The Double Refuge ☯️ Herr Jung
Into the Forest
The Mind’s Double Refuge - Hawthorne’s Warning
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The Mind’s Double Refuge
Instead of seeing our dreams as recurrent and controlling scenarios, double refugees see them as empirical reworkings of sense impressions and experiences. By not fixing their meanings through personification or dramatization, our minds can move from one unconscious figure, scene, or issue to the next. We may of course explore specific dream moments, yet we don’t get caught up in reworking earlier traumas and scenarios by searching their meanings, connecting them to other figures and scenes, and making of them a complex scenario. We don’t allow a complex set of figures, narratives, and dramatic structures to become reinforced neurologically inside our brains. Instead, our understanding evolves and changes, just as the neurological structures inside our brain evolve and change. They do so naturally, and shouldn’t be fixed into frightening patterns.
Because paradigms come and go, double refugees urge their thoughts to adhere to positive paradigms, i.e., those ideas and ideals that unify our psyches and guide us toward happiness and a sense of liberation. These paradigms can come from psychology & sociology, science & religion, literature & art. They can come from our own ideas or from the ideas of others. Or from the fusion of all the above. We can analyze dark scenarios, either in the world or in our dreaming minds, yet we should keep in mind that there’s a clear difference between waking and dreaming scenarios: one has to be grappled with; the other doesn’t. One needs to be seen in every possible form, from the practical to the metaphoric; the other doesn’t. One needs continual observation and modification; the other doesn’t.
In the waking world, moving from one scenario to the next is an exercise in continual bridging, in continual examining of cause and effect, in order to find ways to smooth transitions and to create a more efficient flow of personal, cultural, and material traffic. In the dreaming world, as in the mythic realm, we don’t need to continually examine in this way. We don’t need to continually connect or to dwell on the root causes.
I have to say that I’ve somewhat triggered myself by using the term root causes, since this is the term that Putin uses to justify his war in Ukraine. But my Freudian slip may be apropos: just as Putin misjudges the root causes, so we too can easily misjudge what’s happening in our unconscious or dreaming mind. We can create scenarios featuring evil figures and intentions when no such figures or intentions exist. Just as the cells and neurons are readjusting themselves during sleep, without any malign intent, so the world readjusted itself after the fall of the Soviet Union. The “evil design of the West” may have some semblance of truth — for instance in Vietman and Iraq — yet NATO’s expansion was a natural move of freed nations that wanted to join a structure that allowed them freedom. It wasn’t an evil conspiracy to tighten our grip on Russia’s throat.
The same applies to the brain and to dreaming: we don’t need to find all the root causes of cells and neurons firing this way and that. We certainly don’t need to create new neuron patterns that may work against the patterns we already have. And we most certainly don’t need to empower these new structures with the force of mythic figures and scenarios, such as Jung’s Shadow and Anima, or Consuelo’s black magic and possession.
This doesn’t mean that Jung is wrong or that we may not need to appeal to forces that are mythic or religious. If indeed there is a dark figure or scenario operating or “acting out” in our unconscious, we'd be better advised to short-circuit its operation by appealing to a more powerful benign mystic force – Jesus, Krishna, Mary, Shiva, etc. – rather than trying to defeat such a metaphysical figure on its own ground.
We aren't spiritual warriors by nature. Our waking minds are better adapted to the winding road and the battering wave than the shifting subaquatic currents of dreams. In cases of spiritual danger — whether real or perceived, the open agnostic can’t say — why not appeal to mystic or religious forces that know those shifting fields and forces, those deep underwater currents? Even Jung found terrifying nightmares within his nightmares – just look at his Red Book. How is the average Joe to navigate such powerful unconscious currents? Better to leave the navigation to Jesus, who walked on the Sea of Galilee, or to Shiva, who tempered the impact of the falling sky-torrent by directing it onto his hair, and by letting it flow peacefully from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal.
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Hawthorne’s Warning
We can see the inappropriateness of applying mythic and religious scenarios to our own unconscious minds by looking at literature. Aura, like Macbeth, provides us with a model for understanding politics and psychology, not for populating our inner minds. These works remain, like Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” cautionary tales. The same principle ought to be applied to mythic and religious narratives: Jesus and Satan, Shiva and Ravanna are characters in holy stories. They are also principles, spiritual forces even, yet they aren’t personalities who are present within our dreaming minds. Dwelling on them as such only reinforces their neurological imprint, making them more and more alive to our minds, and making what we can learn from them more and more tenuous.
In Hawthorne’s short story, Young Goodman Brown enters the forest in order to make a temporary deal with the forces of darkness. As he advances into the forest he sees the good people he knows in the town, yet he sees them as sinister. Finding a clearing even deeper in the forest, he finds a midnight bonfire presided over by the town preacher. He realizes that he and his wife are to be initiated into the community of the town’s evil. After running from the forest and arriving home, he can’t tell if his experience was a dream or a reality. He then suspects his wife and all the townspeople of hiding evil in their hearts. He becomes alienated and miserable for the rest of his life.
Hawthorne’s point isn’t that everyone in a New England Puritan town is in fact evil. Rather, his point is that looking for evil in the forest and in other people leads to distortion, distrust, and despair. He also suggests that if it was a dream, the dream is a distortion, a product of Brown’s fears and suspicions, not an accurate reflection of the world. Brown destroys his relation with his loving beautiful wife (whose name is Faith!), and he destroys his own happiness, all because he can’t distinguish between the fearful scenarios of religion on one hand and the reality of the waking world on the other. Instead of choosing a religion of love and faith he chooses a religion of fear and distrust. The beauty of the forest succumbs to the dark stereotype of evil, instead of to nature’s wild beauty, what Hawthorne as an American Romantic cherished.
I see the scenarios in “Young Goodman Brown,” Aura, and dreaming in much the same light. We can create dark scenarios about the world and other people, and we can interpret our nightmares as harbingers of dark truth, yet doing this is counter to empirical reality and to our own interests. While we may need to free ourselves from empirical sense impressions, that is, from our past experiences, this doesn’t mean we abandon ourselves to distorted and negative scenarios that are mythic or religious in nature. It’s better to 1. use empirical doubt to separate our waking from our dreaming state, and 2. use open theism to see any possible metaphysical dimension in terms of positive ideals, such as a loving God, hope, faith, charity, love, etc.
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Next: ☯️ Aura 4: Emanations