part0008

Because inner work is a dialogue between conscious and unconscious elements, it always raises the specter of conflict—inner conflict over values, urges, beliefs, ways of life, morals, loyalties. The conflicts, of course, are there in any case, regardless of whether we face up to them. But our dream work forces us to look at them. And Active Imagination, perhaps more than any other form of inner work, brings the conflicts to the surface and gets them out in the open.

How can we stand to bring them into the open? Most people can’t face inner conflict at all; they impose a kind of artificial unity on life by clinging to the prejudices of their ego and repressing the voices of the unconscious. If there are other parts of ourselves who have different values or different needs, most of us would rather not hear about it.

We have already talked about the pluralism of our inner structure. We know that, although we seem to be individuals, we are actually plural beings. Each of us has a great multitude of distinct personalities coexisting within one body, sharing one psyche. We also know that the human mind experiences the world as a duality: We divide the world and our own selves into darkness and light, “good” and “bad,” and we stand eternally in judgment, siding first with one side, then with the other, but rarely undertaking the terrible task of integrating all this into a whole.

It is perhaps this human tendency to see everything as “good” or “bad” that creates the greatest obstacle to accepting and utilizing our varied inner personalities. We don’t realize that our categories of “good” and “bad” are usually arbitrary and subjective. We derive most of these standards from family, culture, and childhood conditioning without questioning them. If we have the courage to look with open minds at some of the instincts and energy systems within that we have been so ashamed of, we almost always find that they can also be positive strengths—and that they are merely normal parts of a total human character. As with all our inner contents, they need to be acknowledged, honored, and lived on an appropriate and constructive level.

It takes courage to go to the “bad” side of ourselves, to acknowledge it as part of ourselves, to consider that it could have a constructive role to play in our lives. It takes courage to look directly at the fragmentation of our desires and urges. One side seems to argue yes while another side vehemently says no. One side of my psyche argues for relatedness, rootedness, and stability. Another side wants to go on heroic crusades, have great adventures in exotic places, travel to the other side of the world and live like a gypsy. Yet another personality wants to build an empire and consolidate my power systems. Sometimes these conflicts seem irreconcilable, and we feel torn apart in the conflicts of desires, duties, and obligations that we feel.

How, then, can we go to the unconscious in our inner work and immerse ourselves in this fragmentation and duality? We could not find the courage to face up to the terrible divisions in us unless we felt instinctively that the conflicts must eventually resolve, the warring parts come together in peace, the fragmentation finally reveal a deeper reality, an underlying fundamental unity and meaning in life.

Millions of people repeat this statement in one language or another every week. Of course, most of us never consider its implications; it has become another phrase to repeat without thinking about it. Whatever may be your feeling about the creed as a literal, religious statement, you should consider what it means on a psychological level. It says that there is only one subject; there is only one Source, one beginning, one unity out of which all the multiplicity of this life flows, and to which it returns.

Without this conviction we would be helpless; serious dream work and the confrontations of Active Imagination would be impossible. The sheer multiplicity of our inner selves would overwhelm us. But the Credo teaches us that all these selves, all these energies, flow from one indivisible source and can be traced back to that One. One way of doing that tracing is to enter bravely into the pluralism, into the duality, through inner work.

Who isn’t plagued most of a lifetime by this duality of life? Masculine and feminine voices within, duty or desire, good or evil, this choice or that choice, follow my heart or follow my mind—we can go on forever reciting the pairs of opposites that express the yin and yang of life.

Since we will use these terms yin and yang again, it may help to explain what is meant. In ancient Chinese psychology and philosophy these words denoted the inherent spontaneous division of the world into pairs of opposites: darkness and light, hot and cold, masculine and feminine. The early sages taught that a grasp of total reality required keeping the pairs of opposites in balance.

Yang denoted masculine, in motion, activist, hard, warm, dry, light. Yin denoted feminine, at rest, receptive, soft, cold, dark. The sense in which we use the terms in Jungian psychology is as an expression for the general human psychological experience of duality. We always contain within us attitudes that are complementary opposites. Part of us is in favor, part of us is opposed. Part of us wants to move ahead, part of us wants to be quiet and see how things go. One attitude comes from the feminine side, another from the masculine.

Wisdom, according to the ancient sages, comes from letting the yin side predominate when its time comes and functioning from the yang side when its turn comes. Regardless of the subject, balance comes only when both sides are given their due.

But without this duality, this division of the cosmos, there could be no human life as we know it. It is the price that is paid for our incarnation as conscious beings who inevitably learn to divide the world and to see ourselves as distinct from it.

The path toward consciousness begins when we learn to break the primordial unity of our original unconsciousness. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, we learn to see ourselves as distinct from the world and the people around us. We learn to divide the world into categories, to classify. We begin to divide not only the phenomena outside us but our own traits and characteristics into opposites: what seems “good” from what seems “bad,” the things that frighten us from the things that comfort us, that which affirms us from that which threatens and humiliates us. Thus we arrive at self-consciousness, a sense of ourselves as individuals who stand apart from the herd, egos who stand apart from the collective unconscious.

But the price that is paid for this consciousness is a heavy one: the fragmentation, the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts within us, the feeling that the universe has fallen apart and has no central core of meaning. We are conscious enough to be torn by the conflicts of life but not yet conscious enough to sense life’s underlying unity. Yet, it is by this path that Nature becomes aware of its own existence by giving birth to its one witness: human consciousness.

“But why on earth,” you may ask, “should it be necessary for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness?” This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy. Instead of a real answer I can only make a confession of faith: I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists . From a low hill in the plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of a primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is . The entire world around me was still in a primeval state; it did not know that it was . And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man…. Every advance, even the smallest, along this path of conscious realization adds that much to the world. (Jung, 9, I, CW par. 177)

Once we have stood apart, once we have brought the world into being by becoming conscious of it as distinct from ourselves, our task is still not finished. Each of us carries an intuition, a latent conviction that all this finally adds up to a meaning. There is a universal sense in humans that there is unity and cohesion at the heart of life, and that it is possible for us to be consciously aware of it. So far as I can discover, it is this awareness of the primordial and essential unity of the human psyche that most religions and philosophies have referred to as enlightenment .

Inner work teaches us one of the most important principles of the path toward the unified self. Many people believe they can achieve unity by going backwards, avoiding the conflicts, pretending they aren’t there. Inner work, as a practical experience, shows us that we can embrace the conflict, embrace the duality, bravely place ourselves in the very midst of the warring voices, and find our way through them to the unity that they ultimately express.

We cannot go backwards. We can’t retreat. We can’t find our primordial sense of unity by canceling out consciousness and retreating to animal unconsciousness. Our evolution has taken a different path, and that path is built into us as surely as is the structure of our physical bodies. Our path leads straight ahead, not around the duality but through it to a consciousness of its underlying oneness. Our task is to find the fundamental unity and meaning of life without sacrificing our consciousness of our pluralism, our sense of ourselves as distinct and individual beings.

It is because the cosmos gets divided into heaven and earth, and because heaven and earth are in dialogue, that the universe has produced a Christ, a Buddha, a Mohammed, and the prophets. Each of them carries the archetype of the unified self and the message that the many are actually one. It is because of the conflicts in our own personal lives—and our willingness to face them and convert them into constructive dialogue—that we grow toward consciousness.

It is our lot, if we are honest, to live in duality and paradox. The dialogue of those paradoxical elements is the stuff of life. Surprisingly it is also the surest path toward unity. Our dreams are its stage, its workshop and battleground. And Active Imagination is its superb language.