“There is no better means of protecting the individual from depersonalization than the possession of a secret that he either wishes or is obliged to keep.”
— Carl Gustav Jung, Autobiography, p. 337
The secret plays a very specific role in the processes of individuation that are connected with the attainment of psychic maturity. Whoever is capable of keeping a entrusted secret deserves trust. Such a person can withstand the temptation to boast or to show others that he knows something they do not know. He is capable of holding the “thing” within himself, because he possesses the strength and the sense of responsibility to do so. It is more difficult to see its connection with spiritual maturity, understood as independence from dominant religious views or from belonging to spiritual communities.
Yet this is precisely what Jung is writing about, because in its very essence this is individuation itself—a long process of differentiation of consciousness, whose primary aim is the separation of the ego from the collective conscious and unconscious. In this process, a person is compelled to assert himself and his difference both against the social pressure of group consensus and against the powerful waves of the unconscious within his own psyche. In its essence, this is also what a secret does—it creates a division and a distinction, whereby one person knows something that another does not.
To be able to live alone with one’s secret condemns a person to solitude, isolation, fear, and inner tension. A secret not only separates you from others, but also intensifies the experience of your difference from them and forces you to find ways to cope with it.
If a person is neurotic and overly eager to please others, this inevitably leads to depersonalization, fusion with the environment, and social chameleonism. In such a case, the presence of a secret—which forces the individual to hold the tension within himself without being able to discharge it outwardly—has a distinctly therapeutic effect. It is as if life itself truly creates a situation that compels the person to become a separate, autonomous, and independent individual.
“Just as the initiate, through the secret society, succeeds in freeing himself from the delusion of an undifferentiated collective origin, so the individual, on his solitary path, also requires some kind of secret that, for one reason or another, must not be sacrificed.
Such a secret condemns him to isolation in his individual goals. Many individuals are incapable of bearing such isolation. These are the neurotics, who of necessity are always playing hide-and-seek with themselves and with others, without being able to take either seriously. As a rule, they sacrifice the personal goal in the name of their need to merge with the collective, receiving in this respect the full support of the opinions, convictions, and ideals of their environment. Against the latter there exist no sufficiently reasonable arguments. Only a secret that one does not dare to betray—one that one fears, and perhaps is unable to formulate adequately in words (and which for that very reason obviously belongs to the category of delusional ideas)—only such a secret could prevent the otherwise inevitable regression.”
— Carl Gustav Jung, Autobiography, p. 339
A secret forces one to learn how to contain within oneself psychic contents that one would otherwise share with others in order to receive their support. It is a prerequisite for the inner tension—which is a fundamental experience of the individuation process and of the birth of the Whole personality—to be held within the individual without finding relief externally.
A person experiences something that makes him think either that he is mad or going mad, or that arouses shame and fear of judgment, yet he does not dare to share it. He begins to conceal this part of himself by pretending to be like the others. But he is not. The secret pushes him into constant contact with his difference and with the fear of the reactions of those around him. We understand why such an experience is in fact therapeutic when this person’s problem is his dependence on the opinions and reactions of others.
The coercive function of the secret as a therapeutic means and an instrument of individuation can also be seen in relation to inner processes. This time, differentiation takes place in relation to contents arising from the collective unconscious—that is, from the world of archetypes. The threat to the positive image of the ego now comes from within, from one’s own Shadow and rejected parts, which fill the soul with tension and moral conflicts.
The enemy is within you, splitting your soul into two opposing parts—but this suffering, too, has its meaning. It is precisely in the midst of inner conflict that a person may discover his own Center—this “eye at the center of the hurricane”:
“The need for such a secret is in certain cases so great that thoughts and actions arise for which one is no longer responsible. They are not dictated by arbitrariness or arrogance, but represent a dira necessitas (a harsh necessity), very often inexplicable even to the individual himself. It befalls him with wild fatality and probably for the first time in his life demonstrates ad oculos (before his very eyes) the existence of something stronger and alien within his own most intimate domains, where he had imagined himself to be the absolute master.”
— C. G. Jung, Autobiography, p. 339
The encounter with contents from the world of archetypes is an unequal battle, but also the only way for a person to separate his ego from the deep waters of the unconscious from which it originally emerged. Jung compares this battle to Jacob’s struggle with the angel, in which the angel acknowledges Jacob’s strength to wrestle with him and gives him a new name—Israel, that is, “he who has wrestled with God.” A modern Jacob, however, as Jung remarks, would not dare to speak of such experiences, for fear of being considered mad. Therefore, he conducts his inner struggles with angel-demons far from others, isolated and alone.
