timboucher

This Isn’t Really About Cats

A cat meowed outside my window this morning. Twice loudly. It must have known I was in here. I pretended like I wasn’t. I thought it was going to come in but then it went away eventually.

I recognize that I have been purposely obscure in my writing these past few months. I think that’s why I had that dream recently where my “anima figure” asked me for “advice about going crazy.” It’s a directive from my subconscious to share what I have learned from doing (or almost doing) just that.

First off, let me at least address the anima issue, rather than just brushing it under the carpet. The other night I was lit at a friend’s house and picked up Jung’s Man and His Symbols and, of course, randomly opened to the part about anima possession. In a man, the anima is his female soul counterpart and acts as his mediator towards the contents of the subconscious. This is, by and large, a positive and completely natural attribute of the male personality (females have their masculine animus equivalent). Or so says Jung. But I take him to know what he’s talking about.

Letting Yourself Plummet Down

I just re-read the chapter in his autobiography about how after he broke ways with Freud he found himself needing to realign his approach to life and thinking with regards to psychoanalysis. He had been avoiding doing so for years but finally allowed himself to descend into the abyss and face all of the psychological rigors he sought to put his clients through. He writes:

In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me “underground,” I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them, as it were. I felt not only violent resistence to this, but a distinct fear. For I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies - and as a psychiatrist I realized only too well what that meant. After prolonged hesitation, I saw that there was no other way out. I had to take the chance, had to try to gain power over them; for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me. A cogent motive for my making the attempt was the conviction that I could not expect of my patients something I did not dare to do myself. The excuse that a helper stood at their side would not pass muster, for I was well aware that the so-called helper - that is, myself - could not help them unless he knew their fantasy material from his own direct experience, and that at present all he possessed were a few theoretical prejudices of dubious value.

Reading that rang so incredibly true for me that I bought my second copy of this book yesterday and began devouring it all over again last night. The man knew what he was talking about because he himself passed through the fire.

Anima Possession

So anyway I picked up Man and His Symbols the other night and began seeing these diamond-shaped patterns in the text, which are interesting of themselves, but a diversion to our current subject: anima possession. The anima is a subconscious potentiality within the male psyche, and as such has great potential to be projected onto actual living persons (more on taking conscious control of this projection process here). I transcribed some relevant passages from this book via Amazon’s “search inside” feature.

It is the presence of the anima that causes a man to fall suddenly in love when he sees a woman for the first and knows at once that this is “she.” In this situation, the man feels as if he has known this woman intimately for all time; he falls for her so helplessly that it looks to outsiders like complete madness. Women who are of “fairy-like” character especially attract such anima projections, because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague, and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her.

Ha ha ha. It almost makes me a little embarrassed to read that because of how accurate it is on one level to what I went through these past months, and in moving down to California, etc. I should have, I supposed, known what was going on when I began composing poems directed at various conglomerations of goddesses instead of at a real human woman. But then, that’s how you learn these things: by doing. No other way, it seems.

But the feelings unleashed at the time were so immensely powerful and overwhelming that they simply could not be denied. I mean, I was getting direct symbolic and active imagination-type communications from the Virgin Mary for a little while. And that certainly never happened to me before. And the messages were extremely clear, and frankly still are - even though outward circumstances no longer really reflect, well, much of anything at the present moment. But the gifts that have been bestowed upon my heart and soul by way of these experiences are not only immeasurable but quite irreversible - even through the worst of what I have experienced.

The process of reducing mythical goddesses down to a real woman has, of course, been necessarily tragic. But in such a way that it has caused me to finally confront and (hopefully) overcome a lot of false assumptions, hidden beliefs and convoluted obsessive tendencies with regards to love relationships. I don’t think I’m quite out of the woods yet, but the trees are definitely starting to thin.

A bearable solution to such a drama can be found only if the anima is recognized as an inner power. The secret aim of the unconscious in bringing about such an entanglement is to force a man to develop and to bring his own being to maturity by integrating more of his unconscious personality and bringing it into his real life.

The experience has of course left me with innumerable questions about the actual woman, the actual object of my desire throughout this whole process. As I still feel great love for her, but now the massive wave of unconscious content which she inadvertently dredged up for me has finally broken against the shore. And now here I am standing dripping with seaweed soaking wet. What does she see in all of what happened?

