Individuation
Carl Jung hypothesized there's a fundamental drive towards healing in the human psyche - he referred to this as "the individuation process".
Like flowers leaning towards the sun; our souls too move towards wholeness.
Individuation can be defined as the achievement of self-actualization through a process of integrating the conscious and the unconscious.
Individuation can be defined as the achievement of self-actualization through a process of integrating the conscious and the unconscious.
Our conscious minds can only focus on a limited sector of our total being at any given time. The key to going down the path to the unconscious is learning it's symbols and how to be receptive to it's messages. This is the only way to find the unknown parts of ourselves. The two pathways to bridge the gap and speak with with unconscious mind are dreams and the imagination.
Human Evolution
Our unconscious, the original primal mind and matrix of our psyches, where our minds evolved from was developed in the framework of symbols as our teachers.
This was a profound Earth-body connection, that helped us in our survival and evolution. It was what helped humans unlock our intuition, to commune with the land to find water and animals to help us survive. And ultimately, it was the birth of our spiritual connection; humans then discovered there must be a higher power behind the scenes, an interconnectedness that links everything in the universe together that we too are a part of.
Know thyself, and "As within, so without" were keys to the wisdom traditions that understood the significance of symbols. Using symbols to better understand ourselves individually and collectively for our personal development, and our development as a species. This is now a lost art, as many people can't recall their dreams or know how to analyze the symbols within them.
Symbols
Symbols have a collective or cultural meaning associated with them, and a personal symbolic significance as well. When getting into symbol study, it's recommend to have a great symbol book to go deeper into the vast meanings of symbols from the history of humankind. I personally like the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols for it's in-depth religious and cultural associations. I also recommended to start analyzing your personal significance with symbols to figure out what they could mean to you.
For example, in the spirit animal tradition the rabbit symbolizes growth, abundance, fertility and rebirth. In my personal symbol connection to the rabbit, it represents comfort, curiosity and youth since it was the theme of my childhood bedroom growing up, with lots of soft stuffed rabbits I loved playing with. You can see how these two sources of analyzing symbols can then overlap and help with dream or active imagination analysis. Dreaming of being in a car that accidentally hits a rabbit on the road can symbolize parts of my youth or naivety coming to an end, but with the possibility of it being a new beginning as well. This would not be clear if I didn't have a deeper understanding of what the symbols meant to me personally and collectively if I didn't study the symbols and connect to it in my personal unconscious.
I will be following up this post soon with a second part on Active Imagination and part 3 on Dreams. Stay tuned ☺️