Shifting ways of the psyche

What makes consciousness change?

I ask this question after having decided, with much deliberation and angst over a long time, to move out of the flat I’ve been renting for five years. It’s expensive nowadays to live on your own in the inner neighbourhoods of a large city but I value my space, and so had been balking at the prospect of moving out to share with others. I also know that in some ways it is emotionally easier to live on your own.  A hefty increase in rent and a meaningful conversation with a friend suddenly turned the tide in my mind: next month I will do the obligatory cleaning, turn the key in the lock and say goodbye to the flat.

And so, what brings about a change when for months or years we toss and turn without resolution, beating our heads against an impasse?

Consciousness rests on the shifting tectonic plates of the unconscious which, as Carl Jung pointed out, is a vast reserve of impulses and energies beyond the threshold of the conscious mind. The psyche consists of myriad relationships between consciousness and the unconscious – where consciousness moves one way, the unconscious responds, and vice versa.  We can see this, for instance, in the way that dreams and fantasies compensate for attitudes and realities that exist in the conscious world, ensuring that there is an overall psychic balance.

Though consciousness and the unconscious are in constant relationship, it is our ability to become aware of this that is crucial. The more insight we bring into our lives, the more light we shed into dark corners, the more vital and energised is the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. It’s not a matter of expelling the dark, but rather allowing it to be in a healthy relationship with the facts of the created world, or mediating it for the greater good of life.  

Consciousness can benefit immensely from this relationship: it brings meaning and depth to life. As an example, a person may spend years changing careers until they find something that truly suits them, which is the correct alignment with energies moving deep inside. Or the ending or beginning of a personal relationship can mean previously blocked channels are opened, benefitting life. When the inner world is drawn into greater harmony with the outer world, a developmental leap occurs individually and collectively.

Jung and other depth psychologists after him have pointed out that human consciousness developed over millennia from the unconscious natural state of instinct, and the unconscious is still very much with us. Religions helped to channel and refine inner energies to create living cosmologies in which consciousness and the unconscious coalesced. The world was rich with unseen forces, spirit and meaning. In the past few centuries in the West, however, Christianity has increasingly lost relevance and atrophied. The decline of religion and triumph of materialist secularism has meant that in our society consciousness is privileged and stands apart from the unconscious. Banished from a full life in our world, unconscious energies bubble and seethe below the surface, affecting us in ways of which we are largely unaware.

I think there is an evolutionary imperative in bringing the unconscious back into a healthy relationship with consciousness.  The ascendency of human reason and the independent ego has meant unprecedented mastery over our material conditions, but it has come at a frightful cost. We are destroying life on our planet not because of a deficiency in reason, but because we are not fully awake to the unconscious drives and forces that motivate us. Greed and the drive to power are dominant in our society even as we continue to think of ourselves as civilised, sophisticated and technically progressive.

When we face any situation in our lives, we bring to it the energies that are at play inside us – our full personality is a dynamic amalgam of conscious and unconscious. The unconscious is along for the ride no matter what we do, and so it is vital to be aware of it. When a dilemma appears, such as the one I have faced with my living circumstances, the unconscious is part of the solution. I might think about a problem for a long time, talking with friends or family about it; I may take certain steps like attending a few share house interviews or driving to some suburbs to ascertain what it would be like to live there – every conscious action stirs the energies of the unconscious and in turn propels it to affect consciousness. The information that is gathered in the conscious mind from such a process is heavily inlaid with unconscious energy.

A resolution arrives because a transformation has occurred in which consciousness and the unconscious are aligned. When there is no alignment the potential exists for destructive behaviour: if consciousness attempts to force a resolution or, conversely, if it is too weak or fragile before potent inner drives. Blocked conscious attitudes can lead to the damming of unconscious energy, forcing it to spill outwards. Alcoholism and other addictions are consequences when inner energy cannot find adequate, meaningful expression in the conscious world.

