Solar Psyche: Overcoming Anxiety Through Personal Mythology

Life is opposition. Or, as Buddha put it, “Life is suffering” (Peck 15). This truth lies at the very essence of all living things, for all living things live in a matrix of opposition. Every seed that produces fruit must first find its way out of the dark earth; even when it finds sunlight, its stalk and sapling leaves must weather the elements. Every fish that hatches must swim against the currents. Every bird, reptile, or animal that lives on earth fights for survival in an atmosphere of opposition. Even the earth itself finds in its yearly revolution a season of summer and a season of winter. So why should it be different for us? Of course it is not different; just the reverse is true. We are ultimately beings of polarity: the id vies with the super-ego, the conscious vies with the unconscious, there is progression and regression. As Jung states, “sooner or later everything runs into its opposite” (Astor 25). Human beings are beings of opposition, inside and out.

For human beings, however, there are oppositions which extend well beyond that which is found in nature. Once food, clothing, and shelter are procured life does not suddenly become easy. Oppositions still arise, and these in their nature are no less severe than the basic needs of survival. Tillich explains there are three natural and metaphysical oppositions which haunt the human consciousness and fill every thinking being with anxiety: the fear of death, the fear of meaninglessness, and the fear of guilt and condemnation (Tillich 42-54). Every human being is immersed in these fears. And as, Tillich says, even if the fear is “faced, analyzed, attacked, endured” there still remains anxiety, an uneasiness that abides (Tillich 36-37).

Throughout history structures have been put in place to assuage these elemental fears within the human psyche, balance them, and in many cases entirely conquer them. According to Eliade, ancient cultures sought to reconcile these potent anxieties by the creation of sacred space and sacred time. The temple and the altar were fixed points of orientation which brought meaning and allowed the participant in ritual to traverse the spheres of heaven and earth (Eliade 31). The symbols and structures of ancient religion provided tools for humankind to deal with their psychic oppositions. Ancient mythology, of which religion was a part, likewise crafted a matrix of story about creation which provided for a renewal of both cultural and personal oppositions. “Life cannot be repaired,” states Eliade, “it can only be recreated through symbolic repetition of the cosmogony...” (Eliade 82). This was the purpose of myth: to recreate, to maintain, to preserve the sacred culture (Bond 38), which in turn provided the tools which faced the fears of death and meaninglessness and reduced the fear of guilt. Being apart of a mythic culture meant belonging to a homogeneous sacral center that was the mythic axis-mundi or center of both the physical and spiritual worlds.

Modern civilization however, has been desacralized. There are no cosmic centers with religious meaning that the whole of modern society chooses as a point of orientation; manifest-destiny has been wholly replaced with ambivalence. There are no overriding mythologies that modern culture applies as a basis of cultural renewal; rather, modern myths tend to be splintered and antagonistic towards one another. When a society loses its mythic core it loses its psychic energy, and as Jung states, this is nothing short of a moral catastrophe (Jung and Kerenyi 73). This modern reality is due to several factors. Modern religion, as Jung noted, has failed to adapt its own symbolism and stories with current experience (Izod 35). The images and myths that sustained ancient cultures are without meaning in modern times. They have been repackaged and frozen in formulaic expression: kitsch has replaced cosmogony. In so many ways modern religion has not faced the ever-present fears of the human psyche, death, meaninglessness, and guilt, but has ironically heightened these fears through guilt-ridden dogmas. Indeed, ancient myth has been replaced by modern dogma.

The modern secular reaction to failing religious power has fared no better. Modern secularism has not re-forged the mythic experience or infused new ideas and symbols into culture. In fact, secularism has done worse. “Business,” as John Jay Chapman wrote, “has destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except business” (Berman 130). Secular sacred space are places like Citbank and Wall Street; these places hold no meaning for individuals and promote only the value of materialism. Materialism has never been able to address any of the basic fears of the human psyche. Further, the secular oracle is CBS News and Hollywood Boulevard. Modern media is perhaps the worse thing for human, psychic health, as its modus-operandi is to generate “an endless stream of minute, useless information as a form of news entertainment...” (Berman128). In the media, the sacred is replaced with the titillating. Language is the victim of modern business and media, and along with language goes any vestige of sacred or powerful symbol which enables individuals to deal with their basic fears. The only thing left is a heightened neurosis which has become apart of modern secular life.

Of course, cultural decay has occurred before. Many civilizations have risen and fallen during great cycles of time, or it could be said, during great cycles of consciousness. When individuals can no longer relate to their environment and their environment no longer provides “adequate adaptations” nor can it form “functional relationships” in which personal or cultural psychological needs are balanced, then a new, living myth must be created. Living myth is the crystallization of adaptations and relationships between individuals and their culture that work (Bond 39): “We cannot live without a myth, because we need a vital functional relationship to the environments in which we live. As a culture and ultimately as individuals we cannot live without a myth that connects us to our own evolution from environment to environment. [...] when the cultural myth fails, the new myth must come from within the individual” (Bond 47).

