, I am likened to the black raven, for that is the wages of sin; in dust and earth I lie, that out of Three may come One. O soul and spirit leave me not, that I may see again the light of day, and the hero of peace whom the whole world shall behold may arise from me..." ~ Aurelia Occulta Philosophorum
THE GREAT WORK
Alchemy is the Great Work, a process of separation, transformation and integration. This is just as true of the substances worked experimentally in the retort as it is of the personality undergoing the transformative process. You are the alchemical vessel and the contents of your psyche is the means and object of transformation. As the images and substances change, you change too.
There is theory and practice in science, and two applications in alchemy -- spiritual alchemy and experimental alchemy involving literal lab work. You can work either method separately or both in concert. Our true selves are beyond what our conscious awareness alone could ever make of us.
Benchwork is a projective mechanism that mirrors your psychic transformation synchronistically. Projection turns into a clarifying image. You gain an experiential knowledge of the elements and materials of alchemy, rather than just comprehending a concept.
There is a treasure to be discovered. Your psychophysical being is a vessel of the soul and spirit. The physical body is sustained by the energy body, the field body and its zero-point component. You are made of the fabric of spacetime. The alchemical axiom, “As Above, So Below” means there is a universe to explore within yourself and you are not separate from the whole Cosmos in any way.
The raw psychic contents (prima materia) become cooked (ultima materia). There is no quick fix to the accumulated baggage of life. The method works if you do, but you must be motivated, either by passion or despair to enter into such an arcane pursuit. You must dare to seize the noble fruit. The impetus may come from an inexplicable attraction to the experimental alchemical art, life passages, spiritual longing, an illness or dis-ease of body or mind, or both.
The spiritual landscape is changing and alchemy offers a safe harbor for the drifting spirit beyond institutional or cult affiliation. Many paths are vying for participants but alchemy chooses you. It is a self-initiatory path that provides a structure or scaffolding for metaphorical death and rebirth, a generic process described in many traditions. But you must remain dedicated to the process.
In exploring the unknown you are exploring yourself. The journey to wholeness often begins with a retreat – into oneself, your interior nature. The experience can be one of darkness, coldness, the isolation of the self-imposed outsider. Your energy is purposefully turning inward and it is best to follow it, even to amplify that dynamic. Some choose the laboratory, some a therapeutic setting, some plant allies, and others an eclectic self-directed approach.
We all have negative tendencies, self-destructive compulsions, self-sabotaging impulses, or neurotic self-defeating patterns. This is our psychological baggage. In his or her work, the novice alchemist channels both the voluntary and compulsive aspects of the depression that can drive the urge to transform.
The work itself forms a vessel of transformation, a safe place where the alchemist can be fully open to nature and his or her own primordial nature. With alchemy you can work with your thoughts and feelings rather than fighting or avoiding them. Once initiated, the unfolding cycles of the Magnum Opus naturally lead through and beyond the nigredo toward breakthroughs rather than breakdown, emergence rather than emergency.
You must grow and face your fears to solve the problems of multidimensional existence. But to do so you have to make spiritual growth a priority by giving it time and attention. Only your comprehension of the deeper nature of depression, recognizing the call, and your commitment to the conscious struggle for transformation makes it alchemical. Then you rescue the fragmented parts of yourself. Suffering is meaningful. It leads to empathy, which funds active compassion.
TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE
Part of the art of alchemy is decoding your own symbolic language. Depression means you have lost your dream and have yet to reconnect with a new one, with the new images or symbols that can pull you forward toward your future. Primal people call it loss of soul. We recognize it as loss of self-worth.
You hurt so much that you may be convinced you are going to die or even wish you would. But the fantasies of death are telegraphing a metaphorical message. Your old self is on its way out. Getting into this morbid state is the point. You have acute awareness of your mortality. The experience of maximum despair is “hitting bottom”. You are a mess. The good thing is there is nowhere to go but up. What do you want your tombstone to say?
You are metaphorically decomposing. This is the paradoxical flip side of ego inflation, toxic narcissism, and shallow self-absorption. It keeps us from responding to even outstanding opportunities. This crisis is an extraordinary opportunity to re-create your life and world. You have to learn how to use your strengths and skills while you meet multiple challenges and stressors. You need to uncover your buried potential and mine the gold of your buried talents and creativity.
This hero’s depression lifts once you embark on your mission with purpose, based on finding your inner vision. Once you’ve heard the “Call to Adventure” you have enthusiasm, passion, intentionality and direction. You determine to persevere through the crisis, but the road has many trials. The devil comes as chaos, suffering or pain. Psychophysical suffering feels like wandering around in fear and darkness – a dark night of the soul, even a journey to Hell.
The ancient Greek vision of Hades was that of a dark, cold, windy, dry realm. This is a good metaphor of all our early traumas of abandonment, hunger, loss, sorrow and shame that are frozen in the labyrinthine halls of psyche. We cannot meet or accept life's legitimate suffering. We can't grieve these ominous shadows so they pile up on us creating blind spots, despair, denial, and wrongful assumptions. The trouble they cause is their demand to be seen for what they are.
This glacial ice cave houses unresolved issues that continue to affect our relationships with self, others and world. It drives our compulsions for achievement and the pain of loneliness. We all carry the burdens of self-doubt and loneliness. We simply remove ourselves from whatever we cannot or will not process, but they remain alive and powerful though buried or frozen, multiplying in scope and weight as we grow older.
Though lack of unconditional acceptance is a natural part of human experience, these unhealing wounds are the hidden focus of our conscious lives. These early losses hang around frozen in time, as if they are still happening. Simply changing their apparent expression, they obstruct the flow of our lives until we recognize and acknowledge them.
The unhealing wounds of unrealized suffering, self-delusion, addiction, chronic depression, compulsivity, failed relationships and some physical illness present opportunities throughout life to reconcile and resolve what we couldn't heal earlier. The word 'resolve' echoes the alchemical maxim of 'Solve et Cogaula," the liquification and reintegration of essentially frozen psychic energy.
SOUL RETRIEVAL
Heartache and pain, a persistent sense of failure and inadequacy are core human experiences. We feel a hunger or sense we are missing something. The older we get, the more the fear of death creeps in, feeding the desire to numb out and not feel anything at all. Death tempts and attacks us in this predestined confrontation.
This unfinished business locks us into a distorted "virtual" reality, a false self. When we are out of balance and pursue pleasure at any cost, our old wound is showing. If these deepening shadows mess up our lives enough, we are forced to break free and tunnel out of the cocoon of distortions and self-loathing. This deadly and dreaded challenge to your courage can reconnect you with your lost confidence by drawing on transpersonal resources. It is an unavoidable part of the journey to an authentic life.
Constructive discontent can drive our best thoughts, emotions, and actions. But to get to its root you must enter a tomblike passageway, making a journey to “the center of the Earth,” to the center of yourself to gain the treasure, the cure, the grace. This is engagement with power within.
You can't go back so you must go forward. We have the potential to grow beyond mere personal fulfillment to transpersonal experiences. New information you gain from the unconscious helps you create a dynamic new situation, an ever-widening, self-perpetuating cycle that restores flow.
LIVING TRUST
What if you actually believed you are a capable and worthwhile person? How would building and aligning with greater mental, emotional and physical power within impact all facets of your life and relationships? What would life be like if you really opened a new pathway that helps you live, lead and succeed in your purpose, in your essential nature? What is blocking you?
When old defenses no longer work, you must develop new coping skills for developmental challenges. But this initiatory way includes many deaths and rebirths. Nigredo, the blackening, isn’t always the first stage, but may be one of relapse, eclipse or another incubation stage.
Nigredo is a recurrent cycle of desire and frustration with no real beginning. Your energies are sucked from the outer world and turned in on themselves. Normal life is radically disrupted. When you are paralyzed by life there is nothing to do but let go of your control fantasies. An eclipse of the ego offers a way into the deeper energies of the unconscious.
After involuntary or voluntary symbolic death, reborn spirit eventually emerges from the rotting corpse of the old self with its limiting worldview. This death is equivalent to the conception of the legendary Philosopher’s Stone. Death becomes your ally and advisor. Meditators are advised to “die daily” in their practice. The ego is eclipsed but the Stone is born. These trials nourish the Self. Vision expands, wisdom deepens, self matures.
Conscious alchemy offers a direction, an operational roadmap for realizing your highest potential. It is a psychospiritual path, approached experimentally and spiritually. You make the experiment on yourself. It is a whole brain, whole self process, involving both rational and irrational forces.
Psyche has a regressive tendency. If you block the process of growth, depression will recur, again and again. You will regress anytime your work goes awry, you seemingly take a step backward, or circumstances weigh you down. Each octave of work brings exponential results. Over time, you catch yourself in self-defeating acts sooner in the cycle. But the full weight of the dirty business must be born each time disruption intrudes chaotically into your life.
THE NIGREDO
Even the root of the word “alchemy” refers to the black soil of Egypt. This Egypt is an imaginal realm of Hermetic mysteries, which created the dying and rising god Osiris. This root mystery influenced many cultures, including the Eleusinian rites of ancient Greece. Initiatory rebirth is an awakening into a higher life. It is echoed in the rites of Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, and Mithras. Death and spiritual rebirth permeates all the mystery religions. Hermetic texts influenced the growth of European alchemy.
You must bury your old self in that rejuvenating soil for new life to emerge. The nigredo means seeing all through the bleak eyes of depression but it also means “seeing through” the meaning and value of depression. You may belong to a guild of like-minded travellers, but you walk the transformative path alone. It is a solitary journey.
The nigredo is often called the first alchemical operation but there is no distinct order handed down from tradition. It is the first stage of mortificatio – the killing of the old worn out or obsolete personality. Many people seek a spiritual path because of their existential despair. The old self must dissolve, the neurosis must be liquified and reduced to the primal condition.
Only a purging fire will turn this darkness white. It might be the slow heat of a rotting corpse or fetid compost pile but the inner fire is lit. Like a struck flint, flashes of insight ignite the inner fire which leads to searing visions of the truth of your reality and channel your burning desire toward further transformation that brings clarity.
“Something” in you has already died and it’s beginning to stink. This blackening phase of the alchemical process describes a gloomy time of depression. All the signs seem inauspicious. You feel unlucky, caught in a black mood whose origin may be difficult to pinpoint. This is because your current ego attitudes are outdated.
You feel stuck because you aren’t coping or adapting to present circumstances. These feelings may come into your life due to an overload of stress, financial and relationship problems or clinical depression. Depression is a “no love” script. Love may be there but you have lost the capacity to feel it. You wonder in anguish, “Is this all there is?"
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There are three main types of clinical depressive disorders: major depressive disorder, dysthymia (mood swings), and the depressive lows of bipolar disorder. Mania is a defense against depression. Self-deception, loss of self-esteem and anger are part of it. Conventional treatment freely dispenses antidepressants. However, that just adds to the numbing and fakeness.
Paradoxically, both depression and its medical cure cause the personality to become “flat,” libido is suppressed. An integrative approach includes psychosocial therapy to focus on the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal issues behind depression. A wide range of severe side effects make antidepressants alone poor therapy, particularly for seekers in spiritual crisis. The condition must be actively addressed. Medication suppresses self-expression just like addiction kills creativity.
Poison is in the cure. Research has shown that traumatic experiences can change the way the brain works. So can talk therapy, and even more so, process-oriented therapy, which creates flow experiences. Self-regulation can be learned, using resonance techniques, concentration and meditation. The brain undergoes changes similar to those induced by medication but in a positive, adaptive way that arises within.
Whether we speak of normal experience, chronic depression or grief, it is a fact that frustration is deeply woven into the fabric of life. We are riddled with desires and programmed by ideals. Should some of our real or imagined needs be temporarily met, we immediately begin wishing for more.
Chronic dissatisfaction stands in the way of our contentment. Depression has its roots in failure to adjust to lowered expectations of self, others, and a world that doesn’t meet our childish needs. Overcoming the anxiety and depressions of contemporary life requires a drastic change in attitude about what is important and what is not.
MELANCHOLIA
Faust was given power by the Devil on condition that he would never be satisfied with what he has. The advertising myth of the “American Dream” did the same thing to us all. Happiness and satisfaction with life depend on how small a gap you perceives between what you wish for and what you possess. Traditional social shields such as religion, ethnic traditions, patriotism, etc. no longer are effective for many disrupted by the harsh winds of chaos.
Psychic disorder produces conflicting signals that prevent or distract us from carrying out our good intentions. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, depression, ennui, anomie, or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder divert and force our attention obsessively into undesirable directions. Energetic flow is blocked.
The new biological explanations of mental disorders as neurotransmitter imbalances make “good stories” but still lack empirical substantiation. Over-diagnosis has led to a “pharmademic” of over-medicated “pod people.” Yet, research shows that talk therapy and self-regulation techniques are as effective as drugs. The cornerstones of psychotherapy are insight and emotional growth.
If you practice alchemy with the feedback of other practitioners, it functions as a process-oriented therapy, allowing for projection and solution of problems. It is one of the most ancient spiritual paths. Spiritual technologies are the intuitive response to depression and the ever-present fear of death.
Many individuals experience a period of melancholia between the ages of 28 to 30 (and again at 55 to 60). Astrologically, this is triggered by Saturn return, the return of the planet to its original position in the natal chart. Classically, it is a time of disappointment, divorce, soul-searching and reassessment of values and orientation in life. It also holds the seed of mastery.
Saturn governs the aging process, since it represents actualization of more and more of one's potential. It presides over lingering death and chronic illness. At its worst, senex consciousness destroys spontaneity, obsessed by its repetitive disciplines into a narrowness of emotions, mental processes, and activities. Saturn has “control issues” and also rules crises situations of life and the mental cravings of “lust for results.”
The planet Saturn puts the accent on responsibility, in this case responsibility to yourself for fulfilling your potential. Finally, you are truly growing up and your destiny begins to take form. You may be pressured into it, even if you resist it, and this is that black mood's positive intent. Suffering becomes a meaningful path.