The key is to maintain healthy channels between consciousness and the unconscious, to make sure there is a vibrant flow both ways. Psychology has developed many methods for self-analysis and self-knowledge, including ways to interpret and work with dreams and fantasies. Eastern religions and philosophies offer profound help through such means as meditation and yoga. The arts are a channel for conveying the unconscious. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, ritual and ceremony acts as a conscious-unconscious bridge. Ultimately, all life is a dance of mystery in which opposing forces interact, shaping and reshaping each other, meeting in union and opposition, transcending and being reborn anew.

End of nature?

American environmentalist Bill McKibben recently finished a speaking tour in Australia, lecturing to packed theatres in Melbourne and Sydney and doing an assortment of media engagements.

McKibben wrote The End of Nature, one of the seminal books of the environment movement, in the 1980s. He’s learned, passionate and inspiring. His message, much like that of Al Gore in The Inconvenient Truth, is that humanity is leading the planet down the path of catastrophe unless there is a great shift away from fossil fuels towards an economy powered by renewable energy.

McKibben founded 350.org, a worldwide group that is campaigning against carbon pollution and the coal, oil and gas industries, and for an ecologically balanced future. I applaud his work and that of the environment movement generally, even as I think the movement could benefit from a wider perspective that is not so bound to the old world view dominated by modern science and technology.

I once heard Australian academic David Tacey say something like: “Environmentalists are appealing to people’s conscience, when what is needed is a change in consciousness.” By that, Tacey was saying that saving the planet requires a fundamental shift in perspective towards an awareness in which we see ourselves as part of nature, not separate from it. According to Tacey, our materialist culture, sprung from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, cannot solve today’s ecological problems. That’s because humanity’s perceived independence from nature and our dominance and control of it are central to the Enlightenment world view, and you cannot fix something with the very tools that caused the problem in the first place.  

While Tacey is right, I believe groups like 350.org implicitly lead towards the new consciousness to which he refers. That’s because they are aligned to something that teachers of mine have described as “the will to good”. This is the fundamental propensity towards life – its development and furtherance. The will to good is the energy that propels the work of spirit in the world and it’s connected intimately to the zeitgeist or spirit of the time. The spirit of our time is shifting towards a culture of connection, oneness and integration with nature, a culture with strong feminine energy in which we don’t abandon the lessons of the past but move beyond the narrow and ego-centred materialism that’s been our lot for some time.     

That said, I think there is a need for greater understanding within movements for change of the implications of their work, so as to better facilitate the new dawning consciousness. For example, the desire for human civilisation to shift to renewable energy is problematic unless we take into account our overall footprint on the planet. That means tackling the difficult issues of consumption, economic growth, industrialisation and population. In the old paradigm of separation from nature, humanity stands apart and looks objectively at “the natural world”. Nature is an “other” with which we have no intrinsic life bonds and that we can attempt to manage or “fix”. Ecological consciousness requires us to be fully present “in” nature, to realise that we are an expression of life on the planet and that everything we do must be aligned in accordance with life. Fundamentally, we have to return to balance.  

There is a mistake in the environment movement, I believe, in its continuing emphasis on reason. Appeals to reason are continually made for governments to change their policies and individuals to change their behaviour: if we don’t, it is said, the consequences will be dire. The truth is that if humanity acted on the basis of what is right and sensible, we would have changed direction a long time ago and be living a far different reality. Psychology right back to Freud at the start of the 20^th century established that conscious reason constituted only a small part of the psyche, the bulk of people’s motivations coming from a vast unconscious reservoir of emotions, urges and desires. Humans are largely non-rational beings, and environmentalism needs to acknowledge this.

Despite its current close connection with science, the environment movement is at heart a romantic movement. The kind of science that emerges in the new consciousness will be holistic and far more sophisticated and evolved than the modern, mechanistic version of it that still holds in the popular mind. Separative masculine objectivity will not support action to protect and repair the planet – we need to build an emotional connection with nature. That means an experience of oneness, of direct communion and active being in nature, of getting to know its cycles and myriad processes in our lives. As we become fully present in nature, fully alive in it and it fully alive in us, so human society radically changes. When we find meaning in nature and our systems change accordingly, human society itself becomes less alienated, more connected and meaningful. 

