In our lifetime, we set our site on goals and go after what we desire to accomplish. We associate with a teacher we want to learn from and even influence. We are often intuitively drawn to a school, a group or church that we resonate with, that feeds our spirit. We try to live a romantic ideal with a relationship or marriage we believe will bring us happiness.
Life is filled with highs and lows and that is how we move forward and grow. Many desires come out exactly as we wanted and some do not. Sometimes goals we have on our wish list for the year take place without our having the need to lift a finger or even come up with the money. They suddenly are given to us by the Universe. In my life, I have been in awe of how we are able to choose a goal for ourselves and have it manifest in the outer world. These desires and objectives are all 1st half of life experiences and serve to lead us to become more of who we are. Everything around us is a reflection of our ego development.
In the second half of our life, seeking the divine becomes paramount.
Carl Jung says,
“Our life is like the course of the sun. In the morning it gains continually in strength until it reaches the zenith-heat of high noon. Then comes the enantiodromia:* the steady forward movement no longer denotes an increase, but a decrease, in strength.”
“But the problems that crop up at this age are no longer to be solved by the old recipes: the hand of this clock cannot be put back. What youth found and must find outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself.”
— Carl Jung, Two Essays in Analytical Psychology, para 114
“The transition from morning to afternoon means a revaluation of the earlier values. There comes the urgent need to appreciate the value of the opposite of our former ideals, to perceive the error in our former convictions, to recognize the untruth in our former truth, and to feel how much antagonism and even hatred lay in what, until now, had passed for love. Not a few of those who are drawn into the conflict of opposites jettison everything that had previously seemed to them good and worth striving for; they try to live in complete opposition to their former ego.”
— Carl Jung, Two Essays in Analytical Psychology, para 115
Dreams are a direct experience of the divine and if we pay attention to our dreams they will be guiding us as to what is next for us. Last night I had a revelatory dream. I was going up some stairs that were open on all sides carrying my rings in my hand. I always wear four rings. One ring in particular I always wear whether I am wearing gold or silver as it is a moon and star in both gold and silver. In this dream, I dropped that ring and it fell all the way down to a square section of earth. That was my favorite ring but I could see it from where I stood. I figured it was no big deal and decided to go back down to get it. However, when I reached the ground that square of ground was no longer familiar as there were several squares of ground but I chose the one where I thought I saw it land. It was not on the surface so I started digging with my right hand into the dirt. In the process of digging, I kept finding rings. I found a large topaz ring, an amethyst ring, a pearl ring and many silver and gold rings. In all about 8 to 10 rings but not my ring. That ring has always been special to me as one Christmas, my best friend, my business partner and my son Kevin all bought me the same ring. I kept the one my son gave me. One my business partner had bought from a catalogue so I was able to send it back and picked out a blue stained glass man in the moon that hangs in my living room window. The other ring my best friend had bought on a trip in Mexico so I could not return it. It was too big for me so I gave it to my business partner as it fit her finger. Well, in my dream, I never found my favorite ring before I woke up.
What the dream said to me is that letting go of attachments is the next stage of my souls journey and whatever I was attached to can be lost or taken away from me. That is a process that has been going on for quite some time and it has led to my experiencing more and more of the divine in my life inside me instead of outside in the world of objects and relationships. Now, I feel no remorse whenever anything is take from me. I feel only gratitude for the experience and realize it is time to let go and move on. The pain and sadness I felt in the past of letting go is completely gone now. The dream showed me that there is so much more to experience as I continue in my desire to develop consciousness as my main goal. Every day brings another joyful experience knowing that I have this connection to the transcendent and it will never be taken away from me.
Jung says, that as we subordinate our ego to the transpersonal will, new relationships and experiences come into our life as the unconscious is always being mirrored to us from within and without. The transits of the planets are also synchronistically parallel to these inner processes. Right now, Neptune is squaring my Moon. Neptune is the part of us that seeks oneness with all things and especially with the dream world and mystical union within ourselves. The Moon symbolizes the emotional feeling side of our nature, our desire to nurture others, to protect and care for whoever crosses our path. I have started teaching Relationships, Shadow Work & 7th House again in person in Houston and online in zoom. See my scheduled-events here.
*Jungian vocabulary can be found on my web site: shadowdance.com/jungian-vocabulary-a-f