You may think you are not depressed because your feelings are numbed out or you make sure you stay too busy to notice. You may just be in denial with workaholism, hypochondria, an antisocial personality, substance abuse problem, hyperactivity, compulsivity, oppositional behavior, rage, or other means of devil may care acting out and acting in. You may try many horizontal escapes, but no matter where you go, there you are.
Having lost the sweet savor of life, you may be feeling older than your years, not in a good way but rigid and humorless with a thousand aches and pains. If chronic degenerative disease isn’t enough, there is the continual futureshock of new technology and morphing culture. If you are young, depression masquerades as anxiety, a conflict of opposites, generational and social rebellion, alienation, and angst.
Your behavior telegraphs the underlying depression to those with eyes to see. They know because they have been through it. Often when you are in it, you can’t see it. You might even unconsciously use your predicament to manipulate the sympathy and attention of others. But something’s just not right and you sense it in every fiber of your being.
GOOD GRIEF
Like Charlie Brown with his dark cloud, most of us have felt depressed in greater or lesser degree. Loss is a psychophysical experience. Since everything changes as time flows, and change entails loss, this is not surprising. Sometimes we lose face through shameful behavior, in our own eyes and those of others. There are some things we just need to face directly even if they are scary or painful.
We grow sad and depressed when a person we love dies or a cherished phase of life passes. Grief is universal and normal. In fact, failure to grieve is evidence of psychological abnormality. Staying stuck in grief is not healthy; it suppresses the immune system and élan vital. Process work in alchemy or therapy is a way of moving on. Mourning is work and takes mental effort.
Mourning is characteristically a state of mind, but it is accompanied by a host of painful somatic sensations that are remarkably uniform. In acute grief we experience physical distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath. We need to sigh, have an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and intense subjective distress we call tension or mental pain.
Traumatic bereavement happens in a variety of settings including personal and community violence, even global catastrophe. Traumatic bereavement contrasts experiences of quiet death at home, without mutilation, bodily distortion, shock, threat, horror, and helplessness. Reactions to the traumatic circumstances are different and predict more adverse health outcomes for the bereaved.
Traumatic stress interferes with the grieving process. The emotional aspect of grief is just as painful as the somatic. Inner anguish, loss of interest in a dreary, empty world, isolation from other people, loneliness and feelings of inner emptiness seem to persist for an eternity. In this way, grief mimics clinical depression.
The call to heal and the call to death are ultimately the same call to formlessness, to return to source. Many disorders display symptoms and imagery which represent stalled stages in the natural consciousness restructuring process. We get stuck in our attempts to heal ourselves.
HEALING PROCESS
Alchemy is a creative, synergetic process. It produces the universal medicine because it is essentially a healing process. Healing is a form of creativity. You become aware of previously unconscious emotions and find patterns in your behavior. You learn discernment and to intervene in our own negative cycle by exercising, practicing your passion, thought-stopping and changing your messages to yourself.
This curative power is that of the wounded healer archetype. Conscious alchemy means self-care, self-regulation, and self-help through a philosophical mindbody lifestyle. In an eclectic approach, you choose what works for you. You apply it with a level of intensity that meets or exceeds the compelling nature of the depression. Knowing yourself is true wisdom and mastering yourself is true power. You learn to modulate your own neurochemistry to improve your quality of life.
UNIVERSAL METASYN
What is described as the Elixir or Universal Medicine is a primary goal of alchemy. Those who take this literally might seek it in spagyrics or the "white gold" of Ormus, but it can just as easily be the mobilization of the body's own healing potential through psychoneuroimmunology and/or the placebo effect.
Arguably, the universal medicine is inextinguishable Light. Science has shown that the basis of biophysics is not chemistry but subtle fields and biophotons. Life has a biophotonic nature which is the basis of the energy body or field body. Life is orchestrated by light. Our atoms, DNA and cells emit light which choreographs our biological processes. An ultrapowerful energy potential radiates from zero point.
http://myzeropoint.50megs.com http://photonichuman.50megs.com
The Void exist within us just as it pervades the entire cosmos. Uncountable photons flicker on and off within us and influence the holographic blueprint of the body that is transcribed through our DNA and gene expression. The essence of healing is a return to the unconditioned state, free of all conditioning and full of primordial energy potential. Coherent light and sonic resonance or cymatics are present at the intracellular level. http://virtualphysics.50megs.com
We can take responsibility for our bodies and health, reclaiming our inherent shamanic, yogic and psychosomatic self-healing power. This alone changes our compassionate spiritual relationship to self, others, and universe. Meditation masters of all traditions speak of this primordial inner light and its brilliant healing power - Medicine Light.
The old-yet-new healing paradigm includes non-material but highly effective shamanic, psychic and spiritual tech that can be applied effectively in any cultural context. Mind is more than a powerless prisoner of the body. It has the power of focus, committed attention and intentionality. When you take responsibility for you own healing and well-being, the self-organizing power of your own hyperdimensional organism creates a positive resonance.
Healing fosters our evolutionary potential. Personal stillpoint is the point of release and reconnection. There is catharsis in the void. We touch our source, drink of the wellspring of life, reboot our system. Potentials are the source of all electromagnetic phenomena. To realize our own potential, we need to learn the art of living well, not just living better.
We can root out the disturbances of the past and transform them into assets, or strengths. We can remove the incongruencies of conflicting agendas in our belief systems and their fallout - our unresolved feelings. When we change our attitudes about ourselves and our past, we initiate a cascade of neurological changes that cover all four domains of our being. We can cultivate deeper awareness. The mind can change what "matters" to embody a healthier self.
The symbols of alchemy represent aspects of yourself. As you manipulate them, the attitudes associated with them morph. You start recovering from acute depression and become less vulnerable to depression in the future. We heal in the ground of our being.
The healing comes from deep inside not outside, adding to a sense of personal empowerment, rather than reliance or dependence on a pill or another person or an intangible belief. Suffering teaches us to nurture hope. Healthier lifestyle choices may follow.
Sadness is a clarifying and relieving emotion that helps us move on after losses. On the other hand, depression is a paralyzing short-circuit of self-doubt and self-recrimination. Sometimes people become depressed because they are not appropriately angry or sad over the situation. Self-reported distress includes the experience of headaches, faintness, loss of sexual appetite, trouble remembering things, uncontrolled temper outbursts, blaming oneself, pains in the lower back, feelings of inferiority to others, feeling hopeless and nauseous.
A BITTER PILL
Some lives are structured around a depressive life script. Often someone occupies the Victim role in the drama triangle, but switches periodically into the Persecutor role, or through magical means into the Rescuer role. The timing of the script is “Wait.” The “wait” is for a magical occurrence that transforms the world without requiring us to take an active part to initiate change. This is the secret meaning of “initiation” – it includes practice. It must be experiential. One must maintain a beginner’s mind.
The blocks include negative self-talk: “Don’t Succeed,” “Don’t Think,” “Don’t Be Close,” “Don’t Have Fun,” and “Don’t Judge Others.” Even “new age guilt”: “It’s my fault I’m sick; I did it to myself.” Medications may suppress symptoms, but turn you into a homogenized “pod person.” By themselves, they are never a cure. As such, they should be used only to recalibrate for the real healing process. They don’t deal with issues of guilt or change self-accusatory self-talk.
An experience we think is worthless can turn out to be the portal to healing, deepening and enriching us, funding our compassion for self and others. “Healing” does not necessarily mean a cure or total elimination of all symptoms. It has to do with a subjective process, difficult to describe. Self-expression has a curative value. As you work with symbols to manifest them, they heal you right back. By its very nature, the alchemical process is irrational, totally individual, and yet linked to a timeless and universal experience.
The therapist gives helpful encouragement to integrate new knowledge, or relate to the unintegratable, and accept it. Alchemy also helps us understand what the unconscious is saying directly. This promotes growth according to our own inner laws, allowing the unfolding of the total potential. Alchemy helps you conduct a similar process of self-initiation on yourself. The guide is your higher self, perhaps in some personification, pulling you toward your future.
REVIVAL
Flow helps us to integrate the self because in a state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings, and all senses are focused on the same goal. Concentration and ritual are forms of meditation – in alchemy, the meditatio. Experience is in harmony. And when the flow episode is over, one feels more “together” than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people, the world and cosmos in general.
Ultimately, it matters little what complex mechanisms help us mobilize our own inner capacity for healing. The fact that we enter the healing process with commitment and intentionality is far more important. Taking the journey toward healing means we recreate the archetypal journey of the hero or heroine, who is neither helpless nor hopeless, but approaches fate with determinism and courage.
NEW SELF-IMAGE
Is pain, grief, depression, fear, anxiety, guilt, relationship or career disappointment, rejection, alienation, inner conflict, victimization, resentment, superstition, rage, self-doubt or procrastination holding you back? Perhaps your old view of your self has become confining, obsolete, role-bound, or you just feel stuck. Are you afraid you can't cope with either failure or success? We always have to adapt to our environment. You have to TRY, even to fail. Maybe you think your 'glory days' are all in the past.
Through conscious alchemy you can retrieve the psychophysical biochemistry of your balanced and peak performance states. You can apply this felt sense to pain management as well as emotional issues or boosting your potential. By recalling vital times, you essentially regress your body chemistry to a more youthful you, and minimize the toxic chemistry of stress. This allows both body and mind to relax and recalibrate homeostasis. You can also draw on the support and encouragement of your evolving future self through imagination.
Just as one incident can create trauma, one healing moment can change that instantly. When we willingly submit to the universal process of death and renewal we activate transpersonal resources that transcend our own limited capacities for restructuring our consciousness and self-healing. Ultimately all healing is self-healing, and implies profound self-acceptance, and can lead to loving acceptance of others and the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. This is the basis of compassion and service.
ENVISION YOUR FUTURE
Perhaps you lack the right tools to help you realize your potential, to make it so. Self-mastery is a continuous process, which can be used to improve your position wherever you currently find yourself. Our motivations come from our beliefs and values. But along the road of life we may not have developed the resources to deploy our skills or have fallen into traps that derail us when we try.
Identifying beliefs and roadblocks is a solid first step to change. You already probably know exactly what you would like to change, and just how you feel when that's not happening, and even where you feel that in your body and what it is like. This technique allows you to get in touch with a metaphor of your situation.
The body is an alchemical furnace. The brain sends chemical messengers -- neurotransmitters of pain and pleasure -- throughout the body. In turn, the body sends signals to the brain about its sense of distress or safety and well-being.
We can intervene intentionally in this cycle at any point. We can use nutrition, exercise, self-talk and psycho-sensory exercises that create the kinds of experiences that move us forward in our goals. This is 21st Century alchemy - intentionally changing body chemistry from both inside and outside. Our organism obeys one of the maxims of information technology: "Garbage In; Garbage Out".
SELF DIRECTION
Studies have shown that the mindbody cannot distinguish imagination from reality in its automatic reactions. The same internal chemistry is produced whether you do something or imagine it, making mind and body truly one. Transform your imagination into reality.
It all starts and ends with imagination - with what you picture in your mind and the self-talk you use to convince yourself what things mean and what to do. This is where you develop vision and create meaning, which leads to purpose and understanding your mission in life. To change your mind, along with the feelings, attitudes and chemistry that it creates, just systematically change your imagination - the image you hold of your self, others, and world.
Inner guidance comes through the intimate connection between the chemistry of your body and that of your mind and moods. We all recognize a gut-feeling when we have it. Health and well-being involves physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions.
A healthy mindbody opens the way to balance, integration, and inner peace, without resorting to personality-distorting medications. Research has shown that therapy is as effective as antidepressants. We all need exercise, affection, and discipline. We also benefit from reflection or self-knowledge. This alchemical investigation of self is a spiritual journey toward increased balance and mastery.
THE SHADOW KNOWS
Your shadow consists of all the baggage you have stuffed into your false self. You are either afraid to show it, or paradoxically compelled to show it in impulsive behavior. Either way, it is out of control. Acting out self-limiting, self-defeating or self-destructive tendencies means the shadow is running the show. Anger, sadness and fear block joy.
When your ego can no longer pursue only its selfish concerns and addictive demands, the Self forces you into a depression to shake up the stagnant order of things. It brings a burning awareness of your shortcomings and inadequacies. To get to the root of these, you need to process old traumas and negative core beliefs that limit you severely. The self appears on your inner stage as the shadow, and confronts you with your inferior traits.
"The head of the Raven" is another traditional name for the nigredo. It corresponds to the encounter with the shadow. Your ego and the shadow must eventually be reconciled. Your restlessness and disorientation come from your conscious experience of conflict between conscious and unconscious drives. The unconscious must be transformed. The Self devours itself and dies, only to rise again when the work is perfected. But feelings of guilt, worthlessness and powerlessness must be suffered and worked through patiently.
The Shadow is a ‘splinter personality’ that prevents you from realizing your unique potential for personal fulfillment. Cowardice, laziness, ambivalence, rashness, dishonesty, envy, greed, lust, vanity, and attachment, and other self-indulgent tendencies will have to be faced directly. The narcissistic shadow is the diametrical opposite of our positive assets. If you are compulsively organized in daily life, the shadow is a slacker. If you are puritanical, the shadow is promiscuous.
Our dark side isn’t necessarily acted out in self-destructive behavior, but if it has no means of self-expression no ego can transform beyond this phase of development. Some form of inner dialogue is useful. You must come to a conscious understanding of those things you have repressed, and have not been able, nor dared to live out. As a symbol of the self, the shadow embodies the primitive, dark background from which we all emerge. But only the ego passes negative judgment on the shadow. The self embraces all opposites, including good and bad.
Highly religious individuals, who tend to over-identify with the great good of the Light, have shadows that may assume the form of a devilish adversary. What may start as good intentions becomes perverted through repression not transformation. But in the broader reality, the shadow gives human existence body and depth. In physics, the brighter the light, the deeper the shadows which are cast by it. The shadow embodies our hidden agendas, ulterior motives and pathologies.
If you do not take responsibility for consciously becoming aware of your shadow traits, you will find them projected onto others (of the same sex) in your environment. You may feel an irrational instinctive hatred for virtual strangers. This is the collective basis of racial prejudice. When you feel any emotion that seems highly exaggerated, it usually means you are projecting. When that extreme emotion is irrational vehemence, you are projecting your own repressed weakness onto others. To do this you must deny a part of yourself and you cannot experience wholeness.