Even more vital is the role that the anima plays in putting a man’s mind in tune with the right inner values and thereby opening the way into more profound inner depths. It is as if an inner “radio” becomes tuned to a certain wave length that excludes irrelevancies but allows the voice of the Great Man to be hear. In establishing this inner radio reception, the anima takes on the role of guide or mediator to the world within and to the Self.

No Comment

I’m tempted to keep on my psychoanalysis hat for a little while longer and offer the following quotes about corresponding animus possession in women without any specific pointed commentary:

A strange passivity and paralysis of feeling or a deep insecurity that can lead almost to a sense of nullity, may sometimes be the result of an unconscious animus opinion. In the depths of the woman’s being, the animus whispers: “You are hopeless. What’s the use of trying? There is no point in doing anything. Life will never change for the better.”

Unfortunately, whenever one of these personifications of the unconscious takes possession of our mind, it seems as if we ourselves are having such thoughts and feelings. The ego identifies with them to the point where it is unable to detach them and see them for what they are are. One is really “possessed” by the figure from the unconscious. Only after the possession has fallen away does one realize with horror that one has said and done things diametrically opposed to one’s real thoughts and feelings - that one has been the prey of an alien psychic factor.

…

Very often the heroine is not allowed to ask questions about her mysterious, unknown lover and husband; or she only meets him in the dark and may never look at him. The implication is that by blindly trusting and loving him she will be able to redeem her bridegroom. But this never succeeds. She always breaks her promise and finally finds her lover again only after a long, difficult quest and much suffering.

…

The woman must find the courage and inner broadmindedness to question the sacredness of her own convictions. Only then will she be able to take in the suggestions of the unconscious, especially when they contradict her animus opinions. Only then will the manifestations of the Self get through to her and will she be able to consciously understand their meaning.

“Understanding” The Numinous

Jung in his work talks a fair bit about something called the “numinous“, which I think is a beautiful word. From my own experiences, I would describe things that are numinous simply as things that are so weird you simply have to notice them. Usually you don’t know why they are weird exactly, and may jot them down or mentally save them for later to tell a friend about. And then they will be like, “so what?”

Synchronicities of course fall distinctly under the category of numinous. And I have had those in such massive numbers these past few months that I don’t even know where to begin. Dipping back into Jung’s scientific analysis of these processes again, we may be able to readily see why. My initial response throughout this whole thing has essentially been “It’s magic” and “she’s magic” and “we’re magic together.” Which I don’t think is necessarily wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily give you much to go on beyond that. Another way of looking at it is that - at least for me - there was a great deal of unwitting and unrecognized archetypal possession going on, by way of the anima: me seeking the essence of my own female creative soul in another being.

I never really “got” what anima possession meant before this, but one of the things that it means is that ordinary things become numinous. A phrase someone says at a party, words on a sign, a strange configuration of objects on a table. Just about any and everything can take on these qualities of anything from slight oddness to transcendent mystery. It is as though everything suddenly has a soul and is speaking to you - loudly.

The thing I’ve been struggling with is that this state of affairs is “cool”, basically. It’s fun on a certain level, although totally maddening on another level and is the short road to insanity if you don’t know what you’re doing. Not that I know specifically what I am doing, but I am extraordinarily lucky - I should say blessed - to have been personally prepared enough for these events to occur that I was able to find a way through them without utterly destroying myself.

Be Observant & Excited

My solution this whole time has been basically just to write down anything numinous I come across in a little notebook I carry with me. She actually gave it to me and bought a corresponding book herself. Mine is green and has butterflies on it. I think hers is pink and has phoenixes or flowers or something on it. I have often dreamt about these books because they hold great power within them: they hold keys to each of our own experiences of our lives and of our symbolic and subconscious inner processes.

But that’s the thing about synchronicities and “the numinous” is that when you are REALLY caught in them and they are REALLY charged up - and potentially at their most dangerous - they appear to you to be completely real. They do not appear as inner events anymore. Or rather, the difference between inner and outer events is all but wholly destroyed. You descend into a mythic realm.

