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That wasn’t the end of the process.
After watching the Patriot football game
the next day, I went to bed and dreamed I had designed a new Patriot logo and
was about to unveil it to the screaming fans. The logo consisted of a maze of square
tubes circling outward from the core in a rectangular form. The tubes were not
just static and square pipes but glowing and pulsating, infused with
feeling. I wasn’t totally pleased with my creation. I had wanted it even
more flowing and alive but it was too late now: it was show time. What I had
created would have to do.
But at the last minute, disaster struck: a
few of the tubes suddenly appeared disconnected and askew. Worse yet, the whole
logo began to slowly collapse upon itself, the same way that my Janus mask had
threatened to collapse at that delicate juncture in the construction
process when I had to cut the Janus mask into two halves in order to remove the
temporary inner form, consisting as it did of old crumbled newspapers covered
with masking tape. As I feared, once the inner support was removed, my mask
started to collapse. I worked desperately, smoothing the severed edges of
the still moist and pliable clay back together while, at the same time,
frantically stretching and straightening the clay to keep it in some sort of
coherent form.
The Logo was a metaphor for
me
I can see now that the Patriot logo was a
metaphor for me. Entering old age, I am finally attempting to open myself up in
order to remove my crumbled up, old newspaper, conventional persona, the
social face I project outward, the one preoccupied with collective ideas. And,
indeed, it comes at a risk. As Jung says, the disintegration of persona of
conventionality may well lead initially to a state of chaos in the individual:
“one result of the dissolution of the persona is the release of
fantasy…disorientation.” [i]
The key to weathering this dissolution of
the self is not to attempt to replace it with a single authentic self because one
doesn’t exist. What we must understand, as Peter Baldwin tells us, is that
we have many parts, multiple selves, both conscious and non-conscious, which
we must learn to integrate to live a full and rich life. [ii]
Robert Jay Lifton, in another of my
favorite books, calls this ability to integrate multiple selves one of the
great psychological challenges of our times, not just as a means to understand
ourselves but to help save the world by learning to develop deeper empathy and
a real sense of commonality with our fellow humans and the natural world. [iii]
I read these books years ago and have
always had a great appreciation for what they have to say. But now I
realize it was mostly at the theoretical level of my being. It only became
experiential knowledge, seeping into every bone of my being, when I got my
hands dirty building my Janus mask.
Experiencing synchronicity:
Little
known to me at the time, my experiential work with masks was not completed. I
was about to experience a ‘meaningful coincidence’, something Jung called
synchronicity.
Jung
was transfixed by the idea that life was not a series of random events but
rather an expression of a deeper order, something he called synchronicity. Jung
felt the principle of synchronicity provided “conclusive evidence for his
concepts of archetypes
and the collective
unconscious, in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that
underlies the whole of human experience and history — social, emotional,
psychological, and spiritual.” Jung believed that there were parallels between
synchronicity and aspects of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. [iv]
Now
back to my meaningful experience.
After
writing about my dream, I attempted to draw my dream image of the
Patriot logo that set this whole blog into being. But for whatever reason,
after failing miserably, I decided to give up and take a warm bath instead.
While the tub was filling, it occurred to me that if I was, in fact, tapping
into the Jungian collective unconsciousness, other searchers would have surely
also connected to it and created similar images to the one I had dreamed
about.
With that in mind, I grabbed one of
Russet’s art books, Modern and Primitive Art[v],
and took it into the bathtub with me to check out my theory. I opened the
book at random and flipped through a couple of pages. When I got to page 37,
there it was: My dream image!
I swear – no exaggeration – that’s the way
it happened! Synchronicity won the battle against my rational mind.
Conclusions and food for thought
My working assumption is that my jagged,
rectangular logo dream image indicates that I am a work-in-progress, journeying
from the rigid, theoretical, ideological, patriarchal rationality of my youth
toward the more feminine, mystical, spiritual, creative wholeness represented
by the flowing spiral forms of Native American symbols, Buddhist mandalas,
and Tantra painting. According to Jung, the basic design of all mandalas is
"a circle or square (most often a square) symbolizing 'wholeness', and in
all of them the relation to the center is accentuated. " [vi]
Jung says that the circle is one of the
great primordial images of humankind and that when we analyze the symbol of the
circle, we are really analyzing the self. In a similar vein, Joseph
Campbell, the great master of mythology and a devotee of Jung, adds this:
"Making a mandala is a discipline for pulling all those scattered aspects
of your life together, for finding a center and ordering your life to it. You
try to coordinate your circle with the universal circle." [vii]
I believe that is what I am being prompted
to do by my dream: To step away from conventional society and discover my
authentic self which involves accessing and pulling together into harmony my
various disparate parts, both conscious and unconscious. And most important, aligning
myself with something bigger than myself: Mother Earth and what Jung called the
universal whole.
XXX
Notes
on other avenues to explore:
Another
avenue to explore is the meaning of “logo” in my dream. The word logo is the
root of logos. Carl Jung contrasted the critical and rational faculties of
logos with the emotional, mystical elements of Eros. Wikipedia tells us
according to Jung’s approach, logos vs. Eros can be represented as
"science vs. mysticism", or "reason vs. imagination" or
"conscious activity vs. the unconscious. [viii]
For
Jung, logos represented the masculine principle of rationality, in contrast to
its female counterpart. In terms of my dream, perhaps I am encountering my
"soul-image," the complementary, contrasexual part of my psyche when
the archetype of my male collective unconscious, animus, finds
expression through my feminine inner personality, anima.[ix]
That
would explain my increased interest in the imagination and the mystical. And why
in my dream I was attempting to mold the rectangular logo into a more flowing,
spiraling mandala. I need to explore this further.
Jung
viewed the anima process as being one of the sources of creative
ability. “In the book The Invisible Partners it is said that the
key to controlling one's anima/animus is to recognize it when it manifests and
exercise our ability to discern the anima/animus from reality.”[x]
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