Therefore, in order to continue your process of transformation, you must come to an awareness of your particular shadow characteristics. If you reach down deeply enough, you will find that the shadow is not only negative, but holds your unlived potential for positive change, also.
As you re-own this lost part of yourself, you open a channel between the conscious and the superconscious levels, between the ego and the self. This experience can bring a flood of light, joy, and energy, which brings temporary release from the depression.
Even your psychosomatic symptoms may vanish suddenly. It’s more than placebo effect.
If your personality is not well-grounded you may not be able to assimilate an inflow of light and strength. The alchemist must balance intellect and emotion by using imagination in a controlled way to digest this sudden illuminating insight. For your ego to react with egotism or conceit is to confuse itself with the power of the self. This confusion of levels has the unfortunate effect of creating a self-glorification. Of course, you are divine, but it is Source shining through you.
If you are bedazzled by spiritual truths beyond your mental power to digest, you may become self-deluded and/or victimized by a cult. You need to develop your powers of discrimination. Megalomania is extreme egotism and can lead a person to act out the role of prophet or savior, spurred on by the excitement of his or her own inner awakening.
You may begin experiencing paranormal phenomena, ESP, clairvoyance, or synchronicities (meaningful coincidences). You may have visions of divine beings, or hear voices, or dabble with automatic writing. Be sure to examine any messages of uncommon origin with discrimination. Any messages exalting your personality should be automatically suspect.
Other reactions to spiritual awakening may occur later as doubts fall away and inner security is found. You may be elated for a time, but your personal self was only temporarily overpowered not permanently transformed. When the spiritual influx ebbs away you may be in for trouble from your ego, which desperately seeks to reassert its dominion.
The trap is to judge yourself even more harshly for being merely human. You have not fallen lower than when you began, but you may feel the full fury of the lower drives when their uncontrolled expression is threatened. They may rear their ugly heads with more force than ever.
Another reaction is to deny the value and reality of your spiritual awakening. The inner critic, or skeptic, creates doubts and attempts to label it a fantasy. With bitterness and sarcasm you may rebuke your aspirations and ideals. But when you have had a transformative vision, you cannot deny it for long, and remain healthy. It brings more depression, a sense of unworthiness, and the feeling you are damned. Nigredo can be likened to "going through Hell."
All those in the arts and sciences experience periods of aridity and inability to work. No new inspirations come. You feel cut off from the source of creative flow. The depression and restlessness that result may lead to alcohol or drugs, until or unless the sudden flow of inspiration brings a sense of renewal.
You need to be aware of the true nature of this crisis, and realize that an exalted state cannot be maintained forever. It is no fall from grace, but a natural occurrence that gives you emotional and mental relief from the tensions of inspiration and illumination. After all, you can only digest so much change at once. Instead of staying stuck in the depression you can continue on the path to self-realization.
MEANING & MYSTERY
It is impossible to feel isolated, lonely, and “dead” with a felt sense of revivifying identification, which stems from direct experience of the dynamic whole of reality. It restores our sense of personal wholeness. We are an indivisible part of a flow in the whole field of consciousness. The entire cosmos is contained holographically within us: “As Above; So Below.”
When we become “superconductors” of consciousness, we draw from the spiritual wellsprings of life and health, that which eternally makes the world bloom anew, which brings re-enchantment. The “dam” of depression which has blocked the dynamic flow of life and love cannot withstand this immense healing force forever. It breaks through the “dead void” and one is no longer estranged from the power of the dynamic ground-state of existence, or cosmic unity.
What was lost has been found. The wilderness is no longer barren. Life blossoms and bears fruit. The self is the whole range of psychic phenomena, a psychic organ of perception. The self is transcendent, a center between conscious and unconscious, because it points to an unlimited future and unbound creative expansion of the evolutionary process. It signifies the harmony and balance of various opposing forces. Symbols of the self can be anything the ego recognizes as a greater totality than itself: the androgyne, the diamond body, the flower of life, the Elixir, the Stone.
The average heart beats two billion times and you can change utterly in any one of them. Reclaim your innate capacity for changing the cellular, subatomic, and psychophysical processes of your energy body. WHAT YOU THINK and the excitation level of your overall system changes your chemistry, markedly. We are fluid fields, through which energy and matter dynamically flow and change. Lifestyle, diet, emotional state and consciousness play a huge role in health and disease. We can catalyze our psychophysical homeostasis and spontaneous healing processes, complementing any traditional care we may require.
Restoration of the flow-state comes through identification with the alchemical process. Genius embodies powers greater than our own for no one can ever embody at once all the potential qualities of archetypal Self. But we can become extraordinary by transforming our character like carving a diamond from the rough.
Self is the primordial I AM of Being, as fundamental as inhalation and exhalation. Our lives are defined by their limitations and the strategies we use to cope with and overcome them. The self expresses the unity of the personality as a Whole, our holistic organism. The unconscious, including the mindbody and energy body, is the medium from which the sacred Source flows forth.
This is the serpentine process of healing. It changes us at the quantum, energetic and psychobiological levels. It literally changes our biochemistry. Creative flow states have the power to restructure our consciousness at the most fundamental level. Alchemy is an endless source of creativity, spiritual sustenance, and pleasure. Passion for the Great Work connects you experientially with Mystery.
REFERENCES
Campbell, Joseph (1976), The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen.
Miller, Iona, “Conscious Alchemy,” (2006) consciousalchemy.50megs.com/
Miller, Iona and Graywolf Swinney, (2000) CHAOSOPHY 2000, “Depressive Disorders / Grief and the Consciousness Restructuring Process,” Asklepia Foundation. www.asklepia.org/Chaosophy...onCRP.html
Miller, Iona and Richard Alan Miller (1994), THE MODERN ALCHEMIST: A Guide to Personal Transformation, Phanes Press: Grand Rapids, Michigan. themodernalchemist.chaosmagic.com
Working Through Depression with Alchemy
by Iona Miller, 2/2008
"Right at the beginning you meet the dragon, the chthonic spirit, the devil or, as the alchemists called it, the blackness, the nigredo, and this encounter produces suffering..."
~ Carl Jung
"I am an infirm and weak old man, surnamed the dragon; therefore am I shut up in a cave, that I may become ransomed by the kingly crown...A fiery sword inflicts great torments on me; death makes weak my flesh and bones...My soul and my spirit depart; a terrible poison, I am likened to the black raven, for that is the wages of sin; in dust and earth I lie, that out of Three may come One. O soul and spirit leave me not, that I may see again the light of day, and the hero of peace whom the whole world shall behold may arise from me..." ~ Aurelia Occulta Philosophorum
THE GREAT WORK
Alchemy is the Great Work, a process of separation, transformation and integration. This is just as true of the substances worked experimentally in the retort as it is of the personality undergoing the transformative process. You are the alchemical vessel and the contents of your psyche is the means and object of transformation. As the images and substances change, you change too.
There is theory and practice in science, and two applications in alchemy -- spiritual alchemy and experimental alchemy involving literal lab work. You can work either method separately or both in concert. Our true selves are beyond what our conscious awareness alone could ever make of us.
Benchwork is a projective mechanism that mirrors your psychic transformation synchronistically. Projection turns into a clarifying image. You gain an experiential knowledge of the elements and materials of alchemy, rather than just comprehending a concept.
There is a treasure to be discovered. Your psychophysical being is a vessel of the soul and spirit. The physical body is sustained by the energy body, the field body and its zero-point component. You are made of the fabric of spacetime. The alchemical axiom, “As Above, So Below” means there is a universe to explore within yourself and you are not separate from the whole Cosmos in any way.
The raw psychic contents (prima materia) become cooked (ultima materia). There is no quick fix to the accumulated baggage of life. The method works if you do, but you must be motivated, either by passion or despair to enter into such an arcane pursuit. You must dare to seize the noble fruit. The impetus may come from an inexplicable attraction to the experimental alchemical art, life passages, spiritual longing, an illness or dis-ease of body or mind, or both.
The spiritual landscape is changing and alchemy offers a safe harbor for the drifting spirit beyond institutional or cult affiliation. Many paths are vying for participants but alchemy chooses you. It is a self-initiatory path that provides a structure or scaffolding for metaphorical death and rebirth, a generic process described in many traditions. But you must remain dedicated to the process.
In exploring the unknown you are exploring yourself. The journey to wholeness often begins with a retreat – into oneself, your interior nature. The experience can be one of darkness, coldness, the isolation of the self-imposed outsider. Your energy is purposefully turning inward and it is best to follow it, even to amplify that dynamic. Some choose the laboratory, some a therapeutic setting, some plant allies, and others an eclectic self-directed approach.
We all have negative tendencies, self-destructive compulsions, self-sabotaging impulses, or neurotic self-defeating patterns. This is our psychological baggage. In his or her work, the novice alchemist channels both the voluntary and compulsive aspects of the depression that can drive the urge to transform.
The work itself forms a vessel of transformation, a safe place where the alchemist can be fully open to nature and his or her own primordial nature. With alchemy you can work with your thoughts and feelings rather than fighting or avoiding them. Once initiated, the unfolding cycles of the Magnum Opus naturally lead through and beyond the nigredo toward breakthroughs rather than breakdown, emergence rather than emergency.
You must grow and face your fears to solve the problems of multidimensional existence. But to do so you have to make spiritual growth a priority by giving it time and attention. Only your comprehension of the deeper nature of depression, recognizing the call, and your commitment to the conscious struggle for transformation makes it alchemical. Then you rescue the fragmented parts of yourself. Suffering is meaningful. It leads to empathy, which funds active compassion.
TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE
Part of the art of alchemy is decoding your own symbolic language. Depression means you have lost your dream and have yet to reconnect with a new one, with the new images or symbols that can pull you forward toward your future. Primal people call it loss of soul. We recognize it as loss of self-worth.
You hurt so much that you may be convinced you are going to die or even wish you would. But the fantasies of death are telegraphing a metaphorical message. Your old self is on its way out. Getting into this morbid state is the point. You have acute awareness of your mortality. The experience of maximum despair is “hitting bottom”. You are a mess. The good thing is there is nowhere to go but up. What do you want your tombstone to say?
You are metaphorically decomposing. This is the paradoxical flip side of ego inflation, toxic narcissism, and shallow self-absorption. It keeps us from responding to even outstanding opportunities. This crisis is an extraordinary opportunity to re-create your life and world. You have to learn how to use your strengths and skills while you meet multiple challenges and stressors. You need to uncover your buried potential and mine the gold of your buried talents and creativity.
This hero’s depression lifts once you embark on your mission with purpose, based on finding your inner vision. Once you’ve heard the “Call to Adventure” you have enthusiasm, passion, intentionality and direction. You determine to persevere through the crisis, but the road has many trials. The devil comes as chaos, suffering or pain. Psychophysical suffering feels like wandering around in fear and darkness – a dark night of the soul, even a journey to Hell.
The ancient Greek vision of Hades was that of a dark, cold, windy, dry realm. This is a good metaphor of all our early traumas of abandonment, hunger, loss, sorrow and shame that are frozen in the labyrinthine halls of psyche. We cannot meet or accept life's legitimate suffering. We can't grieve these ominous shadows so they pile up on us creating blind spots, despair, denial, and wrongful assumptions. The trouble they cause is their demand to be seen for what they are.
This glacial ice cave houses unresolved issues that continue to affect our relationships with self, others and world. It drives our compulsions for achievement and the pain of loneliness. We all carry the burdens of self-doubt and loneliness. We simply remove ourselves from whatever we cannot or will not process, but they remain alive and powerful though buried or frozen, multiplying in scope and weight as we grow older.
Though lack of unconditional acceptance is a natural part of human experience, these unhealing wounds are the hidden focus of our conscious lives. These early losses hang around frozen in time, as if they are still happening. Simply changing their apparent expression, they obstruct the flow of our lives until we recognize and acknowledge them.
The unhealing wounds of unrealized suffering, self-delusion, addiction, chronic depression, compulsivity, failed relationships and some physical illness present opportunities throughout life to reconcile and resolve what we couldn't heal earlier. The word 'resolve' echoes the alchemical maxim of 'Solve et Cogaula," the liquification and reintegration of essentially frozen psychic energy.
SOUL RETRIEVAL
Heartache and pain, a persistent sense of failure and inadequacy are core human experiences. We feel a hunger or sense we are missing something. The older we get, the more the fear of death creeps in, feeding the desire to numb out and not feel anything at all. Death tempts and attacks us in this predestined confrontation.
This unfinished business locks us into a distorted "virtual" reality, a false self. When we are out of balance and pursue pleasure at any cost, our old wound is showing. If these deepening shadows mess up our lives enough, we are forced to break free and tunnel out of the cocoon of distortions and self-loathing. This deadly and dreaded challenge to your courage can reconnect you with your lost confidence by drawing on transpersonal resources. It is an unavoidable part of the journey to an authentic life.
Constructive discontent can drive our best thoughts, emotions, and actions. But to get to its root you must enter a tomblike passageway, making a journey to “the center of the Earth,” to the center of yourself to gain the treasure, the cure, the grace. This is engagement with power within.
You can't go back so you must go forward. We have the potential to grow beyond mere personal fulfillment to transpersonal experiences. New information you gain from the unconscious helps you create a dynamic new situation, an ever-widening, self-perpetuating cycle that restores flow.
LIVING TRUST
What if you actually believed you are a capable and worthwhile person? How would building and aligning with greater mental, emotional and physical power within impact all facets of your life and relationships? What would life be like if you really opened a new pathway that helps you live, lead and succeed in your purpose, in your essential nature? What is blocking you?
When old defenses no longer work, you must develop new coping skills for developmental challenges. But this initiatory way includes many deaths and rebirths. Nigredo, the blackening, isn’t always the first stage, but may be one of relapse, eclipse or another incubation stage.
Nigredo is a recurrent cycle of desire and frustration with no real beginning. Your energies are sucked from the outer world and turned in on themselves. Normal life is radically disrupted. When you are paralyzed by life there is nothing to do but let go of your control fantasies. An eclipse of the ego offers a way into the deeper energies of the unconscious.
