Heaven and Hell
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven
unless its roots reach down to hell.
Carl Jung (1951)
It’s written on the walls of this hotel
You go to heaven once you’ve been to hell.
Leonard Cohen (1977)
Heaven, as dichotomies do, gains meaning from its counterpart, its shadow. What does heaven mean if there is no contrast? We come to heaven from hell; the tree grows up from its roots. Is consciousness similarly dichotomous? Freud and Jung helped our understanding of
consciousness
Another way of approaching consciousness is through its origins.
by proposing it too had a counterpart - the ‘unconscious’, consciousness’s shadow. The term shadow for them let us see the words as separate but irrevocably linked, while also contributing connotations of skulking, of avoiding observation. The tree’s shadow is utterly linked to the tree, it is both part, yet
not part,
The boundary of what is in our worlds and what is not.
of the tree; just as the unconscious always accompanies me, yet I do not know it. As always
analogies
The pitfalls of using analogies.
need caution. Shadows do not become trees, and hell does have its purgatory. It is essential for the psychoanalysts, and for the concept of consciousness, that it can include the surely mysterious process of coming
into awareness:
On the problem of coming out of concealment.
making conscious what
was not.
How can what did not exist come into existence?
The Jung quote is from page 43 of Volume 9 (Part 2) of the English collected works - Aion - published in 1968 by Routledge & Kegan Paul. Cohen’s song Paper Thin Hotel was on his LP Death of a Ladies Man issued by Warner Bros Records 1977.
The photo was taken from the path that leads to Gallowhill from Moffat, in the south of Scotland.
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 24th May 2025
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