Addiction, Relationships
& the Imaginal Realm
"We both feel we're in a rut that we keep repeating," she said. They knew they were stuck, and needed some kind of intervention, some kind of leverage, to change things. They had painted each other into opposing corners of their marriage, and had copped some serious attitudes in an endless circling of one another's position.
The dynamics of their life together had become reduced to a static routine: the rattled newspaper, the bit lip, the assumptions and pre-emptory strike, and then the triumphant escape into some smug sort of retreat from one another. But there are moments in the cycle when an insight into purpose, rather than cause, will permit the necessary shift in paradigm from this persistent deja vu to the discovery of something new.
The idea of finding fault, of the pointing of fingers toward some cause, seems to permit bad behavior. "He made me do it!" was what we said as children. This is the etiological point of view, that things are caused by things in a linear sort of way, a way that makes us hostage to the rationalization of cause-and-effect.
We believe this will help us to avoid the same problem in the future; but exactly the same problem will never reoccur, and usually we are too busy tracing the chicken and the egg back into a receding past to do anything about the future anyway. There is something seductively, satisfyingly tangible about establishing fault, something that appeals to a victim's nascent self-pity. And, when you get right down to it, blaming others can only be the result of feeling sorry for yourself.
The idea (on the other hand) of looking into the more intangible purpose for things to have happened gives us something more productive to do besides being caught up in the receding past. "Suppose you had dreamed this had happened to you," a teacher once asked me, "what would that mean?" Rather than point an etiological, fault-finding finger into the past, he was indicating a teleological gesture towards the future and its potential, recommending that I step out of the moment's quandary and into the imaginal realm.
The imaginal realm is not an imaginary world. It is comprehended by means of images rather than concepts, and is composed of fundamental facts-- rather than opinions of those facts, opinions that have been developed by a linear human mind, conditioned as it is by the mantram of cause-and-effect. The imaginal realm is the Platonic world of archetypes, and the source of the ten thousand things spoken of in the Tao Te Ching. It is within the imaginal realm that purpose may be discovered, and a direction out of the confusing tangle of reductions and fascinations that go toward the addiction of a micromanaged life. A letter written by Carl Jung in which he spoke of his work with Roland H., a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, fits here. I quote portions of it at length, in order to capture his entire message:
...craving for alcohol [is] the equivalent, on a low level, for the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness; expressed in medieval language: the union with God... The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality, and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to higher understanding. You might be led to that goal by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism... I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society, cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. But the use of such words arouses so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible. ..."alcohol" in Latin is spiritus, and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.
Two things are needed for recovery, which work together like left hand and right. On the one hand, the role of conscious human relationships as a "personal and honest contact" with the "protective wall of human community" provides boundaries that can contain the alchemical process of recovery. Meanwhile, on the other hand, "real religious insight" characterized as a "union with God" provides the discovery of a spiritual significance-- or a teleological purpose-- for human events.
Recovery has gained two special meanings in recent years. One refers to recovery from an addiction to a substance (such as alcohol or drugs), which had distracted our attention from the more significant ongoing work of being human. And this work of being human refers to the second meaning of recovery: recovery of the soul. This is what Jung meant by the "spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness." It is a constant process, taking place always in the present-- neither lost in the past nor deferred to the future, but now-- one day at a time. Each one of us is defined, after all, in the present tense, as a "human being", not as a "human was" or a "human will be".
Any conscious relationship can provide the alchemical container for recognizing our personal significance, especially the more intimate relationship with the "significant other". What is needed is to realize the purpose for having formed that relationship, which simply is to become a better person in the presence of another person. The more intimate that relationship, the more intimate we are required to be with ourselves.
We fall in love, and choose to marry, with that same unconscious desire for wholeness and completion Jung saw as a spiritual thirst. Something within us is fascinated by the way a certain other person is different, not realizing that (like the half of the Tao that circles the other half) we would not have noticed and focused upon that different quality without in fact possessing a seed of it within our own personal unconscious.
The problem is that, if we remain unconscious of that seed within ourselves, what once had been attractive (that is, attracting our attention) will in time become vaguely annoying. The difference that we had perceived becomes something unacceptable, something we grow to resent as being beyond our personal control. Then the power struggles begin as we attempt control over one another, in an effort to reassert control over the seeds of wholeness that we do not integrate within ourselves.
The opportunity then, when times are hard emotionally, is to ask ourselves what function, what purpose can this "difference" between us serve? What if I had dreamed it, swimming up from my unconscious? What could that teach me? To begin to learn the lesson offered we must learn to view the difference as an arena, an imaginal realm, and have the courage to come out of our corners to inhabit and share it with those we love. At another time, I wrote:
Put off your shoes when troubled by your lover. This is not, as you may have believed, a battleground where victory must be sought: you have come instead to holy ground. Be as Moses at Mt. Sinai: it is not a time to solve problems but instead a time for listening closely. Put off your shoes and be present, be grounded, be humble, be reverent-- and attentive.
The purpose of loving, after all, is to become transformed by love, and it is only through rapt attention that this transformation can begin to take place.
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This article previously appeared in The Listener: volume four, issue two (Summer 1999) and in The Observer Quarterly: volume two, issue eight (Summer 1999).