The Magical Fountain of Me
How To Work With The Reality of Our Complexes
When I wake up in the morning, I’m always cognizant of my motivations. These come in various shapes and sizes and there are quite a few of them. The first motivation is of the animal kind and connected with bodily instincts. For example, I need to use the bathroom and drink some water. The next is learned behavior — I have to make my bed, brush my teeth, put on my clothes. I also have to eat breakfast because I’ve been taught that it’s the most important meal of the day. Conversely, I may fast because I’ve been taught fasting and not eating breakfast is better. Regardless of which breakfast train I take, I know that the motivation has been taught to me by some outside entity, let’s call her Mom. I suppose my body requires food, so, in the end, I do eat something but not before I consume some caffeine. So far, motivations have been limited to the mechanics of the human body and its existence in a social sphere.
As I proceed a bit further into the day (and even before that, usually), I become aware of a whole slew of bubbling motives that are all jostling for attention and for supremacy. It’s sort of like having a classroom filled with kids who all need to pee really bad. Each one is squirming and scrambling and making a bit of a racket trying to get my attention. These motivations all want to be taken to a place where they can relieve themselves of their excess burden of energy. Until I attend to them, they will continue to bubble beneath the surface making the overall psychospiritual energy of the organism (i.e., me) very chaotic. Most of us are operating under these kinds of circumstances. The kids who need to pee are our complexes and they need to be attended to or else there will be hell to pay.
The trouble is that many of us have zero awareness about how the human psyche works. We are connected with our conscious awareness, the ego, and know virtually nothing about the rest of the psyche. So we have no awareness that we actually have two modes of consciousness — one is conscious which means we are aware of it, the other is unconscious which means we are unaware of it. When I say we are unaware of it, I mean it. We have no clue it’s there at all. We simply don't realize that these complexes are the motivating forces that get us out of bed each day and keep us putting one foot in front of the other in this magical journey we call life. Without the complexes, there would be no energy because all the energy for life is coming from the unconscious level of the human psyche. Think of them like a battery that gives life to a mechanical object like a flashlight, or like the electricity running through a wiring system in your house which feeds power into the lamp on your desk. Cut off the electricity and there’s no light. Cut off the complexes in the unconscious and there’s no consciousness.
So even though we wake up in the morning and go about our business thinking we are in charge of our decisions, the truth is that our complexes are driving us into this or that choice, this or that behavior and we 1) have no idea that this is occurring, and 2) wouldn’t be able to stop or change it even if we did know. For example, I may wake up in the morning and feel a little weirder than usual. I may feel a little depressed or something. Less motivated, less bouncy or happy. I have no idea why, and since I live in a society that discourages me from having these episodic mood swings, I elect to push through and heroically achieve all my goals for the day despite feeling bad or weird. But the unconscious complex that is now living with me side by side as I go through my day won’t be put off by the heroic ego. It will have its say, it will have its day. Why? Because it has more psychic power than the ego has so it can take over the ego sphere of consciousness and wreak all sorts of havoc.
When I wake up with the energy of a deeply unconscious complex flapping around my head like a murder of crows, I have two choices: I can ignore it and hope it goes away or I can turn to face it as though a revered guest has come to my home. If I choose the former route, I will pay a hefty price by day’s end. I will have yelled at a loved one, sent an inappropriate email, blown up at my boss, or else descended into a mood so black and so debilitating that all I can do is hide under my covers for the next few days as the complex drains me of all psychic energy and forces me to admit what is plain as the nose on my face.
Running away from the reality and power of our inner worlds is how many of us deal with the inexplicable moods and difficult emotions that clamor for our attention all day long. C. G. Jung wrote that a complex is an inner image of a certain psychic situation. A Jungian image is not just a visual picture, it’s more like a feeling and an idea wrapped together which form a sort of inner pattern that is vague and fluid but powerful and specific, too. For example, an inferiority complex can be experienced through these inward images that perpetually and repetitively show us being incomplete or insufficient in one way or another. Sometimes the image of a complex can be a specific memory of an event that resurfaces every time the inferiority complex is constellated (triggered). At other times, we may wake up and find that one of our complexes has been constellated, perhaps by last night’s dream. Maybe we’re super angry and can barely contain our rage yet there’s nothing in the immediate surrounding that can account for it.
