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Chuck's Blog

#665 Chuck’s Place: Black Gold

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When challenged with the question, “Why so much focus on alchemy in your writing, Chuck?” my truthful response is: Carl Jung, that Master Shaman, spent decades of his life unearthing and sifting through the rich black earth of this ancient system to empower us to decipher the gold in our thoroughly modern dreams. Modern Alchemy 101: sift through the nigredo, the blackness in your dreams, and you will find your gold. Before I elucidate on a dream from last night that Jan is allowing me to “expose,” I first need to discuss a homework assignment I was given this week.

A client, who was reading an early blog I had written on blackness, America Chooses the Black Doll, assigned me to read Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison. For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of tackling Ms. Morrison, I assure you, she is as dense and playful in her writing as Jung is when writing on alchemy. In this work, she makes a compelling argument for the need to shed light upon the cultural context of blackness in America, to fully realize its unconscious influence upon all American authorship.

Morrison reflects upon Marie Cardinal’s autobiography, The Words to Say It, where Cardinal describes her initiation into madness, triggered in the midst of a jazz improvisation at a Louis Armstrong concert. Morrison questions the automatic, uncontested assumptions of this encounter with blackness and the onset of madness. Morrison draws attention to the automatic acceptance of these things —black people—black music—mental chaos—madness— as being associatively linked and the unconscious projection of them into American literature.

Taking it beyond literature, I would argue that we are absolutely stymied in America by this dilemma. Is there not a very strong attempt to play upon this automatic unconscious assumption with blackness by associating Obama with madness, as the devil incarnate? If we don’t shed light upon these projections we become a country paralyzed by apocalyptic fear.

The issue here is to separate the ancient symbol of blackness from its projection onto people of color. The contrasting symbols of white and black, day and night, light and dark, visible and invisible, yin and yang, are so ancient that they long precede awareness of race. These symbols exist in the depths of the collective unconscious and present themselves in dreams, impervious to political and social correctness. It remains for the conscious individual to decipher the true meaning and personal relevance of these symbols in dreams. Blackness, or the nigredo as the alchemists named it, symbolizes unknown material; black is in the dark, where things are unseen and therefore unknown. In order to arrive at the highest value, always considered to be gold, one must go into the unknown, the darkness of the self and redeem that which lies there, either because it has been rejected or because it has, more significantly, yet to be discovered. The nigredo, in this context, is that which lies in the darkness. The nigredo is universal to all races because all people have parts of themselves hidden in the dark and, similarly, because it is unknown, it is equally unsettling for all races. Racism is a collective attempt to escape this inner tension of reckoning with one’s unknown self, the nigredo, by ridding oneself of its threat, by assigning it to and projecting it upon another race, and maintaining power over that race to keep one’s fears in check.

One can hardly escape the current obvious, unabashedly, in-your-face attempt to seduce white America into avoiding facing the truth of what lies hidden in its own darkness by projecting its nigredo upon Obama and ridding itself of its own curse. Toni Morrison is right to draw such attention to the archetypal implications of blackness being automatically and unchallengingly projected upon human beings. The symbol is not the object. The symbol in the dream is ancient, archetypal, and personally relevant. Own it, and take the personal journey with it. We use Jan’s dream to illustrate this.

