The space between Time and Depth

Trust Trainer Giel Luichjes explores Carl Jung’s Spirit of the Times and Spirit of the Depths, followed by a peace meditation on cultivating feelings of safety and vulnerability to help us balance these two spirits.

The Space between Time and Depth by Giel Luichjes

In May 2022 I had the honour of guiding a ‘Peace Meditation’ for the European Psychosynthesis Association (EAP). The war in Ukraine is triggering a lot of people and filling them with worry, disgust, pain, and other emotions and feelings. The EPA hold a weekly peace meditation that can be joined by everyone. I wanted to support this initiative and felt compelled to widen the scope at the same time, as the way we respond to these situations testifies of our capacity to generate a lot of will and, as seen from a psychosynthesis perspective, we are curious about balancing this with love.

Let me state my position first. I was born and raised in a Western European country and this has influenced my world view, which I would refer to as Eurocentric. I identify as white, male, and have had the privilege of having had a higher university education. My perspective is not the truth but one of many thinkable perspectives on the current situation we live in.

The Spirit of the Times and the Spirit of the Depths

Firstly, as an introduction to the reflection/meditation shared below this article, I would like to remind us of what contemporary and colleague of Assagioli, Karl Jung, wrote about the Spirit of the Times and the Spirits of the Depths which we all carry within us; I think it bears relevance to the time we live in, at least in how I look at it. 

For this introduction I was inspired by Kae Tempest in their publication On Connection, as Tempest explores the human condition and connection. Both are relevant in these times of separation and conflict, happening in many places and in many ways. Tempest explains Jung’s concepts as follows:

“In The Red Book, Jung explores at length his idea that a person is governed by two spirits: the spirit of the times and the spirit of the depths. This idea chimed with me so resolutely that it became a crucial part of my understanding of the human condition.

In my reading of it, the spirit of the times is the part of you that is preoccupied with ordering your life into a narrative that you can stomach, the part of you that is concerned with current issues, current trends and the pursuits of the day. The part of you that urges you to achieve a particular set of goals.

The spirit of the depths is the ancient part of you. The part that responds to the invisible world. The part that makes no sense and speaks in heavy symbols. Your madness, your dreams, your visions. The spirit of the depths communicated through archetypes, masks, animal shapes. It is drawn to nature and wildness. The spirit of the depths is not satisfied when you obtain the things the spirit of the times told you what you needed in order to live a satisfying life.” [1]

To now quote Jung:

“The spirit of the depths sees the soul as a living and self-existing being, and with this he contradicts the spirit of this time for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man, which lets himself be judged and arranged, and whose circumference we can grasp. I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system.” [2]

From these writings I understood that each of these spirits have different needs, and those needs do not always go well together. One (the Spirit of the Times) might want to have clarity and uses judgement in order to feel safe. The other mind, the Spirit of the Depths, is curious, open, and wants to understand the world in which it lives and to connect to that world, be it not always in ways we can understand with our rational mind in the moment, or ever at all. I would like to bring this non-dualistic approach in, as it is one of the principles of psychosynthesis as a philosophy that’s featured in this meditation. 

Which also leads to, in my view, a sad truth: that we only know peace through conflict, like light cannot exist without the existence of darkness.

As I personally worry about all of the splitting processes taking place in the world, I hope the below reflection/meditation offers us the space to reflect on how we can see that both spirits are needed, to help us create both our safety and our imaginary capacity in relating to conflict, pain, death, loss and much more.

To quote Jung on this:

“Speak then of sick delusion when the spirit of the depths can no longer stay down and forces a man to speak in tongues instead of in human speech and makes him believe that he himself is the spirit of the depths. But also speak of sick delusion when the spirit of this time does not leave a man and forces him to see only the surface, to deny the spirit of the depths and to take himself for the spirit of the times. The spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly, balance is godly.” [3]

And then Jung concludes later on:

“He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul. If he does not find the soul, the horror of emptiness will overcome him, and fear will drive him with a ship lashing time and again in a desperate endeavour and a blind desire for the hollow things of the world. He becomes a fool through his endless desire and forgets the way of his soul, never to find her again. He will run after things and will seize hold of them, but he will not find his soul, since he would find her only in himself.” [4]

It’s a challenging and even hard consequence to draw from this idea: that when we find ourselves in pain, in injustice, situations of death, conflict, hardship, we want nothing else but for it to stop. However, when we do this, we put ourselves at risk of subjecting ourselves to the spirit of the times, which wants concrete outcomes. It is a desire that can either be fulfilled, or not. Our mind becomes fixed on one outcome only and loses the soulfulness of our existence, our access to our capacity to respond to that situation with creativity. Even though the circumstances we want to change might not be under our influence at all, we might attach a lot of meaning to them, even making ourselves dependent on the outcome of a process we have no influence over.

Vulnerability 

To be able to be open (and I think, with that, to have access to our creativity), vulnerability is a helpful quality. And for us as mammals to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, we need to feel safe, experience an inner peace, we need to be in homeostasis. The openness allows us access to both of these spirits, to have a choice, and to be able to balance between them.

Judging, I would say is a quality of the Spirit of the Times, even when we judge situations that seem to be so clearly wrong, we run the risk of reducing our capacity to observe, to reflect, to take different realities into our perception. And in, or after that moment of judging, what would it be like if we instead could bring curiosity into ourselves and ask: what might I have been afraid of? What was unclear or even unsettling for me, that I had to judge?

As some say, the nature of man is dualistic. Even if that is true, we might want to practice mindfulness and use our awareness to always keep our perception as open as possible for what we do not know yet – to inquire into what we have taken to be true and real; for what we have held on to; to understand the world around us. And sometimes, sooner or later, we might find different truths and different realities from different perspectives, that might not match the impressions we have held onto until that moment.

Safety

However, there is a tension here: we need to feel safe to be able to be vulnerable and to limit – to have space for this attitude of inquiry.

If you are interested to read about these spirits then you might want to explore Ian McGilchrist who approached this, and how the right and left hemispheres of our brains function differently. You can read some of his last work, or perhaps watch some interviews with him online.

To encourage our openness it helps if we take care of ourselves, our bodies and our emotions and feelings, because then there is a bigger chance for us to feel safe. If we feel safe and experience our inner peace, we are more open for connecting with ourselves, with others, with nature, with our planet – and, very importantly, are able to be in connection with those in need or in distress, who in that moment do not have access to their inner peace. We can be the co-regulator of the other, which is a core principle of psychotherapy, in that – at least for some time – the therapist supports the client to regulate, until the client acquires the capacity to self-regulate. 

What can we do to find this peace? One thing is to nurture our awareness and give ourselves time to step back, reflect, contemplate. Perhaps during a walk in the park, in a forest, alongside a river. Switch off the phone. Feel the soil under our feet.

Another part of reflection is taking the time to sit with oneself and reflect, such as through the meditation reflection below.

A fairly known quote to end this piece is:

“God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. God give me strength so I may clearly see.”

Notes