...the price that is paid for [our] consciousness is a heavy one: the fragmentation, the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts within us, the feeling that the universe has fallen apart and has no central core of meaning. We are conscious enough to be torn by the conflicts of life but not yet conscious enough to sense life's underlying unity. Yet, it is by this path that Nature becomes aware of its own existence by giving birth to its one witness: human consciousness.
"But why on earth," you may ask, "should it be necessary for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness?" This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy. Instead of a real answer I can only make a confession of faith: I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill on the plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of a primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is. The entire world around me was still in a primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man.... Every advance, even the smallest, along this path of conscious realization adds that much to the world. (Jung)
Once we have stood apart, once we have brought the world into being by becoming conscious of it as distinct from ourselves, our task is still not finished. Each of us carries an intuition, a latent conviction that all this finally adds up to a meaning. There is a universal sense in humans that there is unity and cohesion at the heart of life, and that it is possible for us to be consciously aware of it. So far as I can discover, it is this awareness of the primordial and essential unity of the human psyche that most religions and philosophies have referred to as enlightenment.
Inner work teaches us one of the most important principles of the path toward the unified self. Many people believe they can achieve unity by going backwards, avoiding the conflicts, pretending they aren't there. Inner work, as a practical experience, shows us that we can embrace the conflict, embrace the duality, bravely place ourselves in the very midst of the warring voices, and find our way through them to the unity that they ultimately express.
We cannot go backwards. We can't retreat. We can't find our primordial sense of unity by canceling out consciousness and retreating to animal unconsciousness. Our evolution has taken a different path, and that path is built into us as surely as is the structure of our physical bodies. Our path leads straight ahead, not around the duality but through it to a consciousness of its underlying oneness. Our task is to find the fundamental unity and meaning of life without sacrificing our consciousness of our pluralism, our sense of ourselves as distinct and individual beings.
It is because the cosmos gets divided into heaven and earth, and because heaven and earth are in dialogue, that the universe has produced a Christ, a Buddha, a Mohammed, and the prophets. Each of them carries the archetype of the unified self and the message that the many are actually the one. It is because of the conflicts in our own personal lives—and our willingness to face them and convert them into constructive dialogue—that we grow toward consciousness.
It is our lot, if we are honest, to live in duality and paradox. The dialogue of those paradoxical elements is the stuff of life. Surprisingly it is also the surest path toward unity. Our dreams are its stage, its workshop and battleground. And Active Imagination is its superb language.