Personal mythology is a modern term, but its utility and function has always been with the human race. As Jung theorized, an individual’s psyche is divided into three concentric and interacting realms: personal consciousness, personal unconsciousness, and collective unconsciousness. Individuals live in consciousness, but when the conscious self is out of alignment with unconscious anxieties and when culture no longer satisfies the demands of these anxieties, then the personal unconscious acts as a polarizing force driving the conscious self through enantiodromia, through a state of oppositions in an attempt to find harmony. As Jung writes, “I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self” (Jung 196). A self which “cannot tolerate self deceptions” (Ibid).

This process of psychic development is often painful for it is a full confrontation of the self with the self. All of us, at some time, try to avoid this confrontation as it lies at the very source of our personal fears and anxieties. However, this process of enantiodromia is healthy and even liberating to the individual. Without this willful interaction between the conscious and unconscious a neurosis develops. Individuals get stuck in one mode of being and thinking which in turn is the cause of cultural collapse which further exacerbates inner polarities. Fortunately the conscious self has help in this confrontation–the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is defined by Jung as:

...fantasies (including dreams) of an impersonal character, which cannot be reduced to experiences in the individual’s past, and thus cannot be explained as something individually acquired. These fantasy-images undoubtedly have their closest analogues in mythological types. We must therefore assume that they correspond to certain collective (and not personal) structural elements of the human psyche in general, and, like the morphological elements of the human body, are inherited.[...] These cases are so numerous that we are obliged to assume the existence of a collective psychic substratum. I have called this the collective unconscious” (Jung and Kerenyi 74).

Dreams, images, ideas, and even symbols emerge from the unconscious as the polarity and counterpoint of the conscious self. These fantasies (as Jung called them) inflict consciousness and demand examination, for within them are the keys that resolve the basic anxieties and create mental and spiritual health. Many of these fantasies, however, have no root in an individual’s personal experience or past. These, Jung asserts, come from a collective fantasy, of which ancient mythology was made, and which provide balance to inner polarities. Ancient mythology, therefore, was the crystallization of the collective fantasy, and like ancient religious space and time, provided a point of orientation for individual and communal psychic integrity.

Jung called significant symbols in collective fantasy archetypes. Archetypal images provide nodes in the personal unconscious from which the pendulum of enantiodromia swing until harmony is restored. Thus, when the collective myth of a society degenerates, archetypal images expand within individuals which in turn provide the basis of self-examination and ultimately a new mythology–a new modality that constitutes working relationships in the present environment. Our fantasies become the foundation for insight, which over time seeks a lifestyle with rules for living meaningfully (Bond 70). This process is a continual cycle: as cultural myth fails, personal myth rises until the culture is restored.

Archetypal images are found in every myth and culture, ancient and modern. The child-savior, the nurturing mother, the mystic mountain, or the tree of life are but a few of these archetypes. One such archetypal image is the sun. Many ancient mythological deities are solar deities and therefore a symbol of light and fecundation. Ra, Osiris, Rama, Zeus, Apollo, and Jesus are just a few deities which always have some form of halo or solar light accompanying their image. Almost always solar deities promise the resolution of the basic fears identified by Tillich. First, death: the sun as a seasonal luminary resurrects the earth from winter. Most solar deities promise some form of resurrection after death. Second, meaninglessness: the sun as a psychic symbol provides illumination. In Christian myth Jesus ritually invites “Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Matthew 7:7). And third, guilt: the sun as a fiery orb purifies. Rama purifies Sita through ritual fire and Apollo purifies the earth with his golden chariot. Solar deities are archetypal symbols which provide courage and context in the midst of chaos.

For many, these gods are dead. But in archetypal symbol they indeed are immortal. No scholarly citation need be mentioned to illustrate this concept; I have a personal case study. After all, not even Jung arrived at his theories by theorizing only on the writings of others. The exact opposite is true. Jung kept careful diaries of his own dreams and fantasies as well as explored his psychic depths by working with stone (Jung 175-176).

Sometime ago I found myself in psychic turbulence; in this case under the anxiety of meaninglessness. After viewing some distressing material in the news, and reflecting upon the state of culture in which I and my family live, great doubt began to surround my every thought. I began to fear for the lives of my children; not their actual physical lives, but their mental and spiritual lives. A neurosis that develops from the anxiety of meaninglessness is despair. Individuals who succumb to hopelessness cease finding joy or happiness in their day to day activities and in their personal relationships. Despair is crippling and damning. It was to despair that I wanted to succumb. Neither I, nor the culture in which I lived, had any answers for my personal fears: terrorism, national debt, economic woes, cultural collapse, and, as I perceived then and now, a cultural language no longer based on myth or religion, but only on the empty shell of rhetoric.

Oft times in psychic crisis I turn to meditation and prayer as the calming salve that helps harmonize the polarities within. This was a time of sober reflection for me and I took it upon myself to meditate and pray over the situation. It is in such reflection that enantiodromia finds expression. In this case, while in prayer and meditation an image not familiar to me nor part of anything that in my own thinking made sense appeared. The image came with such poignancy that reluctantly I arose from my seat and sketched the image down as a scribble (see Appendix). I have learned to pay attention to such images that come from within and are unexplainable for almost always they are archetypal.

