The Otter Fat Wishes, by Carl Jung

The major push for me to begin exploring this edge of imagination, that really demonstrated how imagination did have an edge and wasn’t just endless egoistic ideations to only be used as a tool for furniture shopping (or clothes shopping, if a fitting room isn’t available,) was Carl Jung’s Liber Novus, also known as The Red Book.

It chronicles his own experiments with a psychological treatment that he called Active Imagination, that I call questing, and as he analyzes his own quests as they happen this Red Book is a great insight into his personal philosophy.

A couple of passages did cause me discomfort, such as his assertion to one of his imaginary friends that the ideological conquest by Christianity and the cultural death that it left in its wake was right to have happened, that it should be embraced, and that anybody in the world who was not Christian was either Asian or lying to themselves…such as Jews. Jung’s imaginary friend did call him out on his anti-Semitism.

Later, Jung related to his more Biblically-formed imaginary friends the realization that his own subconscious landscape was also influenced by the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Nibelunglied, and Greek mythology, and therefore polytheism was the more psychologically-fulfilling path, which I still disagreed with because it’s still universalizing his personal experience.

Another feature that bothered me, but does explain Jung’s standpoint, was this spectacularly self-abusive tirade. Jung basically threatened torture and murder upon himself because he loves personal development that much, except that the way he puts it is that he loathes himself for ever depending on people, and for the fact that whenever he feels hurt or misunderstood that his first instinct isn’t to navel-gaze and figure out why he should even care about what somebody else ever does.

I think that’s rather harsh, considering that it’s a scientific qualifier for life that a specimen would react to outside stimuli. Maybe that doesn’t apply to the level of psychology and society, but the passageway to that paradigm shift would be the notion that on that level, we are always completely isolated and only think that we’re not because, by some paradoxical nature, we can’t understand or process that fact.

In any case, that tirade came in somewhere between the folktale-structured story that Jung received by a serpent-shaped imaginary friend of his, and Philemon’s seven sermons to the dead.

Once upon a time, there was a king who couldn’t have a baby. The king visited a witch, who told him to get some otter fat and bury it for nine months before digging it up again.

The kind did so, and the otter fat grew in the ground so that when it was dug up the king found a baby, and the baby became heir to the throne. The heir grew up and asked for the throne.

The king, upset at this new development, went to the witch and asked how to get rid of his son.

The witch told him to get some otter fat and bury it for nine months before digging it up again.

The otter fat drained the life force from the son, and within nine months the heir sickened and died.

The king went back to the witch to ask how to heal his remorse. The witch told him to get some otter fat and bury it for nine months before digging it up again

Seriously, is that her solution to everything?? Excuse me, I mean…carrying on…

This action produced a baby again, which the King raised up to be the exact same heir. But this time, when the son asked his father to abdicate, the King embraced him and gave him the crown because he knew it would happen and was prepared for it, and so was willing to allow his son to do this.

It reminded me a lot of the deconstruction of three wishes in Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky. In any story about three wishes that successfully communicates the human condition, the third wish is special and always the same. “I wish that all the harm caused by the previous two wishes would be undone.”

Jung definitely approached all this more from a psychological standpoint rather than one where the Otherworld was a real world and people went to and fro with their imaginations, or through hallucinogenic drugs, or sensory deprivation, and brought back otherworldly wisdom. I think one of Jung’s imaginary friends in his imaginary world, Salome I think it was, made the request that Jung quit calling her a “symbol” because she was real, but then again she also tried to convince Jung that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ so it was probably well and good that Jung continued to consider it all symbolic anyway.

Still, the cadence of this particular story stands on its own in stark contrast to its source that usually lacks rhyme and reason except through the filter of Jung’s express interpretation.

Another Sort of Faery Court

Shadows, in the Jungian psychology sense of painful truths that we’d prefer to ignore but consume and corrupt our souls if we repress them, come in many forms. I guess they call for many different sorts of processes. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of making a safe space and safe time to get in a particular half-conscious state of mind where Shadow confrontation-processing can happen.

In addition to the example I linked, more recently on the 10th of September 2014, I achieved this again with confronting platitudes about my deceased abusive mother. Her voice seemed to come into my head from outside me, bypassing my ears, and echoing, “I sacrificed everything for you” “I’m not perfect” “I did the best that I knew how to do” and I wrote that down, as well as my direct responses to each of them, saying exactly why they were wrong. I seemed to get responses, so I continued this sort of conversation with whatever was generating a reply. It seemed to take form, too, at the edge of my thoughts, a dark and spiky-plated Western dragon in a cave with, I intuitively sensed, a tendency to hoard kidnapped maidens and turn them into her daughters. I named this dragon Rafflesia, to keep this floral and arboreal theme with naming my imaginary characters.

