A Light Touch

We have two friends, a couple, who visited us recently. She is a Jungian and he a Zen teacher, a sensei. We don’t really talk about it but privately it intrigues me how their two disciplines go together. I wonder what they say to each other? Part of the interest is that I have been a paid up Jungian in the past and am now very obviously trying to practice Buddhism. In a way I am also asking how in myself do these two ways of understanding things fit together? So, given all this stuff has been bubbling around in the back of my mind, it is really no surprise that this morning I woke up with an image of how the two relate to each other even if they do not quite fit.

It starts with simple experiences. Something that every human being - in fact all sentient beings - have in an endless sequences from birth to death. What human beings do - and I’m doing it now - is create stories about their experience that makes it meaningful. It’s obvious really. Picture a small group of people sitting around a fire with their backs to the darkness. What do they do? They tell stories about people they know and those that, now dead, were special in some way. Study of these stories - myths, legends, fairy tales, Hollywood movies, adverts, but also just how we explain ourselves to ourselves and others - reveal that stories have typical patterns. It is these typical or universal patterns that C.G. Jung called ‘archetypal’, meaning a pattern of experience that is common to everyone. I won’t go on in detail about archetypes here but an example of one meaningful pattern of experience is what Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, calls the ’Hero’s Journey’.

So what is this Hero’s Journey - this way of dividing up the sequence of experience so that it reveals a meaning? In essence it’s very simple: it’s recognising a pattern of experience that goes down and then comes up. Perhaps an early example of this is simply learning to walk. I stagger along, fall (which can be distressing) then doing this enough, I learn to stand up and keep walking. Adults watching me allow me to do this often quite painful thing because they can see its final and desirable outcome - my struggling to walk experiences have a meaning. Another example - a silly one, bungee jumping. Recently some other friends sent us a video of their adult daughter doing a jump over a huge ravine. The hero’s journey was written all over her face at each step of the event. She initially walked up to the platform looking quite confident. However, with her toes over the edge of the platform, facing into the void, she looked plainly terrified and I suspect was tempted to turn back. However, she faced her fear and jumped. Seeing her plummet down, head first, was beautiful - I felt really proud of her - she followed the instructions perfectly and put out her arms like a swift or a swallow. In those few seconds she faced the possibility of her death and gained a much greater sense of what she was capable of. And then, as the bounces finished, she was reeled back in, reached the end of the experience and walked off knowing herself in a different way - grinning ear to ear. She went down and then up and was transformed by it.

There are many patterns like the Hero’s Journey that can be overlaid on our stream of experiences that give it different types of meaning. This really is the stuff of Jungian analysis - what do my experiences, particularly my dream experiences, tell me about my one special life? However, though also a meaning making story in its own way, the Buddhist approach to experience is quite different. Rather than dividing it up into personally meaningful patterns, it focus on the fact that the stream of experience is continually changing irrespective of whether it is an experience we like and want or the opposite. Buddhism observes that at the most fundamental level all experience is transitory and that within this stream of impermanent experience nothing can be found - a soul, spirit or self - that is not also in perpetual flux. This characteristic of experience - its endless change - Buddhism calls ‘emptiness’, shunyata, but we could almost also call it fullness. The fullness of being that is always in the process of becoming. And - here comes the important step - Buddhism also observes that when we cannot accept the reality of change, when we fight or resist it, this becomes a source of dissatisfaction and causes us to a have a ‘bumpy ride’. This is the Buddhist first ‘Noble Truth’, the truth of the ‘bumpy ride’, dukkha. And what follows, the whole of the Buddhist Dharma, is what to do about it - which is a whole other story.

So where does this get us? Well, life is a sequence of experiences, some wanted and some not. Human beings need to make sense of this and we do this by making up stories about what we experience. These stories make experience meaningful - which is something we need. All good so far. However, we not only create meaningful stories, we also have a relationship to the stories we make up and this is where the problems begin. When we become protective of our stories, particularly when they have adverse affects on others - think of the political conflicts presently happening - then the story becomes a cause of suffering. Another word for ‘story’ here might be ‘ideology’. And on a personal level just think of the feeling when someone says something about us that does not fit with the picture - our story - of who we feel we are. However, if we can treat our story making lightly, remembering we are ephemeral beings and that nothing is solid and absolute, that even when something feels real it may still not be true, then it all gets just a little bit easier.

Let’s end with another story. When I came to the my last session of almost fourteen-years of Jungian analysis I told my much loved analyst that I had reached a place of really not knowing who I was. She understandably looked crest-fallen and asked should we stop then? I laughed and said yes - it was okay, I was happy with reaching this place. What I now think of this is that, far from a failure of the analytic journey, it was in fact an intuition of the transparency of being. The whole thing was actually a success.

And what about what I have just written here - well, it’s another story and I will try not to cling to it.

NW. 6 June 2024 with thanks J and J.