The visible world is the familiar world, and our perceptions of it are affected by our senses, our thinking, how we feel, and our intuition, but these perceptions are also conditioned by our upbringing, what we may have picked up from others, and by our environment. Inevitably, what appears to be ‘real’ is different for someone with a different perspective from ours, and so our visible world will hold many contradictions: what we see will not always fit with what we have been told, and so on. ‘We have to learn either to close our eyes to dissonance or to coexist with ambiguity and paradox.’

Despite this dissonance, the visible world seems solid, and so we commit ourselves to the world we see, and become possessive about our opinions believing that we know more or less who we are. This gives us our ‘ego’ – the coherent, stable, and enduring part of us which helps us live in the here and now. Yet the ego has its limitations, and its duration is limited by birth and death – it can also become too restrictive.

Laurel, a high-achieving academic researcher, seeing June Singer for Jungian analysis dreamt of two aquariums – one small with a defect in it and one large.

‘It is necessary to transfer the fish from the small to the large aquarium, or else they will die because the small aquarium is gradually losing water. The big aquarium is self-sustaining, as it has a system that aerates and filters the water and plants and there are secluded places in it for the fish to breed in.’

In the session Laurel realized the small aquarium was a metaphor for the visible world, a closed system, nothing came in from outside to replenish it and nothing could escape. The large aquarium was an open system letting in fresh air, and that could represent the self-perpetuating, adaptive cosmos, the farthest reaches of which are part of the invisible world.

Opening to the invisible world can happen in many different ways: dreams, visions, meditation, unusual events, extended illness, disaster, and so on. We are led to repeatedly confront this dimension which is all around us, just beyond our line of vision. If we’re not open to it or receptive to the ways that it affects us then the invisible world will find its own ways of intruding and drawing us towards its orbit. Sometime later into her analysis Laurel said:

‘My unconscious is telling me that there is something more important than any task I perform. It is a way of being a form of redemption. I don’t know exactly what I mean by ‘redemption’ or even by ‘a way of being’. We have talked in here about goals. That is my goal. It is not an easy path, and I don’t get any rewards for it in this world. … The reward must be finding the meaning of my existence.’

Beyond the ego state lies the state of wholeness in which the ego serves a larger reality than itself, and where the conscious and the unconscious can communicate in an open way. Jung called the larger reality the Self (with a capital ‘S’), which is unlimited, infinite, oriented towards wisdom, and is the central focus of the totality of the individual. Singer sees this level of awareness as: ‘This …corresponds to the Tree of Life, while the pure ego state is controlled by the Tree of Knowledge, which is also the Tree of Death’.

For, as Jung himself noted, towards the end of his life:

‘The decisive question for [a person] is, are they related to something infinite or not?’ It’s ultimately the only thing that truly matters … In the final analysis we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, then life is wasted.’