“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― C.G. Jung
How the human mind operates, where creativity comes from, why does imagination exist, what are the meaning of dreams - these are some of the questions we are still, after all the monumental developments and understandings of the modern times - still looking for complete answers to.
Swiss Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, perhaps took us closer to understanding these questions than anyone has since. The intricacy and profundity of his thought, even today, is hard to comprehend. He is, after all, also credited with introducing concepts into the zeitgeist that are now commonplace and even close to trite. Archetypes, complexes, personas, introversions and extraversions, the shadow - overused and commonplace in this good year of our Lord, Two thousand and Twenty four - yet in hindsight, one can see that they were truly remarkable breakthroughs for otherwise ill understood phenomena's of the mind.
I am ill-prepared to understand the human mind, but if I were to look into my own mind, and question myself as to how I operate… well, that is a different matter all together. At times, it appears, thoughts pop into my head as if from their own accord, and when such things happen, one leans towards believing in higher powers placing thoughts into your psyche… at other times I am filled with an indomitable will and arrow like precision of thought, where every action, nay, every thought I have, seems as a result of my own function and doing. But it fluctuates, between these two occurrences, which we can thank Mr. Freud for popularizing such occurrences that we now come to know as the conscious and the unconscious mind. Certainly, he broke it down to a more precise level by differentiations like id, ego and super ego - the basic tenants psychology students will learn in their first psych 101 class of the semester. Jung took Freud's concepts to a whole new level with psychoanalytical breakthroughs like the personal and the collective unconscious.
You just have to look out into the real world, but look at it with the lens of history, with the records of the past we so far have managed to preserve and recount to posterity in a (hopefully) unfabricated way. Every darkness within the personal unconscious - fear, power, death, corruption - all manifest in the 'collective' at certain points in our short history. The brutalities of the Nazi's, the Russian Gulags, the Rape of Nanking - how can such atrocities exist in a world other than one in which the eternal darkness hidden in the human soul manifests in the most brutal ways one can hardly comprehend. Yet it does, and it is still doing, we know this much. So the question remains, how do we conduct ourselves and our minds to ensure that if the situation arises where you were put in a position to commit an atrocity, how could you avoid it? Jung said the repressed parts of our psyche, if not dealt with appropriately and conscientiously, will manifest as complexes in the humans day to day life. How, therefore, do we avoid said repression? In Jung's own words, 'by bringing the darkness to light,'
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious'
~ Carl Gustav Jung
We need to look inwards honestly and without reservations and understand those parts of ourselves that are dark and at times even malevolent. If this exercise is difficult for you. Use an 'anchor' - a memory of a negative situation that was made negative because of your direct actions. For some reason, it is so much easier to recall pain than joy - we all remember that one time in high school where we were seriously embarrassed or filled with shame. By trying to vividly remember the circumstances of that time, we use the memory as an 'anchor' to experience the emotions and sensations and this allows us to observe it almost from a third person perspective, safely and without consequence (other than the growth consequence of your own soul). Once you are fully immersed in the memory, you must 'set your bearing'. The sailing terminology is apt as each human psyche contains seas of darkness and only streams of light - navigating is difficult. By setting your bearing, you are actively imagining scenarios how your negative action could have played out differently, perhaps if you had done one little thing differently, no negative consequence would have materialized and in fact a positive outcome could have happened. As you run through all the different scenarios in your head, you will slowly zero in on the root cause of your base actions. You will understand the precise moment or emotion that led you down the dark path - and your understanding combined with your experience will turn to wisdom.
Now to forage deeper into the waters of darkness, use this exercise but instead of your own experiences, anchor yourself in the experiences of someone who committed those atrocities. This is where imagination comes into play, at times, imagination can be a curse on the psyche. Try and even get a little glimpse of what that would be like, and before you come at my throat saying how could I imagine such horrors, how am I even human? Don’t forget that humans, just like you and I dear reader, committed those atrocities - and as Terence beautifully put it,
"Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto: I am a human being; I consider nothing human alien to me."
Once you enter this deep well of darkness, willingly, and set your bearings towards the light, towards the negation of evil, then you will find yourself a deeper being, a deeper capacity to understand and accept pain, and when an opportunity to inflict pain materializes for you, you avoid it. Do this everyday, and never lose sight of the eternal goodness in your heart, and you shall grow taller than the Baobab trees in Madagascar! And if still, you do not believe me, then let Jung tell you again:
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious."
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