We mistakenly believe that all we do with our conscious mind is all we need to do. There is a mantra in the world that ‘Man is a rational creature.’ We conduct all our affairs as if all of us are perfectly rational. This is hysterical to any student of history. If one views the twentieth century it is a hundred year testament to the irrationality of man. I call it the century of blood.

Carl Jung, the great psychologist and part time mystic talks mostly about our hidden depths in the unconscious. In his little book, “The Unconscious Self’, he explores the difficulty of knowing who we are without exploring the unconscious in ourselves.

It is necessary to realize that neither the church nor the state will help us discover who we are. This is a process we have to go through so we learn and know the part of us hidden from our conscious mind.

Jung believes that makes the case for psychotherapy as a major modality for the modern man to understand himself. This is true but most of us can’t afford that luxury and there aren’t enough competent psychologists in the world to service the world.

This means that we have to undertake this quest ourselves. We can do this most easily when we are struggling to understand something by letting ourselves fall into a kind of reverie and notice what pops up. You must be in an observer only state as you do this or you’ll chase the insight away.

Another choice is meditation with the mindset of being open and letting things come up. In both of these cases horrific images and chimera may come up. You have to learn to let that pass through you as you seek to understand what is going on in your hidden depths.

Dreams work too but that is for another day.

When you are trying to make breakthroughs and doing new things for yourself, this kind of attention will help you develop insight into your blocks. From this you gain clarity.