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The unconscious II: Connected: keeping company
with the uncon
Knowing more about the bodily structure
of conscious and nonconscious function does not reduce, but instead deepens,
appreciation for the possibilities of human being. In Workshop 2 we will
look at some of these possibilities. Ancient skills of nonconscious perception
and comprehension have been handed down within the traditions of magic,
wicca, fairytales, shamanism, spiritualism, music, art, religion, and even
science itself. Our means for directly experiencing an autonomous creative
self include trance, meditation, dream study, automatic writing, scrying,
conversations with alternate selves, Tarot, many art forms, and - in fact
- an ethical life.
Nonconscious powers are notoriously attractive
to the flaky and the downright mad. It takes a lot of consciousness to work
safely with the unconscious. What are the dangers and safeguards? What sort
of testing is needed and effective? Is there a difference between 'working
with the unconscious' and integration?
This session is a practical introduction to working
with nonconscious powers.
Working with the uncon
Buddhism and the uncon
Je est un autre.
Alternate selves.
Trance states.
The Faery tradition of Celtic paganism
describes three selves in a person: talking self, younger self, larger
self.
Creation and the unconscious.
'Intuition.'
Experiencing the autonomy of creative
self beyond the self of self-talk.
How do we recognize truths we haven't
been able to formulate?
Realms of intuitive knowing: magic, shamanism,
art, religion, science
In most people talking self is socially
conditioned. learning silent attention. Music, drugs, meditation exercise,
photography, drawing. Cliché's, Latinate terms,
Ways. Get to larger self through younger
self.
altered states, trance, hypnotic or trance
induction
Meaning of integration
Artists
Personal work
Traditions:
Automatic writing
'The paranormal' unrecognized senses
Scrying, tarot cards, pendulum,
Emotional processing
Dreams
Talking self, younger self, larger self
Jung
Surrealists
Gestalt integrating
Buddhist psychology 'clarifying' moral
work, living honestly and consciously
- The more-than-human world
- The more-than-conscious mind
Intuition and the uncon
our secret room where someone lives
in quiet.
I learned what I know in hundreds of books
on many topics. There really is no teacher. It had to be pieced together
in light of what I learned in therapy, in art-making, in writing down and
studying my own dreams over decades, in yoga and meditation, and in very
deep struggles with friends and lovers. For a while in drugs.
Am fond of Freud and Jung but they are
beginners. I believe there are Buddhists who know much more, but one can't
understand what they say until one has come upon it on one's own.
One of the things I am dubious about in
the surrealists is that they seem to look to the uncon for just one thing,
just one mood, a kind of rush. The uncon is much more than a source of
euphoria.
Unexplained connection
"The connective tissue between each
of us." I have no doubt at all that people who are intimate with each
other are connected in unknown ways, and sometimes at great distance. When
I am suddenly in trouble my friend Louie will phone me. Out of the blue,
the phone rings. I can't believe it. She happens to be a genius of that
sort of perception. My sweetie Tom will suddenly sing aloud a line of a
song that has been repeating in my head. My son when he was little used
to do that too.
Expanded perception
Surrealizing vision, that nice phrase.
There are other ways to get expanded vision, though. Love eyes. Some sexual
chemical makes them. Once it was too much nutmeg in a chocolate cake.
How do dreams choose their images?
I learned a lot about dreaming by spending
a year writing down every single dream every night, every boring dream.
"It has to be good enough"
"This is what we get to keep:"
claims Caws, "our redefinition of ourselves. It has to be good enough" (22).
Contact with the uncon has ethical requirements.
Not the social rules. Self-honesty. Bravery to act on core understanding.
Contact can be forced by drugs and other
means, but when that happens a wholeness is broken up. The fragments can't
be fitted.
The contrasexual
"stressed and dismembered, punctured
and severed"
"I have my head shaved, my teeth
pulled and my breasts cut off-everything that bothers my gaze or slows
it down-the stomach, the ovaries, the conscious and cysted brain. When
I have nothing more than a heartbeat to note, to perfection, I will have
won." (99).
