Embrace of the Serpent
According to the swiss psychologist Carl Jung, the greatest threat to civilization lies not with the forces of nature, nor with any physical disease, but with our inability to deal with the forces of our own psyche.
“Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious” he writes “that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”
I am a human being, I am complex and layered, I am not simply a civilized, relational, and moral character, I am a descendent of the earth. I am of the primal instincts, the primordial force of nature. I experience overwhelming emotions of desire, frustration, and elation. I have brilliant flashes of insight, and movements of profound confusion. I have language, rational faculties that allow me to create concepts and narratives about the things my eyes see and my ears hear, yet what goes on in the space between my ears may be as foreign to me as the world I perceive outside of me. We are complex and brilliant, having both a genius and a madness, we are both child and parent, We are an unceasing multiplicity and paradox that never ceases to confuse and frustrate me. and as Lorca said;
"On particular romantic evenings, I go salsa dancing with my confusion."
And so, in the spirit of addressing the threat of a mass psychosis that is our world today, Amongst this cacophony of sound, how do we practice psychic and spiritual hygiene? How do we continue to hear the soft call of the heart? How do we keep ourselves between the thin guard rails of individual autonomy and not fall victim to the overwhelming forces and narratives of collective fear, paranoia, and hatred we humans often dissolve into?
The metaphor of the serpent feels important to me. They weave and contort themselves in opposing directions, yet remain stead fast in a singular direction. Their body moves both totally left, totally right, yet this movement only serves the totality of the snake moving forward. The righteous and the wicked, war and peace. Yesterdays success is today's failure. What worked for your parents is the reason you find yourself a neurotic mess today. It is only upon reflecting on an event, that we understand it. How interesting is that? How often we seek desperately for answers, when they are always on their way, in their own time. How often am I seeking something in certainty, only to find out years later the unconscious intentions were playing a totally different game entirely.
What I'm trying to elucidate here is the limitations of our awareness, and the cost we pay in our spiritual, emotional, and physical well being when we lack a sense of faith. In believing there are greater things at work, really and truly having a trust in the serpents movement, even if that means being bit. How very small the light of consciousness is in the totality of what is, and how in the end, it is always a keen ear to the heart, and eye on the divine nature of those forces beyond ones control that seem to consistently reveal the path among the rubble was, and always is, here.