Rytuały - złączenie z nieświadomym

Za Robert A. Johnson

"Inner work using dreams and active imagination for personal growth"

...

Many years ago, when I was studying at the Jung Institute in Zurich, the famous Toni Wolffe (a colleague of Jung)

was still working with patients there as an analyst. On this

particular subject, doing something concrete about your dream, she

was known as a holy terror. She met her patients at the door, and

before they could even get into a chair, she would demand: “And

what did you do about that dream from last week?”

Patients who had done something specific, something

concrete and physical, were safe from the wrath to come. But if

they hemmed and hawed, said they had thought about it a little, had

talked with someone about it, or some such vague thing, she would

turn them around and steer them back through the door. As the door

was slamming behind them, she would say: “Come back when you mean

business.” That was the way it was with her, and everyone knew it:

You either worked or you fled.

Toni Wolffe’s idea was that dreams exist in modern

people too much as airy thoughts, too much as abstractions in the

head. One has to notify the rest of one’s body that one has

dreamed. She said: “People can analyze for twenty years, and

nothing below the neck is aware that anything is going on! You have

to do something about it. Do something with your muscles!”

Our tendency in the West is to make everything

abstract, to use wordy discussion as a substitute for direct

feeling experience. We have a tremendous need to get our bodies and

our feelings involved. We have to transform our theoretical ideas

into “gut-level” experience. Ideas and images from your dream

should enter into your emotions, your muscle fibers, the cells of

your body. It takes a physical act. When it registers physically,

it also registers at the deepest levels of the psyche.

...

If we look at ritual from a psychological

standpoint, we may say that correct ritual is symbolic behavior,

consciously performed. Different persons will have different

language to express what is symbolized by the ritual acts. But the

highest form of ritual has this characteristic: Those who

participate sense that they are doing an act that has symbolic

meaning, and they consciously seek to transform that act into an

active, dynamic symbol. Their every movement becomes a

symbol-in-motion that carries the power of the inner world into

visible and physical form.