DIVING IN A crisis helps us face something about ourselves that we have been overlooking. If we look carefully, we might see that all the crises and issues of our lives go back to a central fear. For example, we may believe that vulnerability will lead to being dropped, that we must always expect the worst, that a catastrophe has always been waiting for us. We can resolve that fear by choosing to dive. There is an ancient archetypal dimension to this theme, and it helps us to know more about daring to free ourselves from fear. In pagan times, a dive was considered a conscious baptism, a plunge of the ego into the waters that dissolve it. Diving is a symbol of daring the death of the ego and of its frantic clinging to fear and desire. To resurface from the water is to be reborn in the likeness of the Self, that is, purified of attachment. A Hindu scripture says that the sea dissolves our name, that is, our exclusive identification with ego. A leap is a metaphor for the combination of two opposites, fear of risk and surrender to it. Diving into our pain and predicament represents a readiness for total letting go—without having to be pushed. It is heroic because it is voluntary. Diving off a very high cliff was a sacrament in ancient Greece and Turkey. This was the order of the rite: First a priest recited myths about heroes and their feats. This made the ancestral heroes present as assisting forces and encouraging advocates to the diver. An intoxicating herb was then given to the diver to make it easier to dare the leap into the waters awaiting him. The attending women shouted words of encouragement. The young man then dove off the cliff. His life flashed before him as he sailed through the air, as if it were being reviewed for the last time and then ended in its former way. The gods’ grace supported him, and he emerged reborn from the waters to the cheers of the people. Diving also became associated with proofs of daring or caring. Pliny says that Sappho, an excellent diver, dove from a cliff in Lesbos “to transcend earthly love.” Throughout history, from China to New England, the ritual plunge became a judicial ordeal to prove one’s innocence or one’s favor with God. Christian baptism, based on Judaic tradition, is a plunge into the waters that bring about the death of the old Adam (ego) and rebirth as a new Christ (Self) in the human soul. It is a sacrament in that it is a correlation of a ritual and a grace, an act with a result that matches it, hence synchronicity. In the Greek rite, the women who stood on the sidelines and encouraged the men to dive portray an archetypal role of the feminine: to help drown the male ego. The Sirens, Lorelei, and mermaids are personifications of this seduction into dissolution—a role women have played archetypally for centuries. Any ordinary guy today has noticed it happening in his relationship with women too. In our relationships, we may be willing to live together, to love, to be faithful. Are we willing to risk this other plunge into the dissolving of our ego? If only we trusted that when ego goes, all our fears go with it. Fear dives in, but it is courageous love that climbs out. If there is a fear of falling, the only safety is in deliberately jumping. —CARL JUNG excerpt from The Power of Coincedence, David Richo
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 17:35:36 +0000
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