The Transcendent Function by Carl Jung

Many things in life, as Lao Tze wrote, are a function of a yin yang balance: light/dark, female/male, up/down...We are all familiar with the yin yang symbol. Months ago at a Meetup Ken Wilber New York City lecture, I helped organize this program after I was gifted a DVD of The 16 Ways, which features the movement practice Dylan developed. Within five minutes of watching the introduction Dylan Newcomb, a professional dancer who trained at Julliard and is well versed in Integral Theory, gave a talk and display of different energetic ways of being and moving. In them, elements of yin were in yang and elements of yang were in yin in different amounts beyond the traditional symbol. Look him up online. This friendly get-together at my favorite café in New York City, Dante, reminded me of Lao Tze, Wilber and Newcomb.

Jung brings to the forefront how our unconscious and archetypes guide us, whether we know it or not. Through meditation, movement, and relationships, we can uncover our hidden desires, problems, etc. often; others see our shadows and point them out to us. As Harville Hendrix writes, if we are committed in a relationship where we each bring up for the other what we need to complete from childhood, we grow even more than in religion. Both members of the relationship have to be committed to stay and grow.

Other blog posts in the future will expand on some of these elements.

From the article:
• Active imagination can bring forth the unconscious. This is true in art. A great dance teacher, Pearl Lang, pupil of Martha Graham, and cofounder of the Alvin Ailey school, said “Don’t’ think. Dance.”
• Consciousness inhibits the unconscious, which sinks to being hidden.
• Consciousness is directed. The unconscious contains fantasy combination that have not attained threshold intensity. I thought; Perhaps people drink or take drugs – to let their inhibitions go. I think if one is not hooked or harming others and it is not in excess, it may be all right.
• Sips of the tongue come from the unconscious expressing itself.
• Analysis may show us our blind spots.
• The dream or fantasy is to be analyzed as a symbol, not semiotically.
• Dreams may show us our unconscious because the conscience is not there as much with its inhibiting energy. I believe this but not 100 percent.
• The conscious is sometimes needed to direct or inhibit the unconscious. I say: There goes that yin yang balance again. At different times, you may need different elements of each. Examples: Upon choreographing, you need your imagination to run wild, and your conscious to have you make specific steps and time.
• People are often bored and attribute it to the weather (sound familiar) when they are not connected to their unconscious desires, etc.
• There may be a “general, dull discontent, a feeling of resistance to everything, a sort of boredom or vague disgust, and indefinable but excruciating emptiness.” LOL
• Make yourself go in or process your emotional mood first...in and then out...this is great. Often people avoid it by excuses, drink or drugs, small talk, etc. instead of delving in it, really feeling, having an inquiry with themselves and then starting to express and create as in art or talking about it to a good listener.

From the get-together:
• You can look up his essay online. I will touch upon it here and upon the elements of the get-together that stood out for me.
• Christianity can be an attachment.
• Society favors consciousness and reasons, so those related jobs, like accountant or doctor, tend to pay more.
• Perhaps some mental illness or violence is “due to” not having a healthy out for emotions
• Irrational intuition can be a bridge from the subconscious to the conscious
• If you create a vacuum, as in mediation for a few seconds, blind spot, Self and self, and imagination can emerge.
• We can have personas if we are aware of them and not always taken by them
• A good intuition can arise when the conscious and unconscious energy are balance. I say it may be partly hereditary and experiential as well. The energy part may be more than one-third responsible for the good intuition.
• The unconscious and ego must be balanced.
• We can listen to see how much (and if) of another person’s perspective is true.
• Mythological assumption or mythologems, exist in our collective unconscious. As a woman, I can fall into the persona or sexy, diva, motherly etc. instead of having a balance of each as is true in the moment.
• “Consciousness is continually widened through the confrontation with previously unconscious contents, or – to be more accurate—could be widened if it took the trouble to integrate them.”

The transcendent function is the bringing together of opposites.