(Photo by Corey Arnold - coreyfishes.com)
My father’s family where fishermen for generations. Me, I have never been on a boat for longer than a day, and the times when I have gone fishing with my dad I would only be able to fantasize about how it would feel to be on a tiny boat so many miles from the shore, floating over such a vast body of water. Underneath, a darkness teeming with life that I can only dream of. In the past couple of months, I have dreamt about 5 times, that I find myself on the beach that I would go to every summer in Peru as I was growing up. In all these dreams I am on land, sometimes at the beach, and sometimes in my family’s beach house. Every time, I am watching as the raging ocean, with big and powerful waves, swallows everything in between me and it. If I am in the house, the waves either crash on the outside walls or actually flood the house, but just fast enough to allow me time to escape. If I am at the beach, I either stand on the shore as I watch the ocean as I feel it calling me, defying me to go nearer it; or, I am hanging onto rocks inches from where huge waves crash as I helplessly watch the sea’s majestic power.
When I was 12 years old I got my first guitar. Even though I barely knew how to play it, my first impulse with it was to compose my own melodies and lyrics, instead of learning songs from my favorite artists. I found a sense of freedom in being creative. I would normally first find a combination of chords or notes that I liked. Then I would repeat that circle for some time until along with the ongoing music, a “silence” was created in my whole being, a space from which very slowly words and melodies would start to arise. Many are my memories of those initial months, when I was becoming “addicted” to the process of creating songs. Who can blame me. More often than not, I would grab my guitar when I was feeling angry, sad or scared, and the way things went - after a while - I was feeling better. I don’t remember ever stopping to wonder about how this happened. I was too busy being a very intense teenager.
This past year and a half of my master’s program has been for me a most challenging, exciting, terrifying and beautiful period of time. Luckily for me, once music came into my life, it never went away. I can’t count the times that music has been to me like a lifesaver as I floated in the stormy seas of my mind. Even before I took this class, I have been thinking about the idea of music creation (or any type of personal expression), as an alchemical process. Jung (2014b), as he describes how the alchemists’ inner world was projected onto the matter they were working with, mentions that “everything unknown and empty is filled with psychological projection: it is as if the investigator’s own psychic background were mirrored in the darkness” (p.288). From this quote, the concepts of “emptiness” and what is “unknown” are very interesting. First, the relationship of “emptiness” and “silence” is right now appearing as something worth looking into in the context of my own process of musical creation.
Certainly, we could say that before any musician plays or sings the first sound, a relative silence is broken by the appearance of music. I have to wonder though, whether silence is actually possible. Without going either into religious theories about all-pervading sacred sounds such as the Vedic aum, or into the science behind soundwaves which tells us that absolute silence can’t exist, I would like to explore this moment of relative silence before musical creation begins. (I will use the word “silence” because what is important here is how the artist relates to it, and not whether it is objectively there. Also, I think that this process is translatable to any form of creative art or endeavor). In artistic creation, “silence” or “emptiness”, a blank canvas, or a silent room, are for me symbols of infinite possibility. In my own experience, I can explain it as if the urge to create comes from that which is latent but needs to be actualized, that which is unmanifested and needs to be manifested; inevitably, I am lured to think that the intention to create serves as a bridge to the unconscious. From a Jungian lens, this would mean a connection with the realm where my Self resides, and where I have glimpses of my own divinity.
After this connection is effective, the “silence” becomes “pregnant” with an intention that comes from beyond my consciousness, a message from my daimon that the next bit of darkness is ripe to be illumined. This is why the word “emptiness” is in my opinion a little bit confusing, for while it is useful in a symbolic way, I don’t know if I can really say that there’s something out there to which I can relate that is really free of my own projections. So, as long as I am there as a subject to relate to it, “matter”, or in this case “emptiness” can never be devoid of meaning. Some refer to this from of phenomenological stance as the experience of the dissolution of the boundaries between subject and object; varied forms of this experience are sought after by spiritual seekers and people with interest in altered states of consciousness. This brings me to my next topic: “the unknown”. The common thread in these experiences of ourselves as “one with creation” or “one with God” is that our egoic mind is somehow bypassed or relegated of its command. So, it seems that when I was twelve years old and I started writing my first songs, what I actually became “addicted” to, was to entering this altered state of consciousness which was facilitated by allowing myself to be taken over by this quasi-cathartic practice of musical creation.