The trouble is that there’s no running away from our complexes. But we live in a world that demands us to be perfect little sunshine balls all the time. Being moody, emotional, angry, antisocial, crabby, selfish — all these behaviors are villainized and disparaged so that the minute we are visited by the creepy ghoul of a complex we have to run hither and thither in fear and despair, busily trying to suppress and get rid of whatever it is. We do this by staying busy, or getting drunk, or going shopping. Most people are doing it these days by uncontrollably scrolling through their phones, clicking and liking with growing helplessness. I’ve noticed that more people have third chins lately, and I think it’s because everyone is looking downward at their phone all day causing the chin to be squished into a fatty corner. But all of us have these complexes, all of us are routinely accosted by them. All of us unconsciously project our complexes onto others and all of us have the reality of the psyche to contend with. No one is free of the vast depths of psychological reality. So we should stop trying to make each other feel bad for having emotions. It’s the most natural thing in the world and everyone is equal in this regard.
So what about that other option, the option of turning around to face the complex as though a revered guest has come to visit? When I first started studying Depth Psychology, one of my teachers told us a story about one of King Arthur’s knights. It was said that there was a fountain of youth in the land and a knight was sought to go out and find it. A young knight from the court volunteered to go and find it for the king. He got prepared and finally set out. After a time, he came to a dark forest and suddenly standing there before him barring his passage was a truly massive three-eyed monster all covered in hair. The young knight could see right away that there was no way he could fight this monster. He knew he would surely lose. So rather than fighting, he walked over and politely asked the monster for directions to the fountain. The monster kindly replied and showed him the way. The knight thanked the monster and went away, unharmed.
I was really impressed by this story because it perfectly illustrates the method for discoursing with our inner world manifestations. Our thoughts and emotions can be really scary sometimes, like the monster in the story. We feel tiny next to them, unable to fight them off, unable to subdue them using the sword of reason and the shield of logic. These ordinary heroic (and masculine) accouterments are useless before these powerful psychic emanations. What is needed is the more feminine attitude of relating, kindness, and surrender. What is needed is a polite acknowledgment and a kind of humility that gives birth to honesty. It takes courage and humility to admit that there are forces in this world beyond the control of our heroic egos. When a giant constellated complex is standing in front of us barring our safe passage into the rest of the day or the rest of the week, we have to behave like the knight. We have to put down our weapons and approach this imaginal psychic being with respect and honor. If more of us attended kindly and politely to these imaginal psychic beings that rise up out of the unconscious, we would be less frazzled and chaotic, for one thing. For another, these imaginal beings of the psyche have valuable information for us! In the story, the knight is lost and it is the monster who shows him the way to the magical fountain.
So we have to face our complexes not just because there’s no escaping them, but also because they function like psychological treasure mines where we can dig deep and unearth important and valuable information that will lead us to magical freedom, maturity, inner peace, and so much creative energy. Conversely, when we spend our energy trying to escape from our complex-monsters, they continue to hound us and we keep staying lost, moving away from the magical fountain instead of toward it. The magical fountain here is a symbol that represents what we might be as mature, awakened, realized beings.
There are a number of methods for engaging with complexes in a healthy and productive way. One of the best resources for this sort of work is Robert Johnson’s Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth. The book can be the opening to an inward journey that brings you closer to knowing yourself and the way the totality of your organism (i.e., you) works. We all need to engage in this kind of work. Being blindly led by our complexes has turned our planet into a nightmare for everyone, especially the animals and the cruelly disenfranchised humans of this world. Activism is well and good, but I don’t believe we can be of true service if we are unconsciously motivated by unexamined and undifferentiated psychological forces. It takes time, but with sincere and committed engagement, we can reach that magical fountain of a realized and awakened “me” and joyfully start sharing its riches with the world around us.
