Routing Out Royal Roads of Gold

In my last blog I referred to the shadow side of ourselves, the complex web of thoughts and feelings we keep hidden from our conscious life. As Francis Bacon is alleged to have said, “We are the last to know ourselves.


Not everyone has time and money to invest in years of psychotherapy/psychoanalysis to discover the hidden self(ves). Even so, we don’t need to despair. If we allow ourselves time, space, honesty and courage, dreams, daydreams and meditation are tools within our grasp.


We try to keep our contradictory feelings out of awareness because we assume we’re crazy to have them. But often they make good sense.


When I was ten years old I began to write a journal because I both loved and hated my newborn brother. Where to put these feelings except on paper?  To my surprise, owning my feelings relieved me. I don’t think I understood the whys until recently. (I loved my brother because he was adorable and I could indulge my maternal feelings and help take care of him. And I hated him because he diluted the attention I received from my overwhelmed mother.)  To experience mutually contradictory  emotions makes sense!


A dear friend of mine, a mathematician, familiar and comfortable dealing with the world of numbers, didn’t understand my writing compulsion until recently when she wrote down her thoughts and identified feelings she hadn’t been able to voice in a conversation.
“Now I see why you are always writing,” she said. 


Her sudden insight is what is known as an “aha” experience.


The concept of the “life-altering moment” (or “aha experience”) has become a popular and well-recognized state of mind, due in large part to Oprah Winfrey’s emphasis of the notion on her TV program. Originally known as the ‘eureka’ experience, the definition is based on the insight of Archimedes  (287-212 BC).  When he was taking a bath, he realized the amount of water he displaced related to his weight. He could apply the same phenomenon (of water displacement) to determine if the king’s crown was pure gold.  In his state of excitement, he leapt from the bathtub and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, Sicily yelling “Eureka, Eureka!” (“I found it; I found it.”)

Committing ourselves to daily or almost daily practice to rout out  ‘the royal road to the unconscious’  (as Freud referred to dreams) is not easy. Our minds construct endless arguments of resistance to defeat our constructive goals. Voices of judges censor, condemn, criticize.  Each of us harbors within our minds an enemy as cunning and clever as the Trojan horse.


We’re afraid to discover our opposing thoughts and feelings because we may realize we have to change. And change is very frightening.


 “I think I’m accustomed to my misery, “ a woman once told me after she’d spent a few years thinking about possible ways to improve her situation.


And that’s okay too. To choose to remain in a situation may be the best solution. What is important is that we recognize the possibility of choice.

Conclusion: To allow ourselves to become aware of our contradictory thoughts can be calming and diminish stress, even if we don’t act on them to change our lives. Acceptance is key.

Dear Reader: I welcome your comments. (jsimon145@gmail.com)