Falling Shadows


Today I'm looking at how unconscious material becomes conscious through analysis. The process of writing a story without plan or revision is like being in analysis, where the unconscious material comes out unexamined. The analyst listens, and helps make the material more conscious. I'm looking back at what came up and trying to make sense of it. While flying back from Arizona to Oakland, I figured out what cousins in love is all about.

I am in a spiritual group which meets for five days four times a year, and between times we communicate on a web site, and of course some of us email each other privately to facilitate our growth and understanding of the material that comes up. When I tell somebody I am in such a group one of the first questions often is, "What do you believe?"

"We believe in heart centering," I say.

"And what else?"

"Nothing else that I know of."

In the group I am part of there is a sense of community and of privacy, so that anyone in the group can talk about anything, no matter how personal or difficult, with the assurance that it will stay inside the group. The group is led by a medical doctor who moved his focus to spiritual health, and who has a grasp of pattern level psychology. Like all practitioners he is in a practice, and it deepens and changes as he practices over periods of time, and with different people.

I wasn't sure why I was in the group this year, other than that I felt the need to be in a group because I've spent too much time alone for awhile. One day I was talking to Clay, mentioning this guitar luthier who was looking for help with his web page. He grinned, because he is a picker and grinner, and asked, "You get the feeling he's one of these guys who's spending way too much time alone?"

And I knew just what he meant. It's a kind of spooked look when he's having a conversation with another person, and the way he crowds the conversation into what he knows for sure, which is doing setup and stringing and repairing on a guitar. There's a background feeling of anxiety about joking around or expanding the conversation. The guy feels brittle.

There's nothing wrong with it and I appreciate the information, but it reminds me of someone who can't cook without a running documentary about growing anxieties around how the meal is going to come together, so you realize you're holding your breath only after an internal investigation into why you're about to pass out.

Others cook dinner and you hardly notice they're doing it. They might engage you in conversation or play, or you might just do what you were doing and feel no guilt, as you would if you had to listen to somebody struggle with the potatoes. No matter how absurd the dragon, when the bell rings you've got to joust it or sneak off into your cave. So one cook drives you into a cave and another one leads you back out into the light.

The luthier looked like he had been in his cave for a long spell. And I know I had been in my cave for a long spell. It's like with Gollum, you go mad hoarding the ring down there. "A man can talk to himself but he has a madman for a companion," Asturius wrote.

These things were beginning to converge on me, and it seemed like the best place I knew to join a really good group of people was through Brugh Joy. He is a major dude, and a good example of how to grow older without showing any negative effects of aging. He keeps on shining bright, bless his heart, and he provides guidance to an ever growing community of people.

We had a ritual which bound us into the group for the duration of the year. It's like a contract. You can leave if you want but you are breaking your vow to the rest of the group. This level of work requires a container just like the Alchemist requires containment for the process. Brugh holds it together because he's the most conscious member.

During the ritual by which we began, I looked down and saw a pair of sad, black shoes. It was pretty easy to spot who was taking on the unconscious shadow. Nobody else would have stepped into the ritual space in black shoes but the shadow.

What started as my unthinkingly dumping more shadow onto this other person began to evolve into my recognition that what for her was going to be a continuation of unconscious business as usual, could be a conscious growth experience for me. I like the shadow because, as with a horse, it doesn't trust you if it picks up your anxiety that it's dangerous. Castenada wrote a hilarious account of Carlos running in terror from the ally, and when Don Juan finally rescued him, he asked, "Why was it chasing me?" He said, "It's attracted to your fear."

If you aren't familiar with the shadow, it is the part of you that you are but don't know you are. It is the you which you have rejected, the same way the sculptor discards what does not fit into the image he or she is shaping as finished art. If you try to conform to some outside social code of behavior, you are rejecting the non-conformist. So in your shadow you have a non-conformist. This shadow energy is often taken on by one of your children, much to your horror if you have disowned the shadow. Your impulse will be to disown the child's behavior while insisting that you love the child, as if the two things can be separated. You are in reality demanding the child's conformity, which is to say, you are trying to force the child to reflect your ego. And there you have Snow White's mother.



"This is a pig's heart, you moron!"

Somehow some of us survive, torn between the opposites, wearing little depictions of a crucifixion around our necks to remind us that we are not the only ones torn between the patrilineal and matrilineal arms of the cross.

Which brings me back to cousins in love.

When I started writing Ash Fork this last time I got uneasy. I was writing about little people and the obvious parallel was children. The conscious analyst in me said that was some hidden desire or Freudian thing, and when the midgets had sex, though they were cousins, I asked myself, "Can't we do a gunfight or disembowelment or something that's more of a guy thing?" But that was what was coming through my fingers and my head just had to put up with it, though I did get to have the gunfight and enjoyed it thoroughly.

