Magicians or Teachers

Magicians or Teachers

The Japanese have a concept of man in relation to the externality, the concept of 'Mu'. Everything that exists outside the individual is, potentially, part of his/her 'Mu'; or, to put it another way, what appears in one's field of vision/experiential domain is, in fact, 'for us' and, in a very real way, the creation of our minds - 'we get', as it were, 'what we want' in terms of our developmental requirements.

  In the parlance of Jungian psychology what is happening is that the archetype of the `Self`, corresponding in religious parlance to 'God', is providing opportunities for personal growth and enrichment, which is where the educator becomes important - as an interface between the child and its internal 'mission'. The usual approach is for the child to be taught that the world is a difficult and dangerous place against which it - and its parents - need to protect it. The result being that the child sees the outside world as a threatening, hostile, alien 'thing', a situation complicated by parents who have problems of their own; child abuse, violence, psychoses, neuroses etc., possibly due to previous problematical educations of their own including false conditioning and social maladaptation. On the other hand, if the growing infant is taught that, for example, the world is his/hers - like a virtual reality film script - to use the latest techspeak - in which the child can write his/herself, but because he/she is small and vulnerable, its parents will guide and care for it until it is sufficiently developed enough to access the medium, the child's relationship to, as it were, 'God' is of a directly developmental or 'personal' one, that is, what happens to the child as it grows is aimed directly at him/her in terms of his/her development or progress.

 The use of archetypal symbolism/imagery in pediatrics does not end there, however. It also has a role to play in the developmental understanding of children with dysfunctionalities; for example, a Hungarian scientist working on the structure of the benzine molecule dreamt one night of  a serpent eating its own tail, a central motif in Jung’s theories of self-actualization or individuation, and the next day - as if by magic -  the helical structure of the benzine molecule appeared in his mind. The point here is that, if we can juxtapose archetypal symbolism or imagery associated with, let's say mathematics or chemistry, then those images could help the student grasp the subject more easily - to say nothing of the possibilities for creativity.

 The use of Jungian archetypes and symbolic motifs in the analysis of the unconscious is widespread, but their role as a framework with which to measure/enhance the level of consciousness is not. It is, for example, well known that the unconscious of a woman from Manchester may contain elements from symbolic structures/systems as diverse as Egyptian mythological fragments and Tibetan mandalas, as well as images from the Judaeo-Christian tradition that constitutes her background. The point here being that knowledge of the various symbol systems/frameworks, which would be the task of a Jungian educator, is essential in mapping the level of development/functioning - the chakra system of energy points and their associated mental images/symbols in Kundalini yoga and the system of Sefiroths in the Kabbalah are but two instances of models available for the purposes of such mapping - and also in his/her task of monitoring, gauging and guiding the child's creative potential, that is, through the literary/artistic products of its 'imagination'.

 The role of sex as an educative medium cannot be ignored. The importance of the channelling of libido in ensuring developmental progress cannot be overemphasised. Consultation with experts in the field of pediatrics, particularly with regard to the linking of movement therapy with speech articulation, suggest that concentration upon correct body posture with regard to the crown of the head produces normal individuals at the expense of their creative potential. In Kundalini yoga the third chakra in the vicinity of the solar plexus is described rather poetically as a plenitude of jewels, a reference to its in potentiam character, corresponding in psychological parlance to the wealth of psychic contents waiting to receive actualization in the psyche of the individual, the fruition of which is symbolized in alchemy as the cauda pavonis or peacock's tail, but which might also be described as the 'crown jewels' a suggestion that has both a sexual connotation - in the English vernacular a reference to the male genitalia - and a psycho-physical dimension in terms of the crown of the head or lotus chakra in yoga. Sex or Tantric yoga is, therefore, indicated as a useful form of therapy in assisting individuals who, for whatever reason, are unable to realise their blocked potential due to socio-economic conditioning which tells them that work, marriage and the raising of a family - a situation associated with the third or solar plexus chakra in the Hindu system - should be the zenith of their aspirations, and is in fact 'normal'. Of course, vested interests may have a role to play. There are elements of society - Freemasons, for example - whose goal is to maintain the status quo and keep the mass of people at a low level of consciousness becuase they are easier to manipulate that way. Emphasis in Christianity, for example, upon logic in the form of Logos rather than Eros may have been necessary for the channelling of libido into the creation of a technological approach, but at the expense of the brain's as-yet unmapped capacities (a human being we are told uses only 10% of its potential); in other words, the field of Eros is a territory which needs to be opened up and fully explored if an individual is to maximize his/her intellectual/creative potential.

 With regard to youth culture and, in particular, the taking of drugs and the need to find a solution to the problem of those seeking to recover from substance abuse, recent experimental studies in the field suggest that the use of symbolic structures and archetypal frameworks in the environment can be useful in producing a therapeutic relationship between individuals and what often seems an alien and hostile world surrounding them. Results indicate that the use of symbols in the externality as iconographical tools - just as one might 'click' on icons in a computer - by focusing one's energies upon a particular motif, produce effects associated with that particular 'icon', thus creating a more creative, playful and harmonious relationship between 'subject' and his/her reality. The therapeutic applications for those  experimenting with drugs is great - and I am not an advocate of such methodologies, but if it's going to occur isn't it better to give those undertaking this self-examination or research exploration into inner space all the information they might need in order to survive it?.