But returning to the actual notions being dealt with, when I hear the same from other people, I get similarly defensive. In what I call the blacksmything mindset, however, I could get to the heart of those harmful messages and dismantle them and dissipate them.

Other times, it’s more symbolic, such as witnessing the effect of the Shadow upon what I call the Fetch, or witnessing and interacting with a shadowy separate person (probably… I just don’t know about that last one, it’s just strange. Does it count as a Shadow of something like “my self-righteousness” when I have such a thorough conscious conviction that I’m right to have developed such an elementary thing as personal sovereignty?)

What I describe below is the most elaborate blacksmything experience I’ve had, if that’s what it even was. It did involve mulling over events that I’d prefer to forget about for their implications, but it took place in this surreal paracosm and involved characters that didn’t fit the classical image of the Jungian Shadow. This episode of manifestation of it simply dissolved, without conveying catharsis or epiphany, without even with some hint of how to progress with the process so that I can get to that point—another characteristic I attribute to blacksmything.

The hues of the “Shadows”, if that turn of phrase is even sensible, was rather different. Captain Marigold confronted me with the religious edicts utilized by my emotionally abusive family, but blacksmything would vet what part of me still believed in the feasibility and validity of such edicts that would condemn the rest of me, and I didn’t even have a single grain of that. Captain Foxglove confronted me with how my needs have violated other people’s boundaries, and that felt more like blacksmything because I believe it was wrong even as I couldn’t have done otherwise, knowing my character and the circumstances.

Neither of them brought up this one particularly sharp and many-hued shadow. No, not this one. Well, maybe something like that one. But it’s one I haven’t mentioned yet because I only have this nascent notion of it, which was why I would have thought someone below would have brought it up at some time. I mean, it’s kind of got to do with my sexuality, and as both Marigold and Foxglove showed up, who I consider my Anima and my Animus respectively, I thought that Shadow would have been their priority. But no, instead…

Well, first, I found myself in a mindscape that I’d visited before. It was a city of white marble pillars and white granite steps that lead into clear waters under clear skies. The rivers wrapped around every block of this city, like a road system.

The tops of the stairs that led into the rivers didn’t have bollards, so I imagined some in there so Foxglove could tie his ship to it.

The plot that I imagined on that spot was that I would seek out a book in a library. Foxglove declined to come with me, so I went to explore the city on my own. I found an archway of a building and walked through it. That was in August.

In mid-September, the fantasy continued from whatever stasis had halted it, and I wanted into a courtroom. Well, it was more like a giant void with a giant statue of a giant blindfolded figure holding balancing scales. Foxglove stood on one. Marigold stood on the other. I walked through the archway onto a jut of stability that just sort of elbowed me into the void, and the double doors slammed behind me.

Except there hadn’t been doors there before, there had just been an archway leading into a void. In any case…

Psychic Chirurgery

 

Early November, 2013

My ankles are chained to an iron weight, and I wait at a low rock at high tide. The sea foam rushes up to my chin like a quilt, like I’m being tucked in for a final sleep.

How does a body rot underwater? Does the salt preserve some parts? Does the whole body grow bloated like melting waxwork? I imagine, when my chest stops aching for air at last, that starfish and crabs will welcome this body to the ocean with a silent, “May we take your coat?” like good hosts do. And a coat of scalp will hang on a claw, and a coat of toenail will hang on a tooth, and a coat of eyelid will hang on a gull’s beak, guts on a crest of wave, muscle fibers combed by shrimp, and the rest left to the sun to iron smooth. It is cold now, but I won’t miss all these coats by then. My bones will blossom into coral.

Inspired writing doesn’t always result in flowery prose. Around August of 2014, I felt moved to begin writing things out, about three hours every day at a convenience store with seats by a sunny window, on a notepad–but they were all just vague philosophical ideas about the world.

This was a different sort of inspiration. It began with an obsessive admirer’s fantasy, which I’d picked up somehow that this was A Bad Thing, so the segue into otherreal effectiveness certainly troubled the part of me that believed in mortification as the only valid path to personal development, because the Good and Right Thing Is Never Easy or Pleasant. So, the worse I feel in any aspect, the more on-track I should be to some mysteriously divine virtue, because contentment and joy are always evils in disguise. If I ever feel a light or warmth in my heart from doing something right, then I should snuff that out, because right is a duty to the world whereas something that has such a positive personal effect on myself is by nature selfish, and spoilt the good deed irreparably to feel it.