But I did not know why I was writing what I was writing, in the sense that I was looking at it for the underlying pattern but could not see it yet. You may have seen those books where you look at a pattern, and gradually, when you look long enough, you see a picture come through it that was hidden to the cursory look. Things are not always as they appear. Sometimes there is underlying complexity, and this is the fish I am trying to catch.

We are beginning the shadow work in the group and in preparation for this I was reading some selections form C.G. Jung while on the flight from Phoenix to here. The book is, "The Practice of Psychotherapy," and is mostly about transference. To my surprise I opened the volume to a discussion of cousin marriage, and quickly grasped that the pattern for marriage in the first social groups, extended families, was the symbol a circle divided by a cross. A sniper sees it every time he sights in on a target.

The two arms of the cross are the patrilineal and the matrilineal. You have your descent through the line of the father and through the line of the mother. This is your position in society. In the original structure of marriage, the male could not marry into the same line as his father. He had to marry into a different male line, so he could marry the daughter of his mother's brother, and his sister could marry her brother.

This arrangement of marriage of cousins was required as the most basic building block of community, and even if we think we are far removed from the problem, we are simply not conscious of dealing with it. It has become an archetype in the collective unconscious, and has tremendous energy. The fear of incest is behind a lot of marriage breakups, though the two people involved might fight about any number of things, they do not know the secret cause. The fear of incest is behind a loss of libido in some relationships and the reveling in incestuous fantasy drives libido in others.

At least that's my understanding. I might be sexing up the intelligence.

What was exciting for me was seeing that this basic pattern of cousin marriage was repeated in what Jung calls a "peculiar psychologem" in Alchemy. Instead of the cross marriages of brothers and sisters to brothers and sisters, the cross moved into a spiritual realm from a sociological realm. The need for new blood put the original pattern into the background, and led to the development of culture.

(The alchemical pattern shows the cross marriage in the spiritual realm as Soror Mystica, or mystical sister, connecting to Rex, the animus, and the Adept connecting to Regina, anima. The symbols of Rex and Regina are king and queen. The Adept's unconscious projected self cannot be his conscious self, which is male. It is the feminine form, or queen. The female connects to the King, which is her unconscious, projected self.)

The cross within the circle becomes also a St. Andrew's cross contained in a rectangle. St. Andrew's Cross is also the national flag of Scotland.




Jung is pretty complicated and I'm explaining what I understood of it as best I can, and any corrections are welcomed.

When family groups began joining together to create larger groups there was still a feeling of relatedness, but what Jung calls the "exogamous" system began to drive the original incest impulse of the "endogamous" system into the background, which means that the original family clan system was replaced by a more complex social arrangement.

The stronger the consciousness of the people in the exogamous system, the more the endogamous system was driven into the unconscious, until it became dissociated, or an autonomous complex. When this happened it moved first to the realm of great men, who were allowed incest, such as royalty, and then to the realm of the gods, so that people who were possessed by the complex took on supernatural lovers.

In this context it is interesting to see the complex at work in the stories of sexual relationships between gods and humans, which was common with the Greeks, and integral to Christianity. This becomes more understandable when the displacement of the incest drive by taboo in the expanding exogamous system is grasped as forcing it to play out unconsciously.

So the incest taboo on the outside drives a dissociated, inner desire for incest, which is experienced by a man as relationship to a goddess, or anima, figure. She represents an object of desire that has long ago been sacrificed. It is the longing experienced in the dissociated endogamous tendency for the mother or sister relationship, projected into the spiritual realm, i.e., for "mother" Mary or the "father in heaven."

There are a lot of other elements in the story which I am analyzing as I look back at it. Brugh told me a long time ago that you can read what people tell you the same as you read a dream. If somebody describes where they have been and who they met and what they did, the pattern will show through just as it shows through in a dream, if you can see the picture inside the picture.

I remember the first time I was studying the structure of fairy tales, and read that the structures are perfect mathematical models of patterns in the psyche. I thought that wasn't likely, because they were just children's stories, and who would have been smart enough to think of how to do them in some underlying model? We're talking James Joyce here, and he's a rare model of storyteller.

Now I understand that people didn't think them up and then tell them. Most likely they began as dreams which were felt to have some special significance, and so they were told as stories, and the intelligence behind the dream was hidden inside the story, as an integral mathematical pattern. Or, they told them spontaneously, and the same intelligence was hidden in the deep structure. Because back when fairy tales began, there was no conscious mind as we think of it today.

Posted: Wed - June 7, 2006 at 04:09 PM