In her own words: I am standing on 42nd Street outside Grand Central Terminal in New York City talking to a woman who says she has just won the Lottery, a winning of several million dollars. “So, I didn’t win?” I ask. “Oh well, I guess it just wasn’t my turn.” And with that I turn and walk into the cavernous main hall of Grand Central Terminal where the vast space is lined with row upon row of black toilets, with no lids. The toilets are packed tightly together and there are perhaps fifty or so rows of them interspersed with black metal folding chairs. I have to go to the bathroom, “a crap,” so I begin walking up and down the aisles of toilets looking for a place where I can comfortably sit down and do what I have to do, but there is absolutely no privacy here. People are sitting on some of the toilets and I can hear farting and peeing sounds. They are reading, smoking, and talking to others sitting next to them or opposite them, as if it were nothing unusual, but I just can’t allow myself to be so exposed. I think up all kinds of reasons why I should not just sit down on a toilet like everyone else, such as: There is no privacy here! There are too many men sitting in this row! How can that woman sit there like that! Don’t people have any sense of privacy? This is too intimate! Finally, I decide that I will “just hold it” and, upon deciding this, I walk out of the terminal. As soon as I walk outside I get into a car with Chuck and our daughter Erica, who in the dream is a happy and bubbly thirteen year old. I am driving. We travel into the countryside over winding, hilly snow and ice covered roads. People are driving way too fast for the conditions and several times I have to make some quick maneuvers so we don’t have collisions. Erica is very impressed with my driving skills but even so we are eventually forced off the road by an oncoming Cadillac that sideswipes the driver’s side mirror and sends us hurtling into a snow bank. We exit the car, leaving it stranded in the snow, grab three round flying saucer sleds from the trunk and begin walking up a steep ice and snow-covered road. We arrive at the top of the hill and decide to sled down the other side, but the snow is so wet and sticky that we are unable to slide down without getting stuck repeatedly, so we abandon our flying saucers and walk the rest of the way. At the bottom of the hill, Erica points to a blurry picture of a nutcracker painted on the road —like a logo of the nutcracker from the ballet The Nutcracker Suite— barely visible beneath the thick ice that is covering the road. As we continue walking along, I see that a railroad bridge crosses over the road far ahead and that there is a railroad station off to the left. “Look, a train station!” I say with great relief. “We are taking that train!” Chuck says, firmly. As we get closer I see that the station name is Warwarsing. I joke repeatedly into Chuck’s ear, saying that we are in “War-Washing! War-Washing! Get it? We are in WAR-WASHING!” I know that we can take the train back to Grand Central Terminal, and as we walk into the station to buy our tickets I wake up.

Jan does not win the lottery, i.e. the gold! No, you have to work for it. The work begins at Grand Central—an allusion to a directive from the SELF. “Grand” suggests something greater than the ego; “Central” shows it to be at the center of the personality. Grand Central is also the meeting place of many old tried and true paths. Evidently the SELF is directing Jan into a scene that captures many people’s worst nightmare in dreams, a vast public unisex restroom without partitions. The nigredo is identified by the black toilets, the black chairs, and, obviously, that which is concealed inside the body! The nigredo points to that which is unknown or concealed, and requires work. The work here means exposing oneself to the truth of that which is unsettling and unknown. The dream is placing obvious emphasis on EXPOSURE. The SELF wants the nigredo exposed, not discretely flushed away. Jan balks at this request, choosing instead to take her own heroic journey, symbolized by the accompaniment of the innocent, bubbly, youthful Erica, avoiding the blackness and going off into the white snow.

As it turns out, all of Jan’s efforts at transcendence in pure whiteness fail, including the flying saucers—an inflated attempt to win her wholeness, symbolized by the round saucer that flies. The nutcracker, beneath the ice, is a reminder that the real nut has yet to be cracked. Ultimately, we end up at the Warwarsing station, where I, representing Jan’s inner masculine guide, as animus, insist we take the train back to Grand Central. The WAR symbolizes taking on the tension of exposure within the self, encountering internalized judgments, inhibitions, unacceptable facts, etc., symbolized by all the characters hanging around the terminal in this dream. The WASHING symbolizes separating out the elements of nigredo, sifting through “the crap” and discovering that which has been hidden. In this dream, the path to be taken is an ancient one leading back to Grand Central. An inflationary avoidance, however heroic, could not achieve reconciliation.