…Wow, that is a horrible worldview. That’s the part of me that was so dominant?

I don’t know how that happened, and I don’t wonder. What I can remember is how this was undone.

Basically: Captain Foxglove is overwhelmingly charismatic. My whiteboard doodles and Photoshopping don’t do him justice. He showed that desire and fantasy is a path to the numinous, not necessarily a distraction from it.

Where was I? Ah, yes. In the corporeal world, lying in a borrowed bed, waiting for sleep, fantasizing about my own death by drowning.

Vorpal Sword 3/3

It doesn’t matter that my weapon is a sword. At least, it doesn’t matter in the way that I thought it would matter. I thought, “Why a rapier? My short stature wouldn’t have an advantageous reach: why not a spear? I don’t like direct stabby-slashy confrontation: why not an archery set? I don’t like combat at all: why not something defensive like an invisibility cloak, or a shield? Sure, I wanted a sword, but I wanted a katana.”

My sword does have ranged attacks. I don’t “blast” out billows combatively without my hands—my sword does that. My sword also creates protective bubbles and warps, so that’s a defensive function that doesn’t suit the symbolic form. That’s archery and shielding together, and I don’t know how or why that is.

The form that it takes, if it means anything, means something else that I haven’t figured out yet.

So, I propose a notable difference between the real world and otherworlds: form doesn’t always determine function.

I noticed that there’s a certain kind of anger that arises in me, that seems to correlate to the sword’s blade lengthening. There’s another kind of anger that correlates to the sword’s color darkening. Other times, I feel like I won’t get carried away with any sort of anger, and my sword turns into something that looks like silver or ivory. (It doesn’t turn into a flower, or anything like that.) This started on New Year’s eve, 31st of December 2012.

In mid-January of 2013, my sword took on the appearance of a gold hilt with a red gemstone: definitely not my style, but there was a rightness in that form. Or so I thought. When I descended into the surreal with the red-gold sword in hand—I was wandering the most unhappy grade school I had ever attended, and not voluntarily—I encountered what appeared to be an aggressive figure. I also identified it as an acceptable target, because (I sensed) it would continue to be aggressive and do harm without any capacity for negotiation—so, I ran it through with my red-and-gold sword. It only grew bigger, and appeared jauntier, without necessarily becoming friendly.

I snapped out of Surreality, and haven’t seen the aggressive figure again, but I figured that this was yet another example of form defying function in Fairyland. To wit, when you attack a target with the intent to damage, that target shouldn’t get healthier.

It continued to bother me that this had no name. I could think up of some way to refer to it or another, but it would always feel vague or wrong.

In September 2013, I was walking around the mall with the extended family. We passed by a hardware store, and I saw a wrench. We chatted, had dinner, and I recalled that the red jewel on the gold sword sometimes pulsed like a heart.

I named it Heartwrench, and while I recognized it when it was in my hand the next time, the form had changed to one even more cumbersome. It was a broadsword, with a central fuller groove.

Sometimes it would darken, and I would feel the cursedness of the sword being its main feature, and then it would be useful for attacking. Other times it would redden, and I would fall upon the blade and come out feeling healthier.

It remains terribly ugly and not at all the weapon I would have chosen, but it’s mine–perhaps it’s even me. I don’t need to use it, I’m even loathe to use it—but I like having it. I never thought I’d be like that.

I guess Heartwrench represents the warrior ideal, which is that it’s an innately noble and harmless thing to have a warrior’s spirit. To be a warrior does not mean just being a mass-murderer with good public relations. Rather, it’s a philosophy that adds fullness to life…I’m guessing. I haven’t quite figured any of this all out yet.

Later on, I consciously recalled this “black, red, white” psychological jargon that I’d read in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves, and “nigredo, rubedo, albedo” that my own therapist had mentioned. When I finally got around to looking up alchemy, I found some version which had four color-coded stages: black, white, yellow, and red.

The symbol for psychological alchemy was more applicable to my psyche than I’d thought, then.

The Uninhibited Imagination

The following entry may contain triggering material.

 

When I was very young, I had a pet lizard (Physignathus cocincinus, common name: Asian Water Dragon). Her name was Peachy, although it might have been a he. She’d escaped from her cage, and we were never fast enough to catch her, and there were too many nooks and crannies in the house, so we just decided to leave out some food in the garden and leave her alone whenever we found her. One day, she escaped from the house.