James Hillman also writes about the role of the secret in the processes of individuation in his commentaries on Gopi Krishna’s book. Crucified between the fear of going mad and the fear of being diagnosed as mad, Gopi Krishna is forced to keep secret what he is going through. At first, he shares his experiences with only one or two people, but after realizing that even they cannot understand him or help him, he withdraws completely into himself. Not even his wife—his closest person—knows about the changes taking place within him. When one reads his book, one is left with the impression that it was precisely this secret that tormented him the most—his endless doubts about the validity of the interpretations and explanations he gives of his experiences, which he is unable to share with others.
“Secrecy intensifies that ‘something’ which must mature in complete silence in order to appear later, at the right moment, in the open.
Secrecy is the foundation of all revelations—indeed, revelation is possible only because of it. What happens behind the scenes creates drama when the curtain is raised and the stage is flooded with light. Therefore, the witness of an unusual striving must simply keep silent. What to conceal and what to reveal, and when—all these questions lie on the boundary between paranoid isolation and personal power, between private esotericism and ordinary, silent solitude. It is precisely the observance of secrecy that secures individuality—what everyone knows is no longer individual. Without our personal secrets, we are merely statistical figures.”
— James Hillman
And yet, after this long process of nearly twelve years of total transformation comes to an end, Gopi Krishna not only shares it with those close to him, but even writes a book to be read by people all over the world. This would not have been possible if, at the end of this process, he had not succeeded in developing a strong and independent ego, capable of affirming the truth of his experiences despite the fear of misunderstanding, rejection, and even ridicule—both from science and from religion.
But this is precisely what Jung also experienced—misunderstanding and rejection both from his scientific community and from theologians. This is exactly the essence of the concept of the “collective conscious”—the commonly accepted knowledge at a given stage of a society’s development. It is traditional knowledge, regardless of whether it belongs to religion or science, which at a certain point becomes quite conservative and resistant to the new and the different.
Before Christianity became one of the leading religions of today, the first Christians were persecuted and killed. History is now repeating itself. That which has become established resists whatever threatens its dogma and its dominance. Thus the role of the secret becomes clear—before it comes into the light, the new matures in the darkness and in the protective environment of concealment, until it gathers the strength to assert its difference.
After the secret has fulfilled its function of separation and differentiation, however, it must come out into the open. Otherwise, healing will not occur—neither for the individual to whom it pertains, nor for the community. Healing occurs only when what is hidden is brought into the open, when the wound is exposed to the sun. Pluto—an archetypal symbol of the underworld, of the hidden and of secrets—emerges above the surface of the earth twice: when seeking healing and when seeking a wife.
Jung writes of his work as a psychiatrist that only when he succeeds in reaching his patient’s secret does he know what the key to healing is. It is precisely the secret that contains the truth capable of healing. He himself, as a child, also coped with inner tension by inventing a secret and entrusting it to a small wooden figure that he carved himself.
“My inner division and insecurity in the great world drove me to an undertaking that was incomprehensible even to myself. At that time, I used a yellow-lacquered school pencil case with a small lock of the kind used by junior secondary school pupils. In it I carried a ruler, at the end of which I carved a small little man—about six centimeters tall—‘in a frock coat, with a top hat and polished black shoes.’ I painted it black with ink and carved it out of the ruler, then laid it in the pencil case, in which I had prepared a little bed for it. I even made it a little coat from a piece of woolen cloth. I also added a small stone—a smooth, elongated Rhine pebble—which I had painted with watercolors so that it formed a lower and an upper half. For quite some time this little stone accompanied me in my trouser pocket; it was his stone, and the whole story was a great secret of which I understood nothing. I secretly carried the box with the little man up to the forbidden attic (forbidden because the floorboards were worm-eaten and rotten and therefore dangerous) and hid it there behind a beam supporting the roof. I felt immense satisfaction at the thought that no one would discover the box; I knew that no one would uncover and spoil my secret. I felt safe, and the tormenting feeling of inner division within me disappeared.”
— Jung, Autobiography, p. 18
When there is no suitable person who can understand you, this role can temporarily be fulfilled even by a wooden little man hidden in your pencil case. True healing, however, takes place when the sharing is with another human being—as Jung, Gopi Krishna, and many others later did through their books. Through them, it becomes healing also for people with similar experiences and kindred secrets. Thus we arrive at the role of the secret in the individuation process and in society through the creation of secret societies that provide an environment and conditions for differentiation from the dominant religious doctrine—such as esoteric teachings, Freemasonry, alchemy, and others. All of them, as Jung calls them, are “intermediate stages in the separation of the individual from the collective conscious”:
“From the very emergence of society, the necessity of creating secret organizations was recognized. Even where there are no sufficient grounds for keeping any secrets, such secrets are invented, and access to their ‘understanding’ or ‘mastery’ is granted only to the privileged or the initiated. This is the case with the Rosicrucians, as well as with many others. By a curious irony of fate, among these pseudo-secrets there are also genuine secrets, neither known nor even suspected by the initiates—for example, in secret societies that have adopted their ‘secret’ chiefly from the alchemical tradition.”
