Maintaining a relationship with the animal body

Reference for an upcoming post on shame:

Here is a question by Dr. Harding: “Can you take up in further detail the section in the chapter on the Compassionate Ones where Nietzsche speaks of man as the animal with red cheeks? The interpretation given at the last seminar that he was ashamed on account of the unconsciousness of his fellow man does not seem adequate to me. Is there not an analogy with the story of Eden where we are told that when Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree of knowledge they were ashamed before God of their nakedness, which had never bothered them before? And perhaps – who knows? – they may have been ashamed of their clothes before the other animals? In fact, does not consciousness itself carry its own burden of guilt because the discerning one can no longer act with the complete rightness of unconscious instinct?”

Well, you have answered your question yourself, practically. That shame is of course a very typical reaction; it is a primitive reaction which clearly shows the distance that exists between the ego consciousness and the original unconsciousness of mere instinct. As long as man is in a merely instinctive animal condition, there is absolutely no ground for shame, no possibility of shame even, but with the coming of ego consciousness, he feels apart from the animal kingdom and the original paradise of unconsciousness, and then naturally he is inclined to have feelings of inferiority. The beginning of consciousness is characterized by feelings of inferiority, and also by megalomania. The old prophets and philosophers say nothing is greater than man, but on the other side nothing is more miserable than man, for the ego consciousness is only a little spark of light in an immense darkness. Yet it is the light, and if you pile up a thousand darknesses you don’t get a spark of light, you don’t make consciousness. Consciousness is the sun in the great darkness of the world. Man is just a little lantern in the world of darkness, and as soon as you have a certain amount of ego consciousness naturally you are isolated and become self-conscious – you can’t help it – and naturally you no longer possess the absolute simplicity of nature: you are no longer naïve. It is a great art and a great difficulty to become like unto a child again – or better still, like unto an animal; to become like an animal is then the supreme ideal.

When you have built up your consciousness to a decent degree, you become so separated from nature that you feel it to be a disadvantage; you feel that you have fallen from grace. This is of course the expulsion from paradise. Then life becomes ego misery and lawlessness and you must create artificial laws in order to develop a feeling of obedience. Having ego consciousness means that you have a certain amount of disposable willpower, which of course means arbitrary feelings and decisions, disobedience of natural laws and so on; and that gives you a terrible feeling of being lost, cursed, isolated, and wrong altogether. And of course this causes feelings of shame. Compare your state of innocence with the innocence of a little child and you have ground for shame; and compared with an animal you are nowhere. So the dawn of consciousness was naturally a tremendous problem to man; he had to invent a new law-abiding world of obedience, the careful observance of rules; instead of the herd or the natural animal state, he had to invent an artificial state. He has now succeeded in making of the state a tremendous monster, such as nature probably never would have tolerated, but he had to do it in order to compensate that sentiment d’incompletude, d’insuffisance. For we should not live instinctively any longer. We had to invent machines and law books and morals in order to give mankind a feeling of being in order, of being in a decent condition – something similar to paradise where the animals knew how to behave with each other. You see, the great world seems to be a self-regulating orderliness, an organism that moves and lives in a more or less decent way. The catastrophes are not too great or too many. There are not too many diseases – only a decent amount to kill off enough animals. But we know that we can break out at any time and destroy as no volcano and no epidemic ever destroyed, and we chiefly injure our own species; we would not dream of making an international war against flies or microbes or against whales or elephants – it isn’t worthwhile – but it is worthwhile when it is against man. That is so much against nature that on the other side, man seeks to protect himself by complicated machines, states, and contracts which he cannot observe. So this first reaction of shame symbolizes the moment when man felt his tragic difference from paradise, his original condition.

Yet that original condition was also not a very happy one. The primitive man did not feel his unconscious to be very satisfactory. He tried to get away from it. Of course, we have the idea that the original condition was a wonderful paradise, but as a matter of actual fact man has always tried to move away from that unconsciousness. All his many ceremonies were attempts to create a more conscious condition, and any new positive acquisition in the field of consciousness was praised as a great asset, a great accomplishment. Prometheus stealing the fire from the immortal gods has become a savior of mankind, and man’s greatest triumph was that God himself incarnated in man in order to illumine the world; that was a tremendous increase of consciousness. But every increase of consciousness means a further separation from the original animal-like condition, and I don’t know where it will end: it is really a tragic problem. We have to discover more consciousness, to extend consciousness, and the more it is extended the more we get away from the original condition.

