AHP Perspective Feb Mar 2012.indd - California Institute of Integral ...

REVIEWS
explore universal spiritual
principles of existence and move
around in activities which are too
concretist and mono-referential.
In other words they have learned
to mask their ego-persona
keeping themselves far from the
unconscious with behavior that is
too conscious and unilateral.
“Far from the unconscious,
far from the mother” is an
indubitable order which the
young learn to accept in today’s
society. Nevertheless there are rare
individuals who do not follow
the order imposed by matriarchal
laws and dare to fight “primordial
parents,” managing on the whole
to defeat the dragon. These are
the outsiders, the great individuals
who belong to the category of
heroes.
They are the precursors who
move the false disenchanted
consciousnesses of the
unconscious mother, the anima
mundi, the birthplace of myths,
gods, and legends and with their
creative power they re-enchant
them. They revolutionalize old
paradigms and impose new ones
which are far from ordinary. It
is clear that this creative twist is
seen with suspicion and alarm
inside a tradition of old cultural
values. This twist causes reactions
and collective psychisms—real
and proper mass epidemics. A
creative individual is drastically
expelled from his
conservative society
with old values and will
only be able to return
through a re-education
of values with preexisting
conservative
laws. The relationship
of compensation
between the Great
Individual and his
society is avoided,
and in the worst cases
is compromised by such an
unquestionable expulsion. He will
only be able to return as a hero
or dragon slayer—victorious over
the forces of evil. He will then be
received with all the honors of
the substituted symbol of the old
canon. . . .
As Jung showed, we are faced
with archetypal images: The
mythologeme is a language that is
expressed for images and is charged
with mythical image “nouveauenriched”
from potentiality
of meaning. No language can
reach the expressive riches of the
mythical image. On the contrary,
the mythologeme is an original
language expressed by metaphors.
(C. G. Jung, 1960, A review of
the complex theory. Collected
Works, vol. 8, Bollingen Series
XX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press)
For the individual soul, society’s
collective scorn is dissociative
estrangement
otherwise known
as alienation. For a
soulless world which
wanders through the
dispersion of identities
regrouped to the
moral of great quantity,
through mystified
identities of false
cultural figures where
a symbol, the only
mediator of the unconscious and
meaning, has lost supremacy, even
the true experiential unity and
mythical tale has lost its value—it
has been sent to the meta-narratives
which post-modernism
drastically refuses to accept. Myth
is the universal vision and historical
truth of things; it represents
the hero’s epic journey which in
a large measure all of humanity
should confront. We will understand
that the creative person,
the hero, can be found in a great
divide, setting himself out as the
troubleshooter or “unifying symbol”
for man’s religious, political,
psychological, and philosophical
conflicts. Maybe one day man will
be able to liberate himself from his
dreamy odyssey without dragging
his daimon behind him.
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ahp PERSPECTIVE
FEBRUARY / MARCH 2012