Going Out & Returning: All life processes are dynamic and involve an oscillation between going out from one’s own center of being, and returning to it. Since that center is a manifestation of the Sacred or Ultimate, I call it The Center.

From The Center we are inspired or guided and lured out into the world, and the world beckons to us to explore it, engage it, become nourished and enriched by it, and offer our voice and efforts to its well being. But we must also return to The Center, to integrate what we have received from the world, renew, recharge, and prepare for another round of engaging the world. The daily round and the life cycle involves this oscillation of going out and return. This applies to the nourishment we receive from food, other people, from satisfying work, from achieving something, from exploring new things. They can all be fascinating and enjoyable, or not. In time they drain you with an energetic entropy that calls us to assimilate, integrate, and renew yourself at the energetic source, The Center.

There are risks involved in this rhythm of going forth from The Center. One is that you may become dispersed, distracted, or so caught up in the world, that you forget to return. Your energy and sense of freedom and purpose begin to flag and wane. You become part of the ordinary, and existence can become a flatland. What you have received requires that you return to The Center, to digest, integrate, and renew. When you forget or wait to long to return, you can begin to fall apart, fragment, disintegrate because of the lack of balance of the going forth and the return. The key, here, the Sufi’s say, is “to be In the world but Not of it.”

A more serious danger is when trauma happens to you in the world and you are unable to take it back into the Center and integrate it in your self-affirmation. The traumata and wounded parts remain as estranged elements outside it, or along side it, creating an unnecessary split or division within oneself. Those estranged parts live on in exile, creating intrusive dramas in the individual’s self-system because they are not taken into the uniting and integrative powers of The Center.

Those are some of the risks of moving out into the world. There is an opposite set of dangers. This happens when the individual is afraid
to engage the world, for fear of losing one’s sense of self, or fear of losing what one has gained in the life process until now. One tries to preserve oneself at the price of stagnation and living in a neurotic bubble of protection. If one only remains with The Center and does not engage the world, the price is that one fails to actualize one’s potentiality, and life is reduced in power, expression, and richness of experience. You cannot let yourself be all that you could be. Your possible human self doesn’t get the chance.

What I have said here applies to life in all dimensions in the “multidimensional unity” of life: physically, structurally, biochemically, psychologically, intellectually, socially, politically, culturally, and economically. Health or Wellness requires this rhythm of going out and return, and it entails risks, but the risks are worth the benefit. Balance is required.

Entropy and the Need for Sacred Infusions
Entropy is a law of thermodynamics that holds that order within a closed system tends to decay, and that higher forms of energy convert into lower forms of energy. I am psychologically reading Mircea Eliade, the great historian of religions who tracked the beliefs about energy in the worlds mythologies. He discovered that most ancient peoples believed it was necessary to periodically regenerate the world at intervals far briefer than the grand cosmic cycles. These old peoples of the earth (pre-modern and indigenous peoples) believed that their tribal members and the society itself needed regular infusions of the Sacred, of the Divine Force, to counteract the running down of energy.

This is a need for us modern humans as well. We have all experienced times when we could feel ourselves running out of energy, getting bored, or stale, and needing to plug back in to the energy source. Without the energetic infusion of the vital energy, we grow weary at various times of the day, the week, the year, or a stage of life. We may grow weary of our friends, or of the entertainments we’ve indulged in. It is like our psychic cosmos is running out of libido. Our home-life is bland, our work isn’t challenging, we find ourselves dealing with nagging problems. The luminosity of the world gives way to a profane flatland existence. Too much ordinariness.

Consider the process of falling in love. When we fall in love with someone we become ecstatic, energized, passionate and full of life. We are dreaming of a wonderful life together, a home, a picket fence, children running around, the pleasures of raising them, and of a long life together. Then we get married, have the children, have to make and save money, pay the taxes, repair the roof, and probably both of you have jobs, that consume considerable energy. You both start feeling tired, things start to go flat. None has time to “see” how wonderful the other is. The energy of this dream sooner or later runs down. What once was ecstatic and passionate sediments into the ordinary. While the ordinary and the daily round has its place in any life, the signs of boredom and fatigue tell us that the charge of the primal source energy is running down.

