In its blue castle, behind its high blue walls, dressed in its blue gown, Reason is untouchable. It cannot be touched. It is isolated. Alone. Its fear of everything that is not purely logical makes the ego defensive. Reason is most powerful, formidable, and yet the rational ego fears what it cannot understand. It protects itself and, with every wall, it isolates itself from everything that is mysterious, everything that is not logical.
When I started this so-called ‘journey’ (even if all the answers were already right here), I knew that dropping my logical armour would be my hardest challenge. It permeates everything in my life. It gets me out of trouble and allows me to progress in the external world. It is my excuse. My defence against every non-sense. It is clean, flat, blue. It is perfect.
My logical mind has learnt to relativise everything, so that it cannot get hurt. Emotions are put in the general perspective of the whole world, of the whole universe, so that their relevance is minimised by the weight of a logical argument that is hard to counterbalance. Only music and perhaps poetry can pierce the armour and touch what is inside. Like a breeze of air, as if the armour was transparent and light, and not metallic, dense and heavy. As if music could find all that empty space within the atoms and run through it.
When I found Jung, I sensed that something stirred inside me. It was a very strange feeling of illogical certainty (intuition). Although often criticised for being a mystic, I can see Jung really tried to approach the study of the unconscious and the different personalities from a logical point of view. He looked for facts, patterns. To me, Jung laid a bridge back to the unconscious. A logical bridge, at least in its first steps, without which I would never find my way back home.
I have been struggling with this post for several weeks now, as if it were reflecting some internal conflict. I guess my whole blog reflects this tension between logical thinking, intuition, sensing and feeling. I often dream in terms of Logos and Eros, interpreted in a most generic fashion: Logos is everything that is logical and Eros accounts for emotions and everything else that is not strictly logical. In my dreams, they often appear as opposites. Who knows, despite all my complaints, maybe it is an advantage to have red in one hand, in one neuron, and blue in the other. Maybe this is the only way for me to reach balance. Or maybe what we normally call ‘heart’ and our logical mind are not opposites, but actually work together. Balance is everything.
Today it dawned on me that I was not writing about logic. I was writing about fear. Logical thinking has served me well in life, but it is nothing more than an instrument. Not good or bad, just a beautiful, blue, cold tool. This is the reason why I have been sitting with this post for so long. Logic just provided a justification for fear, an unpierceable blue mesh that became the perfect armour against pain.
Fear is unjustly vilified. We consider it a negative emotion, but it is as necessary as joy and sadness (and yes, I love Inside Out). Fear keeps us alive. It also enables us to develop some stability, as it ‘convinces’ us not to change. I’m not saying that change is bad, it is unavoidable, but if we run after anything we suddenly wish for, our life would become unstable and society as a whole would lose cohesion. Fear just needs to be balanced. Balance is everything.
That an intellectual understanding of the psychic process must end in paradox and relativity is simply unavoidable, if only for the reason that the intellect is but one of many psychic functions which is intended by nature to serve man in constructing of his images of the objective world. We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only a half-truth, and must, if it is honest, also admit its inadequacy.
Carl G. Jung, Psychological Types
I have often perceived logical thinking as a major cause of unhappiness. But this is unfair and, well, illogical. Thinking is just one of our psychological functions. How much it influences my decision making ultimately depends on me. The blue armour is also the blue bridge home. My mind will never accept a path that has no blue in it. It just needs some red balance.
I used to think that the day would never come
New Order, True Faith
I’d see delight in the shade of the morning sun
My morning sun is the drug that brings me near
To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear
I used to think that the day would never come
Spend my life in the shade of the morning sun
The Introverted Tree 