The Center of Being

In my first blog, I related the events surrounding a transformative dream I had which evoked a powerful feeling tone, its effect rippling out through my life. A series of events the previous day, coupled with reading an S.T. Coleridge poem upon cracking open the first Jung volume I had yet to read, seemingly led to my experience of this dream, replete with a mysterious archetypal projection.

I amplified the image, researched the content to the extent that I was able, but only much later did I make the Coleridge connection.

[from the previous blog]:

‘I searched for this information about “worlds within worlds”. At the time, I didn’t catch any meaningful references through the search engine of my browser. Every time I ran across references to entering worlds, all the obvious stuff, I looked closer. I thought that it seemed familiar but never found anything relating to it.’

Recently, I re-watched Joseph Campbell’s Mythos, season 1, episode 1, Psyche and Symbol. Cupping his hands, he explains that, ‘the elementary idea (read: archetype) is held within the the folk aspect, (local, provincial and popular).’

Joseph goes on to say that the old Sanskrit term for a trail left by an animal is “marga” and has been used in the context of the human, following the path of the Archetypes to the place within, the heart. 

‘At post mid-life, the folk system leaves you, and the path of the marga (archetypes) leads you within, to the heart, or the center of being.’

I finished the Collected Works this week, before watching the episode of Mythos, tonight. Remembering that Campbell’s insistence on the importance of Jungian theory had excited my impulse to read him, I feel that something has come full circle, and that I finally understand the cryptic words of this being with whom I spoke, just a few years ago in a dream.

The meaning of these words to me is that I had an extremely concretistic, or literalistic sense of reality. My freedom was constrained and I was trapped by my ‘weltanschauung’, or point of view. In the years since, I have entered a new world with a much wider perspective, and yes, I was at the halfway point in life.

Synchronistically, the timing is exact. I experienced some number coincidences today, and I had the thought of constellating contents of the unconscious, which just might show themselves in such phenomena, not thinking that the resolution of a mystery was at hand. Perhaps there was no ‘cryptomnesia’, but that I had not yet understood or explored completely enough the meaning of the words, “worlds within worlds”, spoken from within my own center of being.

He looked at his own Soul

with a Telescope. What seemed

all irregular, he saw and

shewed (showed) to be beautiful

Constellations; and he added

to the Consciousness hidden

worlds within worlds.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge- Notebooks