When I was sixteen years old I first became aware of an image that pressed its reality upon my life for the next fifty years or so. The mood of the image is one of anxious urgency! And because I became thoroughly entangled in the image, all aspects of my life were coloured by this mood. I knew the image but its meaning was not conscious, i.e. until now, in my sixty-eighth year.
In high school I had a girlfriend. She was a “fallen woman”, at least according to the standards of the day. She had been caught in the bushes behind school initiating a few boys into the feminine mysteries. This outrage led to a school meeting with the school nurse giving us a nervous and clumsy speech on the birds and the bees, propriety etc. I had something else entirely in mind. It was my task to save her soul! I was driven by a weird image of seeing her on top of the school building, helpless, as a fire raged out of control, threatening to consume her entirely. “Jump! Jump,” I cried, “I will save you.”
In reality my “girlfriend” hardly knew I existed but she was very much alive in my mind as a figure of the human soul endangered by a conflagration. This image, like all images, has many layers of meaning that played relentlessly throughout my life over the decades.[1]But each variation contained the persistent mood of urgent anxiety—the human soul in danger from a fiery conflagration, and in need of a saviour. While I was entangled in unconscious identification with this image, its components cycled mercilessly through the details of my life. At times I was the crazed “prophet” shouting to a deaf world, “can’t you see? Our most precious possession is in imminent danger!” At other times, I was shouting for help as the flames consumed me. And worse, I became the conflagration, seized by the impulse to violently destroy every beautiful individual variation appearing on my path of wilful, monomaniacal certainty.
All my books, essays, even Facebook and blog posts, carry one inflection or another of this image as it worked its way towards consciousness. As world empirical events began to intensify with the election of Trump, I began to see more clearly their connections with my childhood image. To take just one example, in 2015, I wrote a book called The Peril in Thinking.[2]This book was a further refinement of my descriptions, based on personal experience, of a spiritual, i.e. non-human process breaking into the empirical world with the force of a fiery conflagration. This spiritual fire has the form of non-human or unhumanised ideologies that effectively destroy any individual response to their unquestioned and certain “authority”—authority that in reality is a thinly disguised face of a destructive untrammelled exercise of power.
I was given this understanding of the fiery conflagration in the early nineties through direct experience of the fire as it entered my soul life.[3]Now in 2018, it is relatively easy to see how those earlier experiences correspond to the present outer collective situation. In 2017-18, I experienced an intensification of the phenomenon of my childhood image that seemed to run parallel to an equal intensification of the outer mood of collective anxiety and sense of urgency. During this period I wrote thirty-nine blog posts, many essays and several books.
At the same time, my dreams were intensifying too. I was being shown having to face and hold in consciousness the most extreme contraries, from the most personal to the collective scale. Outwardly I was also exposed to circumstances and events that carried the same imperative. The most extreme contraries were already to be seen in my childhood image of the anima being consumed by a fire. The image did not portray them as irreconcilable opposites. Rather, my style of consciousness insisted on it, for historical reasons (eg the historical disjunction between spiritual/empirical, personal/collective, etc.), and that style of consciousness had to be broken down before anything else could break through. That dreadful breakdown could well be the story of my life during the nineties. Now the breakdown has intensified in 2017-18, but at deeper level. It peaked only last night when I had a dream, filled with images from my teen years, along with what always had been a terrifying image: of a figure that I may call Loveless! This figure WAS contempt, hatred fuelled by envy, poison, and vitriol, aimed at me. Over the decades when confronted by Loveless, I would flee in terror. Now, in this dream I turned to face her and compassion filled my heart. I simply said, “You are being consumed from within!”
I was shocked awake. A storm was raging. I heard it so clearly. I got up and went to the window. It was completely calm. The storm apparently was spent. Stillness reigned. All urgency and anxiety had departed. Now I am in a very unfamiliar “place”.[4]
Nothing has changed in the collective situation, as the “conflagration” strengthens its work of destruction in the world. Just yesterday on the Twitter feed I saw a woman screaming at two young policemen. She subsequently resigned her public office and the reporter’s comment was, “It’s not clear why she reacted this way, though it’s hard to imagine she doesn’t regret it.”She simply flipped into the conflagration and raged out-of-control. This phenomenon is happening across scale today as the fire gets a firmer hold on the lives and psyches of ordinary individuals and indeed groups of people.
My childhood image has now become, finally, “just so,” after fifty years of struggling, trapped within its unyielding logic. This time has not been wasted. The lesson has gone deep and with the full meaning, ie its archetypal depths, released into consciousness, I am now free!
But free to do what? I have no doubt that I will continue my work on behalf of soul being and life but now without the edge of fearful anxiety. We indeed may be at the end of our time, as many are saying now. I have every reason to believe this outcome is “just so”, too. But I am more synchronized with this possible fate. A calm has settled—not resignation, but more like this poem:
And while the prophets shudder or adore
Before the flame, hoping it will give ear,
If you at last must have a word to say,
Say neither, in their way,
“It is a deadly magic and accursed,”
Nor “It is blest,” but only “It is here.” [5]
[1]Including the obvious sexual one for adolescent psyches.
[2]The Peril in Thinking at www.amazon.com/author/johncwoodcock
[3]See my earlier autobiographical books, The Imperative and Mouthpiece.
[4]I have also had a string of dreams showing me in unfamiliar places, or leaving the familiar, striking out into the unknown, etc.
[5]Benet, S. V.: John Brown’s Body (1928)
