Have you ever been told my someone when you tried to share something traumatic that it was just a story and to keep telling it would keep you locked inside of it? It is something I have been through and it came to mind when I just read this quote from Carl Jung.
The crucial thing is the story. For it alone shows the human background and the human suffering.
This quote mentioned in David Rosen’s book on Jung, relating to the period when Jung having met with writer and bushman Laurens Van Der Post who lived close to the Kalhari Bushment in Africa, Van Der Post shared with him how the stories of these people were taken away by the white man and their culture destroyed. I was reading this at the same time as listening to Daniel Browning discussing on radio the impact of indigenous aboriginal stories and language also being stolen or lost.
Then there are the hidden stories that gave rise to us in terms of our parents and ancestors.. I am in the middle of watching Season 5 of the American drama This Is Us at the moment and in it the African American character Randall who believed his mother died in childbirth and that was the reason his father left him abandoned at the local fire station only to have him adopted by a white family, learns that in fact she lived on and was put in prison after he was born, due at the time, to being on heroin and nearly dying from withdrawal. His mother’s story of abuse, loss, grief and abandonment comes to light only when he meets someone who knew her and eventually manages to trace Randall many years later.. Learning all of this Randall has to grieve knowing his mother was actually alive until very recently.. There is a very moving scene toward the end of that episode where he meets his mother’s spirit in a dark body of water as she helps him to grieve and scream out his pain and in so doing release it. It was powerful to watch especially considering his mother lost her own brother as a young woman as a result of the Vietnam War and was never able to grieve due to having a very powerful patriarchal father who ruled over her with an iron fist even forbidding her relationship with his younger sister, yet later Randall’s mother sought out her aunt and it was she, who in time, helped her to find ways to release the pain. Sadly in the end breast cancer took Randall’s mother, Laurel.
Despite the pain he went through in learning all of this, Randall felt more resolved knowing the story. Being able to tell and speak our stories or learn the stories of others means that in some way we have a chance to come to terms with and make sense of the past, even if that process is painful. Maybe one of the reasons others want us to deny our stories and also our pain is that they are not really that comfortable with their own or else they may be making judgments about us based on absolutely zilch knowing of what we or others, such as indigenous cultures actually value, need, suffer at the hand of ignorance and have to find a way to bear and live through.
The silencing of the story then, in some ways, becomes a silencing of the soul in the person or the family.. And our stories and experiences DO DEFINE US, even as we have choices to make about how we cope in the aftermath and with the long term impact.
Jung also believed that :
Every human being at core …held (and)… had a unique story and no man could discover his greatest meaning unless he lived, and, as it were, grew his own story.
This is a very different view to saying we should forget our stories, put them to one side or rise above them in some way. And it shows that in choosing to erase a culture and their stories in some way we are exiling others in a no man’s land of no meaning and no soul at all. In this context the damage done to a culture by something like forced removal from the maternal matrix, such as happened to hundreds of thousands of indigenous children here in Australia following colonization, then leads to a terrible inner soul sickness that then becomes a breeding ground for addiction and a profound sense of disconnection, disorientation and soul loss.
I certainly know for myself that being able to find out and connect to the stories and experience of my ancestors my own pain has enabled me to make meaning of so much that to others seems to mean nothing or appears as some form of aberration. Finding the meaning, means bearing with the pain and feelings, it is not an easy process or comfortable at time but I also see it as a soul quest…one that may enable us to grow in wisdom while not cutting ourselves off from our own roots in the primal matrix that gave rise to us…
For me the spirit may feed on those souls stories and even find, in time, a way to rise above as in cycling and recycling around them over many years, consciousness can evolve.. I often experience this in my body as a form of both descending and ascending a spiral staircase of ancestral experience and I am not alone in seeing this as a some kind of spiral journey that in time leads us to a better understanding of our personal selves within a wider collective evolutionary context. ]
Jung believed that over a life time we tended to circumnavigate the Self. But if we deny the stories that give us rise to our evolution and self emergence what happens to the meaning and to our ability to engage in a soul quest? Perhaps this is not the way for some who would rather use the rise above and fly away into some kind of spiritual bypass solution, seeking then from a lofty perch to cut others off at the deep roots of being and feeling by using platitudes or other forms of soul negation, but to my mind there is something profoundly damaging in that response to the soul not only of one human individual but of a entire collective or culture of human beings.
Despite the seeming darkness of such a quest in terms of where it can at times take us in terms of depression and despair, Jung also believed that the capacity of a human being to hold through such a quest and find meaning was down to a great light that he believed lived at the heart of each human individual.. Sadly some of us never find our way to that light, which often only appears as we become capable of expanding enough on a soul, emotional and bodily level to contain and begin to manifest a greater wholeness and expression of our spirit in matter. This capacity develops as we find ways to bear witness to darkness, struggle, suffering and pain. Over a long period we can then begin to bring more hidden parts of our deeper personal and ancestral Selves to light. Through love, patience, bearing witness and compassion we may in time unite everything we undergo and endure weaving it all into a more deeply rich and meaningfully significant tapestry.
Emerging From The Dark Night 