It is only after taking this class that I am beginning to understand what happens when I am saved by music. I am feeling anxious… My heart is beating faster than normal, yes, again… I feel an uncomfortable pressure on my chest, and even though doing yogic breathing helps a little bit, it eventually starts feeling counterproductive to try to control this vicious cycle of mind and body with forced deep breaths… This unsustainable illusion of control only feeds my ego and its desperate cling to power… Heart-beat, heart-beat, heart-beat, something terrible is going to happen… Wait! There is my guitar! I grab my guitar and I tune it as fast as I can… By now my only intention is to play… I feel as if I am responding to the knocks of my beating heart that needs to tell me something and it can’t wait any longer… I am not sure if I am free at all, or if I am actually a prisoner and vessel of whatever has chosen to be manifested now through me… This has happened so many times and it is all pretty scary… You know the drill, just have faith, I always end up saying to myself… OK, let’s do this, even if by “this” I really mean sitting here with my guitar, waiting… I wait… It doesn’t take long and my fingers start moving up and down the fretboard, as if guided by an agenda of their own… Ah, a chord, and then another, and then another… Repeat, repeat… A couple of minutes of this go by… I notice myself being slowly enveloped by a sense of calmness… Space… Music… My energy flows unimpeded towards an unknown destination... My whole body resonates with fullness… For a second I start getting restless in my mind, excited to witness the end result… Patience… It’s OK… This is not just about me…
I plunge back into the ocean of sound waves… Suddenly, an uncomfortable feeling in the core of my body quickly starts moving upwards until it reaches my throat and vocal cords… As I exhale, the air decidedly makes its way out into that which weirdly feels as “outside of me” … Along with air, sound irrupts from my being as I begin to utter languageless words in a melody… I am possessed by a force whose language I don’t speak… I trust… This has happened before… This must be what great saints refer to when they talk about faith… I let go again as my mind seems to bow in reverence and humbleness to that which it cannot grasp… But my body certainly can, and it revels in the honor of hosting such a magical show… I am guided to craft languageless melodies that adorn the persistent guitar background music… Slowly, something in me begins to be able to decode the initially unintelligible message… I experience a tension inside, as a part of me refuses to encapsulate and name what was formless and nameless… Oh! The beauty of the meaningless... The relief you bring to my weary being… But it is time now… The meaning is here, and my pencil looks eagerly at me… I write a sentence down… Is this blasphemy? How can words capture the depth of what just happened? I then remember… This is not about me… I write down, line after line, until the faucet slowly turns off…
I am comforted by my intuitive affirmation that, like von Franz (1998) writes,
creation, or the nature which surrounds us and of which we are a part, is in Jung’s view probably not entirely meaningless, but the meaning is latent, since the unconscious, which is sheer nature, harbors a latent meaning which becomes actual only when it becomes conscious in us. (p.169)
After the experience though, I recognize that one thing that gets in the way of my satisfaction is a sense of unworthiness, of shame. For most of my life, and much like Jung’s experience, “I had the feeling that I was either outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed” (Jung, 1989, p. 60), for the call to be a messenger of divine will felt mostly as too heavy a burden to bear. As time has passed, and with steadfast determination to reconcile myself with the God that had charged me with such immense responsibility, I began to understand this whole dynamic under a new and much welcome light. Jesus’ plea to God that we all may be one with God as he is one with God (John 17:20-26) never really left my consciousness from the first time I came across it. What has been dawning on me recently however, is that this reality goes both ways; it is not just I who am one with God, but it is also God who is one with me. This way, instead of having to anxiously try to elevate myself to a “higher” state of being from my inherited divinity, I can kindly ask God to “lower” him/herself and experience creation as I do.
