We Cannot Distinguish A Compulsion From A Call

Hillman"s The Dream and the Underworld: "Our modern word unconscious has become a catch-all, collecting into one clouded reservoir all fantasies of the deep, the lower, the baser, the heavier (depressed), and the darker. We have buried in the same monolithic tomb called The Unconscious the red and earthy body of the primeval Adam, the collective common man and woman, and the shades, and the phantoms, and ancestors. We cannot distinguish a compulsion from a call, an instinct from an image, a desirous demand from a movement of imagination. Looking into the night from the white light of the dayworld (where the term unconscious was fashioned) we cannot tell the red from the black. So we read dreams for all sorts of messages at once—somatic, personal, psychic, mantic, ancestral, practical, confusing instinctual and emotional life with the realm of death."

This is crucial, and involves much more than Hillman is talking about here, which is the proper interpretation, or use, of dreams.

No, this is about how we've taken several different worlds, or realms, or whatever you want to call them, and put them all together into one thing which we call the unconscious. But this is worse than, say, thinking that everything south of the Mexican border and on down to Tierra del Fuego is like Tijuana. No discrimination at all.

Now this wouldn't have interested me not too long ago, as it didn't seem to have any relevance to my life. But now things happen. Things that I cannot explain and can barely describe. They imply other realms. More than imply. But in my attempts to understand what happened, I came up against the situation that Hillman describes. What little I knew (and know) was nonetheless extremely confused since I was confusing different realms. Like getting a psychiatric evaluation when an engineering diagram is what is really needed.

We all use the tools we have in hand and are comfortable using, even if they aren't the right thing for the job. So it was—and is—with regard to my cross-realm adventures.