We live our lives tethered between two opposing worlds. The rational world of reason and the unconscious world of myth and magic. These psychic forces manifest their influence in every aspect of our lives, from how we perceive the world to how we value ourselves in it. Our thoughts, feelings, fears and hopes are all a reflection of this internal battle. What we suppress in the shadows will resurface in our thoughts. What we fail to observe in our thoughts will manifest in our fears. When these two worlds are unreconciled, we are battered by emotions and bewildered by our thoughts. Conversely, when they are in balance, we can experience a greater capacity for empathy, joy and meaning.

Yet, we know more about how nuclear fusion works than we do about the mind and the unconscious. The psychologist Carl Jung spent his life trying to understand how the soul and the psyche work. In his later years, he himself admitted that we are only at the beginning of truly understanding our inner life. What we recall from our dreams of our unconscious is only a breadcrumb. We rarely have a deeper understanding of what our visions meant or where they began. In the stark light of day, we are usually too distracted to hear our inner voices.

How do you make the unconscious conscious? How do you navigate in shadow without a light to guide your way?

Our unconscious exists on many planes and does not adhere to the normal laws of space and time. The deepest pits of Tartarus can lead to a door to the beginning of time. A dark forest from our childhood may yield to a barren desert in our future. There are no straight lines in hell. The doors of heaven may open and then suddenly close. The labyrinth has no consistent pattern and its paths are dangerous. The images we see may be false or the messages we hear lies. The archetypes we meet may be reflections of ourselves or our adversaries. We may see visions before we are ready to understand them or are incapable of deciphering their secrets.

To help us on our journey we can invoke the archetypes of our unconscious through ritual or active imagination. When we are able to focus our imagination and still our rational thoughts, we are able to feel their presence through messages and symbols.

Through the magic of ritual and the power of art, we can channel our unconscious. This is the key to surfacing the unbalanced aspects of our personality or the direst aspirations of our soul. The symbols and visions we receive along the path to individuation must be unlocked and deciphered. They are demarcations where our intellect and our subconscious are not in balance or have yet to be confronted. When this struggle is successful it results in new revelations that are fully embraced, resulting in spiritual transformation.

The path to individuation is solitary. Each must find their own path.