This is an edited excerpt from a much longer blog post. http://jhibbett.blogspot.com/2011/09/pilgrimagenovember-13-2005edited_04.html. Some of the dreams and visions mentioned below are describe in another post: http://jhibbett.blogspot.com/2011/10/god-man-woman-and-lovedecember-12-2010.html Otherwise this tribute to my brothers fully stands alone.
Let me begin this by considering the difference between the full blown bewilderment of a presently diagnosed Schizophrenia and what can become a significant, life enhancing/transforming, creative encounter with inner symbolic Sacred realities. They are very similar. On the surface they look the same. Both will be filled with religious images and language. Both receive very strong, dazzling, sometimes horrifying, sometimes sublime ecstatic experience.
This is why my family and brothers were so rightly concerned about me in my first strong encounters with such inner images in 1985. My brothers' concern for me saved my life. I was so wrestling alone with such strong inner archetypal energies/ideas in Houston in the Spring of '85 that I became nearly unable to fully distinguish 'inner from outer' reality. My truck was packed, my apartment was immaculate, I was physically fit. But I could not yet gain inner conscientious permission to leave Houston and go home.
Thus I was on the verge of not functioning effectively enough in outer life to sufficiently keep taking care of myself. I was at a full blown breaking point of serious proportions and was aware of it. Four of my brothers, without my having any notice, drove to Houston, entered my apartment and insisted that I return to our AL hometown. I strongly resisted but thanks to their courageous insistence, and the help of a carefully injected sedative, over my preferred will I surrendered to them and my life was saved that day.
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| Rufus Hibbett And His Seven Sons @ 1975 |
Some context to this: The six months preceding I had worked for a reputable group selling life insurance in Houston. By means of unaccountable grace I had managed each month to make significantly more income than I had ever made in my life. Thus I had the relief of mind that my family was not suffering financially, but I knew the psychological tensions and hurts were growing. But my internal situation and motivation quickly changed leaving me unable to even consider making another sales call. The week before my brothers arrived I had sold everything of value I had to buy food. My utilities were cut off. I knew that same morning that the next experience I was going to have was to scavenge for food. I had already coached myself, 'Jim, you are not the first or the last person who has been so humbled by the brute forces of nature and life. You will do what you have to do.' Amidst this my brothers arrived.
After this major rescuing project of brotherly love, for the next five months my brothers consistently looked after me and my family who were still back in Illinois. One brother gave me a job and paid me more than I was worth at that time. My brothers took turns having me live with them during the next three months while I stayed in our AL hometown of Florence. At my request my brothers found a Jungian trained therapist in Birmingham and escorted me there to first meet him. For nearly three months I drove there to work with him twice a week. What makes all their support and concern even more admirable is they did all this without having any explanation or possible appreciation of 'why' their little brother(41 years old) had fallen into such totally unexpected straits and was expressing such revised beliefs. When such an archetypal scenario is playing out in real life it often offers no conventional explanation. And when humans have no clear explanations imaginations run wild. I experienced a good deal of that happening with regards to my life process as it unfolded. Except for Jungian thought I also had no explanation.
After this major rescuing project of brotherly love, for the next five months my brothers consistently looked after me and my family who were still back in Illinois. One brother gave me a job and paid me more than I was worth at that time. My brothers took turns having me live with them during the next three months while I stayed in our AL hometown of Florence. At my request my brothers found a Jungian trained therapist in Birmingham and escorted me there to first meet him. For nearly three months I drove there to work with him twice a week. What makes all their support and concern even more admirable is they did all this without having any explanation or possible appreciation of 'why' their little brother(41 years old) had fallen into such totally unexpected straits and was expressing such revised beliefs. When such an archetypal scenario is playing out in real life it often offers no conventional explanation. And when humans have no clear explanations imaginations run wild. I experienced a good deal of that happening with regards to my life process as it unfolded. Except for Jungian thought I also had no explanation.
Fortunately some people's imaginations are very kind and they look for the best, not the unseemly, sensational or worst. I am grateful that my brothers and my wife and children actually helped protect me from the storm by offering up the most kind and encouraging explanations.