Even though I don’t agree with Jung when he implies that humans are the only conscious beings in this world, von Franz (1998) cites Jung (1989, pp. 338/311-312) as she explains how God actually needs our consciousness to experience his own creation: “that is the meaning of divine service, of the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge from darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of His creation, and man conscious of himself” (p.174). The last part is revelatory, for even if in many spiritual traditions we are encouraged to come into contact with our self, the emphasis of this tends to be an undermining or even annihilation of our egos in service of a full submission to God’s “higher” will. Jung has redeemed our beaten egos and has presented us with a different approach; one that has so far fit very well with my present condition. When we see spiritual development as a hierarchical process, with God-like infinite knowledge at the top, then what I feel, and have felt most of my life, is that my ego is actually strengthened with all the knowledge I gain. Consequently, the more I know, the more I want. Thus, being spiritual becomes a race on a stairway to heaven, and we leave the world, and ourselves behind.
In the Red Book, Jung (2009) says that “cleverness conquers the world, but simplemindedness, the soul. So take on the vow of poverty of spirit in order to partake of the soul” (p.237). This has become crucial to me in my own relationship with my soul, and God. The intuition that my will is important, and with faith that my own soul knows what’s best for me, I can reclaim my story, my myth, as an adventure worth living, for it has been pre-approved by God. This makes we think of Hillman’s acorn theory, and I wonder whether “pre-approved” also entails our lives as being “pre-determined”. I’d like to think that they are not pre-determined. If I am in a path towards individuation, I’d like it to be my creation and not just be a spectator of the story where I am the main character. Do I think I know better what to do with me than God? Of course not, but just as God creates, we children have inherited this same creative ability, and to not use it would be like rejecting one of God’s most exciting gifts to humanity: artistic license.
Here, the image of the hero comes up. It is important then to balance the responsibility of the sacred process of becoming ourselves with the recognition of the fact that we are not alone in doing so. We are not alone because we are in relationship with a host of other beings whose libido also strives towards wholeness. Jung (1996) says that
the instinct of individuation is found everywhere in life, for there is no life on earth that is not individual. Each form of life is manifested in a differentiated being naturally, otherwise life could not exist. An innate urge of life is to produce an individual as complete as possible. (p.4)
The hero image also fits nicely with a hierarchical understating of spiritual development, one where knowledge is to be accumulated so we can shine brighter and brighter, until eventually, the whole world can see us. Contrary to this, Jung (2014a) mentions that
the ‘renewal’ (reformatio) of the mind is not meant as an actual alteration of consciousness, but rather as a restoration of an original condition, an apocatastasis. This is in exact agreement with the empirical findings of psychology, that there is an ever-present archetype of wholeness… (p.40)
This means that, contrary to the greedy amassing of knowledge proposed both by many spiritual traditions and seconded by our post-modern culture, the movement towards wholeness implies an actual shedding of preconceived, limiting and rigid ideas of how reality is, so that we can make room and become vessels for how God wishes to manifest him/herself through us. This needn’t go against our individuality, for we can rest assured that the way wholeness is projected through us is a completely unique phenomenon. This is how I make sense of our individuality. It is a full and reverent acceptance of our divine nature being manifested in a space-time context. We are responsible for how the infinite enters into the finite, and for how lovingly we can love and accept ourselves and others who are also charged with this very complex task.
Going back to my dreams about the ocean somehow defying me, I can’t help it but make the connection with the fact that with this Master’s Degree in East-West Psychology, and especially this class, I feel like I have been gaining the tools and courage to slowly but surely go deeper and deeper into my unconscious. Luckily for me, and as I have tried to describe, during most of my life, I have had the magic of music as an outlet for my inner world. I am so excited about the fact that in my relationship with music, even though I intuited why and how it was so powerful for me, I wasn’t consciously acknowledging the depth and potential of the process. When I am writing songs, fishing is exactly what I am doing. I am sitting on a boat with a fishing pole waiting for the vast darkness beneath me, the ocean, to feed me. I trust, the ocean knows; I am patient, whatever arises is food for my body and soul.
References
Franz, M.-L. v. (1998). C.G. Jung: His myth in our time. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Jung, C. G. (1989). Memories, dreams, reflections. New York: Vintage Books.
Jung, C. G. (1996). The psychology of kundalini yoga: Notes of the seminar given in 1932 by C. G. Jung. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (2009). The red book: Liber novus: A reader's edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Jung, C. G. (2014a). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 9 Part 2). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (2014b). Psychology and Alchemy Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 12). New Jersey: Princeton University Press.