I am drawn to a dream from years back. It was a word dream, a message coming straight off the hotline of the unconscious mind. It said, "If you stop, you drop." Immediately I took this to heart. There's no going back from healing, growing and changing.
If we try and stop our transformation process, we deteriorate. We notice this via symptoms. We become neurotic, unhappy, fretting about this or that. We're in an awful predicament of our choosing.
To stop up consciousness requires work. We need to stop our dreams by over working, over eating, over drinking, by numbing our emotional life, so we don't feel. If we don't feel we don't dream and we don't grow. Numbness and eventual deadness require our cooperation and effort, at least the energy that goes into doing nothing and willfully feeling nothing through denial.
CG Jung wrote, "And yet the attainment of consciousness was the most precious fruit of the tree of knowledge, the magical weapon which gave man victory over the earth, and which we hope will give him a still greater victory over himself." (The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man 1933/1934, CW 10, 289)
Victory over self, as Jung describes, is a working through of the destructive impulse in the human condition. It bids us complain about how hard it is, how dreams are too much, how we can't possibly follow through with what our dreams have intimated.
It takes effort to be and remain conscious. Patients in depth psychotherapy arrive at various crossroads at which continued decisions need to be made. Am I willing to face this, to see what I need to see, to then follow through with what's best for my higher self. These are questions that we regularly face because it takes effort to be and stay conscious.
