Bridging Jung and Wilber: towards healing the 'inner ascender'

Recently participating as a witness in a complex psychotherapeutic intervention called therapeutic enactment -- which is an updated and refined form of Moreno's pioneering work on psychodrama -- has stimulated some thoughts and feelings about the importance of healing a subpersonality, schema, pattern, voice or archetype that we might term the "inner ascender" -- or, the "inner frustrated ascender".  Here I refer to what Wilber describes in Sex, Ecology and Spirituality as the "frustrated ascent" that became a punishing descent in the West.  So, part of our Western cultural baggage, if Wilber is right, is that we may carry this frustrated inner ascender...and potentially not even realize it consciously. 

From a depth psychology or Jungian standpoint, we need to make this unconscious pattern conscious, so that then we can heal it, into something more akin to a "healthy ascender".  We don't want to lose our inner ascender, and we don't want to be "in denial" of it:  we want to have a healthy inner ascender or, put another way, a healthy relationship with our inner ascender. 

How can we describe the inner ascender?  The inner ascender is that part of us that sincerely desires to know God or Spirit in the most intimate way imaginable: communion, yes, but even beyond that the inner ascender desires union or even identity with Spirit or God (whatever terms we are using).  The inner ascender intuits that this is possible....even intuits, perhaps, that such a state is true NOW -- if only the other aspects of ourselves would relax enough to allow such a state to be known consciously. 

And this direct knowing of God or Spirit that the inner ascender intuits is not an abstract thing; rather, it is fully embodied  -- its an experiential knowing.

So let's just posit for a moment that we each have an inner ascender, but that for many of us, our relationship to it is highly frustrated.  Having identified the problem, how might we intervene?

Well, let's turn to Jung first.  Let's imagine that Jung, feeling frustrated by the rather thorough denial of ascent in Freud's work, begins to forge a path for the inner ascender to follow.  But Jung, unfortunately but understandably given the lack of proper maps and compass available to the West, gets his directions a bit mixed up.  Sometimes when he thinks he is traveling up the mountain, he is in fact traveling down!  This directional error in Jung's work was spotted by Wilber, and formed a seminal early contribution of Wilber's to transpersonal psychology -- the pre/trans fallacy.  

An understanding of the pre/trans fallacy, speaking very generally and pragmatically, helps us to keep our bearings straight while ascending the mountain. 

For example, sometimes it is very helpful to do intense regressive therapy, in order that we can then continue our ascent in a much more healthy manner.  This is akin to climbing to what one thinks is the top of the mountain, or nearing the top, only to find out that the particular peak we think we are on is a flimsy outcropping of rock that could turn into a rockslide and crumble down the mountainside at any moment, taking us tumbling with it!  In this case, the best course of action is to scurry back down, as quickly as we can, and find another path.  In integral psychotherapy, we might call this "regression in service of the ego" (borrowing Ken's term from the text Integral Psychology). 

But if we are caught in a pre/trans confusion, we will lose our bearings, and having scrambled to the bottom, out of harms way of possible rockslide, we will keep right on going, down, down, winding down, somehow believing because of thick fog that we must be drawing near that darn peak sometime soon! 

Neither of these situations are actually very funny!  Falling down in a rockslide is really dangerous stuff -- better to do the necessary regression work so that one isn't seriously psychically injured in a rockslide because the foundation under one's feet is unstable.  This is the case for me: I realize a need to do regressive work; however, i want to do it in an integrally-informed context, that is, one where the guides aren't stuck in the fog of the pre-trans fallacy, trying to convince me that if only we keep going down, down, down...we'll find the ....top?  Hmmmmm.....this situation isn't very fun either!

An integrally-informed regressive therapy provides a way out of this dilemma.  We do the descent as authentically as possible, while guided by an understanding that descent is descent in service of ascent.  We are not descending out of frustration that ascent is even possible.  We haven't given up hope, as have so many in the West, at least historically, that ascent is even possible!  And we include some of the practices of ascent: e.g. contemplation / meditation or even nondual pointing out instructions.  But neither are we ignoring the narcissistic element in ourselves, the inner Peter Pan that thinks that no backtracking ought to be necessary...we can just climb right up that mountain in one pretty much straight line and hey, why even climb, let's just fly to the top!

Perhaps my partner's name is Wendy for a reason :) 

Hey, if we are postmodern advaita-vedantists, admiring Tolle, Ganjaji or Adyashanti, we don't even need to build up our quadriceps in service of the climb (e.g. no meditation needed).  We just remember our identity in the Now, and we are all done: we are right there at the top already! "That was easy", as the Amazon slogan goes.

Well, this is partially true!  But it is not the whole truth, if by whole truth we mean both relative and absolute...

But I digress...:)

To be continued (perhaps)