After involuntary or voluntary symbolic death, reborn spirit eventually emerges from the rotting corpse of the old self with its limiting worldview. This death is equivalent to the conception of the legendary Philosopher’s Stone. Death becomes your ally and advisor. Meditators are advised to “die daily” in their practice. The ego is eclipsed but the Stone is born. These trials nourish the Self. Vision expands, wisdom deepens, self matures.
Conscious alchemy offers a direction, an operational roadmap for realizing your highest potential. It is a psychospiritual path, approached experimentally and spiritually. You make the experiment on yourself. It is a whole brain, whole self process, involving both rational and irrational forces.
Psyche has a regressive tendency. If you block the process of growth, depression will recur, again and again. You will regress anytime your work goes awry, you seemingly take a step backward, or circumstances weigh you down. Each octave of work brings exponential results. Over time, you catch yourself in self-defeating acts sooner in the cycle. But the full weight of the dirty business must be born each time disruption intrudes chaotically into your life.
THE NIGREDO
Even the root of the word “alchemy” refers to the black soil of Egypt. This Egypt is an imaginal realm of Hermetic mysteries, which created the dying and rising god Osiris. This root mystery influenced many cultures, including the Eleusinian rites of ancient Greece. Initiatory rebirth is an awakening into a higher life. It is echoed in the rites of Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, and Mithras. Death and spiritual rebirth permeates all the mystery religions. Hermetic texts influenced the growth of European alchemy.
You must bury your old self in that rejuvenating soil for new life to emerge. The nigredo means seeing all through the bleak eyes of depression but it also means “seeing through” the meaning and value of depression. You may belong to a guild of like-minded travellers, but you walk the transformative path alone. It is a solitary journey.
The nigredo is often called the first alchemical operation but there is no distinct order handed down from tradition. It is the first stage of mortificatio – the killing of the old worn out or obsolete personality. Many people seek a spiritual path because of their existential despair. The old self must dissolve, the neurosis must be liquified and reduced to the primal condition.
Only a purging fire will turn this darkness white. It might be the slow heat of a rotting corpse or fetid compost pile but the inner fire is lit. Like a struck flint, flashes of insight ignite the inner fire which leads to searing visions of the truth of your reality and channel your burning desire toward further transformation that brings clarity.
“Something” in you has already died and it’s beginning to stink. This blackening phase of the alchemical process describes a gloomy time of depression. All the signs seem inauspicious. You feel unlucky, caught in a black mood whose origin may be difficult to pinpoint. This is because your current ego attitudes are outdated.
You feel stuck because you aren’t coping or adapting to present circumstances. These feelings may come into your life due to an overload of stress, financial and relationship problems or clinical depression. Depression is a “no love” script. Love may be there but you have lost the capacity to feel it. You wonder in anguish, “Is this all there is?"
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There are three main types of clinical depressive disorders: major depressive disorder, dysthymia (mood swings), and the depressive lows of bipolar disorder. Mania is a defense against depression. Self-deception, loss of self-esteem and anger are part of it. Conventional treatment freely dispenses antidepressants. However, that just adds to the numbing and fakeness.
Paradoxically, both depression and its medical cure cause the personality to become “flat,” libido is suppressed. An integrative approach includes psychosocial therapy to focus on the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal issues behind depression. A wide range of severe side effects make antidepressants alone poor therapy, particularly for seekers in spiritual crisis. The condition must be actively addressed. Medication suppresses self-expression just like addiction kills creativity.
Poison is in the cure. Research has shown that traumatic experiences can change the way the brain works. So can talk therapy, and even more so, process-oriented therapy, which creates flow experiences. Self-regulation can be learned, using resonance techniques, concentration and meditation. The brain undergoes changes similar to those induced by medication but in a positive, adaptive way that arises within.
Whether we speak of normal experience, chronic depression or grief, it is a fact that frustration is deeply woven into the fabric of life. We are riddled with desires and programmed by ideals. Should some of our real or imagined needs be temporarily met, we immediately begin wishing for more.
Chronic dissatisfaction stands in the way of our contentment. Depression has its roots in failure to adjust to lowered expectations of self, others, and a world that doesn’t meet our childish needs. Overcoming the anxiety and depressions of contemporary life requires a drastic change in attitude about what is important and what is not.
MELANCHOLIA
Faust was given power by the Devil on condition that he would never be satisfied with what he has. The advertising myth of the “American Dream” did the same thing to us all. Happiness and satisfaction with life depend on how small a gap you perceives between what you wish for and what you possess. Traditional social shields such as religion, ethnic traditions, patriotism, etc. no longer are effective for many disrupted by the harsh winds of chaos.
Psychic disorder produces conflicting signals that prevent or distract us from carrying out our good intentions. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, depression, ennui, anomie, or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder divert and force our attention obsessively into undesirable directions. Energetic flow is blocked.
The new biological explanations of mental disorders as neurotransmitter imbalances make “good stories” but still lack empirical substantiation. Over-diagnosis has led to a “pharmademic” of over-medicated “pod people.” Yet, research shows that talk therapy and self-regulation techniques are as effective as drugs. The cornerstones of psychotherapy are insight and emotional growth.
If you practice alchemy with the feedback of other practitioners, it functions as a process-oriented therapy, allowing for projection and solution of problems. It is one of the most ancient spiritual paths. Spiritual technologies are the intuitive response to depression and the ever-present fear of death.
Many individuals experience a period of melancholia between the ages of 28 to 30 (and again at 55 to 60). Astrologically, this is triggered by Saturn return, the return of the planet to its original position in the natal chart. Classically, it is a time of disappointment, divorce, soul-searching and reassessment of values and orientation in life. It also holds the seed of mastery.
Saturn governs the aging process, since it represents actualization of more and more of one's potential. It presides over lingering death and chronic illness. At its worst, senex consciousness destroys spontaneity, obsessed by its repetitive disciplines into a narrowness of emotions, mental processes, and activities. Saturn has “control issues” and also rules crises situations of life and the mental cravings of “lust for results.”
The planet Saturn puts the accent on responsibility, in this case responsibility to yourself for fulfilling your potential. Finally, you are truly growing up and your destiny begins to take form. You may be pressured into it, even if you resist it, and this is that black mood's positive intent. Suffering becomes a meaningful path.
You may think you are not depressed because your feelings are numbed out or you make sure you stay too busy to notice. You may just be in denial with workaholism, hypochondria, an antisocial personality, substance abuse problem, hyperactivity, compulsivity, oppositional behavior, rage, or other means of devil may care acting out and acting in. You may try many horizontal escapes, but no matter where you go, there you are.
Having lost the sweet savor of life, you may be feeling older than your years, not in a good way but rigid and humorless with a thousand aches and pains. If chronic degenerative disease isn’t enough, there is the continual futureshock of new technology and morphing culture. If you are young, depression masquerades as anxiety, a conflict of opposites, generational and social rebellion, alienation, and angst.
Your behavior telegraphs the underlying depression to those with eyes to see. They know because they have been through it. Often when you are in it, you can’t see it. You might even unconsciously use your predicament to manipulate the sympathy and attention of others. But something’s just not right and you sense it in every fiber of your being.
GOOD GRIEF
Like Charlie Brown with his dark cloud, most of us have felt depressed in greater or lesser degree. Loss is a psychophysical experience. Since everything changes as time flows, and change entails loss, this is not surprising. Sometimes we lose face through shameful behavior, in our own eyes and those of others. There are some things we just need to face directly even if they are scary or painful.
We grow sad and depressed when a person we love dies or a cherished phase of life passes. Grief is universal and normal. In fact, failure to grieve is evidence of psychological abnormality. Staying stuck in grief is not healthy; it suppresses the immune system and élan vital. Process work in alchemy or therapy is a way of moving on. Mourning is work and takes mental effort.
Mourning is characteristically a state of mind, but it is accompanied by a host of painful somatic sensations that are remarkably uniform. In acute grief we experience physical distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath. We need to sigh, have an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and intense subjective distress we call tension or mental pain.
Traumatic bereavement happens in a variety of settings including personal and community violence, even global catastrophe. Traumatic bereavement contrasts experiences of quiet death at home, without mutilation, bodily distortion, shock, threat, horror, and helplessness. Reactions to the traumatic circumstances are different and predict more adverse health outcomes for the bereaved.
Traumatic stress interferes with the grieving process. The emotional aspect of grief is just as painful as the somatic. Inner anguish, loss of interest in a dreary, empty world, isolation from other people, loneliness and feelings of inner emptiness seem to persist for an eternity. In this way, grief mimics clinical depression.
The call to heal and the call to death are ultimately the same call to formlessness, to return to source. Many disorders display symptoms and imagery which represent stalled stages in the natural consciousness restructuring process. We get stuck in our attempts to heal ourselves.
HEALING PROCESS
Alchemy is a creative, synergetic process. It produces the universal medicine because it is essentially a healing process. Healing is a form of creativity. You become aware of previously unconscious emotions and find patterns in your behavior. You learn discernment and to intervene in our own negative cycle by exercising, practicing your passion, thought-stopping and changing your messages to yourself.
This curative power is that of the wounded healer archetype. Conscious alchemy means self-care, self-regulation, and self-help through a philosophical mindbody lifestyle. In an eclectic approach, you choose what works for you. You apply it with a level of intensity that meets or exceeds the compelling nature of the depression. Knowing yourself is true wisdom and mastering yourself is true power. You learn to modulate your own neurochemistry to improve your quality of life.
UNIVERSAL METASYN
What is described as the Elixir or Universal Medicine is a primary goal of alchemy. Those who take this literally might seek it in spagyrics or the "white gold" of Ormus, but it can just as easily be the mobilization of the body's own healing potential through psychoneuroimmunology and/or the placebo effect.
Arguably, the universal medicine is inextinguishable Light. Science has shown that the basis of biophysics is not chemistry but subtle fields and biophotons. Life has a biophotonic nature which is the basis of the energy body or field body. Life is orchestrated by light. Our atoms, DNA and cells emit light which choreographs our biological processes. An ultrapowerful energy potential radiates from zero point.
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The Void exist within us just as it pervades the entire cosmos. Uncountable photons flicker on and off within us and influence the holographic blueprint of the body that is transcribed through our DNA and gene expression. The essence of healing is a return to the unconditioned state, free of all conditioning and full of primordial energy potential. Coherent light and sonic resonance or cymatics are present at the intracellular level. http://virtualphysics.50megs.com
We can take responsibility for our bodies and health, reclaiming our inherent shamanic, yogic and psychosomatic self-healing power. This alone changes our compassionate spiritual relationship to self, others, and universe. Meditation masters of all traditions speak of this primordial inner light and its brilliant healing power - Medicine Light.
The old-yet-new healing paradigm includes non-material but highly effective shamanic, psychic and spiritual tech that can be applied effectively in any cultural context. Mind is more than a powerless prisoner of the body. It has the power of focus, committed attention and intentionality. When you take responsibility for you own healing and well-being, the self-organizing power of your own hyperdimensional organism creates a positive resonance.
Healing fosters our evolutionary potential. Personal stillpoint is the point of release and reconnection. There is catharsis in the void. We touch our source, drink of the wellspring of life, reboot our system. Potentials are the source of all electromagnetic phenomena. To realize our own potential, we need to learn the art of living well, not just living better.
We can root out the disturbances of the past and transform them into assets, or strengths. We can remove the incongruencies of conflicting agendas in our belief systems and their fallout - our unresolved feelings. When we change our attitudes about ourselves and our past, we initiate a cascade of neurological changes that cover all four domains of our being. We can cultivate deeper awareness. The mind can change what "matters" to embody a healthier self.
The symbols of alchemy represent aspects of yourself. As you manipulate them, the attitudes associated with them morph. You start recovering from acute depression and become less vulnerable to depression in the future. We heal in the ground of our being.
The healing comes from deep inside not outside, adding to a sense of personal empowerment, rather than reliance or dependence on a pill or another person or an intangible belief. Suffering teaches us to nurture hope. Healthier lifestyle choices may follow.
Sadness is a clarifying and relieving emotion that helps us move on after losses. On the other hand, depression is a paralyzing short-circuit of self-doubt and self-recrimination. Sometimes people become depressed because they are not appropriately angry or sad over the situation. Self-reported distress includes the experience of headaches, faintness, loss of sexual appetite, trouble remembering things, uncontrolled temper outbursts, blaming oneself, pains in the lower back, feelings of inferiority to others, feeling hopeless and nauseous.
A BITTER PILL
Some lives are structured around a depressive life script. Often someone occupies the Victim role in the drama triangle, but switches periodically into the Persecutor role, or through magical means into the Rescuer role. The timing of the script is “Wait.” The “wait” is for a magical occurrence that transforms the world without requiring us to take an active part to initiate change. This is the secret meaning of “initiation” – it includes practice. It must be experiential. One must maintain a beginner’s mind.
The blocks include negative self-talk: “Don’t Succeed,” “Don’t Think,” “Don’t Be Close,” “Don’t Have Fun,” and “Don’t Judge Others.” Even “new age guilt”: “It’s my fault I’m sick; I did it to myself.” Medications may suppress symptoms, but turn you into a homogenized “pod person.” By themselves, they are never a cure. As such, they should be used only to recalibrate for the real healing process. They don’t deal with issues of guilt or change self-accusatory self-talk.
An experience we think is worthless can turn out to be the portal to healing, deepening and enriching us, funding our compassion for self and others. “Healing” does not necessarily mean a cure or total elimination of all symptoms. It has to do with a subjective process, difficult to describe. Self-expression has a curative value. As you work with symbols to manifest them, they heal you right back. By its very nature, the alchemical process is irrational, totally individual, and yet linked to a timeless and universal experience.
The therapist gives helpful encouragement to integrate new knowledge, or relate to the unintegratable, and accept it. Alchemy also helps us understand what the unconscious is saying directly. This promotes growth according to our own inner laws, allowing the unfolding of the total potential. Alchemy helps you conduct a similar process of self-initiation on yourself. The guide is your higher self, perhaps in some personification, pulling you toward your future.