— Jung, Autobiography, p. 337
In the time in which we live, we are witnessing something very interesting—the very secret societies in question are beginning to share their secrets. Knowledge that until recently was hidden is beginning to become public. Esoteric teachings that in the past were accessible only to a few are becoming public property through countless books published in multimillion print runs, and the popularity of titles containing the word “secret” is striking. The well-known book by the founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky—The Secret Doctrine—is one of the clearest harbingers of the mass emergence of ancient esoteric knowledge into the light.
It is evident that humanity—that is, the society in which we live—has a desperately great need for healing, if such a process is taking place. The irony is that the revelation of the “secret” does not automatically lead to an understanding of the hidden knowledge contained within it. The secret, in fact, was never a secret. It has always been before our eyes—like the open book of Nature, whose signs can be understood only by people such as the third gardener in the Sufi tale, who, before beginning to understand the secrets of Nature, first mastered the “secrets of turning the staff.”
What I am increasingly beginning to understand is that the most hidden obvious secret of our time is the Dark Face of God—that the force from which we are created has not only a luminous but also a dark aspect. This is the face of our Shadow, turned into a secret because either we do not want to see it or we find it difficult to do so. This is the Antichrist—one of the names of the collective shadow, of which our own shadow is also a part. “The emperor has no clothes” has been true for a very long time, yet still only a few dare to see this truth and even fewer to speak it.
Secrets will continue to exist as long as we persist in seeing evil outside ourselves and, instead of fighting our own demons, see only those of others. As long as we revere only two of the faces of the One—the first, Brahma the Creator, and the second, Vishnu the Preserver—while turning our gaze away from Shiva the Destroyer. And yet it is he who, through the death he brings, clears the path for the new, for change, and for progress. His consort, Shakti, is another name for kundalini energy, whose function is likewise to clear the way through destruction.
Shiva, Shakti, the Antichrist peer out from the depths of every secret. They are images of the Shadow we hide behind our backs but see in others. It hides with particular eagerness behind the back of every modern neurotic who wants to be only white and good and fiercely defends his innocence. It follows especially closely on the heels of all enthusiastic newcomers who have recently set out on the spiritual path and who do not yet know that this path is thorny and solitary—it is called Golgotha. It is the demon with whom Jacob wrestled. It is the unknown and the rejected that erupts from our own unconscious and makes us ashamed and afraid.
That is why it is good to know that there is nothing personal in this Shadow. It is simply the way balance occurs in human life—if we look at this face instead of fleeing from it or fighting it, we will discover that it pursues us only because within it lies the path to humility, wisdom, freedom, and the new. There is no other path. The path to change is the path that passes through death.
In its essence, the secret is knowledge—hidden knowledge. Its opposite is manifest knowledge. The criteria for evaluating knowledge are not moral categories—good or evil—but scientific ones: we seek to determine whether the knowledge is true or false. If we want to understand whether our “hidden knowledge” is true, we must subject it to testing. When it comes to the things we think about ourselves, this test consists of the facts of our lives.
We may think how courageous we are, yet in reality remain fearfully silent when we must speak our truth. We may think how generous and magnanimous we are, while our minds are incessantly filled with thoughts of revenge and judgment. We may think how great we are, yet not a single scientific discovery or any other achievement bears our name. This is the healing power of bringing the secret into the open—it is an encounter with truth.
When we know that what we reject in ourselves and are ashamed of is part of the Dark Face of God, things become easier to deal with. You see—there is nothing personal in the dark face of God! Within us, too, there is a particle of this darkness, and in this sense nothing human is foreign to us. Inner darkness becomes Great because of rejection, fear, shame, and misunderstanding.
When you understand that light is nothing other than consciousness, you begin to laugh together with the angel with whom you have struggled for so long. Without him, you would have understood neither who you are nor what your strength is.
There are no more secrets. There is only you and your truth, which you choose with whom, when, and how to share. There is no fear—there is only strength: the strength to be faithful to yourself. If you have long been in the dungeon—imprisoned by the fear of the secret—once you step into the light, nothing else matters except who you are and what your own truth is.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
