Divine Play

Carl Jung mandala

One does not become enlightened
by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious.

On New Year's Day our friend George of Transit Notes posted “Measures of Happiness” in which he brightly contemplates happiness, defined as “a wet dog, bathed in the golden light of a late December sun, breaking through the surf and calling upon me to forget myself and return to the world of divine play. . . .” (my bold) The post is full of poetic delight, as lively as waves crashing and spraying on a sunny beach. I hope that you, too, will read it and begin your year with that happiness.

It just so happened that within hours of relishing George's post, I returned to my shelved copy of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, to a chapter called "Confrontation with the Unconscious." I had read the quote at top recently and wanted to go back to Jung's memoir.

Just before WWI, Jung began deep work to make darkness within himself conscious. He had encountered childhood memories, with intense emotion. He realized this meant that the things in his memory were still alive, and that to harvest what was in them, he needed to play. And so he did. As he played each day, as if he were a boy again with building blocks, or constructing walls with stones and mud, memories and feelings surfaced, and he began to develop his personal myth, which had a profound impact on his entire life's work.

The first thing that came to the surface was a childhood memory from perhaps my tenth or eleventh year. At that time I had had a spell of playing passionately with building blocks. I distinctly recalled how I had built little houses and castles, using bottles to form the sides of gates and vaults. Somewhat later I had used ordinary stones, with mud for mortar. These structures had fascinated me for a long time. To my astonishment, this memory was accompanied by a good deal of emotion. “Aha,” I said to myself, “there is still life in these things. The small boy is still around, and possesses a creative life which I lack. But how can I make my way to it?" For as a grown man it seemed impossible to me that I should be able to bridge the distance from the present back to my eleventh year. Yet if I wanted to re-establish contact with that period, I had no choice but to return to it and take up once more that child’s life with his childish games. This moment was a turning point in my fate, but I gave in only after endless resistances and with a sense of resignation. For it was a painfully humiliating experience to realize that there was nothing to be done except play childish games.

Why play our childhood games? Why seek to discover our personal myths?

To find the elements that assist a writer as she writes poems or stories. To inform a painter of what connects him with the world. To enrich every aspect of life, as we meet loved ones and give them our best selves. To find inner strength. To go deeper into what is most alive in us.

"Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance." (Rilke)

Maybe next snow I'll build a snow house like I did with my brothers when I was five, and discover something sacred worth remembering.

~ Ruth