REVIVAL
Flow helps us to integrate the self because in a state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings, and all senses are focused on the same goal. Concentration and ritual are forms of meditation – in alchemy, the meditatio. Experience is in harmony. And when the flow episode is over, one feels more “together” than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people, the world and cosmos in general.
Ultimately, it matters little what complex mechanisms help us mobilize our own inner capacity for healing. The fact that we enter the healing process with commitment and intentionality is far more important. Taking the journey toward healing means we recreate the archetypal journey of the hero or heroine, who is neither helpless nor hopeless, but approaches fate with determinism and courage.
NEW SELF-IMAGE
Is pain, grief, depression, fear, anxiety, guilt, relationship or career disappointment, rejection, alienation, inner conflict, victimization, resentment, superstition, rage, self-doubt or procrastination holding you back? Perhaps your old view of your self has become confining, obsolete, role-bound, or you just feel stuck. Are you afraid you can't cope with either failure or success? We always have to adapt to our environment. You have to TRY, even to fail. Maybe you think your 'glory days' are all in the past.
Through conscious alchemy you can retrieve the psychophysical biochemistry of your balanced and peak performance states. You can apply this felt sense to pain management as well as emotional issues or boosting your potential. By recalling vital times, you essentially regress your body chemistry to a more youthful you, and minimize the toxic chemistry of stress. This allows both body and mind to relax and recalibrate homeostasis. You can also draw on the support and encouragement of your evolving future self through imagination.
Just as one incident can create trauma, one healing moment can change that instantly. When we willingly submit to the universal process of death and renewal we activate transpersonal resources that transcend our own limited capacities for restructuring our consciousness and self-healing. Ultimately all healing is self-healing, and implies profound self-acceptance, and can lead to loving acceptance of others and the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. This is the basis of compassion and service.
ENVISION YOUR FUTURE
Perhaps you lack the right tools to help you realize your potential, to make it so. Self-mastery is a continuous process, which can be used to improve your position wherever you currently find yourself. Our motivations come from our beliefs and values. But along the road of life we may not have developed the resources to deploy our skills or have fallen into traps that derail us when we try.
Identifying beliefs and roadblocks is a solid first step to change. You already probably know exactly what you would like to change, and just how you feel when that's not happening, and even where you feel that in your body and what it is like. This technique allows you to get in touch with a metaphor of your situation.
The body is an alchemical furnace. The brain sends chemical messengers -- neurotransmitters of pain and pleasure -- throughout the body. In turn, the body sends signals to the brain about its sense of distress or safety and well-being.
We can intervene intentionally in this cycle at any point. We can use nutrition, exercise, self-talk and psycho-sensory exercises that create the kinds of experiences that move us forward in our goals. This is 21st Century alchemy - intentionally changing body chemistry from both inside and outside. Our organism obeys one of the maxims of information technology: "Garbage In; Garbage Out".
SELF DIRECTION
Studies have shown that the mindbody cannot distinguish imagination from reality in its automatic reactions. The same internal chemistry is produced whether you do something or imagine it, making mind and body truly one. Transform your imagination into reality.
It all starts and ends with imagination - with what you picture in your mind and the self-talk you use to convince yourself what things mean and what to do. This is where you develop vision and create meaning, which leads to purpose and understanding your mission in life. To change your mind, along with the feelings, attitudes and chemistry that it creates, just systematically change your imagination - the image you hold of your self, others, and world.
Inner guidance comes through the intimate connection between the chemistry of your body and that of your mind and moods. We all recognize a gut-feeling when we have it. Health and well-being involves physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions.
A healthy mindbody opens the way to balance, integration, and inner peace, without resorting to personality-distorting medications. Research has shown that therapy is as effective as antidepressants. We all need exercise, affection, and discipline. We also benefit from reflection or self-knowledge. This alchemical investigation of self is a spiritual journey toward increased balance and mastery.
THE SHADOW KNOWS
Your shadow consists of all the baggage you have stuffed into your false self. You are either afraid to show it, or paradoxically compelled to show it in impulsive behavior. Either way, it is out of control. Acting out self-limiting, self-defeating or self-destructive tendencies means the shadow is running the show. Anger, sadness and fear block joy.
When your ego can no longer pursue only its selfish concerns and addictive demands, the Self forces you into a depression to shake up the stagnant order of things. It brings a burning awareness of your shortcomings and inadequacies. To get to the root of these, you need to process old traumas and negative core beliefs that limit you severely. The self appears on your inner stage as the shadow, and confronts you with your inferior traits.
"The head of the Raven" is another traditional name for the nigredo. It corresponds to the encounter with the shadow. Your ego and the shadow must eventually be reconciled. Your restlessness and disorientation come from your conscious experience of conflict between conscious and unconscious drives. The unconscious must be transformed. The Self devours itself and dies, only to rise again when the work is perfected. But feelings of guilt, worthlessness and powerlessness must be suffered and worked through patiently.
The Shadow is a ‘splinter personality’ that prevents you from realizing your unique potential for personal fulfillment. Cowardice, laziness, ambivalence, rashness, dishonesty, envy, greed, lust, vanity, and attachment, and other self-indulgent tendencies will have to be faced directly. The narcissistic shadow is the diametrical opposite of our positive assets. If you are compulsively organized in daily life, the shadow is a slacker. If you are puritanical, the shadow is promiscuous.
Our dark side isn’t necessarily acted out in self-destructive behavior, but if it has no means of self-expression no ego can transform beyond this phase of development. Some form of inner dialogue is useful. You must come to a conscious understanding of those things you have repressed, and have not been able, nor dared to live out. As a symbol of the self, the shadow embodies the primitive, dark background from which we all emerge. But only the ego passes negative judgment on the shadow. The self embraces all opposites, including good and bad.
Highly religious individuals, who tend to over-identify with the great good of the Light, have shadows that may assume the form of a devilish adversary. What may start as good intentions becomes perverted through repression not transformation. But in the broader reality, the shadow gives human existence body and depth. In physics, the brighter the light, the deeper the shadows which are cast by it. The shadow embodies our hidden agendas, ulterior motives and pathologies.
If you do not take responsibility for consciously becoming aware of your shadow traits, you will find them projected onto others (of the same sex) in your environment. You may feel an irrational instinctive hatred for virtual strangers. This is the collective basis of racial prejudice. When you feel any emotion that seems highly exaggerated, it usually means you are projecting. When that extreme emotion is irrational vehemence, you are projecting your own repressed weakness onto others. To do this you must deny a part of yourself and you cannot experience wholeness.
Therefore, in order to continue your process of transformation, you must come to an awareness of your particular shadow characteristics. If you reach down deeply enough, you will find that the shadow is not only negative, but holds your unlived potential for positive change, also.
As you re-own this lost part of yourself, you open a channel between the conscious and the superconscious levels, between the ego and the self. This experience can bring a flood of light, joy, and energy, which brings temporary release from the depression.
Even your psychosomatic symptoms may vanish suddenly. It’s more than placebo effect.
If your personality is not well-grounded you may not be able to assimilate an inflow of light and strength. The alchemist must balance intellect and emotion by using imagination in a controlled way to digest this sudden illuminating insight. For your ego to react with egotism or conceit is to confuse itself with the power of the self. This confusion of levels has the unfortunate effect of creating a self-glorification. Of course, you are divine, but it is Source shining through you.
If you are bedazzled by spiritual truths beyond your mental power to digest, you may become self-deluded and/or victimized by a cult. You need to develop your powers of discrimination. Megalomania is extreme egotism and can lead a person to act out the role of prophet or savior, spurred on by the excitement of his or her own inner awakening.
You may begin experiencing paranormal phenomena, ESP, clairvoyance, or synchronicities (meaningful coincidences). You may have visions of divine beings, or hear voices, or dabble with automatic writing. Be sure to examine any messages of uncommon origin with discrimination. Any messages exalting your personality should be automatically suspect.
Other reactions to spiritual awakening may occur later as doubts fall away and inner security is found. You may be elated for a time, but your personal self was only temporarily overpowered not permanently transformed. When the spiritual influx ebbs away you may be in for trouble from your ego, which desperately seeks to reassert its dominion.
The trap is to judge yourself even more harshly for being merely human. You have not fallen lower than when you began, but you may feel the full fury of the lower drives when their uncontrolled expression is threatened. They may rear their ugly heads with more force than ever.
Another reaction is to deny the value and reality of your spiritual awakening. The inner critic, or skeptic, creates doubts and attempts to label it a fantasy. With bitterness and sarcasm you may rebuke your aspirations and ideals. But when you have had a transformative vision, you cannot deny it for long, and remain healthy. It brings more depression, a sense of unworthiness, and the feeling you are damned. Nigredo can be likened to "going through Hell."
All those in the arts and sciences experience periods of aridity and inability to work. No new inspirations come. You feel cut off from the source of creative flow. The depression and restlessness that result may lead to alcohol or drugs, until or unless the sudden flow of inspiration brings a sense of renewal.
You need to be aware of the true nature of this crisis, and realize that an exalted state cannot be maintained forever. It is no fall from grace, but a natural occurrence that gives you emotional and mental relief from the tensions of inspiration and illumination. After all, you can only digest so much change at once. Instead of staying stuck in the depression you can continue on the path to self-realization.
MEANING & MYSTERY
It is impossible to feel isolated, lonely, and “dead” with a felt sense of revivifying identification, which stems from direct experience of the dynamic whole of reality. It restores our sense of personal wholeness. We are an indivisible part of a flow in the whole field of consciousness. The entire cosmos is contained holographically within us: “As Above; So Below.”
When we become “superconductors” of consciousness, we draw from the spiritual wellsprings of life and health, that which eternally makes the world bloom anew, which brings re-enchantment. The “dam” of depression which has blocked the dynamic flow of life and love cannot withstand this immense healing force forever. It breaks through the “dead void” and one is no longer estranged from the power of the dynamic ground-state of existence, or cosmic unity.
What was lost has been found. The wilderness is no longer barren. Life blossoms and bears fruit. The self is the whole range of psychic phenomena, a psychic organ of perception. The self is transcendent, a center between conscious and unconscious, because it points to an unlimited future and unbound creative expansion of the evolutionary process. It signifies the harmony and balance of various opposing forces. Symbols of the self can be anything the ego recognizes as a greater totality than itself: the androgyne, the diamond body, the flower of life, the Elixir, the Stone.
The average heart beats two billion times and you can change utterly in any one of them. Reclaim your innate capacity for changing the cellular, subatomic, and psychophysical processes of your energy body. WHAT YOU THINK and the excitation level of your overall system changes your chemistry, markedly. We are fluid fields, through which energy and matter dynamically flow and change. Lifestyle, diet, emotional state and consciousness play a huge role in health and disease. We can catalyze our psychophysical homeostasis and spontaneous healing processes, complementing any traditional care we may require.
Restoration of the flow-state comes through identification with the alchemical process. Genius embodies powers greater than our own for no one can ever embody at once all the potential qualities of archetypal Self. But we can become extraordinary by transforming our character like carving a diamond from the rough.
Self is the primordial I AM of Being, as fundamental as inhalation and exhalation. Our lives are defined by their limitations and the strategies we use to cope with and overcome them. The self expresses the unity of the personality as a Whole, our holistic organism. The unconscious, including the mindbody and energy body, is the medium from which the sacred Source flows forth.
This is the serpentine process of healing. It changes us at the quantum, energetic and psychobiological levels. It literally changes our biochemistry. Creative flow states have the power to restructure our consciousness at the most fundamental level. Alchemy is an endless source of creativity, spiritual sustenance, and pleasure. Passion for the Great Work connects you experientially with Mystery.
REFERENCES
Campbell, Joseph (1976), The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen.
Miller, Iona, “Conscious Alchemy,” (2006) consciousalchemy.50megs.com/
Miller, Iona and Graywolf Swinney, (2000) CHAOSOPHY 2000, “Depressive Disorders / Grief and the Consciousness Restructuring Process,” Asklepia Foundation. www.asklepia.org/Chaosophy...onCRP.html
Miller, Iona and Richard Alan Miller (1994), THE MODERN ALCHEMIST: A Guide to Personal Transformation, Phanes Press: Grand Rapids, Michigan. themodernalchemist.chaosmagic.com
I am the Hermetic King resurrected from the sepulcher of the Nigredo. My fire has been drawn out of the darkness; purified and exalted. My expansive fire is Solar by nature and I am called the Son of the Sun. I am the purified and exalted fire of your soul. I am the solar radiance of your consciousness and the true Gold of the philosophers. Blessed are they who have assimilated the inner most nature of this most adorable Fire!
Santiago Caruso
Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of Hell is when you can no longer attain what you could attain. Hell is when you must think and feel and do everything that you know you do not want.
Hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to, and that you yourself are responsible for it. Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful. But the deepest
Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell. That is the ambiguity of the God: he is born from a dark ambiguity and rises to a bright ambiguity. Equivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life. If the left foot does not move, then the right one does, and you move. The God wills this. --Jung, [The Red Book; Page 244]
The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they’re not punishing you, they’re freeing your soul. If you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. If you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth. ~ Meister Eckhart
Hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to, and that you yourself are responsible for it. Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful. But the deepest
Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell. That is the ambiguity of the God: he is born from a dark ambiguity and rises to a bright ambiguity. Equivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life. If the left foot does not move, then the right one does, and you move. The God wills this. --Jung, [The Red Book; Page 244]
The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they’re not punishing you, they’re freeing your soul. If you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. If you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth. ~ Meister Eckhart
OuZo Kim
What is self-DDD?
When we deceive, delude or deny to our self, we mislead our self, we misrepresent or disown what we know to be true, we lie to our self, we refuse to acknowledge that which we know. In Vital Lies, Simple Truths, Daniel Goleman notes that we do not see what it is that we do not see, because:
The mind can protect itself against anxiety by diminishing awareness. This mechanism produces a blind spot: a zone of blocked attention and self-deception. Such blind spots occur at each major level of behaviour from the psychological to the social. (p. 22)
Psychological blind spots create a not-knowing about something. However, in order for a system to recognize what to avoid, deny or mislead, it has to maintain knowledge of what to avoid — what it knows to be true. In other words, deceiving our self requires that we both know and not-know something. This apparent paradox is one of the keys to understanding how self-DDD operates.
