Carl Jung made the statement that in modern times the most serious threat to human beings is the human being. Having mastered powers in the physical world once reserved for gods, humans are too-often compelled and driven by unseen forces to use these powers in destructive ways.
Understanding and investigating such compulsions and drives—our complexes—is not only pioneering work, but necessary work.
I often jest that I hold a PhD in investigating what I don’t know about myself, but my expertise does not spare me a recent humbling. Upon reviewing my personal journal written a decade earlier, I find it could just as easily have been written a day earlier given its complaints of no initiative, no energy, no ‘wanna’ and no desire to struggle. My discovery lands somewhere between, “your cancer has returned,” and FAIL on a report card. Dismayed and disheartened, I turn to my collection of notes on complexes.
Identifying a complex
- The complex is an autonomous force (like a tenacious and wily addiction).
- The complex bends one’s perception along lines of its own choosing. It appropriates thought and behavior imperceptibly. “Of course I feel this way, how could I not? Wouldn’t anybody?”
- Disabling a complex requires one to see the complex rather than see the world through the complex.
- Physical and emotional discernment aid in detecting the presence of a complex:
- Is one driven and compelled, or free to choose?
- Is a mood, feeling, opinion or compulsion running the show?
- Is the question “why does this keep happening,” applicable?
- Does one’s speaking voice take on a particular tone or quality?
- Does a predictable tension show up in the body? Do predictable patterns of behavior follow?
When the complex is negative
- Accept that the means by which a negative complex is disabled are forged, not given.
- Hold the tension between what the negative complex wants and what one wants as an individual—do not give in.
- Assess the moral stance of the negative complex and accept responsibility for aiding and abetting it. (This is a demand for moral courage; one must not take a pass on their own complicity.)
- Launch an investigation into unconscious motives (dream work and meditation are royal roads inward).
- Understand it may take days (or weeks or years) to identify and disable a negative complex.
It’s time to take the plunge and investigate, for to take myself seriously is to take the world seriously. I embrace personal growth as creative work—a ‘creativity of being’ that is both evolutionary and stabilizing in a destabile world.