Hamlet

Johnson calls Hamlet the darkest chapter in his book. “Don Quixote,” he says, “with his roots deep in instinct and faith, is the man of courage who redeems anything that befalls him. In Hamlet, we find a man of tragedy, he who makes chaos and failure of everything he touches.”

The opposite of Don Quixote in nearly every respect, Johnson says Hamlet is the “most  profound example in all of literature of the divided man.”

To understand Hamlet, Johnson explains, is to gain insight into the emptiness and loneliness of modern existential life. As a three-dimensional man, Hamlet has neither roots in the instinctive world nor is his head yet in the heavens where he might gain enlightenment.

Modern man, in general, is at a point where he must heal the paradox of masculine and feminine,doing and being.

As Lao-tse said, “He who understand the masculine and keeps to the feminine shall become the whole world’s channel. Eternal virtue shall not part from him and he shall return to the state of an infant.”

Johnson says that Hamlet only touches this design state before making division and tragedy, rather than paradox and synthesis, of it. Because time and again, in refusing to act and make a choice, Hamlet loses the value of both.

Hamlet’s troubles begin with the murder of his father by his uncle who then marries Hamlet’s mother. The ghost of Hamlet’s father tells him to take revenge and thus begins the internal debate–to kill the uncle and take his rightful place as king or decide that enough blood has been shed and be at peace with what has happened.

Instead he does as Emily Dickinson put it,”wavered for us all.” Vacillation in one of the characteristics of the three-dimensional man.

“A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward,” Hamlet thinks. He can see that together the four parts make for wholeness, but only three parts function for him. He cannot listen to his internal wisdom.

“There is no peace in such a man,” Johnson says. “He knows too much to be simple, but not enough to be whole.”

Because Hamlet’s need to act and his abhorrence of violence are in conflict, he descends into depression and madness, and out of this comes the most famous soliloquy in literature:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh in heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream–ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

Johnson explains that this is the despair that causes conflict in every three-dimensional man–while he cannot live, he dare not die. He then begins to torture everyone around him, especially those who love him, and he makes life unbearable for himself.

As Tolstoy wrote, “He was suffering the anguish men suffer when they persist in undertaking a task impossible for them–not from inherent difficulties, but from its incompatibility with their own nature.”

When challenged about what he is doing, Hamlet cries, “Words, words, words.” It is the cry of the three-dimensional man who is so caught up in words he cannot act.

Literary critic R.H. Blyth describes it this way: “This ‘words, words, words’ has a deeply tragic meaning in the play. It is, in fact, the secret of Hamlet’s character, the cause of the tragedy. Hamlet is the Zen-less man, whose energy, like a mouse in a wheel, goes round and round inside him and issues, not in action, but in talking.”

As Johnson says, “It is a characteristic of complex man, caught between functioning by instinct and acting by enlightenment, that he often destroys everything feminine within his grasp. . . . All feminine elements wither in the face of the three-dimensional consciousness.”

Next Week: The Poisoned Rapier

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The Adventures

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza set out to search for Dulcinea and experience a number of adventures. While these adventures will seem like failures to a three-dimensional, complex man, to the two-dimensional man there is always a reason because the fantasy is his inner reality.

The most famous of Don Quixote’s exploits is his battle with the windmills. It is truly amazing, when you think about it, how many of our sayings and even how we look at life have come about through fiction. In this case, we say someone is “tilting at windmills” when they are engaged in behavior that is clearly out of the realm of reality.

So, despite the fact that Sancho Panza tries to warn him that he is about to battle windmills, Don Quixote sees only giants. When he loses the battle and is thrown from his horse, the giants become windmills through the magic of Quixote’s nemesis Freston. Don Quixote is more upset about the loss of his lance than his defeat.

Tilting at windmills today, according to Johnson, may be no more than dealing with unresolved psychological dynamics, but it is still a very real part of life. This is why it is so easy to empathize with Quixote, Johnson says, “he is our selves served up to us in palpable form.”

He sees and hears what he wants to see and hear—a shepherd’s horn becomes a page announcing his arrival; prostitutes become ladies; pub food, a sumptuous feast. Don Quixote’s inner reality is so strong that it translates to the outside world. You can see this today most particularly in children who feel certain they are the thing they want to be—the ballerina, the super hero, etc. And, admittedly, there are even the few adults who have not made the transition to three-dimensional man and still live in a fantasy world.

At the end of the book, Don Quixote lies dying having failed in his search to find Dulcinea. Quixote finally makes the transition to three-dimensional man while Sancho Panza reverses his normal position and tries to talk Don Quixote into setting forth on another quest. In a sense, the true journey of knighthood and chivalry they have taken was to draw the ego and shadow sides together, Johnson explains. Cervantes doesn’t dwell on it, but Johnson says we will see that shadow/ego split intensified in Faust and Mephistopheles. And Hamlet, he says, will spend the last moments of his life in the next higher stage of consciousness—four-dimensional man.

Interestingly, Cervantes and Shakespeare lived during the same time period and both died on the same day—April 23, 1616. Don Quixote was published in 1605, Hamlet in 1603 or 1604.

“It is as if,” Johnson says, “the two men stood back to back, Cervantes looking backward and Shakespeare looking forward.”

Cervantes was illuminating the medieval consciousness that was ending in Europe while Shakespeare looked forward to the modern man who was to come.

“Cervantes spoke of the childhood of Western man,” Johnson writes, “man who had not yet suffered the shock of being expelled from the Garden of Eden. No better description of the two-dimensional man can be found.”