The image was that of the sun and the earth in a peculiar relationship. As the image appeared, the earth was flat and positioned as if it were the shadow of the sun. Such an image is counter-intuitive to the reasoning, conscious mind. Not all fantasy is archetypal, but self-generating images which are oft times nonsensical show that the unconscious is trying to speak, for the symbols that the unconscious delivers are rarely easily interpreted. They are not wrote signs with implicit meaning, rather they are symbolic of relationships which need attention and reflection. Thus it was for me that my psyche began to brood.

In dealing with such images it is also helpful to play with them. Play, after all, is implicit with inner fantasy. In this case, not knowing why this image came to me or what it might mean, I took a pencil and a sketch pad and began to draw a series of images based off what I could remember of the original. I drew numerous suns in various shapes and sizes, as well as numerous circles. I drew images of the earth and sun in co-orbital relation and sketched in light and shadow. But none of this seemed to get me anywhere. That is okay, of course, for after all it is play.

In an another attempt to understand the image I suddenly had the notion to get technical. This meant that I pulled out an old compass and square and began to draw circles of exact geometric proportion (as indeed my scribbles show I cannot draw circles very well). Circles have very unique geometric features which lend themselves to infinite progression (i.e. that which is found with a circle circumscribing a square) and symbolic illumination (i.e. the intersecting of circles forming the vesicus pisces, or gateway to all numeric and geometric form). I thought, perhaps, the image had something to do with symbolic geometry, but as I drew I knew I was lacking the essence of what was strange and mysterious about the image itself: the flat earth as shadow to the sun.

The idea of light and shadow is mythic. Every myth tradition tells of a descent into shadow and a resurrection back into light. Indeed, it is Psyche’s descent into the underworld that provides the basis for our word psychology. And so I took a ball and placed it on a clean, white surface and placed a very bright light upon it so a stark shadow was cast. This image I sketched, and this time I attempted to make the sketch as real as possible. As I sketched I attempted to let the image speak to me rather than imposing my own ideas upon the image. When I nearly had the image completed an insight occurred to me that I had not had before: if the earth was the shadow of the sun, then the sun itself was not the source of light, rather, the sun was the object receiving the light and the earth was the product of that reception.

Suddenly, I felt as if I had come upon a new and strange illuminating idea. Curiously, my anxiety which I had been feeling over my family and our condition also dissipated at this moment of revelation. I cannot say that I knew entirely why, only that at this moment my conscious self and my unconscious self had made a connection; an important connection with an archetypal image.

Finally, I discarded pencil and paper and drew the image in a new medium–graphic art. Here I added color and perspective, trying to recreate the original image, but not holding myself to the bonds of memory. I allowed myself to play in and with the new medium. As I painted and drew, my original anxiety vanished altogether. I no longer felt despair of any sort. Through the process of imagining and creating this mythic image of the sun and earth I realized that the light that cast the sun’s shadow was the same light which created the earth. As Genesis reports at the first moment of creation, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). I had always thought that the light of creation was the allegorical cosmic light of the Big Bang or the galactic center. What I now comprehended, and had never understood before, was that light was the light of the inner soul–illumination. The very object of my despair, the soul of my family, was itself the solution to my despair.

The earth as shadow revealed a relationship. The sun was the bridge between light and shade. What I had attributed as the source of light for the earth and what I had attributed as the source of light for my family was an external power over which I had no control or power. I wanted for them peace and tranquility in an entirely violent and arbitrary world. There was no solution to this dilemma. Yet, what the mythic image revealed to me was that the external power which brought salvation was not itself the sun; the sun was only a symbol of the true light which originates within. As long as my family was true to itself; as long as there was light and love in our relationships; as long as we could support each other with faith and integrity; this would be as long as our world would be manifest and full; our myth would be living and vibrant; our souls connected to each other at their very cores. The meaninglessness I feared for me and my family in a violent and arbitrary world evaporated by the meaningfulness my family brought to that very same world.

Curious it is, indeed, that such inner opposition and polarity is the path for such inner realization and peace. Chaos and creation are two sides of the same coin, just as I suppose, the earth and sun are connected in a dimensional relationship of light and shadow. The bridge between chaos and creation, between sun and earth is in fact enantiodromia. The psychic opposition between consciousness and the unconscious is supported in a very real way by the archetypal images of the collective unconscious. It is by exploring our own personal mythic images and ideas that balance is maintained and our fears over death, meaninglessness, and guilt are brought into proper perspective. In cultural cycles of decay the light of renewal shines forth again through transformation of personal mythology.

WORKS CITED

Astor, James. Michael Fordham: Innovations in Analytical Psychology. Florence: Routledge Press, 1995.

Berman, Morris. The Twilight of American Culture. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Bond, D. Stephenson. Living Myth. Boston: Shambhala Publications Inc., 1993.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959.

Izod, John. Myth, Mind and the Screen: Understanding the Heroes of Our Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Jung, C. G. And C. Kerenyi. Essays on a Science of Mythology, The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books, 1963.

Peck, M. Scott. The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.

Tillich, Paul. The Courage To Be. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Posted by john at March 3, 2005 04:58 PM