"It is not just the dolls of Hans
Bellmer, lying about, it is more. Worse, because more lustily appealing,
as in Man Ray's images" (53). Mary Ann Caws is observing the surrealist
artists' tendency towards representing women in pieces and portions within
their work.
"Headless. And also footless. Often
armless too; and almost always unarmed, except with poetry and passion.
There they are", reveals Caws, "the surrealist women so shot
and painted, so stressed and dismembered, punctured and severed: Is it
any wonder they have (we have) gone to pieces?"
When I look upon works by Han Bellmer,
Man Ray, Rene Magritte, I don't feel violence. I see fragmented bodies,
but what I feel is a distinct desperation
I don't see a fragment of a woman. I,
in fact, hardly see a woman at all. I see a moment of desire.
I see someone reveling in the beauty that
makes a woman different from a man. I see why men love woman. There is
the powerful breast, the wide hips, and the curves of her back. This is
not a woman but women. This is beyond objectification. She is framed and
she is radiant in the light, to give her identity would be to make love
linear and particular instead of generalized and all encompassing. This
is an idol and not a person.
Well, it's beyond objectification, but
in the sense that it is deeper than objectification. It ties into the root
of objectification. Imagine that images of women are not really about women.
Imagine they are only about men. They are images of the unconscious of
men. Then what does it mean about men that contemporary magazine-stand
women look like prostitutes? What does it mean that presidents' wives are
expected to look like automata? What does it mean that women on the cover
of Omni magazine were always bald? What does it mean that the women
Cornell followed in the street were young teenagers? And similarly
what does it mean that surrealist-painted women are in bits?
What I am saying is not meant to trash
any of the above, only to say that the uncon speaks about itself in its
images, and what it says can be plainly understood.
Working with the uncon
Are you interested in the uncon itself?
Are you mainly interested in what it can do for you, how it can make you
feel? If the uncon were another person, what would be your relation to
that person?
Here are some pragmatic things I know
about the uncon from personal experience rather than theory. Will always
want to know anything you can tell me about these sorts of thing.
I use the tarot deck together with a pendulum
as a means of talking to something or someone other. The process
is like a kind of mediumship but one that is a dialogue with the conscious
self rather than replacing it. There are different kinds of other I can
access. One is a child self, myself as a child. One I call love woman is
a sort of alternate personality more based on instinctual femininity than
the daily or work self. She sometimes is the person in conscious control.
There are also male selves. The aspect of uncon I mainly need to talk to
is like your sense of Atman, I think. I call it the larger self, or often
'the book,' for the notebook I write questions and answers in. It is distinctly
other than ego, knows much more, is more objective in the sense that it
is as interested in other peoples' well-being as in my own. In relation
to ego it is like a god or a compassionate teacher. It will help with creative
work, often in critical ways, but its main interest seems to be in radical
liberation for anyone. The card used to say 'liberation' is the 19th major
arcanum, called The Sun. It shows a naked child on a white horse,
arms outthrown, a red banner flowing from its left hand. Behind it is a
row of sunflowers under an enormous benevolent-faced radiant sun.
It is very marvelous, in your sense, to
have access to these conversations with larger self. It is like being able
to live in confidence that life is deep and generous.
The difference between this experience
and what you have described seems to be that surrealist techniques are
built as an alternative to, or escape from, daily life, the anxious self,
relationship worries, responsibility, and livelihood, and the uncon of
my experience is willing to help with all of these. It builds the marvelous
into the tissue of the mundane. This is one of the things I mean by making
friends with the enemy.
"The promise of intoxication where
everything is so much more than we could ever really make it." It's
a good line, but no -- the promise of a sobriety where we really can make
everything more.