Whenever we feel too bored, too low in life-affirmation, too weary and that the world is all too with us, its time for an infusion of primordial energy from the sacred realm of the deep psyche, a return to The Center. This is one of the functions of sacred ceremony in which we let go of the old worn out order, burn it up on the altar, and let ourselves to re-constituted at the sacred source. To get out the prison of our ordinary state, we must enter the non-ordinary reality. I am talking about the need for altered states of consciousness for entering into the realms of the sacred/divine. We live in an overly secularized and one-dimensional society, and the hunger for the sacred is becoming ravenous from all the spiritual starvation. The symptoms are in our addictions, distractions, depressions, physical symptoms, and in the rise of yearning for a true spirituality in many.

Sacred ceremony, at regular intervals can renew a life, a marriage, a community, a society. The old peoples of the earth knew that it was normal for things to run down, and that is why they needed their ceremonies and supporting mythology. They live in a sacred canopy, within a supporting mythology, having a cosmic egg that wasn’t/isn’t crack. Today we modern peoples are no longer embraced by a sacred canopy. We are surrounded by a rational and materialistic assumptive world that leaves little room for the holy, the numinous, the Spirit. According to Eliade, the old peoples of the earth knew that the world comes to birth from a center, and spreads out in four quadrants or directions. They employ the mythic imagination to support life and the need for right order and renewal in life. While we have a surge of Eastern and Shamanic mysticisms on the rise, and it does help many of us in our need and yearning for the sacred, but we need more than expanded awareness or consciousness. We need active practice, and solidly ritualized actions. We need altars, prayers, communal worship, healing ceremonies that employ the sacred, and we need surrender and commitment to The Center, into to integrate what we become aware of, into life.

One of the reasons that so many are drawn to the life and work of C.G. Jung is that he spoke to this need to exit an ordinary flatland existence and live in a sacred cosmos, having a direction relationship with The Center within our own hearts, which he called the archetypal Self. Jung’s life and work gave us a psychology organized around the sacred center, The Center, as our inner Axis Mundi. Not only that, Jung gave us an analogue of ancient mythology, of the pre-modern mythic-meaning structure and ritual process, translated into modern terms, building a bridge for us back to the Center, and then from there into the World, and the old ongoing rhythm of moving our from The Center and the return to integrate and renew. He saw the importance of the four-fold and the mandalas, like the sacred circle or medicine wheel with its Four Powers, Four Directions, or the Four Winds, Four Animals arrayed around The Center, thus aiming at a vital and centered wholeness of life. Jung beckons us still to live the wisdom of our ancestors in our own way, in our modern times, and to creatively add our own flashes of insight and gleaned wisdom to it.

I am thankful for Jung’s life and work. He has been a shaman for his time, and pointed the way in ours. He knew that the sacred had been repressed, that people have forgotten The Center and Source of life energy, and that we must develop solid ritualized ways of finding and re-plugging into it. Jung is not the only Western luminary here. We have the profoundly helpful work of such visionary leaders as Michael Harner, of Stanislav Grof, as well as the burgeoning interest in sacred plant medicines, often facilitated by the curanderos and shamans of the Americas, -all helping so many find their way back to The Center of renewal. But Jung showed us a profound and useful way, not the only way, to retrieve the sacred in our time. He was respectful and sensitive to the power of other mythic-symbolic systems, including Taoism, Buddhism, Alchemy, Shamanism, Gnosticism, Vedanta, and many others. He contributed hugely to the interest we have in these traditions today. He knew this reconnection with the sacred Center must be done with ritual care and respect, so that we do not get inflated, or become dogmatic. He showed us that each individual can find their own path in life and their own ways of practice, inspired and guided by The Center. He offered a life-affirming way, and showed us we are as close to it as our own instincts, intuition, feeling, predilections and dreams. Jung insisted that we not merely think about it and be conscious of it, but that we do the necessary inner work integrate and implement it in life. Whatever vision we get on the Mountain Top must be grown down into the world, in the body, into our relationships and work, and into society. For him, The Center was not only a right ordering for the world, but for each individual, because each is called to live their particular patterned essence, that Daimon or Essence or Mission that is there’s alone to live and to express, in each time and place.
(c) 2018 C. Michael Smith, Ph.D (aka Mikkal)