Every morning I wake up and continue dreaming. My natural state as I wake is for my body to be in all sorts of pain, and my mind to be in a state of daydreaming, not unlike the nightdreaming I had just woken up from.

If I do nothing about this, my morning and likely the rest of my day will be spent with the: imagination, intellect, consciousness (modern psyche), dissociated from: intuitions, instincts, and body (primitive psyche). An inner tension that can only be resolved by consciously surrendering authoritative power from the modern elements of consciousness to the ancient unconscious machinery. The keyword is surrender - it’s not a matter of consciously twisting and turning and trying to force a relationship. That’s an exertion of power where consciousness predetermines what the inner connection and trajectory should look like, instead of listening to the unconscious to figure out what it wants.

We are not so much at odds with our unconscious, as much as we are at odds with particular unconscious expressions if we allow them to embody through us at any given moment. The role of consciousness is not to permanently surrender to the unconscious. If that were the case, why develop consciousness in the first place? Instead, it’s to create a practice of surrender so that consciousness might learn to understand the underlying needs of the unconscious by embodying its expression in various scenarios. The precondition to understanding the patterns of the unconscious is to embody the unconscious desires and pay attention to what they do through you.

It’s like a corporation where a CEO (consciousness) sits at the top and tells its employees (the unconscious) what to do, micromanaging each one of them rather than letting them do their job. The intervention is for the CEO to stop trying to control every movement of their employees and simply observe. Or, the radical alternative is to fully surrender to your unconscious, letting it take you where it feels right all the time. I’m just throwing it out there...

The links between the ancient inner machinery and the modern machinery are strengthened through conscious acts of kindness from the seat of consciousness to the unconscious. The autonomous aspects of the psyche, not unlike a neglected child, can find themselves deeply resentful of being ignored through the constant exertion of conscious power against the will of those aspects. The modern psyche denies their expression because of consciousness’ overly-dependent resonance with the spirit of the times, which places demands on the individual to behave in a very narrow window of possibility. There are some examples of that gone terribly well, like driving. When driving a car, you must inhabit a very particular state of consciousness in which your motor movements are in perfect obedience to the conscious mind. To allow the expression of the instincts while on the highway is to risk death. The consequences are grave for surrendering consciousness at the wrong time.

The individual, as the arbiter of collective ethics, refuses to hear the wisdom of the autonomous aspects of the psyche not only when it goes against the expected behaviour, but, at this point in our Western psychological evolution, as the first line of defence, out of fear of being overwhelmed by the unknown patterns and desires of the unconscious. We fear dipping our toes into the depth of the psyche because of the possibility that something unseen will come up from the depths, grab us by the toe, and pull us into the darkness. That fear is not unfounded.

Look at what happened in the 60s and 70s psychedelic revolution. Some people permanently signed out of modern Western existence in exchange for a more natural lifestyle. Turned away from the concerns of the society they were embedded in and decided it was a lost cause. They would only be satisfied with a full system reboot. To me, they embodied a return to the primitive psyche at the expense of the modern psyche. Their opponents in the culture wars that ensued represent the dissociated consciousness warning how dangerously naive such an undertaking is.

Neither the hippies nor their critics got it quite right. However, the condemnation each projected onto the other was always the real problem, as both should seek reconciliation rather than dissociation from one another. Let’s aim to overcome the fear of association with the ‘other’, and with humility seek the wisdom of our enemy. Because that which we need most is found where we least want to look.

A marker drawing celebrating shape and symbolic form

This drawing began on another page, as I found myself pulled towards shapes that might appear symbolic but without explicit meaning. I began drawing these ‘characters’, constrained in shape and complexity by… some arbitrary rule that had popped into my head. Each one I drew invited me to begin the next, and the next. Eventually, I decided to start on a new page and see if I could draw these hieroglyphs from left to right. And so I did, until eventually the symbols decided that two big eyes were necessary and that the symbols needed to start unravelling into various shapes. The rules governing the drawing of the hieroglyphs started breaking down and towards the end it’s a bunch of shapes like the ones I find myself usually drawing. Who knows what any of this means.