I think one other consideration is important in moving to an ecological consciousness, and that is process. Among people who are sensitive and aware, the environmental crisis is increasingly leading to grief and despair. The public appeals to “act now before it’s too late” that have been around since the 1970s are starting to be replaced by an acceptance that it is, in some sense, “too late”. Catastrophic weather is occurring and sea levels are on the rise. The Earth will warm to a dangerous degree, and it is rather the most extreme levels of danger that are now to be avoided.  A sense of failure is creeping in among those who for years have fought for the environment, a feeling that life on the planet will be changed irreversibly for the worse.

There’s a goal orientation at work here. On the level of individual psychology, goals can be useful and important in a person’s life, but they are ultimately meaningless. What’s important is what is learnt and what changes along the way to the goal, not whether the goal is achieved; it’s the process that counts. So too in a collective sense: even when the goal is as huge as saving the planet, the meaning is in the process and not the destination. There are immeasurable benefits when we direct ourselves towards furthering the cause of life, even if our tangible goals are not reached. Ultimately, we can’t fully measure the effects of our actions as they ripple outwards in time and space, in material and non-material dimensions. The planet may indeed become mostly uninhabitable, but this will be merely yet another phase in its long history; eventually, slowly but inevitably, new life will emerge in the truly breathtaking evolution of this beautiful rock, the Earth. 

After the deluge

They come to stare at their creek,
once a genial trickle
now a coffee-brown tide
slushing, sliding,
lifting the earth's detritus, spinning
it down to some inconceivable end.

They stare mute at the flooded pathways,
the leveled reeds, the battered trees,
the way the bulge has taken out bends,
flattened the world.
Only the playful ducks have a sense of humour.

The old man in the ark, he too saw the tide rising, he too could not comprehend despite God's insistent words. Pushing the rump of the nearest hyena he fingered the latch shut. The door was closed and the watery chaos would do its will.

Perspective

In my other life, my paid work writing for a home magazine, the most common concern environmentally conscious people have when renovating their home is opening it to light.

In cooler climates particularly, using the sun to passively warm a house is important. Light brings joy and life and feelings of comfort and connection. In Melbourne many old houses are dark and gloomy, energy sinks with little connection to the outdoor environment.

When they were built, and until recent years, nature was something you struggled against and retreated from when necessary. Now there is a shift towards openness and communion with the environment; householders want their homes to be oriented properly to make maximum use of the sun, for communal and energised rooms to face north and quieter study areas to be graced by the gentler light from the south. Renovations open constipated houses to embrace their gardens and backyards, replacing walls with windows and glazed doors.  

I find this heartening and inspiring. The metaphors of light, openness and connection with nature are at work in the world. I contrast this with the work of my old profession, journalism. The news we receive through the media is slanted towards conflict and disorder, disasters and impending doom. This has a profound, wide-ranging effect, engendering a level of fear and crisis in the psyche of the community. This persistent, heightened state means it is harder for people to see reality as it truly is – multifaceted and nuanced – and therefore meaningful decisions are harder to make. The media’s black-and-white vision contributes to black-and-white vision in society as a whole, acting as a brake on psychic and social development even as society itself on many levels has evolved well past its narrow and restrictive world view. 

Perspective, I believe, is increasingly important. We should never be naive about the world or live in a saccharine state of denial, but we do need perspective. It is the ability to see and experience the joy and light as well as the darkness and chaos of reality. In daily life there are myriad ways to experience profound joy: from seeing the sun rise in the morning to hearing birdsong or watching children at play; from playing tennis with friends or swimming in the ocean to simply smiling in the wonder of the present moment. Individually and collectively we have to balance the light and dark, and counter the alienating tendencies of our society with appropriate love and care.

Perspective is also about having the big picture in mind. Many activists working for positive change in the world, especially in the environment movement, seem enmeshed in the crisis mentality, attempting to shout above the rest about the impending Armageddon. There’s no doubt that our planet is in crisis, and we do need to hear about the immense ecological changes taking place, but more than anything we need vision of a way forward. We need an emphasis on vision and an understanding that the situation is not static and insoluble. Perspective allows us to see that humanity and the planet are in an immense transition, and we would do well to know more about this transition and act in whatever ways we can to further the cause of life.  

