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Allowing the Unconscious To Be By A T Mann After I wrote the interpretations for the first ten tarot cards for my book The Elements of the Tarot, I gave them to my friend and colleague Derek Seagrief. He read my guided imageries, affirmations and interpretations for each card and gave me feedback about them. He is highly qualified to do so as he also is very much involved in the same work. His primary comment was a question that has since become extremely valuable for me: Why do you always assume that unconscious images must be brought into consciousness? Since reading Carl Jung in the late 1960s, I had accepted his psychological axiom that attaining integration or individualization involved bringing unconscious material into the light of consciousness. Indeed Jung used many metaphors to support this contention, some of which are now seen as being racist. For example, he drew a parallel between the Dark Continent of Africa and the domain of the unconscious, implying that both were mysterious, barbaric, primitive and undifferentiated. I suppose that I never questioned his assumptions because the masculine aspect of my own mind supported this idea, despite the fact that I had spent a number of the most creative years of my own life being in many ways being primarily guided, if not possessed, by the unconscious. Upon looking further, I discovered that since men write a large majority of books on subjects such as psychotherapy and astrology, if was quite natural that this modern myth be perpetuated and supported wherever possible. Indeed women writing in these areas also express it. So it is not a blind spot exclusively for men. For a start, the division of the psyche or its connects into conscious and unconscious is a symbolic one, about which Jung was very clear. As with other such divisions, they constitute boundaries that the psyche creates to define itself and to identify its relationship to reality. It is important to understand what a boundary is. It seems to be natural, or even human, to artificially split our awareness into compartments objective vs. subjective, life vs. death, mind vs. body, etc. Yet this leads to an inner division that often defines our life. The earliest boundary is between us and everything outside of us, which is the universally accepted self /not-self boundary which we usually never bridge or transcend. We eternally seek the dissolution of boundaries, but end up making more and more of them. Even our techniques for liberation, such as psychotherapy and astrology, simply create more complex systems of boundaries, defined in more and more precise ways, until it is easy to forget the initial intention of dissolving boundaries and to be come obsessed with the boundaries themselves as reality. Astrology is a system that utilizes a sequence of such boundaries as a language of the psyche. Any symbolic languages or systems that use symbolic languages also utilize boundaries by defining the differences between this and that. In Eastern mysticism there is a phrase that describes the transcendence of this boundary: This IS That. The tarot is another such system, but it has a fundamental difference. Being images, the cards carry many layers of meaning and leave their interpretation up to the viewer. They are totally integrated scenes which many generations of interpreters have broken down into their component parts, analyzed and utilized to support their own views of the world. And this is the point.
I realized that in a card such as the Empress, which depicts a feminine figure sitting upon her pillow throne within her domain of ripened corn, Cyprus trees and rushing water, I had suggested that it was appropriate to subdue this symbolic representation of nature in order to utilize her power. In reality, it is far more important to allow such symbols of the unconscious to remain in their appropriate domain. If anything, we must take steps to allow the unconscious to remain an eternal source of wisdom unpolluted by consciousness. When we identify our inner wisdom as originating from the unconscious, we must worship that process and protect its source, rather than to control it and neutralize its power. Taken from a more integrated viewpoint, by attempting to eliminate or depotentize a part of the whole we create an imbalance within it which is artificial, and which is therefore extremely difficult to see, much less re-integrate. As a result of this revelation, I have been working to correct this imbalance. Which is why I say, Allow the Unconscious to be Unconscious. |