That “mythic realm” goes something like this: you walk around doubting the reality of what’s happening to you. Am I really experiencing these things or just making them up? In my case, it has been doubly complicated because (at least) one other person experienced first hand a great deal of the weirdest elements of it all: things that were the most numinous. When you have someone else experiencing what seem to be contents of your own mind in the world at large, well let’s just say it’s a difficult situation to be in. But also one of vast creative potential and adventure. I shouldn’t discount any of that either, for the sake of total truthfulness.

In our case we developed an elaborate private language of reference points, which helped each of us anchor what we were experiencing and communicate it to the other in a way that was (sometimes maddeningly) beyond the power of words. There were probably hundreds of YouTube videos exchanged, and my experiences with her are largely (but not exclusively) what lead me off into the depths of stylistic oddity that you’ve seen on my site these past few months. You might say she’s the Yoko Ono responsible for breaking up the Beatles, in one sense. But that’s silly. Further, we started using shorthand mythical descriptions to describe various people who became sort of larger than life characters in our experiences of the world. Most of them were drawn from a shared Catholic symbolic background, combined with late eighties and early nineties rock and roll and popular culture - our shared cultural history in some sense.

I, Rearrangement Servant

It is that process which allowed me to explore possibilities related to what I’ve called “reality rearrangement” but which you might call “magic” for short. Basically it has to do with the linking and re-linking of interior contents with exterior events and persons. It is what ultimately allowed us (actually her idea) to start working out the idea that your life is essentially a musical and you have to write out the best part for all your friends collaboratively so that everybody benefits and has a good time and is transformed by it. The simplicity of her approaches to these types of things always blew me away, and is one of the things which allows me to know with some certainty that there was (and is) more going on between us than simple psychological projection - that there is actual substance to it all.

But it can become hard to trust yourself when your whole world is collapsing in self-referential waves around you. I wouldn’t say I ever was unable to distinguish what was real and not real in the physical world. Like, I never tried to cross the street, saw cars coming and thought: oh those cars are just a product of my imagination. The issue was on a much more insubstantial level: were those cars sent by my subconscious mind to deliver some kind of message? More like that. It’s the gateway to massive paranoia and depression, both of which I have battled with on and off - moreso the depression than the paranoia, but I have certainly had my moments.

Freaking Out Responsibly

The best thing you (or I anyway) could do during those types of moments where you’re “freaking out” is simply to be alone. I’m again extraordinarily blessed and lucky to have worked out some kind of scam so that I don’t currently need a regular job. It’s given me the option to hole up in my room for days on end while I was working through particularly thick knots in my mental-emotional makeup. And its provided me with a great deal of safety and security during a difficult - and important - time in my life.

You must understand: if you are going to go through these things yourself, if you are going to “go crazy” the first step is to simply abandon trying to understand any of it. You will not and you cannot. Attempts to do so will strangle your communication channels with your subconscious mind and cause you only frustration and to fall into comforting illusions which ultimately support instead of solve your neurotic tendencies. And your problems are already strong enough without you making them ten times worse. Which is a very real danger here: not going far enough. Stopping too soon. That’s almost worse than going through all the craziest dangerous parts of this process, because you’ll only have to dislodge yourself from a much more heavily fortified position later on.

My “Spambot” Period

So just give up on trying to understand and control it. It’s not easy if you’re a controlling freak like I am. But it can be done. The best way to do it, actually that I found, was to actively NOT understand it. To consistently throw wrenches into the works. Just when it feels like you understand what’s what, blast yourself with something else you know to be numinous that simply doesn’t relate and can’t be explained by your theories and justifications. This is the easiest way to explain my “spambot period” of writing as it has been called. I basically just looked for things that were weird, and then wedged in all of them together in ways which not only I didn’t understand but which clearly confused and annoyed lots of my old readers. Which is fine, because this process simply needed to gone through and there was no other way to do any of it.

Also during this period I learned something important about language, which I believe I capture the essence of here. It is basically this: the words you have programmed your mind with your whole life have left you with the marked ability to only think (or I should probably say “express”) certain things to the exclusion of other things. That is, if you speak a different language or a different dialect than I, we will still be able to communicate (cause effect truth exchange) but we will literally be able to think different things. This is both a blessing and a curse. It becomes less of a curse when you realize it and begin to tinker with what words mean, and when you begin to make up your own words.

This is why they talked in that psych book I looked at yesterday about how schizophrenics often talk and write in “word-salad” (schizophasia), or “meaningless” words and phrases. The thing is not that they are meaningless but that they have invented new meanings which are perfectly valid and allow them to express themselves in new ways (a positive adaptation) but are simply not part of consensus language usage.