The dominant Western world is moving away from a masculine, heroic culture in which humanity sees itself as separate from nature and towards a more feminine reality in which relationship, connection and oneness with nature are paramount. Author Richard Tarnas, in his book The Passion of the Western Mind, sees the evidence of this shift not only in the rise of feminism and growing empowerment of women, the opening up to feminine values by men and women, but also in increasing ecological awareness, sense of unity with nature and opposition to governments and corporations acting against the environment. Tarnas sees it in the growing embrace of the human community, in the accelerating collapse of long-standing political and ideological barriers separating the world’s people, in the deepening recognition of the value and necessity of partnerships, pluralism, and the interplay of many perspectives. It is visible, he says, in the widespread urge to reconnect with the body, the emotions, the unconscious, the imagination and intuition – among many other things.

No transition is easy or straightforward and elements of the old co-habit for some time with the new, blazing with intensity even as the ground underneath them is disappearing. We cannot fully picture what humanity or the planet will be like in 100 or 200 years, but we can recognise that a meaningful and important shift is under way and act in concert with life to enable its right shape. In this wonderful endeavour we require a healthy amount of perspective. 

 

Land and story

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. William Blake

Heavy cloud draped the top of the hill; or perhaps it was mist masquerading as cloud, or cloud transformed by the pull of earth to mist – whatever it was, it gave the hill a grave mystique on a dark and cold autumn morning.

The hill was one of a chain undulating for several kilometres in this part of north-east Victoria, a volcanic regurgitation millions of years ago with scattered grey rocks to tell the tale. I looked out at it from the kitchen of a friend’s house on a sheep farm.

Staring at it for a while, the urge came to explore and climb: I pulled on my boots and the hill beckoned me forward. My friend had planted trees to stop erosion and there they stood, at intervals, with brown-orange bark peeling. Not much else was around except a tough-looking sedge that grew in clumps. A track that had been ploughed in red-clay mud by the farm’s quad bikes was fringed by the droppings of sheep.

A clammy cold touched my skin as I climbed to the mid-point of the hill. Here the rocks began, covered in dry and seemingly dead lichen. Occasionally an old white or red box tree appeared crookedly on the slope, incongruous amid the barrenness. Occasionally the rocks congregated to a natural seat or vantage point from which you could see for miles the changes of farmland, forests, ridges, gullies and flats; the land at times creased, then smoothed itself out, then as unexpectedly became jagged.

At the top of the hill more rocks and some dead trees dragged to form a spot for shelter and fire – a place for coming together, maybe celebration, on warmer days. The quad bike trail continued along a dip at the other side of the hill and on to the next one. This was solemn, out-of-the-way country; a mob of kangaroos scattered somewhere far below, some twigs crunched underfoot, little else rippled the profound silence.

Well after my experience of climbing I wondered about the story of that land. Indigenous people, no doubt, would have weaved creation stories for these quiet, rocky hills, binding human consciousness deeply with the country. Would the land not have stories still? How could a person recover and retell them?  

Our modern Western consciousness is focused on the concrete and the separate. Reality is largely comprised of physical objects that exist in themselves and that can be seen, felt and touched. But that’s not all that reality is: there are subtle, intuitive dimensions that don’t fit a strict materialist view, and the more these are explored the more it becomes apparent that much of life is non-rational, non-linear, non-separate, and that it is healthy to acknowledge and affirm this.

How do we approach these “spiritual” dimensions of life? I think mystery is the clue here. It’s about paying attention to the silence, the unseen that exists with everything we look at. It requires a broad but measured opening of the senses with focus on the energy or quality of objects. It is cultivated in disciplines of meditation and yoga and contemplative prayer. Its doorway is the relationship of things, and its language that of metaphor and symbol. What comes forth from mystery undergoes a certain filter as we translate it into the concrete world; it registers in the body and mind and passes through the particularities of personality, life experience and training. A certain painter will feel its presence and paint, a certain teacher will hear its call and teach, a certain carpenter will be touched by it and produce inspired work. And so it goes.

