Jung was a man in contact with his unconscious mind from an early age, and many of his experiences could be classed as magical or shamanic but in the spirit of his times he carefully phrased his writings to avoid any reference to the paranormal, and his followers  have sometimes gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid being tainted with the paranormal brush.  Now when Quantum Physics postulates things far stranger than  anything in the realm currently described as paranormal and consciousness is not just  inseparable from the description of reality but, according to Philosopher David Chalmers, a fundamental and irreducible attribute of the universe I can be a little less cautious.

Crowley defined Magick as the art and science of making change occur in conformity with the Will, by which I think he meant the “True Will” which roughly corresponds to the Deep Unconscious.   Here I am concerned with  internal changes in the practitioner, not external changes.

Broadly  speaking   a  magickal system can  be classified along two axes, self-power  ( do it yourself) versus other power ( get a spirit to do it for you) and   another  where the two extremes are change the world  and change yourself.  By definition therapy is high on the  “change yourself” axis, and many  magical systems also form very good therapies. 

Here I am  looking at Jung's theories and  trying to clarify my ideas on Jung's work in Alchemy.  Much of this is based on the excellent summary in Robertson's “Jungian Archetypes”  with additions based on my own study and experience. Nevertheless what I write here is based on  second hand accounts of his work and I may change  my ideas  later  after  reading his alchemical works.

Jung spent  the last part of his working life studying alchemy and appears to have considered it   the culmination of his work. He viewed Alchemy as a  spiritual path with three stages of increasing self awareness and integration.  

Ouspensky viewed the vast majority of people as unconscious automata.  You only have to  look at  people on the way to work to see what he meant: most people   are creatures of mental and physical habit, conscious only on the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchies. I  am currently treating  Jung's alchemical path as  the passage from this “unconscious”  state to a “conscious” state, or perhaps more accurately,  a path  to freedom from the traps of habit and culture.

In the first stage the practitioner  must accept and be reconciled with the junk in their psyche, the things they discarded or suppressed. This “junk” becomes  what Jung called the Shadow and seems, wrongly in my view, to have  equated the Shadow with Trickster.  “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow does”.

Before one  enters this  part of the  path the Shadow merges with the urges of the body.  Sometimes the desire and fantasies in the shadow lead to antisocial behaviour, sometimes, I think, they  feedback to the body in the formation of what Reich called Character Armour, postures designed to protect  the  ego from these desires.  In any case the  Shadow must be dealt with. In dreams it may appear as a ghost inspiring terror – I can testify to this -  or as an exotic person or animal.  In  extreme cases it may  be felt when awake as an external  unseen presence, a ghostly  presence, or may even, I suspect,  produce poltergeist effects.

Dealing with the Shadow can be painful, like the drill a dentist uses to remove decayed matter. But there can be no anaesthetic. The result of this first stage is achieving the goal of knowing oneself, enough to enter the second stage.

Given the fear you can encounter in clearing your mind of  the garbage that accumulates from childhood it is best to have your heart checked before you start to access the unconscious

The second stage is the union of mind and  body, something Robertson seems not to define but which I think of  as  harmony between  the unconscious and the urges of the body.  I would like to think   this alsocorresponds to  the concept of Flow and being “in the zone” as described by  Csiksentmihalyi,  and the glorious feeling athletes and martial artists get when their practice plays them rather than the reverse.

One path to this is meditation or active imagination. Robertson does not mention the physical paths I described above, which may be considered as meditation using the body and does not mention Shamanism, a path I consider a valid, though more difficult  since I think some of the entities in the Shaman's world are not inhabitants  of the collective unconsciousness.

Meditation  or  shamanic travel can  both result in  the unconscious throwing up  images one would rather not see. Ghosts, Big black cats, demons and worse. I  know: they haunted my dreams for years. And  here is  how things get painful for these images come  with emotions attached normally fear.  Some systems say  to ignore these images,   but if there is something dangerous in the unconscious  one should engage  with them and resolve the issue, not ignore it and hope it goes away.

If the practitioner engage with the fantasies or experiences and lets them unfold as they will they  become as involved in the fantasy as an avid soap opera addict is with their  favourite program. And that is where it may become painful.

Robertson notes that at this point it is more dangerous to turn back and stop the process than to continue. To me  the best analogy seems to be   walking  on a narrow bridge over a chasm with a hungry lion  on the ground behind you. 

There is a danger of being seduced by the images and energy from the unconscious. For example in Shamanic travel this would correspond to getting lost and forgetting the reason for travelling or concentrating on the spectacular aspects of the experience. As with computer programming one should know what one is trying to do and not get diverted: a fun tourist ride of the unconscious is OK a long as you do not do it to excess.

Robertson makes the important point that some of the technique of ceremonial magick may be useful protections before diving into the deep unconscious. For myself I tend to use my power animals as guides: not long ago I asked them to help me with an issue and was told bluntly I was not ready to deal with it. Without that I might have blundered in and hurt myself.

An alternative method might be to use a divinatory system: Runes, Tarot, I Ching or your own system and take regular readings as a basis for meditation or dream work. The idea is that the unconscious picks the symbol you need to work on.

The third stage is mystical union, the feeling of being one with the universe. It comes when it will when the second stage is complete. I have not experienced it and could not describe it if I did.

I recently came across a hint that Jung's work indicates that the archetypes created man not the other way round and that archetypes look like spirits more than anything else. Looks like I have some fun ahead