Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity Read online

  NOTES

  1. This paper introduced a Symposium on “Jealousy, Envy, and Hatred Among the World's Religions” at the Parliament of the World's Religions held August 28 to September 4, 1993, in Chicago, Illinois. The program was planned and coordinated by the Institute for World Spirituality. The introductory remarks included a special thank you to President Ken Smith of the Chicago Theological Seminary and to Dean William Myers, who made possible the original funding for this event. Also special words of appreciation to Dr. Andre LaCocque, my colleague at the Chicago Theological Seminary and the director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Studies, and to Ron Kidd, whose work has been important in putting not only the World Parliament centennial together, but this particular symposium.

  2. To these ends I want to thank psychologist Margaret Shanahan, my wife, for teaching me much of the material that I will share with you here, the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago and its many staff and supporters, the Alfred Adler Institute of Chicago, and the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute.

  3. On Adler, see The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (1989), Superiority and Social Interest (1979), and Understanding Human Nature (1927).

  4. On the mythological and psychological foundations of the human need for and capacity to give blessing, see Moore and Gillette (1991).

  CHAPTER 10

  Resources for Facing the Dragon

  Everything now depends on man: immense power of destruction is given into his hand, and the question is whether he can resist the will to use it, and can temper his will with the spirit of love and wisdom. He will hardly be capable of doing so on his own unaided resources. He needs the help of an “advocate” in heaven. . . . The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands.

  —Carl Jung

  WHAT RESOURCES DO WE HAVE FOR CONSCIOUSLY confronting and regulating our grandiose energies? This chapter examines some of the psychological and spiritual resources available to us to deal with these issues in a more effective way than we may have realized was possible.1

  GLOBAL DREAMS

  Many Jungians today look at individual dreams to become more conscious of the collective situation. They engage in a comparative study of the dreams of people around the planet. They find, for example, that people all over the world are dreaming about an approaching world crisis. Some Jungian analysts have studied the dreams of children around the world and found they were dreaming about a great crisis and coming conflagration. That offers us a powerful image of how the unconscious is responding to our situation in the world today.

  In a difficult world situation, people in therapy may have very scary dreams that are not personal dreams at all, but dreams that seek consciousness for the larger collective world. We should consciously open ourselves up to this prophetic dimension of dreaming and let it inform our discernment of personal leadership in areas of social concern. It is not grandiose to raise the question of how we can do our part. It is a move toward realistic grounding of our spiritual life. This kind of listening should include taking seriously the growing consensus among the spiritual leaders of indigenous peoples that a critical time of decision has come for our species and our planet. I think they are right that we are living in a great kairos time that requires a great psychological and spiritual awakening.

  ACTIVE IMAGINATION

  Reclaiming active imagination seems even more important to me than studying dreams. Active imagination, in my view, is an extremely powerful form of prayer. Christians have used the power of active imagination in many forms for a long time, particularly in the Roman Catholic tradition. These practices included the spiritual exercises of Ignatius and a lot of other forms of dialogue with Christ, with Mary, and with the various saints. Before we got so smart that we decided we didn't need to have mythic dialogues, you could dialogue with a saint any time you needed to. Every spiritual tradition drew upon these resources in the past, but in the modern secular world, we became so “smart and sophisticated” that we threw out such imaginal dialogues. That was a terrible loss. We need to rediscover the practice of active imagination with our spiritual saints – our inner magi.

  You can also do active imagination with the great king and queen within. From my point of view, if you want to talk about it theologically, that is a powerful form of prayer. A book came out about ten years ago that got a lot of attention for a while, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1978), an interesting book by Julian Jaynes. His theory was that there once was a time in history when people talked directly to God, and people actually heard God's voice. Then we came to a period of evolution in which human beings lost the capacity to talk to God directly. He thinks the change resulted from a change in brain structure.

  In my view, however, this change did not result from evolution of brain structure but rather from human beings forgetting how to do active imagination. Does this mean that human beings can still have conversations with the spiritual presence? As a Jungian I would have to say, “yes, in active imagination.” If you have direct contact with the king and queen within you, you will not engage in idealizing transferences, that is, you will not nearly as easily displace your center or your sovereignty onto an outside person. More importantly, you will not identify your own ego with “the great royal one.” When you are dealing directly with the sacred king and queen inside, you will not project them onto some human being in the outer world or merge with them unconsciously.

  When you do active imagination, you go on a visualization journey inward. I recently led a group of people to the chambers of the royal couple within, and they had conversations. Some of them, however, did not find a king, some of them did not find a queen, and some of them did not find either one. Some found the royal chambers, but they could not find either a king or a queen.