If you don’t take away anything else from this article though: try this simple exercise. Make up three new words a day - just randomly. And throughout the day drop them into conversations. Try using them as different parts of speech, in different contexts and with different people. Try this for a week and keep track of your word inventions. After a week, see if any of these words have crept into your common parlance. And keep track of if any of your friends of cohorts begin using them and if so what they think these words mean.

Programming Feedback Loops

One other thing I want to talk about with regard to synchronicities and the psychoid layer between mind and matter: what these events do is set up feedback loops between your experience and perception. And they can and should be used as tools. That’s how you gain control of them. For example, the other night I said to a friend, “Let’s do a test and see if we can make something with a moose come up.” At that point, about three other things I’d talked about had suddenly materialized, so it was a fair test. It took a full day to come up for me (and then came up again the next day as well) but it did come up. It may only be that your mind devotes a small subroutine, an automated search agent (angel) whose sole purpose is to find something which matches the frequency of your object of desire.

I say “only” knowing full well just how important this is. Because you can essentially pattern your mind’s behavior to notice certain categories or classes of things. When it finds instances of those things within your field of perception, it sends you a “pingback“. That is, it notifies you with the feeling of numinous excitation that the object of your search has been found in the real world. This is where you go “Whoa!” and say “Holy shit!” (ie, the Holy Shit!Spirit). So you can begin to see how you can consciously tune these tethered search angels to find numinous examples of the things you like within the total field of reality. If you have great discipline and willpower, you will literally be able to bend your own experience of reality.

The jury is still out on whether (1) you are actually bending reality itself, or just the subset of your perception of it and (2) whether such a thing as “reality” even exists at all. And these are the types of questions that can drive you crazy, but with which if you sit long enough you eventually just get used to it.

Manipulating Symbol Chains

These experiences with symbolinking together inner and outer contents, actively modifying language, tracking and programming coincidences both lead me into and would have been confusing as shit if I didn’t stumble onto the simplest way to put them into a framework of meaning. Now, as I said you can’t try to understand them. It just won’t work. But you should try to fit them into some kind of pattern. Just make sure you keep changing what that pattern is so you don’t get fixated on it and it doesn’t gain power over you. The way I did this was for all the most numinous things which I would jot down in my notebook through any given day, I would come back that night or the next afternoon and do Google image searches on those numinous keywords. (I wrote more about this here and how you can hook it directly into your imagination: your inner imaging engine)

What I would do was extremely simple and can be repeated by anyone. Say, for instance, you have a weird experience with a cat that seems somehow out of the ordinary. You write it down, come home and search for “cats” on Google images with whatever associated word sets, like “black” or “fat”. And then you just scan through and download somewhere between ten and twenty images that come up during the course of that search. The way you evaluate them again is by exercising your “numinosity muscle”. You just look for pictures that strike some kind of chord, that seem “relevant somehow” or “cool” or “interesting.”

It’s extremely simple. So what I have been doing for months is just that and then uploading the resulting image chains to my website, interlacing them with sometimes directly related (and often not, or not overtly connected) written content. So I have symbolic records of my days and progress stretching back months.

In my case, I noticed two main things: First, that certain images just kept coming up again and again. You’re well aware of them by now, I’m sure: Jesus, the Virgin Mary, dogs, lions, hearts, roses, etc. This is good. What is happening is you are teaching your subconscious mind that you are ready and willing to communicate with it, because you know how to feed it back with things you both like, that you both have in common. And you create a shared language of expression with which you can increasingly begin to navigate the contents of your own mind and heart more gracefully. And when these numinous things come up more and more in your own life, you’re better able to interpret them and place them within the proper contextual framework. This is where the meat of the real alchemical work is done: following relentlessly your own symbols and allowing them to fully express themselves. For the purpose of these symbols being in your mind in the first place, as Jung says and I agree from my own experiences, is to bring you into wholeness: to heal the fragmented nature of your mind, to transform you and to challenge you to grow. It can be extremely painful as it will invariably melt reality and force you to face things you don’t want to face. But have faith that it will guide you to safety. It is, after all, you that is giving yourself these hints and puzzles. Not just yourself, but your Self. Your guardian angel. God, even: or your connection to Him, that part of your made in his image (in his inner imaging engine, His Holy Imagination).

