Card #207 – Underworld Journey

Journey into, mapping, the underworld of the unconscious. The totality of the self includes many layers that the waking personality often ignores. The path of wholeness, however, requires that you know and integrate all parts of yourself, including the subterranean aspects you may consider dangerous, chaotic, inferior and evil.

Nothing could be more crucial than Socrates’ great commandment: “Know thyself.” Those who don’t know themselves act out their unknown contents in the world, and often with disastrous results.

Explore the unconscious with the courage to see the horror and beauty of the endless diversity of elements. But don’t explore as a tourist, as a psychedelic thrill-seeker or dilettante. If you enter the unconscious without a moral purpose, as Jung pointed out, you are asking to get wrecked. You would not go deep-sea diving without some training, tools, discipline, and a support network. Shamans don’t travel into the unconscious to have fun or hang out, they enter with respect, usually for the moral purpose of healing, and they get in and get out as quickly as possible, well aware of the dangers. Another moral purpose to enter the unconscious is to expand consciousness and to share that expanded consciousness with others.

Sometimes we are in a state where we are consumed or obsessed with some outer controversy, but actually what we are experiencing is much more fundamentally an agitation happening in the unconscious. We live in a mostly extroverted culture where problems and rewards are located in the outer world. But virtually all human problems — war, conflict, environmental destruction, etc. — ultimately derive from a single source, human psychology. Try the following meditation: sit still, focus on your breathing, but instead of trying to still your mind, let it run amuck, going wherever it wants to. Have a pen and notebook (or other recording system) in front of you, and record what comes up. It is also of great value to pay attention to your dreams and record them for further study.

It is crucial to be aware of the forces and subpersonalities in your personal unconscious. To be ignorant of them is to be ruled by them, allowing yourself to be dominated by a network of autonomous complexes.

“I’m not really the type to wander off and sit down and go through deep wrestling with my soul.”

— George W. Bush, as quoted in Vanity Fair, October 2000

“I’m also not very analytical. You know I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things.”

— George W. Bush, aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003

How do you know yourself? One way is continuous, mindful attention to the movies with voiceover narration playing in your head all day and all night. There are waking movies, dreaming movies and daydreaming movies. The Dubyah sort of method of self-inquiry would be to ignore these movies as just bits of nonsense. But notice that every bit of ephemeral whatever — a flickering image, a twisted thought form of words strung together — each of these has an absolutely factual existence. It is a fact that you thought of that particular image, those particular words. The unfolding of the universe is altered because you thought of one thing and not another. And regardless of what a dismissive ego might think, each of these “bits of nonsense” happens for a reason, is a product of inner forces operating within you. Acknowledging this takes courage, because we would rather cling to a neater, tidier version of ourselves, an airbrushed yearbook photo, when actually we look more like labyrinths filled with moving images and words. And these labyrinths have twists and turns and secret corridors we may not know ourselves. If we don’t know them, then this unexplored content — sexuality, emotions, unintegrated desires, etc. — will come spilling out of us as slips of the tongue, and sometimes as horrendous irreversible actions (the stuff that personal and collective histories are made of). For example:

“The truth of that matter is, if you listen carefully, Saddam would still be in power if he were the president of the United States, and the world would be a lot better off.”

— George W. Bush, second presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

“Who could have possibly envisioned an erection — an election in Iraq at this point in history?”

— George W. Bush, at the White House, Washington, D.C., Jan. 10, 2005

“The most important job is not to be governor, or first lady in my case.”

— George W. Bush, Pella, Iowa, as quoted by the San Antonio Express-News, Jan. 30, 2000

“I want to thank my friend, Senator Bill Frist, for joining us today. You’re doing a heck of a job. You cut your teeth here, right? That’s where you started practicing? That’s good. He married a Texas girl, I want you to know. Karyn is with us. A West Texas girl, just like me.”

— George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., May 27, 2004

It is all too easy to point to the unconsciousness of the other, but the only thing standing between you and Dubyah-consciousness is eternal vigilance about your inner content. You must be willing to explore the sometimes dark and twisted contents of yourself. Really listen to the voices speaking in your head all day long. Notice that there are different tones of voice, different agenda, different subpersonalities speaking with those different voices. Witness the voices or else become them as a sequence of acting out personalities. Witness all the images that appear in your mind. It’s said that fear is like a dark room where negatives are developed. Carefully study all those negatives, prints, slides and looping videos. Evaluate each of them on various scales such as negative/neutral/positive, fear/anxiety to calm/spiritual acceptance, power/love.

Besides careful observation of inner content, you must also recognize that you are not merely a passive observer of these inner artifacts. In fact, you are the producer, the director, the special effects team and all the actors in these inner movies. You can decide to start editing out certain repetitious scenes and looping voices. You can consciously choose and create thought forms, images and scenes to add to your inner content. Exploration of inner content is not like a tour of a museum where you mustn’t touch any of the glass cases or their curious contents. Inner exploration is an active, interactive, and sometimes interventionist process. To observe a thing is to change a thing, and the maximal case of this is when the object of your observation is your own inner content. Crowley’s definition of magick is: “The science and art of creating change in conformity to will.” You are at your most magically empowered when you choose to use your will to create change in your inner content. So throw open all those glass cases, probe all the curious inner contents, and, when you are ready, grasp hold of some of these strange artifacts and metamorphose them with your true will.

Exploration of inner content is a pathway of truth that takes great courage, moment by moment. Not everyone who glimpses this pathway to truth has the courage to follow it into the labyrinth of the unconscious. Consider the poem “The Wayfarer” by Stephen Crane (1871-1900):

The Wayfarer,

Perceiving the pathway to truth,

Was struck with astonishment.

It was thickly grown with weeds.

“Ha,” he said,

“I see that no one has passed here in a long time.”

Later he saw that each weed

Was a singular knife.

“Well,” he mumbled at last,

“Doubtless there are other roads.”

For an introduction to learning more about the levels and content of the unconscious see

Thoughts on Jung

Here are a couple of excerpts:

“Nobody doubts the importance of conscious experience; why then should we doubt the significance of unconscious happenings? They also are part of our life, and sometimes more truly a part of it for weal or woe than any happenings of the day.” — C.G. Jung

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. Thus the soul had gradually been turned into a Navareth from which nothing good can come. Therefore let us fetch it from the four corners of the earth—the more far-fetched and bizarre it is the better!”

— C.G. Jung