  Depth psychologists can have a field day thinking about what might keep a person from finding a king or queen when they go into their inner castle. Some go into their inner royal room and discover themselves. “Here I am!” Others discover their mom or dad. If you find your mom or dad on one of the thrones, or if you find yourself there as the queen, or yourself as king, then it can help you understand what is carrying your grandiose energies in an unhealthy way.

  Some people think that such active imagination techniques are phony, that it is just “the ego making it up.” Those people have never tried it, because once you do some active imagination, you are amazed at what these inner figures can tell you that rings a bell of truth but you somehow didn't know. There is no way to prove that to you except to invite you to try it. If you don't know what you need to do about your grandiosity, just ask for an audience with your inner royal couple. They will be much more confrontive about it than I am.

  You may have a hard time finding them. They may be out there in the spaceship Enterprise saving some planets somewhere in another galaxy. I don't know where they are when they aren't home, but you can ask them. My experience after doing this with people for hundreds of hours now over the years is that if you keep going back, you eventually make contact.

  Sometimes you may run into Ivan the Terrible or someone like that, but once you understand how this works, you can follow Jung's advice and say, “I know who you are. I know why I had such a bad experience, because I have been thinking that you were my father.” You must speak up to them, forming conscious contact and more adequate, respectful boundaries with them.

  In active imagination, you need to make sure you can get out and run if you have to. You might need to escape. You might need Ariadne's thread. You may have heard of the hero Theseus who took Ariadne's thread down into the labyrinth. For my analysands, I do not recommend a thread. At the very least I recommend a 100-pound test deep-sea fishing line, maybe a nylon rope, so you can find your way back out of there fast in case it gets ugly.

  Start with Barbar
a Hannah's book, Encounters with the Soul (1981), or Robert Johnson's Inner Work (1986). Also see his little book, We (1985), which shows the implications of this for relationships, and his book on Ecstasy (1989) is a good meditation on how to keep from going crazy when you become wonderful (see also Jung 1996, Ulanov and Ulanov 2000).

  I hope some day to do some writing on active imagination and spirituality, but a lot of people are writing about this. Don't let them scare you to death about it. It is not as dangerous as a lot of people want to think. Leaders with a real magus inflation may imply to the group, “Be very careful how you do this. Only we initiates know how to do it right.” You should be careful, that is true, but don't let yourself be intimidated by people telling you to be afraid of it, because then you won't do anything with it. It is a lot more dangerous to avoid doing it!

  Active imagination is no doubt one of the most important tools we have for confronting and regulating our grandiose energies. Jesus reportedly said “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21 AV). I think there is a lot of merit to that comment, but it is equally important for us to realize that “the king and the queen are within you.” It is one thing to have a kingdom within you, and you go in there and don't find any kings or queens, but if there is a king and queen, a rex and regina within you, it is important to go in there regularly and talk to them about what is happening to you and what you need to be doing. My experience working with overly anxious people is that their anxiety level drops considerably when they do active imagination with their king and queen. It is a creative and useful way to relate to your dragon energies.

  People should try this approach and see what they find out. I invite readers to write me a note and tell me the results. Tell me if you succeeded in forming an active imagination relationship with your inner king and queen and whether it helped your anxiety states. There is no guarantee that it will help everyone, but there is much to gain and little to lose in trying it.

  EXERCISE PROGRAM

  Another way to create a personal ritual to contain and channel grandiose energies is a regular exercise program three to five times a week. It is amazing how much craziness in a human personality can be controlled by the ritual of an exercise program. Some studies show you can manage a sizable depression problem successfully with regular exercise. For many it works as well or better than antidepressant medication. It is certainly much better for your health if you can gradually get off the pills and get “addicted” to your exercise program instead. Of course, even the best exercise plan in the world cannot substitute for conscious, psychological analysis with a competently trained analyst or therapist, but it can always be part of the package.

  Think of the regular exercise as part of your ritual practice, a conscious ritualization in your ongoing spiritual discipline. Let it become a liturgy for you, marking sacred space and time. It will get to where you feel uncomfortable if you do not do your regular run or workout on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. It is striking how easy it is to tell if you missed part of your healing ritualization, because your grandiosity will kick up on you. When you miss your exercise program, you become more compulsive in other ways. This is a rule that you can follow. Take it to the bank. You will act out more destructively to the extent that you do not tend to your physical discipline. This is part of the Zen, the Zen of exercise, an important resource for all of us.

  RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY

  Religious community can also help many people contain their grandiose energies, though this has become more problematic for many people today. Participation may help you avoid terminal fragmentation by allowing the group to carry your unregulated grandiose energies. The more primitive your grandiosity, the more the group you seek will believe in its exclusive legitimacy.