The delightfully ambiguous title of Stanley Cohen's book highlights that States of Denial are equally as evident with nations as with individuals:
People, organizations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged. The information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted. Or else the information 'registers' well enough, but its implications -- cognitive, emotional or moral -- are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away. (p. 1)
Cohen goes on to explain how the ability to repress, disavow, push aside or reinterpret is often helpful, even necessary, in the development of our species and of civilisation. For example:
The inhabitants of Beirut, Bogota or Belfast cannot live in a permanent state of heightened awareness that a car bomb may go off at any minute. Some switching off is necessary to get through the round of everyday life. (p. 15)
Some people develop the capacity to switch off, turn a blind eye or fool themselves to such an extent that it limits their well-being and further growth. Like any natural pattern, self-DDD operates within the dynamic balance of a larger whole. Gregory Bateson was fond of saying, "There is always an optimal value beyond which anything is toxic." (Goleman, p. 245). This is why an overdeveloped ability to self-DDD is a feature of many conditions such as anorexia, body dysmorphia, Munchhausen's disease, physically abusive relationships, compulsions, self-harm and addiction.
In less dramatic ways self-DDD features in everyones' life. Being able to deceive and delude ourselves is both natural and something that to some extent we all engage in. The following is a small sample of hundreds of commonly used metaphors and expressions that point to an apparently universal pattern of human behavior:
I don't want to know.
I couldn't take in the news.
It's got nothing to do with me.
Don't make waves.
I looked the other way.
There's nothing I can do about it.
I can't believe this is happening to me.
Ignorance is bliss.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
Brush it under the carpet.
I'm just hoping it isn't going to happen.
I'll just pop in for a quick pint.
Why didn't I listen to my intuition, again?
With a typical conflict or dilemma, we acknowledge both sides and that we don't know how to resolve it -- we do not deny there is a conflict.
While it is usual to think we self-DDD the unpleasant and troubling experiences of life, it is equally possible to deceive ourselves about pleasant experiences. This is often the case when there is an expectation that a pleasant experience will be followed by a painful one. A client said "it only takes me a millisecond to convert a compliment into a criticism." When we enquired "And where does that 'convert a compliment into a criticism' come from?" she replied, "I can't appear to be stuck up — that's a no-no." Accepting a compliment led to the gut-wrenching feeling of being "stuck up". Better to deny any achievement in the first place and maintain the illusion of worthlessness.
The good news is: because of their paradoxical and contradictory nature, self-DDD patterns can be a doorway to the next level of personal development.
When we deceive, delude or deny to our self, we mislead our self, we misrepresent or disown what we know to be true, we lie to our self, we refuse to acknowledge that which we know. In Vital Lies, Simple Truths, Daniel Goleman notes that we do not see what it is that we do not see, because:
The mind can protect itself against anxiety by diminishing awareness. This mechanism produces a blind spot: a zone of blocked attention and self-deception. Such blind spots occur at each major level of behaviour from the psychological to the social. (p. 22)
Psychological blind spots create a not-knowing about something. However, in order for a system to recognize what to avoid, deny or mislead, it has to maintain knowledge of what to avoid — what it knows to be true. In other words, deceiving our self requires that we both know and not-know something. This apparent paradox is one of the keys to understanding how self-DDD operates.
The delightfully ambiguous title of Stanley Cohen's book highlights that States of Denial are equally as evident with nations as with individuals:
People, organizations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged. The information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted. Or else the information 'registers' well enough, but its implications -- cognitive, emotional or moral -- are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away. (p. 1)
Cohen goes on to explain how the ability to repress, disavow, push aside or reinterpret is often helpful, even necessary, in the development of our species and of civilisation. For example:
The inhabitants of Beirut, Bogota or Belfast cannot live in a permanent state of heightened awareness that a car bomb may go off at any minute. Some switching off is necessary to get through the round of everyday life. (p. 15)
Some people develop the capacity to switch off, turn a blind eye or fool themselves to such an extent that it limits their well-being and further growth. Like any natural pattern, self-DDD operates within the dynamic balance of a larger whole. Gregory Bateson was fond of saying, "There is always an optimal value beyond which anything is toxic." (Goleman, p. 245). This is why an overdeveloped ability to self-DDD is a feature of many conditions such as anorexia, body dysmorphia, Munchhausen's disease, physically abusive relationships, compulsions, self-harm and addiction.
In less dramatic ways self-DDD features in everyones' life. Being able to deceive and delude ourselves is both natural and something that to some extent we all engage in. The following is a small sample of hundreds of commonly used metaphors and expressions that point to an apparently universal pattern of human behavior:
I don't want to know.
I couldn't take in the news.
It's got nothing to do with me.
Don't make waves.
I looked the other way.
There's nothing I can do about it.
I can't believe this is happening to me.
Ignorance is bliss.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
Brush it under the carpet.
I'm just hoping it isn't going to happen.
I'll just pop in for a quick pint.
Why didn't I listen to my intuition, again?
With a typical conflict or dilemma, we acknowledge both sides and that we don't know how to resolve it -- we do not deny there is a conflict.
While it is usual to think we self-DDD the unpleasant and troubling experiences of life, it is equally possible to deceive ourselves about pleasant experiences. This is often the case when there is an expectation that a pleasant experience will be followed by a painful one. A client said "it only takes me a millisecond to convert a compliment into a criticism." When we enquired "And where does that 'convert a compliment into a criticism' come from?" she replied, "I can't appear to be stuck up — that's a no-no." Accepting a compliment led to the gut-wrenching feeling of being "stuck up". Better to deny any achievement in the first place and maintain the illusion of worthlessness.
The good news is: because of their paradoxical and contradictory nature, self-DDD patterns can be a doorway to the next level of personal development.
Overview of Satan (Jung)
I do not wish to multiply examples needlessly, but only to make it clear that the figure of Satan, too, has undergone a curious development, from the time of his first undistinguished appearance in the Old Testament texts to his heyday in Christianity.
He achieved notoriety as the personification of the adversary or principle of evil, though by no means for the first time, as we meet him centuries earlier in the ancient Egyptian Set and the Persian Ahriman. Persian influences have been conjectured as mainly responsible for the Christian devil.
But the real reason for the differentiation of this figure lies in the conception of God as the summum bonum, which stands in sharp contrast to the Old Testament view and which, for reasons of psychic balance, inevitably requires the existence of a “lowest evil”. No logical reasons are needed for this, only the natural and unconscious striving for balance and symmetry.
Hence very early, in Clement of Rome, we meet with the conception of Christ as the right hand and the devil as the left hand of God, not to speak of the Judaeo-Christian view which recognized two sons of God, Satan the elder and Christ the younger.
The figure of the devil then rose to such exalted metaphysical heights that he had to be forcibly depotentiated, under the threatening influence of Manichaeism. The depotentiation was effected this time by rationalistic reflection, by a regular tour de force of sophistry which defined evil as a privatio boni.
But that did nothing to stop the belief from arising in many parts of Europe during the eleventh century, mainly under the influence of the Catharists, that it was not God but the devil who had created the world.
In this way the archetype of the imperfect demiurge, who had enjoyed official recognition in Gnosticism, reappeared in altered guise. (The corresponding archetype is probably to be found in the cosmogonic jester of primitive peoples.)
With the extermination of the heretics that dragged on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an uneasy calm ensued, but the Reformation thrust the figure of Satan once more into the foreground. I would only mention Jakob Bohme, who sketched a picture of evil which leaves the privatio boni pale by comparison.
The same can be said of Milton. He inhabits the same mental climate. As for Bohme, although he was not a direct descendant of alchemical philosophy, whose importance is still grossly underrated today, he certainly took over a number of its leading ideas, among them the specific recognition of Satan, who was exalted to a cosmic figure of first rank in Milton, even emancipating himself from his subordinate role as the left hand of God (the role assigned to him by Clement).
Milton goes even further than Bohme and apostrophizes the devil as the true principium individuationis, a concept which had been anticipated by the alchemists some time before.
To mention only one example: (He rises from earth to heaven and descends again to earth, and receives into himself the power of above and below. Thus thou wilt have the glory of the whole world.) The quotation comes from the famous alchemical classic, the Tabula Smaragdina, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, whose authority remained unchallenged for more than thirteen centuries of alchemical thought.
His words refer not to Satan, but to the filius philosophorum, whose symbolism, as I believe I have shown, coincides with that of the psychological "self."
The “filius” of the alchemists is one of the numerous manifestations of Mercurius, who is called "duplex" and "ambiguous" and is also known outside alchemy as "capable of anything”. His "dark" half has an obvious affinity with Lucifer. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Forward to Werblowsky’s “Lucifer and Prometheus,” Pages 312-314, Paragraph 470.
I do not wish to multiply examples needlessly, but only to make it clear that the figure of Satan, too, has undergone a curious development, from the time of his first undistinguished appearance in the Old Testament texts to his heyday in Christianity.
He achieved notoriety as the personification of the adversary or principle of evil, though by no means for the first time, as we meet him centuries earlier in the ancient Egyptian Set and the Persian Ahriman. Persian influences have been conjectured as mainly responsible for the Christian devil.
But the real reason for the differentiation of this figure lies in the conception of God as the summum bonum, which stands in sharp contrast to the Old Testament view and which, for reasons of psychic balance, inevitably requires the existence of a “lowest evil”. No logical reasons are needed for this, only the natural and unconscious striving for balance and symmetry.
Hence very early, in Clement of Rome, we meet with the conception of Christ as the right hand and the devil as the left hand of God, not to speak of the Judaeo-Christian view which recognized two sons of God, Satan the elder and Christ the younger.
The figure of the devil then rose to such exalted metaphysical heights that he had to be forcibly depotentiated, under the threatening influence of Manichaeism. The depotentiation was effected this time by rationalistic reflection, by a regular tour de force of sophistry which defined evil as a privatio boni.
But that did nothing to stop the belief from arising in many parts of Europe during the eleventh century, mainly under the influence of the Catharists, that it was not God but the devil who had created the world.
In this way the archetype of the imperfect demiurge, who had enjoyed official recognition in Gnosticism, reappeared in altered guise. (The corresponding archetype is probably to be found in the cosmogonic jester of primitive peoples.)
With the extermination of the heretics that dragged on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an uneasy calm ensued, but the Reformation thrust the figure of Satan once more into the foreground. I would only mention Jakob Bohme, who sketched a picture of evil which leaves the privatio boni pale by comparison.
The same can be said of Milton. He inhabits the same mental climate. As for Bohme, although he was not a direct descendant of alchemical philosophy, whose importance is still grossly underrated today, he certainly took over a number of its leading ideas, among them the specific recognition of Satan, who was exalted to a cosmic figure of first rank in Milton, even emancipating himself from his subordinate role as the left hand of God (the role assigned to him by Clement).
Milton goes even further than Bohme and apostrophizes the devil as the true principium individuationis, a concept which had been anticipated by the alchemists some time before.
To mention only one example: (He rises from earth to heaven and descends again to earth, and receives into himself the power of above and below. Thus thou wilt have the glory of the whole world.) The quotation comes from the famous alchemical classic, the Tabula Smaragdina, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, whose authority remained unchallenged for more than thirteen centuries of alchemical thought.
His words refer not to Satan, but to the filius philosophorum, whose symbolism, as I believe I have shown, coincides with that of the psychological "self."
The “filius” of the alchemists is one of the numerous manifestations of Mercurius, who is called "duplex" and "ambiguous" and is also known outside alchemy as "capable of anything”. His "dark" half has an obvious affinity with Lucifer. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Forward to Werblowsky’s “Lucifer and Prometheus,” Pages 312-314, Paragraph 470.