Thank you, Jan, for fulfilling your dream’s request: exposure to the world! Through this act Jan owns her own nigredo, which becomes the source of acquiring her own gold through facing her own inner truth. I hope that this dream illustrates the symbolic meaning of blackness with its golden potential, which is the alchemical process, obviously relevant in understanding the dream of a modern person. Additionally, along with Toni Morrison, I hope that this article furthers an appreciation for the archetypal symbol of blackness, in all its richness, that must be differentiated from unconscious projections onto outer objects.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: The Shadow Lurks

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I seem to do a lot of my inner work in dreaming. It has always been this way. My psyche seems to like to work on issues of importance while my mind sleeps and luckily, more often than not, especially if I intend it, I wake up with good dream recall. I have also discovered that if I present a dreaming intent my psyche readily obliges, giving me just what I need. Over the past few weeks I have made some decisions, one of which, as you know, was to change my name to my married name. This is not as easy at it may sound. Any woman who has faced this prospect upon marriage knows this. Suddenly, a well-known identity is challenged and the big question of “Who am I?” arises. During my recent process of making this life changing decision I had the following dream.

I am having a funeral for Jan Hughes. I am burying her in a field on a hill, under the spreading limbs of a tall tree. As the funeral progresses I have an inner dialogue with this “old Jan,” as she is lowered into the grave, as dirt is thrown onto the casket, and as she is put to rest. I tell her that I am not abandoning her, that I am not rejecting her, but that she has done her life’s work and it is time for her to recede while a new me takes over. I am thankful for the life we had together. I thank her for accompanying me this far and for taking me on my recapitulation journey. I tell her this as her grave is covered, as a headstone is put in place, and as I walk away and leave her buried under the tree, knowing that something is not quite resolved, but I am not sure what it is yet. Even so, every day, in the dream, as I pass by the spot on the hill where she is buried I see her headstone and know that I have made the right decision.

Three days later, I have another dream related to the same theme. In this dream I am approached by a woman who I recognize from my past. When I knew her I was in awe of her and admired her for many reasons. She was beautiful. She wore her hair in a short pixie cut and I once cut my hair like hers, wanting to be like her. She was tall, not exceedingly thin, and she had perfect posture and moved with definite grace, totally in her body, while I am short and in the past tended to hunch my shoulders more than I do now, totally not in my body. She carried herself with such confidence and seemed totally relaxed with who she was, both in her work and in her personal life. In the dream, she is old, her hair is longer and very scraggly, thin, hanging in her face, her expression is withdrawn and dark, her eyes sunken and haunted looking, her skin wrinkled and her cheeks, once so plump and rosy, are cavernous. She comes very close to me and peering into my face says in a harsh whisper: “I love you. I have always loved you. I want to be with you. I want to be your lover forever. Don’t leave me.”

“Oh, yes,” I say, “I remember you came to me in a dream once before and told me the same thing, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, “but you wouldn’t pay attention.”

“But I’m married now,” I say. She looks devastated when I say this and I am not sure what to do with her. She looks sad, sick, lifeless, and I feel her love for me as well as her pain at being rejected. I don’t want to make her feel any worse, but I can’t figure out what to say to her. “I’ll keep it in mind,” I say, referring to her desire to love me forever. And at that she disappears and I wake up.

As I write down this dream upon awakening, I begin to see this woman as my shadow. She tells me that she loves me and is asking me to integrate her. She is my extraverted self whom I have kept hidden for so long, unloved and uncared for, as I have lived most of my life as an introvert. I chose the life of a freelance artist and writer so that I did not have to be in the world or interact in the world, except minimally. She is asking me to take her as my lover, to give her life, to be what I once projected onto her and in so doing restore her beauty. It is my personal challenge, in this life, to be extraverted. I know this. I am totally at ease in introversion, in doing inner work, it is all I have ever done, but being in the world is and always has been my challenge.

It is interesting to note here that I did recently bump into this woman from my past, several months ago, and I was struck by how much she had changed. She did in fact look quite haggard. Her hair was longer and rather thin and, I thought, rather unattractive compared to the way she looked with a shorter cut. She looked almost unhealthy, whereas ten or so years ago when I last saw her she looked beautifully ageless, with that amazing posture and self-assured presence. When I saw her recently I felt that we had almost exchanged personas. She looked the way I did ten years ago, before I did my recapitulation, before my real inner work started. Now I have long thick flowing almost white hair, I am softer and more glowing, and my hunched shoulders are pulling back, my posture exhibiting more self-confidence, and my haunted look is gone.