The body is the original animal condition; we are all animals in the body, and so we should have animal psychology in order to be able to live in it. Yes, if we had no body then we could live with contracts and marvelous laws which everybody could observe and a marvelous morality which everybody could easily fulfil. But since we have a body it is indispensable that we exist also as an animal, and each time we invent a new increase of consciousness we have to put a new link in the chain that binds us to the animal, till finally it will become so long that complications will surely ensure. For when the chain between man and animal has grown so long that we lose sight of the animal, anything can happen in between, and the chain will snarl up somewhere. That has happened already and therefore we doctors have to find in a conscious individual the place where the chain begins; we have to go back and find out where it has been caught or what has happened to the animal at the other end of the line. Then we have to shorten it perhaps, or disentangle it, in order to improve the relationship between the consciousness that went too far ahead and the animal left behind.

- CG Jung, from Jung's Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra

The plumb line of personality

The superior function and the inferior function are two points along a human line, and that human line is the plumb line of the personality which I call the spine. And I like to think of the superior function as the head of the spine, and the inferior function as the tail of the spine. This definition of the spine is a very real thing. When I discovered that I was an intuitive type, I just knew suddenly – the man who dreamed when he was depressed – had to be some kind of intuitive, and I later realized was an extraverted intuitive, and he also had to be an absent-minded bloke who lost things, and that was my inferior introverted sensation, and I felt my spine in that. Not long after that I dreamt that I was present at the birth of a baby, and I was both the person giving the birth, and I was also the person delivering the baby. If I really knew it, I was also the baby. The baby which was coming out of that healthy sense of spine, was my nature, my psychological type. That sense of self we all have is along that mysterious axis between what we are best at and what we are worst at, which is the spine of our personality, and there is our uprightness, there is our integrity. Another way of saying this metaphorically and analogically is that a personality needs to drop anchor. Some people are pretty clear about what they are best at, but it doesn’t ground them enough. What grounds them is that thing they are not so good at, the thing they can’t control with the conscious mind, the thing they can’t make money at, the thing they can’t will, the thing they can’t push around, the thing that just is and constantly brings them down to earth.

I was in my glory just a few days ago at the time of the election because I consulted the I Ching last January, January of 1992, and I asked about some presidential possibilities, and based on the answers I got I concluded Clinton could win the election, and that Bush would lose the election. Because I can’t contain anything, I let that out at a public lecture in April or so, and then I just lived in dread because if that didn’t come through, my name would be mud. It was a very strange political year, there were many vicissitudes, and Clinton finally won. Bush lost. I was the prophet of all time. I was just exactly what I wanted to be – the great extraverted intuitive prophet. And I was so filled with my happiness, my glory and all the rest that I forgot to write down the time of two of my patients and managed to ignore the writing on my calendar on the third, so I messed up three appointments in a single week. What a nerd this would-be genius turned out to be. That’s the way of the balancing act that the psyche gives us every single time between my marvelous extraverted intuition in my case, and my absolutely rotted, no good introverted sensation that can’t be trusted.

Or one could look at it the other way. One could say that what is rotten is my inflated extraverted intuition, and what is good about me is this humble introverted sensation that makes these mistakes to remind me that I need to pay attention to the here and now, the straight and narrow, and to be humble.

- A Jungian Analyst Talks About Psychological Types: A Visit with John Beebe


See also:
Inferior function
Primary ("superior") function

The flower of human beings

Late in life someone asked Jung, "Well, does consciousness help in the process of individuation?" This person was thinking individuation meant some kind of self-actualization, and maybe you could get there without psychotherapy, but it might be so much better to have psychotherapy, so does consciousness help in the process of individuation? And Jung’s answer was just sublime. He said, "Consciousness is the human being’s individuation." And then in the typical language of Jung he said, "Well, you know if a plant has it in its rhizome to produce a certain flower, and the plant goes on to flower, then you can speak of the flowering of the plant as the individuation of the plant." Then Jung said, "Consciousness is the human being’s flower."

- A Jungian Analyst Talks About Psychological Types: A Visit with John Beebe

Symbolism: Wolf

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

The vulgarity of eating

Symbolism: Flying

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

The vulgarity of eating

Symbolism: Earth

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

The vulgarity of eating

Symbolism: Body

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

Symbolism: Eyebrows
The vulgarity of eating

Symbolism: Food/eating

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

 

Posts:

The vulgarity of eating

Reference: The vulgarity of eating

Because wolves are the personification of hunger – one is hungry as a wolf. So when he protects the corpse from the wolves, he [Nietzsche] is protecting it from being eaten by the appetite in himself which he tries to forget. You will remember he says of his hunger before, “And all day it hath failed to come: where hath it been?” This means that he did not realize his hunger for his body; he forgot his body altogether. Therefore, the body died; he overcame it. But the hunger ought to convince him that he should eat his body; then he would return to his humanity and become an ordinary human being. If you want to be an extraordinary human being, don’t eat: people who eat become vulgar. Therefore, many people make a point of not eating before others.

