5.4 Subconscious Searching

(Story begins here) A severe looking man with a shaven head, wireframe glasses and an immaculate three-piece brown suit was coming down the stairs.

“Hello Fraulein!” he said cheerfully, kissing Mary enthusiastically on both cheeks.

“Carl! So good to see you.”

“You too Fraulein,” the newcomer turned to beam at Pete, “you must be Herr Goodshaw, so pleased to meet you. I am Carl Jung.” Pete, impressed, was subjected to a firm and vigorous handshake.

“The mind is like the visible light spectrum, it’s the analogy I used during my life. As above, so below. We are at yellow, the centre of the spectrum, and therefore peak consciousness.”

“The psychiatrist?” he asked, massaging his fingers as he mentally rummaged through his learning. “You’re kind of the same as Sigmund Freud?” Jung flinched.

“In some ways, I am similar to Herr Freud, but in the most fundamental way I am not.”

“Which is?”

“Herr Freud took God away from people,” said Jung simply. “He tried to boil the psyche down to the conscious and the unconscious, the latter he saw as nothing more than sexual and violent drives,” Jung shook his head in disapproval, “he tried to paint the human race as nothing more than clever animals. He said that being good was,” Jung paused as he remembered the quote, “‘a gratuitous search for ethical heights that no longer exist, if they ever did.’ Can you believe that! The world has paid such a high price for those kinds of ideas being unleashed. It is the inevitable result of a materialist mindset, the descent away from God back into matter.” Jung gratefully accepted the hot drink which Mary thrust at him.

“You believe in God, as a scientist?” Jung’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Of course, Herr Goodshaw. Surely you know by now that there is no contradiction between God and science? Why, in my lifetime I said that an individual had to be anchored to God to avoid inevitable submersion in the mass.”

“What do you mean b_”

“It means trapped in the illusion of the physical world,” said Jung quickly, “what the Hindus would call Maya.”
“So you believe in Eastern religions too?”

“Of course! I said at a lecture at a Swiss Institute that the Tao was the indefinable essence of the right way and this is also the mystery of alchemy.” Pete smiled.

“Ah, alchemy, so that’s how you know Mary?”

“Indeed Pete, as above so below. What happens to the alchemical mixture should happen to us. Shall I show you?” Mary’s laboratory faded away and Pete found himself in a long corridor. The walls, floor and ceiling were constructed completely of glass and soft lights shone in from the blackness outside. The lights were yellow where Pete stood, but he could see the colour very gradually changing to violet in one direction and red in the other. Pete glanced at Jung, “where is this?”

“This Herr Goodshaw,” announced Jung grandly, “is the mind.”

“What are all the colours, they almost look like a_”

“Rainbow, yes. The mind is like the visible light spectrum, it’s the analogy I used during my life. As above, so below. We are at yellow, the centre of the spectrum, and therefore peak consciousness. Let’s look outside.” The two men placed hands on the glass to shield reflection and stared. “This is the mind of the young man with the neutral soul that Lisa showed you earlier. This is what I call his persona. It is his conscious, it is how he has tried to be for so long that he thinks it really is him.

“I see,” said Pete, “what’s that? It looks like an aeroplane.”

“That is the flight that the young man missed and which prevented him from saving his sister’s life. It is highly visible in his conscious because he is explaining to his parents that he tried to catch the plane but because of officious airline staff he was prevented from boarding so near to take off. This is what he wants others to believe about himself, but crucially, it is what he wants him to believe about himself. He was willing to sacrifice a large part his lung for her but was thwarted by airline policy. It is his persona, named after the masks worn by actors in ancient Greece.”

“But that’s not the whole story?”
“No Herr Goodshaw,” said Jung solemnly, “let us head towards what I call the shadow.”

“It looks red to me?”
“Indeed, it is the direction of the subconscious.” After a few minutes’ walk, Jung looked out of the corridor shielding out the red light. “Look here please, we are in the area of subconscious urges.” Pete stared out and saw a pair of lungs expanding and contracting. Written across these slippery grey organs in a calligraphic font were the words ‘keep breathing’. “Now, look past the lungs.” Pete saw a mobile phone with a satnav on the screen.

“You see, this is the real reason that he missed the flight,” said Jung excitedly, “he thinks that he set the satnav to the wrong airport by mistake, but his subconscious did it on purpose, as it saw major respiratory surgery and tissue loss as a contravention of it’s deep, core desire to keep breathing.”

“So that is his shadow?”

“Absolutely, this is the murkier, darker parts of our minds which we all have, but are all trying to forget that we have.

“Incredible, what’s further down that way? It looks like the corridor starts to shrink?”

“That way lie the parts of the mind based on older and older parts of the brain and even bodily chemical reactions.”
“The light goes out.”

“It does not go out, it simply passes to infrared.” You can see in the distance, the heart? That’s the signal to make it beat, low-level brain function, then beyond that enzyme reactions in the stomach and so on.”

“Incredible,” breathed Pete, “so there’s kind of a blurred line between where our minds finish, and the universe begins?” Jung frowned,

“Incorrect, there is no line at all, remember, all is one.” He gestured down the corridor. “Which brings us to the ultraviolet end of the mind, would you care to join me?” The two men walked back past the yellow region and beyond. “This is where it gets really interesting,” said Jung, “take a look outside please Herr Goodshaw.” Pete stepped up to the glass corridor wall and shielding the violet light, peaked through and gasped.

“It’s amazing! I can see this young chap, he looks pretty smashed_”

“Smashed? He is in multiple pieces?” asked Jung with concern.

“What? Oh, no I mean drunk.”

“Ah yes,” smiled Jung, “what else do you see?”

“He’s just running around drinking and whooping and_” Pete suddenly blushed, “well doing other things.”

“Describe his appearance.”

“Well, he’s naked, long hair and has a big stick covered with ivy which he’s waving about, amongst… other things.”

“Dionysus,” said Jung with satisfaction, “you’ve just seen your fist archetype, my friend.”

“Archetype? What’s that?” Pete turned from the remarkable spectacle outside.

“Think of them as the forms of thought…” said Jung mysteriously.
“Forms as in Plato? That name just keeps cropping up when I’m in heaven.”

“That is for good reason, yes Plato’s forms. So strictly what you saw was an archetypal symbol or manifestation of the form. Look, here’s the analogy that I used on earth, of course I could never have afforded a real one in those days,” he fished in his pocket and produced a large cut diamond which he rotated carefully beneath the light so Pete could see the sparkles. “You see, this beautiful object is a manifestation of the form of order. The reason that it is so strong and pure is that the atoms are packed in a particularly neat lattice formation. You see? The archetype is the form, the intangible true thing, such as order, neatness etc, the archetypal symbol is the diamond, the projection of the form. Applied to the mind, the archetypes are basic concepts of existence, patterns and images which generate all thoughts.”
“But I’ve not spent much time thinking about a naked long-haired guy drinking wine and waving his_”

“No, because that is just one symbol of the puer aeternus, the eternal youthful God. It is an archetype present across all cultures, merely manifested in different ways. Here we see the ancient Greek puer aeternus, but we could be looking at Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, even Peter Pan in your era and seeing the same archetype. It’s why Christ said, ‘unless you become as little children’, it is what he was talking about, the importance of this archetype.”
“Christ knew about archetypes?”

“He knew everything,” said Jung simply. (continue)