When she comes to me in the dream, this woman from the past is asking me to embrace her as she is now. The last time she came in a dream, I rejected her, and she mentions it. I was not ready at that time, but now I am. She, the shadow, wants me to love the old self now, to embrace the woman I have buried, but also to not reject her. I must not only love what this woman, this shadow once represented and what I projected onto her, but I must also love what she now carries, the old me. And I must do so without feeling sorry for her, but fully embrace her with compassion and love for our unfolding journey together, in real life and in dreaming life. And I must also accept her admiration of me, as I have changed and evolved, for that would complete the picture. As I take back the long ago projection, and love all these parts of myself, I am accepting the challenge.

This is the kind of stuff that the psyche presents to us, whether in dreams, in daily life, or in what happens to us. We are always, in some way, presented with our issues; in problems that arise and in the people we meet and interact with. When we are ready to make some changes and move on, embracing our evolving selves, we are given the opportunity to integrate, to take back our projections, and to embrace the totality of who we are and who we have the potential to still become. I guess I would just like to stress that, in looking to the workings of the psyche, I was able to see how these two dreams were meaningful in my own process of change, and how, as I looked deeper, I was presented with what really lurked below the surface, asking for resolution.

Even though I feel like I have done nothing but deep inner work for the past ten years, I am still being challenged to keep doing it, to go deeper and deeper, into my own shadows. You never know what or who might be lurking there!

Until next time, may your dreams take you where you need to go!
Love,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

#650 Chuck’s Place: The Wise Ancestral Self

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Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy website.

We are born into this world with bodies fully formed and constructed via ancient programs of evolutionary successes and, yet, our minds begin as blank slates, orphans of our ancestral parentage. What an apparent contradiction! This is the dominant scientific perspective and, in fact, the experience of most people with the birth of consciousness, or the ego, in early childhood.

This birth of awareness, of “I,” a separate self, is at once exciting and overwhelming. Excitement comes from discovering the freedom and power of autonomy and choice. Fear springs from the awareness that our newly discovered “I” is small and inadequate, hardly capable of caring for itself in a powerful world it neither understands nor can control.

This birth of consciousness is the moment of eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The punishment for awareness of a separate self is banishment from the garden, and the charge to the ego, that separate self, is to “go it alone,” despite its inadequacy and lack of preparation. Our banishment, the birth of the ego, is our separation from our wise ancestral self. We become a blank slate, seeking, with desperate extraverted eyes, to fill our egos with knowledge, gained from trial and error or formal education, to be capable of occupying a space in this world, with some sense of legitimacy, orphans that we are. This is the plight of the ego, alienated from its wise ancestral self.

We spend the better part of the first half of life struggling to find our place in this world. We seek to discover our talents, our callings, where we belong. We burn through many false starts, trial and error careers and marriages, all the while accumulating more knowledge and clarity of who we “really are.” Regardless of our successes and failures in life, at the deepest level, we remain orphans, at best very adequate, well adapted, successful orphans, but, underneath, aware of a void. For some, this void is a deep sense of inadequacy, while for others it presents as a deep spiritual longing. Jung would identify it as the challenge of individuation, where the ego accepts its rightful but relative place as part of the all-encompassing wise ancestral self.. That wise ancestral self is present and functioning throughout our lives, it is our true guardian angel.

For example, years ago, as I stood alone on a beach in Jamaica, forcibly loading my spear gun, I inadvertently stabbed the back of the spear deep into my palm. (I wrote about this experience in The Book of Us, but I am presenting a different perspective on it this time around.) At that moment, I fainted; my ego vanished. It was overwhelmed; it knew not what to do. When my ego woke up, I returned to consciousness: I was sitting on the beach with my palm packed in a lump of wet sand. The bleeding had been fully contained and coagulated; the wound was completely sterile and healing. Who did that? Who knew exactly what to do without any intervention of consciousness? No one else was on the beach, and my ego was fully asleep.

