A Nuance of Nightmares

In this age of political violence, nightmares have been working overtime. Suddenly, the powers that be are giving people permission to act out. Rallies seethe with hatred: "Lock her up!" shout crowds of angry people, casting blame on anyone but themselves, indeed, attributing their own worst impulses, displayed for all to see, as the diabolical work of the other side. The wealthy dance on the broken hopes and broken health of the poor. Emissions, be they methane, carbon, verbal, or nocturnal have achieved a sudden cachet and respectability.

Those of us who studied with the late Rev. Dr. Jeremy Taylor remember his teachings on the subject of nightmares. From the Tool-kit: "All dreams come in the service of health and wholeness. There is no such thing as a 'bad dream' -- only dreams that sometimes take a dramatically negative form in order to grab our attention." Jeremy's faith in the healing power of the nastiest nightmare helped many of us face our worst impulses and begin the work of transforming their negative energy into a new and deeper understanding of life.

It sent me back to Jung, to the Liber Novus, or Red Book, to an enigmatic paragraph that takes up many of Jeremy's themes: 

The God suffers when man does not accept his darkness. Consequently men must have a suffering God, so long as they suffer from evil. To suffer from evil means: you still love evil and yet love it no longer.* You still hope to gain something, but you do not want to look closely for fear that you might discover that you still love evil. The God suffers because you continue to suffer from loving evil. You do not suffer from evil because you recognize it, but because it affords you secret pleasure, and because you believe it promises the pleasure of an unknown opportunity. 

So long as your God suffers, you have sympathy with him and with yourself. You thus spare your Hell and prolong his suffering. If you want to make him well without engaging in secret sympathy with yourself, evil puts a spoke in your wheel–the evil whose form you generally recognize, but whose hellish strength in yourself you do not know. Your unknowing stems from the previous harmlessness of your life, from the peaceful passage of time, and from the absence of the God. But if the God draws near, your essence starts to seethe and the black mud of the depths whirls up. (Liber Secundus, 68/75, p. 288, Kindle Reader's Edition, Loc 6250ff)

In Jung's rendition of the suffering god, the Cross becomes unconscious projection. Since Jesus died to save me, I'm a good guy. Since I'm saved, I'm OK by nature. If something challenges my self-image, I am entitled, by virtue of my salvation, to crucify it, lock it up, build a wall to keep it out. 

Even if you aren't Christian, the myth of the god who suffers so that I don't have to is pervasive. It hints at the confusion surrounding the archetype of the Willing Sacrifice which Jeremy found so important near the end of his life, and about which I will write in my next essay.

Nightmares arrive to tell us it isn't so easy to distinguish willing from unwilling, which may be why many of them involve themes of peril or sacrifice: the monster, the poisonous serpent, or one of Jeremy's favorite teaching images: the Nazi motorcycle gang exuberant in its own delinquency. Jung suggests that part of the work we do with nightmares, since everything in the dream is an aspect of ourselves, is to face our own capacity to love evil, to become invincible, devouring monsters, poisoners, hooligans. Volatile political situations play hard upon this, giving ordinary people permission to behave badly, which is why it is more important to be aware of my own dark side in times of danger than times of security.

Those of you who remember Jeremy will remember how he likened nightmares to the fight or flight response, i.e. awareness at a moment of extreme peril. I believe we are in such times.

When the Divine draws near, it is never safe. The universe demands more from us than daily life in the suburbs. Jung wrote the above passage as Europe stood at the precipice of the First World War, admitting his love of evil in a vision that involved hatching a god from an egg in his pocket.

In the absence of God, we believe we can rest in safety. But when the Divine draws near, we begin "to seethe and the black mud of the depths whirls up." 

* I take this to mean that I love evil, while expressing dismay that anyone could ever love evil.