Jean Delville, The Treasures of Satan, 1894
Therapy as an Alchemical Process: Mortificatio Paul Kiritsis - Wednesday, December 05, 2012 The mortificatio: the most negative operation in alchemy.The seventh stage of the therapeutic process is a recapitulation of the first (the nigredo) where the matter in the alembic is gradually reduced to its primordial, undifferentiated state of prima materia by manner of incineration. Alchemists often imagined that the vapour condensing at the top of the vessel during this phase was the liberated ‘soul’ of the metal, chemical, or substance undergoing blackening and putrefaction. What this means in psychological terms is that the integrated constellation of unified Oneness achieved during the preceding lesser conjunctio has reached critical mass and has spontaneously activated its polar opposite. The switch back to multiplication and further differentiation brings to light more dross and some of the deeper shadows of the personality that the first nigredo wasn’t able to liquidate. If the analysand wishes to penetrate further and achieve individuation and that illusive state of illumination, any pre-existing and newly formed projections that appropriate transpersonal energies to fulfil the ego’s own personal needs, drives, gains, demands, and lower-level pleasures must be obliterated and wiped clean from the psyche’s innately wired software programs. Failure to consolidate here means a death sentence for the client-counsellor synergy and the therapeutic endeavour as a whole.Left unaided, individuation works quite like a set of dominoes or a pebble being dropped in the midst of oceanic doldrums. One act sets in motion the entire process. Thus the inner hermetic fires which ‘cooked’ the ego and purged it of the aforementioned contaminations in the first nigredo are resurrected temporarily in the second to duplicate their corrosive action again. Here, at the deepest level of the psyche, the transition to mortificatio is articulated telepathically by the corroborating dreambody through nocturnal visions and images of overflowing toilets, couples or individuals being beheaded, eviscerations, mutilations, flagellations, and all other modes of torture, suffering, and death. As the darkest operation in alchemy, mortificatio can be quite an overwhelming and disheartening experience. But a force that can so readily depress the human soul is also liable to raise it to heights unfathomable and imperceptible to its sister operations. What the ego perceives as a personal defeat is really an undisclosed victory for the Self, for there can be no flowering of consciousness from the seedy womb without periodic surrenders to the negative experience of Christ-like passion and self-sacrifice. One cannot self-actualize without the pathos and threnos of suffering.In transpersonal psychotherapy mortificatio can be equated with the realization that, just like everything else subject to the cosmic cycles of birth, death and regeneration, the counsellor-client synergy has an indefinite lifespan and will soon come to an end. In this way it mimics relationships built in the real world which eventually climax and run aground onto stagnant reefs once the interacting forces, the projected psychological makeup of two individuals, have exhausted one another’s potential compatibilities. When performed contentiously, correctly and with much panache, relationships with professional grounding can be just as meaningful as personal ones and involve the transference and countertransference of gut-level sentiments like love, consecration, and loyalty. Furthermore, their predilection to eliciting productivity, purposiveness, meaningfulness, lucidity, and freshness in life by exalting order and raising their subject to ecstatic heights from whence he or she might behold a spiritual alpenglow is something that even the mightiest in resolve would struggle hard to abandon.A chief aim of counselling is to propagate the opinion that a degree of self-love isn’t aberrant or undesirable; in fact, it’s a necessary precursor to the development of a confidence that enables one to act into the environment without the harassment and stress that comes from being the owner of an overbearing conscience or nagging self-doubts. Another of its aims is to encourage self-reliance and poise. As a general rule effective therapy can be a very a liberating and empowering experience, originating attitudes to life worthy of eternal embracement. We can also define it as an artificial or artificial set of circumstances that work with the inner realm (not exclusively though) to make psychospiritual gold from the lead of neuroses, unusual addictions and fixations, and negative mental states. From this perspective it’s not difficult to understand why termination of the process is perceived as a loss by the analysand and kicks up about as much emotional dust as what the ending of a natural relationship does.All things considered, mortificatio means that all the constituent parameters that made therapy a habitual and stable part of the client’s life–time, place of appointment, and level of intensity–are now dissolving and the processes of healing, reintegration, and the resolution of conflicts will either go on unaided in the natural world or enter into communion with a different counsellor. A good counsellor knows when this symbolic death is imminent and will do everything in his or her power to ensure that positive changes achieved during hermetically sealed operations in the counselling room are smoothly and subtlety transliterated into a dialect comprehensible to the rhythms and cycles of real life. The better this is done, the less likelihood there is of the analysand suffering another self-sabotaging setback, regression, or crisis in self-esteem. Of course the weight of making these transitions concrete in the real world is the sole responsibility of the analysand. The counsellor opens up all viable ways to healing through therapy yet all pivotal decision-making is faithfully left to the intuitive devices of the analysand. In the end, whatever course of action he or she chooses to take is going to involve making a choice or a series of choices. As we so clearly witnessed from our phenomenological exploration of madness and hallucinations, building a proactive future is all about making premeditated choices and subsequently taking actions compatible with one’s natural inclinations and inner life.There can be no doubt that those individuals who remain motionless or hesitant for too long without going this or that way end up suffering dire consequences. But linear progression along the multifaceted therapeutic cycle from the death and defeat associated with nigredo to the comprehensive and contemplative vision of albedo is no reassurance of salvation either. Just as white contains the latent seeds of darkness and creation those of destruction, so too does a new perspective or evolutionary standpoint in life contain within it the very real potential for a second devolution and dismemberment at the hands of the psyche’s own inner doubting Thomas. New ways of thinking can slip back into rusty old psychic frameworks, personal relationships might be reassessed under the mediation of a far more critical and judgemental eye, and the problem of transference and countertransference can rear its head in more prominent ways than before.This second baptism into the deleterious fires of torture, death, and decomposition is always bound to stir up overwhelming, fiery emotions like frustration and anger. The analysand might voice these sentiments through negative declarations like: “Why has this issue come up again?”, “Why the same feelings again as before?”, or “I feel like we’re just going around and around in circles.” It’s important for the facilitating therapist to address and dissolve thought-desires of this colour and intensity in the counselling sessions preceding termination otherwise the client can leave feeling that the psychological synergy with the counsellor hasn’t been terminated; that business remains incomplete; and that he or she is free to walk back into therapy from the unstipulated pause at any time. Actually, the critical importance of hermetically sealing termination through the illumination of boundaries and conditions cannot be stressed enough!
The seventh stage of the therapeutic process is a recapitulation of the first (the nigredo) where the matter in the alembic is gradually reduced to its primordial, undifferentiated state of prima materia by manner of incineration. Alchemists often imagined that the vapour condensing at the top of the vessel during this phase was the liberated ‘soul’ of the metal, chemical, or substance undergoing blackening and putrefaction. What this means in psychological terms is that the integrated constellation of unified Oneness achieved during the preceding lesser conjunctio has reached critical mass and has spontaneously activated its polar opposite. The switch back to multiplication and further differentiation brings to light more dross and some of the deeper shadows of the personality that the first nigredo wasn’t able to liquidate. If the analysand wishes to penetrate further and achieve individuation and that illusive state of illumination, any pre-existing and newly formed projections that appropriate transpersonal energies to fulfil the ego’s own personal needs, drives, gains, demands, and lower-level pleasures must be obliterated and wiped clean from the psyche’s innately wired software programs. Failure to consolidate here means a death sentence for the client-counsellor synergy and the therapeutic endeavour as a whole.
Left unaided, individuation works quite like a set of dominoes or a pebble being dropped in the midst of oceanic doldrums. One act sets in motion the entire process. Thus the inner hermetic fires which ‘cooked’ the ego and purged it of the aforementioned contaminations in the first nigredo are resurrected temporarily in the second to duplicate their corrosive action again. Here, at the deepest level of the psyche, the transition to mortificatio is articulated telepathically by the corroborating dreambody through nocturnal visions and images of overflowing toilets, couples or individuals being beheaded, eviscerations, mutilations, flagellations, and all other modes of torture, suffering, and death. As the darkest operation in alchemy, mortificatio can be quite an overwhelming and disheartening experience. But a force that can so readily depress the human soul is also liable to raise it to heights unfathomable and imperceptible to its sister operations. What the ego perceives as a personal defeat is really an undisclosed victory for the Self, for there can be no flowering of consciousness from the seedy womb without periodic surrenders to the negative experience of Christ-like passion and self-sacrifice. One cannot self-actualize without the pathos and threnos of suffering.
In transpersonal psychotherapy mortificatio can be equated with the realization that, just like everything else subject to the cosmic cycles of birth, death and regeneration, the counsellor-client synergy has an indefinite lifespan and will soon come to an end. In this way it mimics relationships built in the real world which eventually climax and run aground onto stagnant reefs once the interacting forces, the projected psychological makeup of two individuals, have exhausted one another’s potential compatibilities. When performed contentiously, correctly and with much panache, relationships with professional grounding can be just as meaningful as personal ones and involve the transference and countertransference of gut-level sentiments like love, consecration, and loyalty. Furthermore, their predilection to eliciting productivity, purposiveness, meaningfulness, lucidity, and freshness in life by exalting order and raising their subject to ecstatic heights from whence he or she might behold a spiritual alpenglow is something that even the mightiest in resolve would struggle hard to abandon.
A chief aim of counselling is to propagate the opinion that a degree of self-love isn’t aberrant or undesirable; in fact, it’s a necessary precursor to the development of a confidence that enables one to act into the environment without the harassment and stress that comes from being the owner of an overbearing conscience or nagging self-doubts. Another of its aims is to encourage self-reliance and poise. As a general rule effective therapy can be a very a liberating and empowering experience, originating attitudes to life worthy of eternal embracement. We can also define it as an artificial or artificial set of circumstances that work with the inner realm (not exclusively though) to make psychospiritual gold from the lead of neuroses, unusual addictions and fixations, and negative mental states. From this perspective it’s not difficult to understand why termination of the process is perceived as a loss by the analysand and kicks up about as much emotional dust as what the ending of a natural relationship does.
All things considered, mortificatio means that all the constituent parameters that made therapy a habitual and stable part of the client’s life–time, place of appointment, and level of intensity–are now dissolving and the processes of healing, reintegration, and the resolution of conflicts will either go on unaided in the natural world or enter into communion with a different counsellor. A good counsellor knows when this symbolic death is imminent and will do everything in his or her power to ensure that positive changes achieved during hermetically sealed operations in the counselling room are smoothly and subtlety transliterated into a dialect comprehensible to the rhythms and cycles of real life. The better this is done, the less likelihood there is of the analysand suffering another self-sabotaging setback, regression, or crisis in self-esteem. Of course the weight of making these transitions concrete in the real world is the sole responsibility of the analysand. The counsellor opens up all viable ways to healing through therapy yet all pivotal decision-making is faithfully left to the intuitive devices of the analysand. In the end, whatever course of action he or she chooses to take is going to involve making a choice or a series of choices. As we so clearly witnessed from our phenomenological exploration of madness and hallucinations, building a proactive future is all about making premeditated choices and subsequently taking actions compatible with one’s natural inclinations and inner life.
There can be no doubt that those individuals who remain motionless or hesitant for too long without going this or that way end up suffering dire consequences. But linear progression along the multifaceted therapeutic cycle from the death and defeat associated with nigredo to the comprehensive and contemplative vision of albedo is no reassurance of salvation either. Just as white contains the latent seeds of darkness and creation those of destruction, so too does a new perspective or evolutionary standpoint in life contain within it the very real potential for a second devolution and dismemberment at the hands of the psyche’s own inner doubting Thomas. New ways of thinking can slip back into rusty old psychic frameworks, personal relationships might be reassessed under the mediation of a far more critical and judgemental eye, and the problem of transference and countertransference can rear its head in more prominent ways than before.
This second baptism into the deleterious fires of torture, death, and decomposition is always bound to stir up overwhelming, fiery emotions like frustration and anger. The analysand might voice these sentiments through negative declarations like: “Why has this issue come up again?”, “Why the same feelings again as before?”, or “I feel like we’re just going around and around in circles.” It’s important for the facilitating therapist to address and dissolve thought-desires of this colour and intensity in the counselling sessions preceding termination otherwise the client can leave feeling that the psychological synergy with the counsellor hasn’t been terminated; that business remains incomplete; and that he or she is free to walk back into therapy from the unstipulated pause at any time. Actually, the critical importance of hermetically sealing termination through the illumination of boundaries and conditions cannot be stressed enough!
The seventh stage of the therapeutic process is a recapitulation of the first (the nigredo) where the matter in the alembic is gradually reduced to its primordial, undifferentiated state of prima materia by manner of incineration. Alchemists often imagined that the vapour condensing at the top of the vessel during this phase was the liberated ‘soul’ of the metal, chemical, or substance undergoing blackening and putrefaction. What this means in psychological terms is that the integrated constellation of unified Oneness achieved during the preceding lesser conjunctio has reached critical mass and has spontaneously activated its polar opposite. The switch back to multiplication and further differentiation brings to light more dross and some of the deeper shadows of the personality that the first nigredo wasn’t able to liquidate. If the analysand wishes to penetrate further and achieve individuation and that illusive state of illumination, any pre-existing and newly formed projections that appropriate transpersonal energies to fulfil the ego’s own personal needs, drives, gains, demands, and lower-level pleasures must be obliterated and wiped clean from the psyche’s innately wired software programs. Failure to consolidate here means a death sentence for the client-counsellor synergy and the therapeutic endeavour as a whole.
Left unaided, individuation works quite like a set of dominoes or a pebble being dropped in the midst of oceanic doldrums. One act sets in motion the entire process. Thus the inner hermetic fires which ‘cooked’ the ego and purged it of the aforementioned contaminations in the first nigredo are resurrected temporarily in the second to duplicate their corrosive action again. Here, at the deepest level of the psyche, the transition to mortificatio is articulated telepathically by the corroborating dreambody through nocturnal visions and images of overflowing toilets, couples or individuals being beheaded, eviscerations, mutilations, flagellations, and all other modes of torture, suffering, and death. As the darkest operation in alchemy, mortificatio can be quite an overwhelming and disheartening experience. But a force that can so readily depress the human soul is also liable to raise it to heights unfathomable and imperceptible to its sister operations. What the ego perceives as a personal defeat is really an undisclosed victory for the Self, for there can be no flowering of consciousness from the seedy womb without periodic surrenders to the negative experience of Christ-like passion and self-sacrifice. One cannot self-actualize without the pathos and threnos of suffering.
In transpersonal psychotherapy mortificatio can be equated with the realization that, just like everything else subject to the cosmic cycles of birth, death and regeneration, the counsellor-client synergy has an indefinite lifespan and will soon come to an end. In this way it mimics relationships built in the real world which eventually climax and run aground onto stagnant reefs once the interacting forces, the projected psychological makeup of two individuals, have exhausted one another’s potential compatibilities. When performed contentiously, correctly and with much panache, relationships with professional grounding can be just as meaningful as personal ones and involve the transference and countertransference of gut-level sentiments like love, consecration, and loyalty. Furthermore, their predilection to eliciting productivity, purposiveness, meaningfulness, lucidity, and freshness in life by exalting order and raising their subject to ecstatic heights from whence he or she might behold a spiritual alpenglow is something that even the mightiest in resolve would struggle hard to abandon.
A chief aim of counselling is to propagate the opinion that a degree of self-love isn’t aberrant or undesirable; in fact, it’s a necessary precursor to the development of a confidence that enables one to act into the environment without the harassment and stress that comes from being the owner of an overbearing conscience or nagging self-doubts. Another of its aims is to encourage self-reliance and poise. As a general rule effective therapy can be a very a liberating and empowering experience, originating attitudes to life worthy of eternal embracement. We can also define it as an artificial or artificial set of circumstances that work with the inner realm (not exclusively though) to make psychospiritual gold from the lead of neuroses, unusual addictions and fixations, and negative mental states. From this perspective it’s not difficult to understand why termination of the process is perceived as a loss by the analysand and kicks up about as much emotional dust as what the ending of a natural relationship does.
All things considered, mortificatio means that all the constituent parameters that made therapy a habitual and stable part of the client’s life–time, place of appointment, and level of intensity–are now dissolving and the processes of healing, reintegration, and the resolution of conflicts will either go on unaided in the natural world or enter into communion with a different counsellor. A good counsellor knows when this symbolic death is imminent and will do everything in his or her power to ensure that positive changes achieved during hermetically sealed operations in the counselling room are smoothly and subtlety transliterated into a dialect comprehensible to the rhythms and cycles of real life. The better this is done, the less likelihood there is of the analysand suffering another self-sabotaging setback, regression, or crisis in self-esteem. Of course the weight of making these transitions concrete in the real world is the sole responsibility of the analysand. The counsellor opens up all viable ways to healing through therapy yet all pivotal decision-making is faithfully left to the intuitive devices of the analysand. In the end, whatever course of action he or she chooses to take is going to involve making a choice or a series of choices. As we so clearly witnessed from our phenomenological exploration of madness and hallucinations, building a proactive future is all about making premeditated choices and subsequently taking actions compatible with one’s natural inclinations and inner life.