Silent Lucidity

But anyway, when you start putting together these symbol chains, allow yourself to fabricate a connective narrative thread between them. Don’t cling to it, but allow it to rise up. And even write it down, or put it into a creative fixed form. This is extremely important because it gives you a concrete place to work through these things: a crucible or laboratory wherein you make the decisions about what reality will consist of - because by this point you may no longer be able to trust the outside world. This is where you write your life musical, or you paint your pictures or make your songs or whatever. But you MUST have a creative outlet for it, or you will either (A) go really and truly crazy or (B) not get anywhere at all and just stagnate. Jung:

This positive function occurs when a man takes seriously the feelings, moods, expectations and fastasies sent by his anima and when he fixes them in some form - for example, in writing, painting, sculpture, musical composition, or dancing. When he works at this patiently and slowly, other more deeply unconscious material wells up from the depths and connects with the earlier material. After a fantasy has been fixed in some specific form, it must be examined both intellectually and ethically, with an evaluating feeling reaction. And it is essential to regard it as being absolutely real; there must be no lurking doubt that is this “only a fantasy”. If this is practiced with devotion over a long period, the process of individuation gradually becomes the single reality and can unfold its true form.

Incidentally, this is EXACTLY what they talk about in the middle spoken section of the Queensryche song Silent Lucidity. They talk about achieving “dream control” by putting your dreams into a fixed form, something something. I’ve always puzzled over just what the lyrics are exactly in that passage, but I think this is the essential substance of it.

By this point, I have probably made “going crazy” sound glamorous and sexy. It is anything but. It is absolutely awful, but nowhere near as awful as the kind of life you live *before* you go through something on this scale. I kind of think of it like a tattoo: it hurts for a while, but then you have a defining thing that you then can carry with you all of your life that changes you. Though it doesn’t seem like it at the time, those changes are inevitably for the better because it is all about purification and realignment. You get rid of all the trash that has accumulated in your heart and mind (which is a hell of a lot) and if you can make it through to the far shore, you will come out a new person. Transfigured even. You will find yourself with literal powers to tap into dimensions of the human mind, heart and collective experiences that few people can do. You will become more “psychic” (possibly even developing mediumistic or magical abilities) and more “spiritual” and more centered. If you do *not* become more centered as a result, then you are doing it wrong and you need to find somebody to help you through it. It’s not the end of the world though if you need somebody else’s help for this. In fact, it’s probably better - although I don’t really know as I pretty much just hunkered down and weathered the worst of it by myself (with a few notably wonderful helpers along the way, of course).

Anyway, happy hunting and there is of course a shitload more to be said about all this. But I’m spent after all that. How bout I leave you with my latest chain of numinous images that I am working on and a dream that I had this afternoon about a pizza place I ate lunch at:

In my dream I am eating in Wallingford Pizza House when two black men walk in, one skinny and one very large. Suddenly I know for sure they are about to rob the place (because in my dream it was recently robbed), and not wanting to get robbed, I immediately lunge for the smaller of the two men, knock him down and hold him between myself and the other gentleman as a shield. Somehow I then make my way outside where I lock the door from the outside - so they can’t get out presumably and run next door to a coffee shop where I tell them to call 911. I then begin booking it down the street to get as far from there as possible. I run and find a spot to hide from the men I know who will be pursuing me. The little guy I knocked over finds me, but I am not afraid. He sits down next to me and we begin commiserating and explaining our respective sides of everything that happened. I realize he is not so bad after all. Then a gang of five or six Italian mobster looking guys come up, who were presumably also at the pizza place and are apparently seeking revenge against this guy. One man has a broken and bloody nose. One of the men drops his car keys as they are taking this guy away. I pick the keys up and throw them back to the men, but no one retrieves them. It’s like they don’t see it. I am feeling very magnanimous and tell them “not to hurt him” referring to the guy I knocked down. They laugh and stalk off into the night. I go to leave and say to the robber, “Peace my brother,” to which someone replies angrily that he just robbed and attacked these guys and that peace has nothing to do with it. To which I respond: “That’s exactly why we need peace now.”

I wish I had gone back to claim the forgotten keys, but I have a feeling they are still there waiting for me.

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