But perhaps most of all I learned from my children. I learned to watch myself, my re-actions, to them and also to my husband. I have written elsewhere about my marriage (in ‘Antidote: Experiences of a Spiritual Energy’) but my children also taught me what was in my unconscious that needed to be brought out into the open. Here Jung helped again. I saw my huge ‘shadow’, as he called it, the nastier aspects of my unconscious: I lived through agonizing days, months, even, of horror and remorse, praying for release, and God’s forgiveness…. “Deliver us from evil”.
It turns out that, whatever you see in other people that annoys you like mad, is something that is a part of your own internal make-up. My children thus showed me what I was really like inside; at the same time they also kept me sane during these times of self-knowing – because I nearly went mad – of seeing the shit, the lower forces inhabiting me, and their negative influences on my life.
We all have them, these vile things, inside us. Usually they are buried deep within our unconscious. And it now seems to me that it is our job – that is, for those who want to work on themselves and become fully human – to accept all these ugly things: accept the disappointment, jealousy, the anger, the sloth, and/or whatever other negative aspects your particular unconscious lower nature contains. They are there because we have animal and even vegetal energies alive and kicking in us, and it is our human task to change them from stumbling blocks into stepping stones.
See them in you, accept them – and forgive yourself.
When you can do this, I discovere, the Spirit that is in the latihan (which has been working on your lower nature and purifying you all this time), now re-organizes your inner life and integrates all these things around a centered Self. It’s like fiddling for ages with all those little numbers in a tumbler lock, and suddenly they click into place and – bingo! – ça marche! – it works. As Jung says, the little ego now becomes secondary to the greater Self. (I really don’t like that capital ‘S’, but on the other hand when such a major transformation happens internally – from the fragmented ego to the constellated self – perhaps it deserves it?)
So my husband, and my children, taught me what I had inside me, unconsciously. And, eventually, I learned to know myself, my self.
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The Metaphysic – an Ancient Indonesian Cosmology
email: abdandsal@ozemail.com.au