Smell the Right Place

Arguably, the whole point is to let go, and more specifically, to let go of ego attachments. As Jung said: “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” This letting go of sorts then impacts both psychic and spiritual energy. To borrow from the Sufi mystic and scholar Abdul Qadir al-Jilani: “The sweet singing of the birds, the sighing of lovers, are among those exterior causes which move the spiritual energy. In this state of spiritual energy evil and the ego have no share; the Devil operates within the dark realms of the doings of the ego and has no say in the illuminated realm of mercy.” 

We let go in order to let in what matters, namely, illumination, insight, psychic and spiritual rejuvenation, and ultimately, love. As Rumi wrote in a poem titled “The Nothing of Roselight”:

“Death comes,

and what we thought we needed loses importance.

The living shiver, focused on a muscular dark hand,

rather than on the glowing cup it holds,

or the toast being proposed.

In that same way, love enters your life,

and the I, the ego,

a corrupt, self-absorbed king, dies during the night.

Let him go. In the dawn

breathe cold new air, the nothing of roselight.”

In turn, the physical and social manifestation of letting go is play. As Jung said: “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” The soul is thus in need of creativity and play above all other psychological and social considerations and priorities. As the Prophet Muhammad said: “The verses of the Quran, the wise and wondrous poems of love and sounds and voices of yearning illuminate the face of the soul.” 

As mentioned before, the main archetype for the unconscious and the letting go of the ego is the nourishment of the mother. In turn, the nourishment of the mother begins in the maternal womb. Hence, the maternal womb is the archetype for where the nourishment of the mother archetype begins. It follows that modern culture is devoid of this particular nourishment, and thus modern culture becomes the archetype for the loss of this nourishment of the mother archetype. As Nietzsche said:

“Let us think of a culture that has no fixed and sacred primordial site but is doomed to exhaust all possibilities and to nourish itself miserably on all other cultures – there we have the present age…the tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge – what does all this point to, if not the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb.”

The specific myth which Nietzsche sought to resurrect was the myth of Dionysus. To borrow from one scholar: “What [Nietzsche] had in mind were the Dionysian mysteries of spiritual sensuality and the ‘beautiful chaos’: a kind of drunken unity with the world substance, with the mystery of creative Being.” And nothing embodies or signifies creative being and the Dionysian myth more than the sexual instinct, or libido. As Jung wrote, the sexual instinct or libido “is not only creative and procreative, but possesses an intuitive faculty, a strange power to ‘smell the right place,’ almost as if it were a live creature with an independent life of its own (which is why it is so easily personified).” Jung added: “It is purposive, like sexuality itself, a favorite object of comparison.” In short: “This libido is a force of nature, good and bad at once, or morally neutral.” 

The archetype for both the libido and God is the sun. Thus, we resolve our inner psychic conflict through the creative powers of the libido and thus oneness or “union” with God. As Jung wrote: “The discord into which the human soul has fallen can be harmoniously resolved through the sun as a natural object which knows no inner conflict.” Both God and the libido represent the union of opposites above all else. It follows that the libido unites the opposites which in turn resolves the inner conflict of the psyche, and as a result, the sun archetype and thus the libido “is perfectly suited to represent the visible God of this world, i.e., the creative power of our own soul, which we call libido, and whose nature it is to bring forth the useful and the harmful, the good and the bad.”