I think the land that I was privileged to visit in north-East Victoria does have a story and that it is accessible through intuition and patient listening. It would not be arrived at rationally and objectively and would not stand up to secular, rationalist scrutiny. It may have changed over time as the land has changed over time. It may, in all likelihood, be slightly different with each individual who cares to tell it. But the point, really, is the purpose of the story, the moral of the tale. It is to connect to the land, to see ourselves in it, our life its life. When we tell its story, we are walking with it in its evolutionary journey just as it feeds into ours. We cannot help but care for it, mythologise it, celebrate it, just as we celebrate our own life and those of other humans.

In a way, my simple description of the walk up the hill is a beginning of that process. In fact, any response of openness and wonder is a beginning – it is then up to us to carry it further, to act in whatever ways we can to bring the sacred back to a meaningful presence in our world.    

Joy

Flying a kite is the loveliest of things: this I discovered by chance when some friends invited me to their place one day.

It was windy and the park near their house was an invitation to play. We brought out their new kite; while my friend held the controls I stood with it at a distance, took a short run and it was in the air, climbing high through the gusty layers of wind. 

I was entranced as a kid, laughing as I watched it fluttering and bobbing. It was so high in the air that it seemed absurd to think someone was controlling it, yet my friend kept nonchalantly tugging at the strings and smiling. The kite was a free spirit and its freedom was infectious – I briefly took hold of the steering, still laughing with sheer delight at the audacity and beauty of its flight. It was the first time I had flown a kite and the memory has been etched deep since.

Joy is the unfettered exuberance of life. It is life with a clear path to express itself, direct and powerful, healing and productive. It is an elemental shout of “yes!” to all creation.

Most often and most clearly we see joy in children: a toddler has just walked for the first time and beams with achievement, or a child jumps onto a playground swing and is immediately overtaken by joyful energy. Joy and play are connected, both requiring an uncluttered and unpolluted innocence to flourish. And both joy and play thrive on discovery, the arrival at a moment that is entirely unique and fresh in time.

Joy is boundless energy: we can face almost anything, no challenge is insurmountable. It also engenders a certain lightness of being that’s crucial in facing life’s ups and downs, and which is a necessary balance to the gravity of life.    

Adult lives with adult cares often seem sapped of joy, confounded by cynicism, complicated by doubt, inhibited by unhelpful psychological patterns. When the path to joy is blocked we can seek it in the wrong places, displacing its life affirmation in drugs, alcohol or other addictions. Joy is also necessary for social stability; some amount of it needs to be stimulated or maintained for a harmonious society – witness the popularity of television, comedy and comedians, and spectator sport, all of which can elicit feelings akin to joy. 

There is also a kind of joy that is less transitory, less dependent on what is happening in each moment. In this regard I recall the work of the late Western Zen master Charlotte Joko Beck, but it’s also described in the wisdom traditions of many different cultures. For Beck, joy is a permanent condition of life that can be experienced in happy times and in hardship: it infuses life’s phenomena, but its origin is in mystery beyond. “Joy is being willing for things to be as they are,” she says in her book, Nothing Special: Living Zen. When we experience life fully but without attachment we connect with joy, a boundless energy that is the ground of being, the source from which ever-changing material forms spring. It is eternal and indestructible, a continuously renewing well of replenishment, affirmation and inspiration.  

Perhaps ultimately, joy is simply life contemplating itself. It is the act of awareness, great or small, that propels the evolutionary process, and without which nothing can exist. It is the fox that catches and devours a rabbit, and the man flying a kite in a field; it is the green algae multiplying in a creek and the pod of dolphins swimming in the ocean; it is the old woman waiting at a bus stop and the Prime Minister speaking in parliament. All are encompassed by joy, and the more awareness we bring to each act, each moment of our lives, the more we increase joy in the world. As joy increases, so all life is boosted and made more robust. Joy is simple, with a simplicity that is at the same time incredibly profound. 

The metaphysical impulse

I came across the work of English philosopher A.C. Grayling while browsing in the wonderfully named Hill of Content Bookshop in central Melbourne.