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Sipphas [followers of a religious sect] believe that it is indecent to feed before each other, so they turn their backs when they eat, or find a place where nobody sees them. To them it is just as indecent as the opposite functions of the body. Eating before others is understood by many people as a sort of taboo; there is mana in it which can easily turn into its own opposite. And here Zarathustra protects his body against the wolves because he tries to make sure that his sanctity or his superiority shall not become injured through the vulgarity of eating, which would put him down to the level of common humanity. To fill himself with physical matter would make him heavy and he could not dance any longer. He could not fly, he would be fettered to the earth. Therefore, in ascetic forms of religion people refrain from eating in order to attain spirituality; in a certain season of the year, or on certain day of the week, they make themselves light by not filling the stomach. They assume that in eating they consume all the dirt of the earth and are fettered by the earth by the heaviness of the belly. So eating is a sort of symbolism…

- C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra



Symbols:
Food/eating
Body
Earth
Flying
Wolf

See also:
Anorexia Mirabilis

Symbolism: Diagonal lines

Diagonal lines give a feeling of dynamism, as well as a lack of balance. By comparison, vertical lines are associated with righteousness and moral rectitude; they are “upright.” From the post on the symbolism of the plumb line, which measures the vertical line:

Plumb-lines are reliable and objective, and offer the user a true vertical reference. They’re also a measure of an “upright” life, and helps us judge our actions based on objective standards.

"Isaiah 28:16-17: In verse 17, the plumb-line is defined as justice and righteousness. We have seen that already in our word “upright,” a synonym of “vertical.” What is upright is righteous, and God will judge according to that standard. He will set us up so that we can see—and He can see—how close we are adhering to godly judgment and right doing. He and we will see how much we are living by the standard.

"Amos 7:7-9: In construction, the plumb-line tests whether what was erected is perpendicular to the square, that is, if it is straight up and down, if it is upright. It provides a standard against which one can measure what he has built. Metaphorically, when God draws near with the plumb-line, He is looking for those people who are living and abiding in His grace and His law. The Israelites' moral standards had degenerated, so their religious profession was not verified by the right kind of works. They were not upright; they failed the test."

John W. Ritenbaugh, “Prepare to Meet Your God!”

"The 'Plumb' admonishes us to walk uprightly in our several stations before God and man, squaring our actions by the Square of Virtue, ever remembering that we are traveling upon the Level of Time, toward 'that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.'  The divine requirement for uprightness and rectitude in all walks of life."

Symbolism: Plumb-bob


Diagonal lines also suggest motion:

Diagonal lines are unbalanced. They are filled with restless and uncontrolled energy. They can appear to be either rising or falling and convey action and motion. Their kinetic energy and apparent movement create tension and excitement. Diagonal lines are more dramatic than either horizontal or vertical lines.

Diagonal lines can also appear solid and unmoving if they are holding something up or at rest against a vertical line or plane.

Compared with vertical lines:

Vertical lines are perpendicular to the horizon. They are filled with potential energy that could be released if they were to fall over. Vertical lines are strong and rigid. They can suggest stability, especially when thicker. Vertical lines accentuate height and convey a lack of movement, which is usually seen as horizontal.

They stretch from the earth to the heavens and are often connected with religious feelings. Their tallness and formality may give the impression of dignity.

The Meaning of Lines: Developing A Visual Grammar (Vanseo Design)

The diagonal line is one of my favorites. Unlike the steady vertical or placid horizontal, it’s the line of dynamic energy and motion. It's the relationship of the diagonal line to the frame edges of the image that gives it energy. Something is going up, or coming down. It’s a rocket shot into the air and the fall of a roller coaster.

A diagonal line tends to create triangular shapes as it interacts with the frame, thereby creating the sensation of  “three’s.” The number 3 is psychologically powerful, sometimes even mystical. Think of parents and child, the love triangle, the Pyramids, the Holy Trinity. Think of the Three Stooges and the Three Little Pigs.

Diagonals are most interesting when they interact with horizontal lines and an opposing diagonal, which creates complex sets of triangles that may converge on an element in the image, lead the eye in different directions, or create an intricate mosaic and constellation of facets, like crystals. Long diagonals may create big triangles that act as arrows that lead the eye to the corners of the image, which may or may not be a good thing.

Although some people think that strong diagonal lines can be too obvious and a bit contrived, they do catch the eye and drive home a point. More subtle diagonals created by delicate lines, background patterns, or psychological connections among elements (like a person’s line of sight), can lend a subliminal feeling of energy to the image.

The Diagonal Line (True Center Publishing)

Diagonal lines are lines of movement; compared to vertical or horizontal lines, they are dynamic, either going up or sliding down. They also suggest a certain moral flexibility, compared to the “upright” vertical line, or the lackadaisical horizontal line.


(Image from True Center Publishing)