There can be no doubt that those individuals who remain motionless or hesitant for too long without going this or that way end up suffering dire consequences. But linear progression along the multifaceted therapeutic cycle from the death and defeat associated with nigredo to the comprehensive and contemplative vision of albedo is no reassurance of salvation either. Just as white contains the latent seeds of darkness and creation those of destruction, so too does a new perspective or evolutionary standpoint in life contain within it the very real potential for a second devolution and dismemberment at the hands of the psyche’s own inner doubting Thomas. New ways of thinking can slip back into rusty old psychic frameworks, personal relationships might be reassessed under the mediation of a far more critical and judgemental eye, and the problem of transference and countertransference can rear its head in more prominent ways than before.
This second baptism into the deleterious fires of torture, death, and decomposition is always bound to stir up overwhelming, fiery emotions like frustration and anger. The analysand might voice these sentiments through negative declarations like: “Why has this issue come up again?”, “Why the same feelings again as before?”, or “I feel like we’re just going around and around in circles.” It’s important for the facilitating therapist to address and dissolve thought-desires of this colour and intensity in the counselling sessions preceding termination otherwise the client can leave feeling that the psychological synergy with the counsellor hasn’t been terminated; that business remains incomplete; and that he or she is free to walk back into therapy from the unstipulated pause at any time. Actually, the critical importance of hermetically sealing termination through the illumination of boundaries and conditions cannot be stressed enough!
The seventh stage of the therapeutic process is a recapitulation of the first (the nigredo) where the matter in the alembic is gradually reduced to its primordial, undifferentiated state of prima materia by manner of incineration. Alchemists often imagined that the vapour condensing at the top of the vessel during this phase was the liberated ‘soul’ of the metal, chemical, or substance undergoing blackening and putrefaction. What this means in psychological terms is that the integrated constellation of unified Oneness achieved during the preceding lesser conjunctio has reached critical mass and has spontaneously activated its polar opposite. The switch back to multiplication and further differentiation brings to light more dross and some of the deeper shadows of the personality that the first nigredo wasn’t able to liquidate. If the analysand wishes to penetrate further and achieve individuation and that illusive state of illumination, any pre-existing and newly formed projections that appropriate transpersonal energies to fulfil the ego’s own personal needs, drives, gains, demands, and lower-level pleasures must be obliterated and wiped clean from the psyche’s innately wired software programs. Failure to consolidate here means a death sentence for the client-counsellor synergy and the therapeutic endeavour as a whole.
Left unaided, individuation works quite like a set of dominoes or a pebble being dropped in the midst of oceanic doldrums. One act sets in motion the entire process. Thus the inner hermetic fires which ‘cooked’ the ego and purged it of the aforementioned contaminations in the first nigredo are resurrected temporarily in the second to duplicate their corrosive action again. Here, at the deepest level of the psyche, the transition to mortificatio is articulated telepathically by the corroborating dreambody through nocturnal visions and images of overflowing toilets, couples or individuals being beheaded, eviscerations, mutilations, flagellations, and all other modes of torture, suffering, and death. As the darkest operation in alchemy, mortificatio can be quite an overwhelming and disheartening experience. But a force that can so readily depress the human soul is also liable to raise it to heights unfathomable and imperceptible to its sister operations. What the ego perceives as a personal defeat is really an undisclosed victory for the Self, for there can be no flowering of consciousness from the seedy womb without periodic surrenders to the negative experience of Christ-like passion and self-sacrifice. One cannot self-actualize without the pathos and threnos of suffering.
In transpersonal psychotherapy mortificatio can be equated with the realization that, just like everything else subject to the cosmic cycles of birth, death and regeneration, the counsellor-client synergy has an indefinite lifespan and will soon come to an end. In this way it mimics relationships built in the real world which eventually climax and run aground onto stagnant reefs once the interacting forces, the projected psychological makeup of two individuals, have exhausted one another’s potential compatibilities. When performed contentiously, correctly and with much panache, relationships with professional grounding can be just as meaningful as personal ones and involve the transference and countertransference of gut-level sentiments like love, consecration, and loyalty. Furthermore, their predilection to eliciting productivity, purposiveness, meaningfulness, lucidity, and freshness in life by exalting order and raising their subject to ecstatic heights from whence he or she might behold a spiritual alpenglow is something that even the mightiest in resolve would struggle hard to abandon.
A chief aim of counselling is to propagate the opinion that a degree of self-love isn’t aberrant or undesirable; in fact, it’s a necessary precursor to the development of a confidence that enables one to act into the environment without the harassment and stress that comes from being the owner of an overbearing conscience or nagging self-doubts. Another of its aims is to encourage self-reliance and poise. As a general rule effective therapy can be a very a liberating and empowering experience, originating attitudes to life worthy of eternal embracement. We can also define it as an artificial or artificial set of circumstances that work with the inner realm (not exclusively though) to make psychospiritual gold from the lead of neuroses, unusual addictions and fixations, and negative mental states. From this perspective it’s not difficult to understand why termination of the process is perceived as a loss by the analysand and kicks up about as much emotional dust as what the ending of a natural relationship does.
All things considered, mortificatio means that all the constituent parameters that made therapy a habitual and stable part of the client’s life–time, place of appointment, and level of intensity–are now dissolving and the processes of healing, reintegration, and the resolution of conflicts will either go on unaided in the natural world or enter into communion with a different counsellor. A good counsellor knows when this symbolic death is imminent and will do everything in his or her power to ensure that positive changes achieved during hermetically sealed operations in the counselling room are smoothly and subtlety transliterated into a dialect comprehensible to the rhythms and cycles of real life. The better this is done, the less likelihood there is of the analysand suffering another self-sabotaging setback, regression, or crisis in self-esteem. Of course the weight of making these transitions concrete in the real world is the sole responsibility of the analysand. The counsellor opens up all viable ways to healing through therapy yet all pivotal decision-making is faithfully left to the intuitive devices of the analysand. In the end, whatever course of action he or she chooses to take is going to involve making a choice or a series of choices. As we so clearly witnessed from our phenomenological exploration of madness and hallucinations, building a proactive future is all about making premeditated choices and subsequently taking actions compatible with one’s natural inclinations and inner life.
There can be no doubt that those individuals who remain motionless or hesitant for too long without going this or that way end up suffering dire consequences. But linear progression along the multifaceted therapeutic cycle from the death and defeat associated with nigredo to the comprehensive and contemplative vision of albedo is no reassurance of salvation either. Just as white contains the latent seeds of darkness and creation those of destruction, so too does a new perspective or evolutionary standpoint in life contain within it the very real potential for a second devolution and dismemberment at the hands of the psyche’s own inner doubting Thomas. New ways of thinking can slip back into rusty old psychic frameworks, personal relationships might be reassessed under the mediation of a far more critical and judgemental eye, and the problem of transference and countertransference can rear its head in more prominent ways than before.
This second baptism into the deleterious fires of torture, death, and decomposition is always bound to stir up overwhelming, fiery emotions like frustration and anger. The analysand might voice these sentiments through negative declarations like: “Why has this issue come up again?”, “Why the same feelings again as before?”, or “I feel like we’re just going around and around in circles.” It’s important for the facilitating therapist to address and dissolve thought-desires of this colour and intensity in the counselling sessions preceding termination otherwise the client can leave feeling that the psychological synergy with the counsellor hasn’t been terminated; that business remains incomplete; and that he or she is free to walk back into therapy from the unstipulated pause at any time. Actually, the critical importance of hermetically sealing termination through the illumination of boundaries and conditions cannot be stressed enough!
The seventh stage of the therapeutic process is a recapitulation of the first (the nigredo) where the matter in the alembic is gradually reduced to its primordial, undifferentiated state of prima materia by manner of incineration. Alchemists often imagined that the vapour condensing at the top of the vessel during this phase was the liberated ‘soul’ of the metal, chemical, or substance undergoing blackening and putrefaction. What this means in psychological terms is that the integrated constellation of unified Oneness achieved during the preceding lesser conjunctio has reached critical mass and has spontaneously activated its polar opposite. The switch back to multiplication and further differentiation brings to light more dross and some of the deeper shadows of the personality that the first nigredo wasn’t able to liquidate. If the analysand wishes to penetrate further and achieve individuation and that illusive state of illumination, any pre-existing and newly formed projections that appropriate transpersonal energies to fulfil the ego’s own personal needs, drives, gains, demands, and lower-level pleasures must be obliterated and wiped clean from the psyche’s innately wired software programs. Failure to consolidate here means a death sentence for the client-counsellor synergy and the therapeutic endeavour as a whole.
Left unaided, individuation works quite like a set of dominoes or a pebble being dropped in the midst of oceanic doldrums. One act sets in motion the entire process. Thus the inner hermetic fires which ‘cooked’ the ego and purged it of the aforementioned contaminations in the first nigredo are resurrected temporarily in the second to duplicate their corrosive action again. Here, at the deepest level of the psyche, the transition to mortificatio is articulated telepathically by the corroborating dreambody through nocturnal visions and images of overflowing toilets, couples or individuals being beheaded, eviscerations, mutilations, flagellations, and all other modes of torture, suffering, and death. As the darkest operation in alchemy, mortificatio can be quite an overwhelming and disheartening experience. But a force that can so readily depress the human soul is also liable to raise it to heights unfathomable and imperceptible to its sister operations. What the ego perceives as a personal defeat is really an undisclosed victory for the Self, for there can be no flowering of consciousness from the seedy womb without periodic surrenders to the negative experience of Christ-like passion and self-sacrifice. One cannot self-actualize without the pathos and threnos of suffering.
In transpersonal psychotherapy mortificatio can be equated with the realization that, just like everything else subject to the cosmic cycles of birth, death and regeneration, the counsellor-client synergy has an indefinite lifespan and will soon come to an end. In this way it mimics relationships built in the real world which eventually climax and run aground onto stagnant reefs once the interacting forces, the projected psychological makeup of two individuals, have exhausted one another’s potential compatibilities. When performed contentiously, correctly and with much panache, relationships with professional grounding can be just as meaningful as personal ones and involve the transference and countertransference of gut-level sentiments like love, consecration, and loyalty. Furthermore, their predilection to eliciting productivity, purposiveness, meaningfulness, lucidity, and freshness in life by exalting order and raising their subject to ecstatic heights from whence he or she might behold a spiritual alpenglow is something that even the mightiest in resolve would struggle hard to abandon.
A chief aim of counselling is to propagate the opinion that a degree of self-love isn’t aberrant or undesirable; in fact, it’s a necessary precursor to the development of a confidence that enables one to act into the environment without the harassment and stress that comes from being the owner of an overbearing conscience or nagging self-doubts. Another of its aims is to encourage self-reliance and poise. As a general rule effective therapy can be a very a liberating and empowering experience, originating attitudes to life worthy of eternal embracement. We can also define it as an artificial or artificial set of circumstances that work with the inner realm (not exclusively though) to make psychospiritual gold from the lead of neuroses, unusual addictions and fixations, and negative mental states. From this perspective it’s not difficult to understand why termination of the process is perceived as a loss by the analysand and kicks up about as much emotional dust as what the ending of a natural relationship does.
All things considered, mortificatio means that all the constituent parameters that made therapy a habitual and stable part of the client’s life–time, place of appointment, and level of intensity–are now dissolving and the processes of healing, reintegration, and the resolution of conflicts will either go on unaided in the natural world or enter into communion with a different counsellor. A good counsellor knows when this symbolic death is imminent and will do everything in his or her power to ensure that positive changes achieved during hermetically sealed operations in the counselling room are smoothly and subtlety transliterated into a dialect comprehensible to the rhythms and cycles of real life. The better this is done, the less likelihood there is of the analysand suffering another self-sabotaging setback, regression, or crisis in self-esteem. Of course the weight of making these transitions concrete in the real world is the sole responsibility of the analysand. The counsellor opens up all viable ways to healing through therapy yet all pivotal decision-making is faithfully left to the intuitive devices of the analysand. In the end, whatever course of action he or she chooses to take is going to involve making a choice or a series of choices. As we so clearly witnessed from our phenomenological exploration of madness and hallucinations, building a proactive future is all about making premeditated choices and subsequently taking actions compatible with one’s natural inclinations and inner life.
There can be no doubt that those individuals who remain motionless or hesitant for too long without going this or that way end up suffering dire consequences. But linear progression along the multifaceted therapeutic cycle from the death and defeat associated with nigredo to the comprehensive and contemplative vision of albedo is no reassurance of salvation either. Just as white contains the latent seeds of darkness and creation those of destruction, so too does a new perspective or evolutionary standpoint in life contain within it the very real potential for a second devolution and dismemberment at the hands of the psyche’s own inner doubting Thomas. New ways of thinking can slip back into rusty old psychic frameworks, personal relationships might be reassessed under the mediation of a far more critical and judgemental eye, and the problem of transference and countertransference can rear its head in more prominent ways than before.
This second baptism into the deleterious fires of torture, death, and decomposition is always bound to stir up overwhelming, fiery emotions like frustration and anger. The analysand might voice these sentiments through negative declarations like: “Why has this issue come up again?”, “Why the same feelings again as before?”, or “I feel like we’re just going around and around in circles.” It’s important for the facilitating therapist to address and dissolve thought-desires of this colour and intensity in the counselling sessions preceding termination otherwise the client can leave feeling that the psychological synergy with the counsellor hasn’t been terminated; that business remains incomplete; and that he or she is free to walk back into therapy from the unstipulated pause at any time. Actually, the critical importance of hermetically sealing termination through the illumination of boundaries and conditions cannot be stressed enough!
(c)2015; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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iona_m@yahoo.com
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