Grayling’s book, The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life caught my attention. In it he devotes short chapters to various aspects of life, some classed as “virtues and attributes”, others as “foes and fallacies” and “amenities and goods”. He ruminates on such things as death, fear, courage, Christianity, faith, health and leadership with admirable simplicity and clarity. His aim is to encourage people to think more about their lives and the world. 

From my perspective and interests, one paragraph in the book’s introduction particularly caught my eye. Grayling is a secular humanist, a follower of the Enlightenment line of Western liberal thought. He’s an atheist with little tolerance for any aspect of religion, yet he says that he believes passionately in “the value of all things spiritual”. By that he means “things of the human spirit, with its capacity for love and enjoyment, creativity and kindness, hope and courage.”

“The value of all things spiritual”: this phrase struck me. No matter how anti-religious or materialist a person is in their views, it seems impossible to find anybody who doesn’t at least entertain some measure of the metaphysical. By metaphysical I mean not of material, objective functioning. “Things of the human spirit” cannot be measured, analysed empirically or talked about in any conventional scientific way. Notwithstanding belief in a material objective universe, it seems all of us ultimately cling to something else as well. Grayling, like other humanists, turns the metaphysical impulse away from organised religion to humanity. Whereas in other times God was the source of all meaning and value, now it is Man. 

The metaphysical or transcendent impulse need not be synonymous with otherworldliness or the supernatural. It simply recognises that there is a level of reality beyond the senses and human reason. Indeed, the transcendent and the material are inextricably linked in a mutual dance. Take sexuality – making love is a physical act of two bodies coming together, yet it’s also an occasion for metaphysical union that can touch us deeply and rejuvenate our spirit. Or as another example we can think of how being in a particular place triggers certain emotions or thoughts – the material conditions of that place relate to non-material levels of experience. 

Of course, modern science is limited to purely rational, material explanations: all human responses, it would say, are ultimately the result of the triggering of certain chemicals in the body, neurones in the brain etc. within a genetic structure. One of the main problems with scientific explanations as the sole, objective descriptions for reality is that they are never ultimately objective, but constantly changing and evolving. The other problem is their tendency to reduce everything to a mechanistic soullessness that denies life rather than enhances it. As a result of this tendency other forces, social and psychological, act as counterbalance. The arts – music, film, dance, painting, poetry – are one important outlet for the metaphysical impulse. The other major component of counterbalance is the unconscious: when we deny or suppress apprehension of the transcendent, we shift its potency elsewhere. Addictions, depression and many forms of anti-social behaviour arise from an inability to comprehend and experience life at meaningful depths. 

For most people in the West there is an uneasy and somewhat schizoid relationship between science and the metaphysical. On the one hand science provides the basis for all knowledge, while at the same time it is tacitly assumed that it does not play a definitive role in many areas of life – such as the emotions and relationships. Creativity, intuition and spontaneity are some of the human attributes science finds difficult to grasp and understand. Because it is too big a leap for us to define ourselves wholly in scientific materialist terms – effectively as complex machines – we are more comfortable for science to have complete sway in the natural world. Any experience of transcendence in nature is said to come from human feelings and imagination, not from the life of nature itself. Rocks themselves don’t speak, nor trees or mountains, and any suggestion that they do is mere anthropomorphism – projecting the human onto the non-human. The modern excision of “soul” from nature means we have lost the direct, close relationship we had with it in earlier times and the resulting distance has made it easier for us to exploit and destroy it.   

The challenge, as I see it, is to bring the metaphysical up from the margins and back into the heart of Western culture: it needs to be openly acknowledged, and its importance recognised. Science would have to cede some of its power to a spiritual way of seeing and being in the world. Material and spiritual explanations would coalesce in service of the fullness and renewal of life. And the wheel does not have to be reinvented too much as we move forward – we can look for inspiration to the myriad wisdom teachings over the thousands of years of Western culture as well as learning from the traditions of others.  

I suspect secular humanists like A.C. Grayling wouldn’t agree with these thoughts. But then humanism itself has been around for hundreds of years, and, like much in our culture, is in sore need of reinvigoration, new ideas and new ways of applying them in the world.