Next Week: Hamlet

Don Quixote

The two-dimensional man.

According to Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, Don Quixote is a “near-perfect representation of two-dimensional man—the simple peasant man.”

For those unfamiliar with the tale, Miguel Cervantes, when he was in his 50s in the early 17^th century, wrote the novel while living in squalor in a single room. Other than having written Don Quixote, Cervantes lived what could essentially be called a failed life. He lost an arm in battle, was captured and served a slave to the Moors for five years, he couldn’t hold down a job once he returned to Spain, he fathered an illegitimate child, married a girl of 19 when he was 50 and then left her to live in poverty while writing Don Quixote.

And while the book was wildly popular, he never made much money off it and died soon after writing a second volume, which wasn’t quite as good. The main character of the book, Don Alonso, has read so many books on chivalry by the time he is 50 years old that he decides to set off on a romantic quest of his own. Don Quixote (essentially Sir Codpiece as he names himself for the piece of armor that covers the thighs and genitals) genuinely believes that his impossible dream will come true.

He hires a squire, Sancho Panza (Mr. Paunch) who is indeed the opposite, perhaps the shadow of Don Quixote—short, fat and practical, and ruled by his appetite. According to Johnson, this is a common pair—from the Bible’s Jacob and Esau and David and Jonathon to today’s Mutt and Jeff or Abbot and Costello or any buddy cop pairing. They are ego and shadow—the parts of us that are opposite yet inseparable.

Johnson quotes W.H. Auden on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, including: “Don Quixote needs Sancho Panza as the one creature about whom he has no illusions but loves as he is; Sancho Panza needs Don Quixote as the one constant loyalty in his life which is independent of feeling. Take away Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is so nearly pure flesh, immediacy of feeling, so nearly without will that he becomes a hedonist pagan who rejects everything but matter. Take away Sancho Panza, on the other hand, and Don Quixote is so nearly pure spirit that he becomes a Manichee who rejects matter and feeling and nothing but an egotistic will.”

Don Quixote purchases an old horse, Rocinante (she-whom-one-follows) and they set off on their adventure to find Dulcinea, the sweetness of life, whom even the Don admits might not exist though he will give his life for her. Needless to say, they never find her. Dulcinea exists only in the heart of the searcher, which Johnson says is all that matters to the two-dimensional man.

“The two-dimensional man lives constantly in the realm of fantasy and imagination,” Johnson says. “They are the Garden of Eden, perfection, total reliability.” But, fantasy and imagination don’t translate to the outer world.

“Don Quixote is creating poetry, not reality,” says Johnson. “Heaven, love, idealism, hope, justice, chivalry, eternity—all are inner realities as palpable and real as any outer realities our world holds in such high esteem. Don Quixote’s optimism ruins everything around him. . . . He loses every time he relies on his sword; it is ‘pure spirit disguised as fantasy,’ as Thomas Mann once wrote. This is the vision of two-dimensional man and is the stuff of nostalgia and fantasy for every three-dimensional man.”

Next Week: The Adventures

Transformation

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Consciousness, Enlightenment

On whom, then, my God, am I the onlooker? How many am I? Who is me? What then is this gap between myself and me?

~~Fernando Pessoa

A recent email informed me that one of my favorite authors, as far as self actualization is concerned, had an ebook available for only $1.99. How could I resist? So I downloaded Transformation by Robert A. Johnson because frankly, it sounded as fascinating as his other works.

According to Johnson, Transformation is “a study of the evolution of consciousness through its three main levels of development.” While the book is masculine in character, using fictional male characters as a way to examine this development, it is just as applicable to women. Because English pronouns are limited to either the masculine or the feminine, Johnson sticks with masculine to avoid confusion.

So, what are these three levels of consciousness? Johnson claims that man is born with a simple consciousness before progressing to a complex consciousness. Unfortunately, this is where most of us remain. Only the rare few can attain an enlightened consciousness.

As Johnson explains, “A Zen proverb states: ‘When I was young and free, the mountains were the mountains, the river was the river, the sky was the sky. Then I lost my way, and the mountains were no longer the mountains, the river was no longer the river, the sky was no longer the sky. Then I attained satori (enlightenment), and the mountains were again the mountains, the river was again the river, and the sky was again the sky.”

If you want to see if from a Biblical standpoint, we go from the simple perfection of the Garden of Eden through every imaginable chaos until we reach the heavenly Jerusalem.

“Man evolves from acting instinctively to putting his psychic energy under the control of his ego,” he says. “Then he must evolve further, to place his psychic energy under the control of the Self.”

In our complex state, in between simple and enlightened, we remain trapped by our nostalgia for the past and our anticipation of the future. When enlightened, we find happiness living in the moment.

“Complex consciousness is so highly prized in our society that no cost is thought too high to gain freedom, self-determination, and choice, the qualities of this level of consciousness,” Johnson says. “We are so jealous in championing complex consciousness that we will export its way of life to any other less-advanced country, free of charge!”

Because our society revels in complex consciousness, and because we essentially force it on our children, it is very difficult to move beyond it. And, unfortunately, impossible to move backwards to simple consciousness. Essentially, we’ve been expelled from the garden and there are cherubim with flaming swords to prevent us from returning. The only way is forward.

In this book, Johnson will use Don Quixote, Hamlet and Faust as examples of the progression from simple consciousness to enlightenment.

Next Week: Don Quixote, the Two-Dimensional Man.