"The inner and outer experience to
mingle in an ongoing, constant communion compared to the scientific experiments
of communicating vessels - in which communing opposites merge." The
tarot's image for that process is the 14th major arcanum, Temperance,
which shows an angel with red wings and a gold triangle over its heart,
standing in a flowering meadow with its right foot in a pool of water.
It is pouring water from a cup in its left hand down into a cup in its
right hand. Its head is radiant, and there is a rainbow arching from one
wing to the other.
I asked my process whether it would tell
me what to tell you and it said, "Improvement by truth and slow growth
of shared pleasure."
Using dreams
Asking the questions carefully enough.
Dreaming can be taken as answering questions
or as commenting on, describing, one's current state.
It is one's state as a being.
Being's story of itself, the self-sense
of being. "This is what Imagination means for Blake, I think."
Dangers and safeguards:
Collective con
Bad states
Connecting with repressed trauma, have
to take it on with support
Unusual powers evoked by creative work,
suggestion
Ethical implications.
If part of a body is not fooled, lies
are one of the most powerful forms of social harm there can be, because
they set conscious and nonconscious structure at odds. They disable the
larger power of a person. There is no such thing as a white lie. Misinformation.
Shortcuts. Booze and other drugs for example.
The body does not know how it got into that state. It is a bewilderment.
Ellie and the unconscious.
Love woman, work woman, child. Jung said
contrasexual. Animus group, anima.
Larger self is something that comes into
being when the two are joined [jointed].
I experience a larger self that is informed,
challenging, benevolent and objective; it cares for my well-being but not
at the expense of anyone else's. It wants me to take responsibility. I
can trust it when I am in trouble. It is like a competent grown-up. It
is not exactly 'me.' Inflation is when the ego identifies with it.
Art and the unconscious
A life in true art is a committed marriage
with uncon self. Image of the lovers with the angel joining them. Why,
because you need access to your whole self for true creation. The experience
of crashing before real work. Reason for procrastination. The crash is
the joining with bad self in order to get access to whole self.
Joyce Wieland "I found the images
in the light within the paper"
Means:
Of learning about the unc:
Of working with the unc:
Developing one's own means of access.
Mine are Joyce, Tarot system, pendulum, emotional crashing, study and noting.
Writing down every shred of dream for six months, was it.
Love affairs and intense friendships that
bring up trouble.
Patch it together from many sources. Reading:
psychology, parapsychology, physical disciplines, creative process, mystical
traditions, fairytales to start with.
Underlying principle was let the uncon
integrate you. Dream instruction to note everything that had a certain
feel of unexplained attraction. Analyze attraction in projective media
like literature.
Examples: everything I noted when I was
tracking the life before birth work.
Feeling into the body. Gendlin. Sigh,
the body says yes. What am I feeling. Focusing.
What are the dangers and safeguards?
Danger for example Eric who used booze
to get into mad states. He was raiding uncon for ego purposes, Literalism:
taking uncon stories literally, ego identifying with aspects of uncon.
How an ethical life is a safeguard to
the dangers. You need to be willing to know the worst. Faith in reality.
Don't assume that 'ethical' means 'conventional.' The conventional life
is highly unethical.
Danger of living a too-psychological life,
fascinated by yourself, not acting.
Look after business.
Safeguards.
Effort, bravery and faith. Scrupulous
care to know and acknowledge your own motives and feelings. People are
afraid of this because they think it will disable them socially. The safeguard
is to accept aggressive motive in oneself.
A trusted teacher. Someone who can back
you up while you go into the pain, contain you while you learn to contain
yourself.
What is the difference between 'working with
the uncon' and integration?
Working with may have the effect of integrating
but it can also be a sort of raiding. Particularly when drugs are used.
The intention is to steal from the uncon for ego's purposes. The religious
traditions say this backfires. For instance Hitler. They say one must purify
the uncon. It is more a question of purifying con, by opening to consciousness
the aspects of conscious knowling that it refuses.
Sins as strategies of the conscious self
that are self-punishing. Errors of ego in relation to the whole self.
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