As explained in Part 1, the deep recognition of yourself as a dual being, a conscious ego accompanied by a constant alien companion in the form of your unconscious mind or personal genius, is necessary but not sufficient. Once you’ve begun to grasp the reality of the situation, you’ll need to start learning the highly distinctive and idiosyncratic personality of your inner companion in order to activate that knowledge and make it more than just an idle insight.
After all, you’re living in a permanent inner partnership with a being that you can only glimpse indirectly, and whose existence you are free to take as a metaphor, a literal reality, or some combination thereof. Getting familiar with its ways is crucial for success in life and art. What follows is equally applicable to both.
The third technique: examine your life and self
The two techniques described in Part One — practicing morning writing and composing a dialogue between your ego and unconscious mind, and analyzing the specific character traits that are revealed about your unconscious — are aimed at engaging your genius directly and trying to channel its “voice” onto paper. By contrast, the one to be described here consists of several parts and counsels you to search for clues about your deep nature by reflecting on the overall outline of your life and personal character.
1. Consider your innate leanings.
One of the classic ways your daimon or genius makes itself known is through a definite attraction to some things and a definite aversion to others. Thus, to get a sense for your daimon’s character, look to your involuntary loves and hatreds. And be sure to consider your entire life history as you do so.
What sorts of subjects have always fascinated you? What sorts of people, places, ideas, activities, and circumstances have you always been drawn to? What things have always filled you with a sense of electric attraction and exhilaration? Conversely, what things have always had the opposite effect? What has sucked the life right out of you and/or filled you with a definite sense of resistance in the form of disgust or indignation or anger? It has been said that the daimon often manifests itself as a definite and incontrovertible inner response of “Yes” or “No” to a given provocation. Paying attention to this sense within yourself can yield a good idea of what your demon muse needs to be fed and, on the other hand, protected from.
Ray Bradbury hits upon exactly this point when he describes the “Feeding of the Muse” as “the continual running after loves.” He likewise referenced it repeatedly in the lectures he used to give where he would strongly advise his audience to pursue the things that inflamed their passion and flee from the things that deadened it. “You have lunch with certain people, and they bore the shit out of you,” he’d say. “Cut out the lunches.”
James Hillman highlights the same point in The Soul’s Code when he underscores the importance of paying attention to your spontaneous childhood attitudes and actions. Many childhood obstinacies and tantrums, he says, stem from a child’s flailing attempts to negotiate between the unyielding demands of his or her daimon and the accidents of circumstance into which he or she has been born. “A child defends its daimon’s dignity,” he says. “That’s why even a frail child at a ‘tender’ age refuses to submit to what it feels is unfair and untrue, and reacts so savagely to abusive misperceptions.”
Get relaxed and do some serious reflecting on these things as you can remember them happening in your own younger years — or as they still emerge in your life right now.
You’re living in a permanent inner partnership with a being that you can only glimpse indirectly, and whose existence you are free to take as a metaphor, a literal reality, or some combination thereof.
2. Consider your innate talents.
This is another classic avenue of daimonic expression. In some people’s lives, as in the case of child prodigies, these are blatantly obvious. Mozart and music. Tiger Woods and golf. An inborn personal genius shines through virtually from birth in such cases. In other cases it may not be so spectacular, but it’s still there, still emerging in the nexus of things that a child is naturally good at.
In particular, you should look for any talents that manifested as a burning desire to do a particular something-or-other long before you were actually able to do it. This aspect of innate talent is deeply connected with the daimonic expression of loves and hatreds described above. You may have been drawn magnetically to a particular activity as a child, and been terribly frustrated when, simply as a function of your mental and/or physical ability at that stage of development, you were unable to do it well or at all. Then, later in life, as a result of normal maturation and maybe some formal training, you gained the technical facility to actualize that desire. These active desires implanted in you from birth are usually signs of a daimonic calling.
