The Double Refuge ☯️ Herr Jung
On Auras & Shadows
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In this chapter I continue my holiday in Guanajuato, yet I shift my focus — 🔹 from travel and the trauma of sense impressions 🔹 to dreams and the trauma of nightmares. In 🇲🇽 Señor Locke I focus on Locke’s sense impressions, and on how these can sometimes seem like a mental trap, especially when you’ve had traumatic experiences that you can't shake. I use as a prime example the trap in which Felipe finds himself in Fuentes’ novella Aura. In ☯️ Herr Jung I argue that in coping with nightmares — which are the result (and perhaps even the revenge) of sense impressions — it can be counter-productive to dig too deeply into our minds and to interpret them in terms of archetypal figures and mythic patterns. I illustrate my point by referring to the relation between literature and dreams, and by returning to Fuentes’ novella.
This chapter contains 🔺 two pages that argue against Jung’s approach to dream analysis (Ciao, Carlo! & Into the Forest), 🔺 two pages that look at Aura in terms of empiricism and the occult (Emanations & Progressions), 🔺 four pages that recommend literature & theology rather than myth & archetypes (Animal Dreams, Knight Errors, On the Couch, & Lust For Life), 🔺 five pages that outline a typology that’s theological and simple rather than occult and complex (In the Land of Mordor, The Bread of Angels, The Travelling Friend, The Gatekeeper, & Gandalf’s Ring), and 🔺 three pages that provide an alternative ending to Aura (Time’s Fool, John Locke on the Beach of the Dead, & Hotel de Cervantes).
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My reservations about Jung follow from the points I made about Locke. In 🇲🇽 Señor Locke I suggested ways in which empiricism is an unavoidable fact, much like evolution. Our sense impressions constitute our memories, and these can both liberate and trap us. Perhaps the best we can do is expand on the good ones and come to terms with the bad ones. In ☯️ Herr Jung I note that these same sense impressions create dreams that are chaotic, nonsensical, blissful, insightful, and disturbing. I argue that in dealing with confusing and nightmarish dreams we should use empiricism as a framework to give meaning to chaos and fear. Empiricism helps us 🔹 to see the range and function of dreams in a more detached light, 🔹 to avoid taking them too personally, and 🔹 to avoid interpreting them symbolically or in terms of paradigmatic figures or dramas. Empiricism also helps us 🔹 to clear a path for a simplified theistic typology that can deal with the most disturbing of nightmares.
Our dreams can help us see our desires, frustrations, preoccupations and hang ups, but most of the time there’s no point trying to figure them out in terms of specific figures or scenarios. If there’s a persistent disturbing aspect to our dreams, we’re better off making a general appeal to our highest ideal of metaphysical Force — that is, to God or to an established positive figure such as Jesus, Krishna, Mary, Saraswati, or Guanyin. Instead of trying to battle demons within us, it’s better to let that higher Force deal with the psychic disturbance.
This is a case where the double refuge comes in: we can follow the detached, doubting, empirical model in general, yet we can also open ourselves to a theological model in the case of persistent slippery and threatening nightmares. In this case the greater positive mystery of theology neutralizes the lesser negative mystery of occultism.
This is where my argument ties in with the novella Aura, where Felipe gets sucked into an occult scenario, with neither the detachment of empiricism nor the grace of religion to save him from Consuelo. Felipe doesn’t appeal to a figure like Mary, whose most famous name in Spanish is Nuestra Señora del Consuelo, Our Lady of Comfort (or Consolation). Instead, Felipe is led by his senses into a trap, and has no way of getting out. Having myself been lulled into complacency and then robbed and beaten up (in Mexico City and Istanbul), I have sympathy for Fuentes’ protagonist. I’ve therefore devised an epilogue to his fate, in which I wake him up from his somnambulant possession, march him back out the door (with its copper dog’s-head knocker and the sandstone gargoyles above), and make him walk in his own skin down the streets of the old town.
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In dealing with dreams, we need to remember that the human mind has evolved over a million years. The way it operates neurologically doesn’t necessarily fit with culturally constructed notions — especially the Jungian notion that we can find specific personas within our dreaming selves. I agree with Jung’s basic idea that we should pay attention to our dreams, and that we should pay attention to the relation between our waking and dreaming minds. I even find many of his encounters in dreams fascinating — take for instance the following excerpt from his strange diary, The Red Book. This excerpt reads more like a Sufi annihilation of self, or like a Poe dream-vision, than like a study in the science of mind:
As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths. You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths. And you do not know how this happens to you. You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress. But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you.
