Sunday, June 17, 2012

Strange Writing Phenomena

This probably goes without saying with hard core readers, but, in every text, there is the apparent meaning and the hidden meaning (Perhaps for every text, there are even multiple layers of meaning). I used to think that this hidden meaning only applied to the great books like the Holy Bible, Plato’s Republic, or Shakespeare. Everyone has come back to some writing after a few years, to reread it and find some new meaning that was not apparent on the first scan. The strange thing is that I have even found this phenomenon with my own writing; things I wrote ten years ago I read again, and find some hidden meaning that I as the author did not understand or know about. Perhaps this phenomenon is congruent with Jung’s suggestion that most of what goes on in our minds is unconscious. The little light that we experience as consciousness is a very small portion of what is going on. He even speculated that consciousness was a creation of the unconscious mind for particular purposes. So, we have (using Jung’s terms) our Shadow, our Anima or Animus, and our Self quietly sitting on our shoulders as we think and write, revealing themselves in multiple layers that are not even apparent to us. Even what is “out there” as we perceive it, may perhaps be one of these hidden aspects of our psyche, and even something called a numinous Archetype expressing itself as a Complex. As I wrote a few days ago, “Who knows?” The Shadow knows.

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