3. Consider the recurring patterns of your life relationships and circumstances.
Look for themes in your life — in its events, personal relationships, and general arrangements — that seem to keep cropping up again and again as if by magic. Interpret these as if you were interpreting art or literature.
You’ll recall that one of the functions of the daimon/genius in its classical Greco-Roman guise was to provide the blueprint for an individual’s life and destiny, and to constantly work to draw each person back into alignment with this plan. Have you ever noticed how all of us — you, me, everybody — seem to live within a webwork of recurring motifs? Radically new patterns of personal relationships and general life circumstances do occasionally disrupt things, but these instances are exceedingly rare, and they’re often tamed and even counteracted by a kind of existential gravity that inexorably pulls our lives back into what comes increasingly to seem like a predetermined shape.
Yes, this can be and sometimes is the result of a destructive personal inertia. Sometimes we need to slough off the encrusted sameness of our lives and launch into genuine newness.
And yes, the tendency of our lives to manifest the same situations over and over can be a sign of negative complexes that need to be dealt with. But then, that’s exactly what we’re talking about. “Our inclinations,” writes Sandra Lee Dennis in Embrace of the Daimon, “especially our pathologies, help define our individuality, and can point us toward the most creative sources in ourselves. From addiction, perversion, and madness, to our everyday irritability, these pathologies hold promise to unfold our destinies when followed as the daimonic spirit-infused guides they can be” (emphasis added).
To say the same thing slightly differently, the inherent gravitational pull of our lives can be a sign of deep truths about what we’re “meant” to be and do. Forget about the major crappage that is Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret with its pop-featherweight presentation of the so-called “law of attraction.” We’re talking about something much more profound here, something outside of our conscious ability to will, control, or change. Jung explained the phenomenon of synchronicity, that tendency for “meaningful coincidences” to occur, as the result of the psyche’s autonomy and relative externality. Some psychic events occur in our private minds. Others occur in the external world. Both are the action of the same reality.
Theodore Roszak
The upshot is that if you want to get to know the character of your personal demon muse, one avenue is to start “reading” your outer life in search of meaningful themes.
Theodore Roszak touches briefly on something like this in his brilliant Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial Society when he points out that whereas most modern Westerners are accustomed to confronting the waking, objective world with the rational empiricist attitude that asks “How does it work?” and “What caused it?”, when it comes to dealing with our nocturnal dreams we reflexively turn to a question that “our ancestors habitually asked of their experience as a whole, awake or dreaming.” Specifically, we ask, “What does it mean?”
In our dreams, he says, we immediately recognize “a symbolic presence which makes what is before us other and more than it seems.” The question of meaning is thus automatic and reflexive. In waking life most of us only encounter such things in art, where we find, in Roszak’s words, “a residue of a reality we first learned in sleep” — that is, in direct experience of deep psychic reality, minus the egoic alienation, which disappears in sleep.
Can you grasp what it would be like to understand your life’s trajectory in terms of meaning, in the same way that you find meaning in music, literature, films, and so on — and to refer the resulting truths and patterns to the influence of a deep aspect of yourself that’s guiding you through life and creating exactly the circumstances that are vitally necessary for you to encounter, experience, know, and respond to?
Equally to the point, can you grasp what it would be like to look around and realize that everybody else is similarly engaged?
Finding your unique creative vision
Feel free to consider all of the above, and especially the third part, a hypothetical exercise if you prefer, a fictional view of things that might have some utilitarian purpose for gaining self-knowledge and stimulating creativity. Or view it as something else. Something more. Either way, the proof’s in the pudding, and if you haven’t been accustomed to reading your life in this daimonically slanted way, you may be surprised at the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that your overall sense of things can shift when you begin toevents notice what appear to be definite tropes and centers of gravity emerging from the flux of your life’s inner and outer shape.
Not incidentally — not at all incidentally — these are the very themes you’ll write about, the very themes you’ll write from, when you start creating from the center of who you are and what you’re meant to bring into the world.
To be concluded in Part 3
Gargoyle image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hackett/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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