I suppose that I was upset about it, but I didn’t know how to deal with that. When pets died, I could cry it out and get it over with. This was a new thing to me.

Dinner a few days after this event was boiled shrimp. My mother peeled them with her own hands, set them in front of me, and encouraged me to eat up. After a couple of bites, the shrimp on my plate started talking in shrill voice, one after the other: “Stop eating us!” “Eating hurts us! Stop hurting us!” “We’re Peachy’s babies!” And together: “WE’RE PEACHY’S BABIES!!!”

This certainly was very upsetting, because I was hungry and would never dream of bothering my mother or the cook to whip up something else. At the moment, I also didn’t think of drawing attention to anybody else that my food was screaming accusations of infanticide at me. I was thinking that this didn’t make sense.

I knew basic zoology, that is: dogs are different from cats, neither lay eggs, chickens don’t give birth to live young…and a shrimp can’t be a direct descendant of a lizard. Also, where did these learn to speak English? And how could they talk with their heads ripped off, without vocal cords or lungs? And, as most cooked food usually was, they should be dead.

So, I kept eating. The voices didn’t stop, even though I knew it didn’t make sense, I didn’t think that not making sense meant that it wasn’t real, only that nobody should care.

What they were saying continued to hurt my feelings, anyway. When my mother refilled my plate (because, it seemed, I was old enough to talk and feed myself, but young enough not to be asked, and I wouldn’t dream of refusing food for reasons that will follow) I couldn’t take it anymore and burst into tears. I begged my mother to stop putting them on my plate, at which I vaguely recall she launched into a tirade about how she hadn’t even eaten anything yet because she was busy peeling shrimp for me and I was so ungrateful and there were starving children in the streets outside our comfortable home…

Well, that shut me up. I didn’t stop crying, nor did I continue eating, but I did give up on telling her about what I was hallucinating. I don’t remember what happened after. It was likely that I was just sent up to my room for having a temper tantrum, and I’d just taken from that that I had been Bad for causing even that much fuss and trouble to everyone. Obviously, that wasn’t real, (for the commonly given value of reality) but it was far too undeliberated and vivid to be imagined. So, I call it a hallucination, thankfully the only one to have happened in my life.

What really got to me, while I was growing up, was anxiety. I was terrified of pulling T-shirts over my head because a huge part of me was convinced that the world I entered through the torso hole would be a different one than I found beyond the neck hole. That it never happened never dismissed the fear I held, each and every time I dressed up, that it would happen this time. I tried not to step on the grotting between tiles because I thought that I had bad thoughts (which, actually, I didn’t very much) and that the tile grotting would know it and the tile grotting would judge me and… that would just really hurt my feelings. The constant sense of impending doom really wasn’t something that I could ever just turn off.

All things considered, I really am very lucky that full-blown hallucinations were no daily struggle that I can’t trust my senses anymore, sort of thing. Perhaps it’s also sheer luck that the way the neurons in my brain were organized gave me some leeway to reason it out, that, “I can’t trust my senses right now.” Mostly, though, I owe the distribution of scientific knowledge that gave me the best tools with which to reason it out, because trust or not, personal experience was the only thing I had to go by. However I reasoned, these experiences couldn’t be ignored. But, I could doubt, and I could function somewhat because of that doubt.

(I have never been diagnosed with or treated for anything other than depression.)

 

That’s why evaluation has been so important to me, when it comes to experiences I have that nobody else in the immediate vicinity can validate. And, from my perspective, what I deal with now (that I wrote about once or twice before) is different enough that, even though they engage directly with me in an immediate experience, I can accept them in my life and make more sense of it without this being destructive. They’ve even helped.

Of course I’d say that, if I were so profoundly insane that there was no coming out of it, and I accepted nonsense as sense, and upheld destruction and harm as the highest virtue. However well I think I structure my arguments, check my heuristics, form my opinions… the ends invalidate the means.

All of this must either be the product of insanity, or a lie.

I’d also say that my uninhibited imagination, or hallucinations if that’s what these are (because when I say “uninhibited” it’s sometimes just deciding to let down my inhibitions and sometimes that I have no choice) are helpful… if they’ve been helpful. Isn’t that simple enough? Isn’t it likely that any complications to take a turn for some other conclusion coasts on willful and basic misconceptions?

I believe that a lot of the most profound and significant experiences I’ve had come from lowering the repressive/dismissive inhibitions on my imagination and simply letting imagination happen within the designated time, space, or world. If I don’t have a choice, if shutting that down and tuning it out is too effortful that I’d given it up as impossible… I can still manage them.