In another example, years after that, I was driving alone very late at night northbound on the Taconic State Parkway. I fell completely asleep. When I woke up I was driving, properly, in the southbound lanes of the Taconic State Parkway! Mind you, I was not drunk, in some kind of blackout state. I’d simply fallen completely asleep. Who took over the wheel and had the sense of humor to make me grapple with the fact that I had somehow successfully made a U-turn while my ego was asleep!

These are dramatic examples that, for me, illustrate the background activity of the wise ancestral self that operates on our behalf, fully independent of our ego awareness. Yes, we think we are orphans but, the truth is, our wise ancestral self is always participating in our lives. The real issue is whether the ego is in alignment with this wise ancestral self or completely at odds with it. Psychological symptoms, such as compulsions or compulsive projections, as well as physical illnesses often reflect interventions by our wise ancestral self to influence the decisions and actions of our alienated egos. I give the following hypothetical example, using a sexual compulsion. This is not a judgment about the type of sexual play enacted in S & M play. I assume here that my hypothetical client is disturbed by their compulsion. For example, this client might be an executive with an extremely powerful, dominant personality in the world, with a lot of control over others but possessed by a strong masochistic sexual compulsion. In this case, the wise ancestral self saddles them with a compulsion that attempts to deflate a power-hungry ego by compelling it to walk around on all fours with a collar around its neck, obeying the commands of a dominatrix. If this individual can rein in its alienated inflated ego and become humble, by assuming its rightful but modest place as part of a greater whole within the psyche, then the wise ancestral self could lift the compulsion and allow balance to be restored.

The introvert has the advantage of direct contact with the wise ancestral self because the primary focus is the inner subjective experience whereas the extravert focuses outside the self, giving primacy to the object. The introvert has direct access to the thoughts and feelings of the wise ancestral self who communicates in both images and words. The artist frequently receives the images and expresses them on a canvas or in other form. For those inclined to words, there is verbal communication with various parts of the wise ancestral self. Jung called this active imagination, where the ego volitionally communicates with the greater psyche to better understand its message or point of view. Channeling, at a certain level, is written or verbal contact with parts of the individual psyche or wise ancestral psyche, what Jung called the collective unconscious. At the deepest level, channeling is communication beyond the psyche and the confines of this world.

Dreaming is a daily dance with the greater psyche. Every time we write down a dream and feel and contemplate the characters and the situations in our dreams we are connecting with and seeking greater alignment with our deeper wise ancestral self. When I write down a dream, I structure it like a poem. For example, recently, I had the following dream:

My younger son was about nine years old, and was a DJ.
His dilemma was, how to get rides to his jobs.
I offered to take him to a particular job.
It turned out that he was the DJ for his own birthday party.
I was surprised. I didn’t know about the party.
He told me he had invited Efren, my old therapist.
I thought, “Why would Efren come?”
He didn’t know anyone.

When I first wrote the dream, I was struck by the image of my son spinning 45’s, as well as the interest of my old therapist in attending his birthday party. That was the extent of my dance with my dream. I returned later, continuing to visualize the spinning record. The word circumambulation came into my mind and I researched its meaning. Jung identified the circular process of attempting to find one’s way to the self as an individuation motif, the process of walking a labyrinth; the ego’s circuitous attempts through life to find its way back to the center, to the garden, to the wise ancestral self. As I visualized the needle on the record, going round and round, making its way toward the center, I recognized that my wise ancestral self was pointing me to embrace the innocence symbolized by my young son. This was further highlighted by my old therapist’s interest in going to the party. He had once been the projection of my wise ancestral self by my younger self, then in therapy with him. This continued dance with my dream shifted both my mood and awareness and directly impacted decisions that I made that day.