From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvelous branches twine around you from above. You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf.
There are passages in The Red Book that seem straight out of The Lord of the Rings, with Sauron’s eye ever-searching this world and the next…
Nothing is more valuable to the evil one than his eye, since only through his eye can emptiness seize gleaming fullness. Because the emptiness lacks fullness, it craves fullness and its shining power. And it drinks it in by means of its eye, which is able to grasp the beauty and unsullied radiance of fullness. The emptiness is poor, and if it lacked its eye it would be hopeless. It sees the most beautiful and wants to devour it in order to spoil it. The devil knows what is beautiful, and hence he is the shadow of beauty and follows it everywhere, awaiting the moment when the beautiful, writhing great with child, seeks to give life to the God.
If your beauty grows, the dreadful worm will also creep up you, waiting for its prey. Nothing is sacred to him except his eye, with which he sees the most beautiful. He will never give up his eye. He is invulnerable, but nothing protects his eye; it is delicate and clear, adept at drinking in the eternal light. It wants you, the bright red light of your life.
As fascinated as I am with the unconscious dreamworld of Freud and Jung, I distance myself from the sexuality and archetypes they use to interpret these interior worlds. I have an especially deep reservation about Jung’s archetypal theory and his psychoanalytical method. In particular, I have a problem with his idea that we should try to identify, and interact with, personifications and archetypes within our dreams. For example, the above passage takes beauty, the general concept of it, and makes it prey to the Evil One, to what more or less amounts to the traditional image of Satan.
The Romantic in me revolts against this ancient gnostic link between beauty, sex, and evil. If a benevolent God made this universe, He didn’t make beauty as a lure for evil, but as a conduit for good. Beauty isn’t to be feared or suspected in this way, as if it was forever hounded, surrounded, and invaded by the ever-searching, ever-devouring Eye. That works in Tolkien because we know it’s fiction. But it doesn’t work in empirical psychology, where sex & beauty are a natual part of our range of sense-impressions. Nor does it work in positive theology, by which I mean a view of the universe in which we focus on Good rather than Evil. Jung is here reminiscent of Young Goodman Brown, Hawthorne’s forlorn character who is surrounded by light and beauty. Married to a lively young woman called Faith, all he sees around him is the Evil Intention that follows him everywhere, from the depth of the forest to the depths of his heart. (I take a closer look at “Young Goodman Brown” in “Hawthorne’s Warning,” which is on the next page, Into the Forest).
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In some ways this chapter is an attempt to turn Jung’s method on its ear. First, I argue that his archetypal approach isn’t suited to the modern mind. To illustrate this, I use Fuentes’ Aura, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet, and Dickens’ Bleak House. Along the way I take Jung’s two major personifications — the Anima and the Shadow — and play around with them, not so much to mock them as to show why they don’t really help us to unify our psyche or attain peace of mind. Finally, I turn Aura on its ear: I deflate Fuentes’ occult scenario using metafiction, and I turn the coercive nightmare of Consuelo’s closeted world inside out: Felipe finds his way free of Consuelo’s archaic embrace, wanders back into the streets of Mexico City, and encounters the real beauty and connection he sought at the start of the story. From being entranced by the figment of Aura and following her about the dark and decrepit house, and from staring in disbelief at the black magic of Consuelo’s altar to blasphemy, Felipe stares angel-headed at the silver cross dancing in the sun on the collarbone of a pretty mestiza waitress.
This silver cross is a symbol of holiness and beauty, and also of liberation from the clutches of any malign, coercive, or threatening power. My point is a general one: the cross, or a different symbol of a Higher Power — the beads of Mary or Saraswati, Vishnu’s conch, Shiva’s drum, Buddha’s wheel — can be helpful in dealing with obscure threatening figures or situations in nightmares. The symbol can be used before we sleep or when we wake up — and if we’re lucky in the nightmare itself — to focus our minds on a specific thing that stands for a Greater Power. This allows us to discreetly step out of our own way, like Frodo or Aragorn when Gandalf and Saruman have it out on a mystic plane. I suggest that we avoid imagining, animating, and engaging with occult figures acting on the stage of our dreaming mind. Let the wizards fight it out.
In such a situation the double refuge works like this: the open agnostic within us can’t disprove yet also can’t disprove that such a battle takes place somewhere in our minds, or in the dimensions on which our minds might be operating, despite our waking objections; the open theist within us avails itself of the main principle of their theism: Good trumps Evil. The solution is simple: let God operate. Be like Strider, and don’t come between the mystic powers of Gandalf and Saruman.