 But there are further far reaching possibilities with regard to future scenarios in connection with this concept. In theoretical physics there is a very famous experiment in which an electron gun is fired at a target. A camera placed next to the target records that each electron arrives as if travelling in a straight line. However, further observation reveals that, in spite of appearances, if the electrons are watched by technical apparatus at a point midway between gun and target, they show signs of deviating from the direct path and, as it were, choosing one amongst many alternative paths to the goal, that is, each electron chooses from a plethora of possibilities within what the phsicists describe as a 'probability wave', a notion that gave birth to the theory of parallel universes or multi-realities and which has some significance for us in our concerns with transcendent consciousness or higher levels of functioning. In short, the extrapolated conclusion would be that, if human consciousness can be said to be responsible for determining the reality which it inhabits, then it must also be possible, by changing the level of consciousness or neurological functioning - either developmentally organic, biochemically, or some kind of fusion of the two approaches - to choose which world to inhabit or even produce alternative worlds through the power of what Jung referred to as creative imagination. The notion of world-as-computer offers the further possibility of individuals being able to simply 'ask' for and obtain what they require, which quite possibly is the area of experimentation for those elements of the drug culture with enquiring minds?

 The question of whether or not moving objects can be categorised as having the attributes of icons is one which brings us into the areas of behavioural psychology and what I have described elsewhere as 'human hieroglyphics', an ancient form of symbolism familiar to us from Egyptian temples and, to take a rather less well known example, the Tarot deck of the seer in which the posturings of the characters depicted in the twenty-two major arcana are associated with the hieroglyphical forms of the twenty-two characters of the Hebraic alphabet. And what of Yin and Yang, the male and the female? Indian temples celebrate the acts of physical love in three-dimensional stone carvings, so what would a study of the 'hieroglyphics of human sexuality' reveal?

 Ethical questions remain to be resolved for advocates of this biochemical and developmentally organic approach. On the one hand, is it appropriate to intervene pharmacologically in the growth process?. On the other hand, is it desirable for an individual's awakening libido to be channelled into sexual rather than mental activity and vice versa? In the end the decision has to be for the individual concerned, the task of the developer or educator being one of guidance and as a facilitator of choices already made.

 The stimulation and observation of the creative imaginations of patients or subjects in relation to the available symbol maps needs to happen in order to ascertain what, if any, correlations exist between the ‘map[s] and the territory’ of the collective unconscious, and the implementation of a programme resulting in a description of the effects produced in the environment by a creative interface between human consciousness and the world-as-computer. To ascertain in infants whether they are highly developed in terms of mental activity - or they are mentally deficient, an archetypal methodology using sound and visual stimuli of an archetypal nature - and the careful monitoring/gauging of the reactions on the part of the infant to this input – would both determine the level of mental activity and, perhaps, assist in facilitating the infants' education; particularly in early language learning or TESOL. The same techniques can, of course, be applied in organically assisting the developmental progress of 'normal' children. By using appropriate archetypal material within the framework of textbooks or computer programmes alongside the usual illustrations and diagrams etc., these images can act as catalysts for developmental/individuational impulses. To take an old example of the sort of thing I mean, a Hungarian scientist dreamt one night of a serpent eating its own tail, a central motif in Jung's theories of individuation, and the next day he was able to model the structure of the benzine molecule he was working on.

The use of hypnotherapy and, perhaps, hypnotic hallucinogens to facilitate the unlocking of  the individual's self-awareness and requirements in terms of his/her potential and goals (part of the battle for individuational growth is discovering just what the person concerned wants from life) is indicated, before using techniques like archetypal imaging and hypnotic autosuggestion to get them moving away from whatever they thought their problem was and towards their self-discovered and, if the Jungian educator is doing his/her job properly, self-programmed destiny.

 Applying aspects of behavioural psychology in connection with Jung’s concept of imaginatio, the effects produced in the  environment by ‘human hieroglyphics’ could be analysed, including thpse effects produced by what might be described as the ‘hieroglyphics of human sexuality’ through analysis of the static image as found in pornography of the ‘Playboy` or 'Leo' types as well as cinematographically. This might be extended to an ‘archetypal archaeology, the use of archetypal icons to ‘access’ racial memories - perhaps involving regression therapy - to, as it were, ‘visit’ the past; or, and which might be more exciting, if certain products of the past were, as some contend, designed/constructed by ‘visitors’ from other worlds/dimensions, either discover something of  that alien psychology/psyche through the aforesaid techniques  - what might we discover about alien psychology by observing the effects produced by intense meditations upon the god Anubis, for example, a figure linked in Egyptian mythology with the binary star system of Sirius and, traditionally, telepathy? - or make contact with the psyches of the now-living ancestors of those visitors both here-and-now and, who knows, out-there-somewhere too through what might described as projection therapy, that is, visiting or producing/creating the future by accessing the developmental archetypes of perhaps alien psychologies as preserved in myth, folklore, stone and image.