The challenge for introverts is to value their inner experiences in a world currently dominated by an extraverted prejudice. The challenge for extraverts is to recognize that the outer world becomes the palette for the deeper psyche to guide and alter judgments and actions. Owning projections for the extravert is an important means to dance with the inner images and align with the intent of the wise ancestral self.

In truth, there is no contradiction between psyche and body when we are born into this world, both are connected to their ancestral roots. It remains for the blank slate ego to rediscover its wise ancestral self. For the introvert, this is most accessible within; for the extravert without, via projection, but no one is a pure introvert or extravert. With a little effort, extraverts can dance with their dreams and introverts recognize their projections.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Mirrors Again!

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I must say, when Jeanne began talking about mirrors again yesterday, in Message #643, I was disappointed, to say the least. To put it bluntly: I am sick and tired of mirrors; totally bored with them. When she replied to Soul Trecker in Message #640 that she did not need mirrors anymore, I thought: Yahoo! No more mirrors! Because no matter who Jeanne is addressing, the message always pertains to me. (I know many of you also feel the same way.) But then I was left with the dilemma of what would replace the mirrors if, in fact, I did not need to keep using them as a means of doing my inner work. So last night, before going to sleep, I sent out a dream intent, asking to be shown what to do now that I am bored with mirrors, projection, and reflection. This is what I got in dreaming:

I am in a room talking with C. G. Jung. I am telling him that I do not want to work with mirrors anymore, that I am bored with them. Suddenly, a large, gray, oval shaped boulder appears between us, hovering in the air a foot or so off the floor. “What?” I say, “A boulder! What is the significance of that?” Jung says: “Man and his Symbols!” referring to his book of the same name. I am clearly disappointed by this enormous and ugly rock and Jung, seeing my disappointment, says: “It may not be what it appears to be!” I reply: “What does that mean?” I peer closely at the stone and in the upper right quadrant I see a tiny white shell embedded in a slight indentation in the boulder. I wake up.

Clearly I am being shown something. At first, I thought of the boulder as a symbol of some insurmountable blockage or issue, or perhaps representative of something that I perceive as ugly or disturbing in my life. Then, I thought that perhaps it represented the archetypes and I found this more to my liking, feeling that I was being given the answer to my dilemma around working with the mirrors theme. Jung was telling me to look into his book for the deeper symbolism and meaning of the stone, but I also thought that he might be suggesting that I now turn to studying my archetypes more deeply. I also thought, as Chuck mentioned when I told him this dream, that perhaps there is a diamond inside the stone, but that remains to be seen.

Fortunately, we have a copy of Man and his Symbols, which is written by Jung and several collaborators. The chapter in which I found the symbolism of the stone discussed is written by Marie-Louise von Franz. The stone, she states, coming from many different sources, can symbolize the SELF, the experience of something eternal at man’s innermost center, something that can never be lost or dissolved, and the psyche of man, among other things. There is the alchemical stone, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Blarney Stone, to name a few, and, personally, I have always been a collector of stones, special stones with special meanings. Basically, in my dream, I was given an undeniably direct answer to my quest for something to work on: The Self! Of course, this is the same thing that Jeanne constantly guides us on as well, and I am always grateful for her guidance, but I have felt a need to shift away from the mirrors, but I wasn’t sure what else I was looking for. Now I know what I have before me.

I can still see Jung chuckling at the sight of the giant boulder he had conjured up, laughing at his cleverness. I know that he didn’t really give me anything new to work on. It’s still the same work, and I know I still have to deal with mirrors, but for a while I can take a closer look at the tiny shell embedded in the stone and I can find out what else the boulder holds. Is there more on the surface to discover, before I chip away at what is possibly inside? Or is it going to be my job to polish the surface of that boulder, until I can see my face reflected there, the self revealed, once again, in a mirror?

It will be interesting to see what Jeanne has to say tomorrow, because I am going to confront her on the mirror thing. In the meantime, I’m going to see what else my dream is trying to tell me.
Until tomorrow!
Jan