"Man as a spiritual being is made human by essence (hsing). The individual man possesses it. but it extends far beyond the limits of the individual" (Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower).
Something has been weighing on me these past few days, and this morning, in an effort to understand what it is, I did an Active Imagination on a recent dream that involved rescuing two children. Active Imagination is a technique used in Jungian therapy to 'drop into' one's unconscious. I have used it before to gain deep insights into a particular image or experience.
This time, however, I was met with darkness, a deep, impenetrable darkness and a terrible smell of my early childhood, the complex mix of flesh, blood and other things that usually accompanies early childhood memories. Looming on the edge of the darkness was the ominous outline of a square tower.
Go no further! Stop here!
It was as clear as if spoken, but it was a feeling, a presentiment, a warning in my body, so compelling that I obeyed.
Since then, I have been asking myself how far one must go into one's past, or into one's own unconscious to know oneself. Is there a limit to how far one can go without being sucked into the unconscious as into a whirlpool or lost there? In the quest to know oneself, must one choose between Scylla or Charybdis?
Has Jungian therapy taken me as deep into the shadows of my childhood as I need to go? Should the children I seek to rescue in dreams sometimes be left in the past? Are they sometimes murdered potentialities that cannot be rescued?
Or might they only sometimes be aspects of my childhood still able to be released from their darkness and allowed to develop in new directions?
Is there a limit to what we must know, or even seek to know? How deep is deep enough?