  Audience: Are you saying that a person without such a problem of grandiosity no longer needs to belong to a group with such beliefs?

  Moore: Well, everyone does have an ongoing problem with grandiosity. That is my key point. The question is, what do they do with it? Different people develop different strategies to contain and regulate their grandiosity. The more consciously confronted and regulated one's grandiosity is, the less one will need to have one's spiritual or ethnic tribe make foolish superiority claims.

  You just have to ask yourself, How do I contain and regulate it? What do I do to keep from unconsciously identifying myself with the god or goddess? We all do something. We do a variety of things. If you are narcissistic, you unconsciously act it out, compulsively seeking adoration by other people. Group membership often helps and is a major resource in many cases. It is important not just to provide a vessel for the numinosity, but to have people who will remind you when you are getting a little crazy. This is why isolation is so dangerous when you are struggling with your grandiosity. When the negative manifestation of the dragon wants to destroy you, it tries to get you alone.

  People who cannot connect with a traditional religious group may find community in one of the many specialized support groups we have today, such as Alcoholics Anonymous. The people in these twelve-step programs practice a sort of guerilla spirituality. You go to a meeting of one of these groups, and you pull up their britches, they have dragon bites all over them. These people do not just theorize about the great dragon. They have actually met the dragon, and it almost killed them, and they know it. They are serious. That is what makes them so much more authentic and serious than most other religious types. This kind of guerilla spirituality is why I admire them so much. It is an important part of what I call “street magic.”

  This is survival spirituality. These people know that you do not pray to be sweet and wonderful. If you are praying to be sweet and wonderful, then your prayer is just another part of your spiritual posturing, your inflation and grandiosity. No, you pray to deal effectively with this great dragon that is in the process of trying to devour you, because you know that in and of yourself you are not equal to it. People go to these meetings because they know they cannot solve the problem alone. If they leave, they know they will soon be tempted to fall off the wagon again. So they stay in touch with their group support for making the grandiosity conscious and keeping the dragon at bay.

  The twelve-step concept of spirituality, to the extent that they don't try to secularize it, serves as a model for humanity to get serious about coping with the dragon of grandiosity. What we need is a group “Humans Anonymous.”

  Audience: There is something called “Co-Dependents Anonymous,” a twelve-step program for people who want to get help with human relationships.

  Moore: That can be useful too. All these twelve-step groups are a powerful ritual resource, because they help people bring their problems into consciousness. They often say, for example, “I am always going to be an alcoholic, and I need you people to help me deal with it.” We need to reframe that, because it is the same thing as saying, “I am always going to have a problem with my grandiosity.” People who cannot admit they have a permanent problem with their tendencies toward pathological grandiosity are simply deluding themselves, and they become part of the larger human problem. We all need to take part in a human recovery project. These programs provide good models for us for serious survival spirituality, for guerilla spirituality!

  WORSHIP AND LITURGY

  Another resource for regulating grandiose energies is regular participation in communal worship and liturgy. If we bracket the religious tribalism issue for a moment and focus on the individual's regulatory needs, then liturgy does offer a partial containment and regulation. Remember we are talking about marking time. It helps if you have a liturgical year to follow. Christians are not the only ones who have done that. Most people in the world before the modern era used sacred calendars to mark time and help them feel oriented in relation to a true center. They used this means to contain themselves and help themselves stay sane, to provide something predictable, a dependable structure for living.

  Say, for example, that you are a
borderline personality, and you don't have enough money to get the kind of therapy you need. You can at least go to Mass every morning. That regular ritual process can develop into a selfobject container that helps you regulate the radical volatility of your psyche. It is my experience working with borderlines, and other extremely unstructured people, that if they work along the outlines of a liturgical year, or work regularly through a liturgical process, it helps them avoid acting out and other self-destructive behaviors. It may not cure them, but it helps them contain their pathology. This applies to all of us, of course, not just to borderline personalities.

  ANCIENT MAGICAL TECHNIQUES

  Another way to help people remember that they are not God would be to rediscover the practical human ritual use of ancient magical techniques that were specieswide prior to modernization (Moore 2001). The use of talismans, for instance, is very simple. Consider the tangible ritual objects used by Roman Catholics through the centuries, the rosary and the crucifix. The Catholics made a mistake by deemphasizing the use of such techniques after Vatican II. You do not hear much about them anymore, but those objects are symbols that represent the archetypal Self, psychologically speaking. That is why Jung made the distinction between symbols and signs. Freudians do not have an adequate theory of symbolism, and they view all ritual practice as obsessional. A Jungian knows that a ritual symbol can help regulate archetypal energies when it symbolizes an affirmation by a person that the archetypal Self is not the ego.