So, the line between hallucination and imagination isn’t that much of a concern, as I can function.

The line between imagination as metaphysical access and imagination as fictional construction, now, while not quite blurred yet (except in the telling of it, because it’s literally all in my head and whoever you are, reading this, you only have my words for it compared to your experience and understanding of the world,) is an area of interest to me, the nature of inspiration in either divinity or frivolity.

Jungian Psyche via Campbell

Pictured above is a model of the psyche that I saw in Joseph Campbell’s Mythos series, a recording of his lectures about mythology and folklore. Campbell based this model on the work of pioneer psychotherapist C.G. Jung, who studied dreams and concluded that they generated symbols. These symbols could be deciphered to reveal the workings of the mind, the shape of a worldview, and the driving force behind a motivation.

Many of the concepts are illustrated above. The circle represents the mind. The ego, which carries a stigma of arrogance or unfocused narrow-mindedness, is merely (in much of philosophy) the standpoint of existence and being. That cannot be dissolved, and it would be unhealthy to even try to dissolve it. Within this model, that state of being is served by the self in the center of the circle, acting as the spoke of the wheel of all personal experience. The ego, also within this model, is the function of structure and reasoning, which isn’t a bad thing because many of us must still function well within social constructs.

Basically, if a person did not have an ego, for example if I didn’t have an ego, then I would 1.) be unable to use that pronoun, 2.) be catatonic, in a brain-dead body, deceased, or C.) turquoise bicycle shoe fins actualize radishes greenly

By that last bit, I mean that I would not make any sense. Even the nonsense to demonstrate that idea makes too much sense to truly demonstrate what making no sense would be.

On the line connecting the self to the outside world are projections. These are distortions in how we relate to the outside world. The real world is represented by the tree, the stick figures of people, and some four-legged perky-eared animal. The projection of the mind is represented by a swirly bracket.

Projections are not reality, and might even be defined by how far off from reality these projections can be. At the same time, everybody generates projections. I think of it as, when our sub-conscious has absorbed enough information to form a conviction about something, then that overflows into the real world.

This can be demonstrated through thematic apperception tests, where a single drawing of people or characters in action can be interpreted in a myriad of ways depending on the beholder’s personal biases.

This process differs from the ego which takes information and categorizes it in a reasoning process, generating opinions rather than convictions. The distinction I make is how the components of an opinion are often considered and examined whereas the sub-conscious mind does not naturally invite such examination, forming convictions that are not thought but felt—if they are even noticed at all, usually being taken for granted as true.

The concept of a psychological projection as a phenomenon carries some troubling implications. For instance, why not just re-calibrate the projection to always see the world in the way that we want most? Everything is only a perception, after all. It also becomes appallingly easy to dismiss the life experiences of those who suffer social injustices with, “You’re just projecting. It has nothing to do with me and I’m not doing anything with whatever distortion you’ve contrived.”

In the Mythos lecture, Campbell did allow for the possibility of clarifying the distortion and coming to terms with reality—This is not, then, to be taken as an impossible goal or even an inhuman one.

Within this model, too, the causes of projections can be mapped, which Campbell referred to as systems. These systems are called the shadow, anima and animus—and, emphatically, these systems were set into motion by the initial experiences of reality that conditioned us.

I plan to write a lot more about working through these systems of the sub-conscious, because there is a lot more. Basically, though, The Shadow is everything that we were taught and conditioned not to be…but we are that, anyway. The Anima and Animus are systems for how we relate to or interact with other people.

Finally, the persona is how a person represents their self to the world. This persona can be so different from the rest of the self and psyche that it’s basically living the pretentious and manipulative lie of a fake faker who fakes things. Or, this persona can be so closely-identified with that the result can be a person who is sincere, but too shallow to be authentic, or perhaps any harm to reputation or legacy would devastate them emotionally and steal their life purpose away. A persona can be disregarded entirely, and such individuals can be profoundly damaged in their attempt at raw honesty with a world that would misunderstand them anyway, and/or be unable to function in society because they’d go naked to a black-tie-ballgown party if the weather were too warm for clothing.

A healthier compromise would be the ability to change the persona when the situation calls for it. Whatever its characteristics, a persona is chosen and constructed: consciously taken on, or consciously rejected.

Campbell’s model had more symbols layering the persona, representing societal pressures and influences, but for now I think this will do.

This is how I understand the mind. Or maybe I misunderstand it.