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I also suggest in this chapter that Jung’s complex (and often spooky) archetypes be replaced by a much simpler and less taxing range of characters. These four characters are ill-defined and vague on purpose: they aren’t to be taken literally, but as symbols of something else. Thus we can see ourselves as the Knight struggling to be good in a fallen world. The idea of a kinght is an old one, and can be replaced by another idea. For instance, we might instead see ourselves as the Hobbit, or any other thing which reminds us of our mixed selves — perhaps even as the dog, with its mad and barking moments and with its friendliness and trustworthiness too. We can also see any force that helps us as the Travelling Friend, and any force that helps us in a magical or fantastic way as the Blue Fairy. These three symbolic or allegorical figures are secondary and subordinate to a fourth: the Gatekeeper.
In my version of simplified types, the Gatekeeper is whatever it is in this world or the next that fuses with our neurology to 🔹 open the gates of dreaming, 🔹 usher in particular dreams, and 🔹 lead us toward darkness or light, confusion or peace of mind. In general terms, the Gatekeeper is similar to God or Mother Nature. In more specific terms, it’s the power that ♦️ determines the border between waking and dreaming, and ♦️ constructs the surreal topography and the shifting ambience of the dreaming mind. By seeing the operation of dreams as controlled by a benevolent power, we direct our minds to positive outcomes. We also don’t allow our minds to fracture into different personifications. We might understand the Gatekeeper in a religious sense as a spiritual force or figure (God, Mother Nature, the Dao, Jesus, Saraswati, Guanyin, Mary, etc.) or in a scientific sense as a material force (Nature, the constructive will within us, Nature’s evolutionary drive toward order, wholeness, happiness, etc.).
To recap: in my version of simplified types, 1. the Gatekeeper employs a very limited number of secondary figures, which serve as basic functions and have the vaguest of names. 2. the Knight is our dreaming self while 3. the Travelling Friend is any friendly force of figure we meet along the way, and 4. the Blue Fairy is any benevolent miraculous or fantastic force or figure that crops up along the way. I use the term the way with a purpose here: in Daoism the invisible and incomprehensible Force that takes care of life is referred to as the Dao, or the Way. All of these figures are intentionally vague, even a bit humorous in the case of the Blue Fairy. This isn’t meant to mock, but to give status and form to vague and mysterious forces — in the same way that Prospero’s poet gives abstract notions “a habitation and a name.” Fictitious and vague names help us remember that they can take many forms. It’s the abstract principle that counts, not the specific packaging.
Using this simplified typology, we’re less likely to get lost in the complexity of nightmare. We don’t engage in the Jungian method of ascribing an enduring or archetypal nature to specific aspects within us. We don’t see these as operating individually with their own agendas, as in the case of the Shadow and the Anima. The only times when it’s helpful to crystallize psychic forces into symbols or figures is 🔹 when we want to identify a positive force, be it magic or realistic, Blue Fairy or Travelling Friend, or 🔹 when we want to appeal to the greater intelligence that directs the show of our dreaming mind — that is, the Gatekeeper, who has the dexterity, power, wisdom, and grace to open our mind to dreams that lead to clarity, peace of mind, and goodness.
Why imagine a negative figure like the Shadow when a positive one like the Travelling Friend might neutralize or dissolve the negative psychological situation? Why create a solid identity for negative sensations and neural pathways when we might solidify positive ones into a stronger current? Thinking figuratively in a positive way, the Blue Fairy and the Travelling Friend pop up here and there in our dreams, while the Gatekeeper controls the larger ebb and flow.
For people who are deeply troubled, it may be therapeutic to see their dreams in terms of figures like a Shadow, Anima, Jester, Mother, Father, Maiden, Wise Old Man, or Magician. This may be a way for them to identify that other inside them, and bring that other back into their identity. And for people of a very adventurous and unflappable nature, I imagine that confronting a Shadow or Anima might be exciting. Yet for people who are mentally stable, or who are looking for peace of mind, it may be a mistake. Perhaps under the guidance of a Jungian psychiatrist it might all work out, yet to try Jung’s method on your own, as I have done, appears to me a dangerous business.
I suspect it’s counter-productive to shape the surreal sketches of our dreams into the coherent meanings of drama, as if the globe of our dreaming minds was Shakespeare’s Globe, and as if the actions within our dreaming minds could be understood in terms of archetype, plot, or structured meaning. Plays and novels can be seen in this way, and we can see some aspects of our dreaming in dramatic terms, yet it doesn’t make sense to interpret the workings of our dreams in light of the coherence we find in myth and drama.
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Next: ☯️ Ciao, Carlo!