Psyche and Opposites

In the unconscious, and its archetypal imagination, opposites do not actually exist per se; it is a conscious idea that is nevertheless not effectively a property of the psyche. Opposites do not pertain to it, and so looking at psychological imagery and instinct by way of opposites is not a helpful approach. Especially, the more one penetrates into the density of the nature of the unconscious. What people might perceive or label as opposites tend to be complementarities, and it is more often than not precisely not their differences that are important to the instinctual landscape of deep mind, but the particular quality each one of them respectively holds. In a dream a few years ago, I saw two foetuses, about 24 weeks gestation, floating in a uterus in the tightest of embraces. The twins were fully formed and looked identical. The unconscious zoomed in on an image of their little hands holding each other’s in such tight a grip that I feel they will never be able to let go. There is no doubt that the archetypal imagination really wanted me to look and make a mental note of this intimacy. The most fascinating thing I remember thinking while looking at this image was that these babies were not opposites, but sames, and that the dream made it implicitly clear that keeping the intimacy between them was the most important thing I had to remember. Whatever quality one of them takes on, the other will become whatever complementary quality it is that will keep the relationship close, the psyche seemed to say to me. What is very important to bear in mind is that such complementary intra-psychic experiences are more often than not of the same category, e.g. different shades or densities of a black mood or a quality of silence. My immediate reflex when I see black animals in my dreams and visions, or I find myself floating in the black universe, is to move into their darkness – to penetrate and become even blacker than the solemnly empty and colourlessly sober instinctual necessities these images signify. The sense of calm, peace and integrity is so profound in the density of this intensifying of your unconscious senses. One time, shortly after it occurred to me that Poetic Psychology seemed to be the creation that connected all the dots on the journey towards my destiny, I found myself sitting on the edge of a black planet looking out into the universe when suddenly the silver-grey moon, illuminated ever so gently with a touch of golden light, appeared right before my eyes. I was absolutely stunned by the enormity of the mass of this perfectly round structure covered in exquisitely rough and uneven lunar regolith. For quite a moment I glanced at it sitting there in the face of me, utterly enchanted by the gigantesque gravitas of this imaginal materiality. What are you, I silently inquired, finally. I am Clarity, the moon answered, with a gentle tranquillity. I remember sitting there in awe, struck by knowing exactly what the lunar swoon was telling me, and having no idea whatsoever what this clarity was about. To this day, my insight and conscious understanding resembles the light and surface of the grand lunar design: it is not white, but silver-grey, not smooth and clear, but a rubble pile of charcoal-gray, powdery dust, and rocky debris founded on fractured bedrock. Whenever I think of the stunningly beautiful nighttime moon that came to face me that one day, I can sense with certainty that it wanted me to meet it, not with daylight insight and awareness, but with lunar consciousness – where clarity derives from ever-changing reflections on the images arising from the unconscious, which themselves, in return, imagine us as their own opaque, incomplete, never-ending, and ever-evolving dreams and fantasies, memories and memoires.