As months went by I became able to sort out the archetypes and their message to me so I could receive their revelatory meanings without being overwhelmed by them. I learned, with much effort and practice, and help from my Jungian therapist, to distinguish clearly between 'inner and outer.' With the seriously mentally ill person the fragile ego (What and who we consciously consider ourselves to be.) is shattered and he takes the images coming in from the Collective Unconscious( from the spiritual realm or God) as his personal revelation and a description of his or her self identity. He fails to keep his 'personal ego' distinct from the images from the Collective Unconscious. This results in the seriously ill person making claims of 'being God' or some other important archetypal being or power. The archetypal powers have at that point taken over or 'possessed' the fragile ego. This person is now fully 'split'(schizo) and retains no longer clearly who he was in his ego personality.
As months went by I became able to sort out the archetypes and their message to me so I could receive their revelatory meanings without being overwhelmed by them. I learned, with much effort and practice, and help from my Jungian therapist, to distinguish clearly between 'inner and outer.' With the seriously mentally ill person the fragile ego (What and who we consciously consider ourselves to be.) is shattered and he takes the images coming in from the Collective Unconscious( from the spiritual realm or God) as his personal revelation and a description of his or her self identity. He fails to keep his 'personal ego' distinct from the images from the Collective Unconscious. This results in the seriously ill person making claims of 'being God' or some other important archetypal being or power. The archetypal powers have at that point taken over or 'possessed' the fragile ego. This person is now fully 'split'(schizo) and retains no longer clearly who he was in his ego personality.
Anyone who visited me in my worst times knows that was never my situation. If necessary I could usually consistently make the other person believe I was experiencing nothing unusual by keeping the archetypal material containeded within myself. But had I not had 'safe' places to let this inner life be expressed to understanding persons I would have been overtaken by it and become very seriously ill as a result.
This is what has always horrified humans when they see it has happened to a loved one. Ancient people called it a 'loss of soul' or 'demon possession'. Today we experience such a struggling person as fully and frighteningly mentally ill. Most anyone can see this happening with a trip to the psychological ward of any Hospital. There is more religious language in that setting than most churches. This is because all religions were begun by literally interpreting an upsurge of archetypal images. Jungian thought, and I know of no other more fully in our day, helps one to see what is happening and to realize the reality of the power of archetypal energies are for good or ill.
This is what has always horrified humans when they see it has happened to a loved one. Ancient people called it a 'loss of soul' or 'demon possession'. Today we experience such a struggling person as fully and frighteningly mentally ill. Most anyone can see this happening with a trip to the psychological ward of any Hospital. There is more religious language in that setting than most churches. This is because all religions were begun by literally interpreting an upsurge of archetypal images. Jungian thought, and I know of no other more fully in our day, helps one to see what is happening and to realize the reality of the power of archetypal energies are for good or ill.
In my situation in 1985 my ego it seems was consistently able to distinguish between the archetypal material of the Collective Unconscious(This is the image and a Jungian name given for the deep eternal source of all collective human experience that has ever been. This is what people of all times and cultures have called the Sacred or God.) and thus to not completely overwhelm my ego identity.
Like my brothers' love and actions on my behalf I can only be grateful: that my ego had acquired, through my particular training and personal experiences, by that time in my life, age 41, just enough strength to withstand the onslaught of the Collective Unconscious and its living archetypal energies in both their positive and negative powers. I shudder at how horribly different things could have worked out rather than how they, by a measure of grace, have.
So when the individual's ego manages to stay intact, however weak and threatened with annihilation, the conclusions an individual eventually reaches about life and reality are significantly changed than what they were going in. Hopefully I am, with these dreams and especially with the 'visions' (No better word seems appropriate unless one prefers 'contained creative temporary hallucinations'.) I had beginning in August 1985, an example of this better outcome. That my ego (with the supporting help of some caring and informed others) did not fly apart and send me into a state of identity with the figures of the Collective Unconscious. I was able to keep recalling that I was 'the human Jim Hibbett, father of Sheri, Brent and Ryan and husband of Beverly. I was born and raised by caring parents at 637 N Cherry St.'
If a person were prone to psychological schizophrenia had the dreams and experiences above he would likely be telling his friends of it and insisting that he is Jesus or some other God figure. And he would be totally convinced of it. After 28 years (2012) of experiencing rather closely many archetypal images and powers I am in little danger of such a misinterpretation. Surely I was at serious risk of it before, like the mid-May day in 1985 when my brothers appeared at my Houston apartment. But I am not aware of my small, struggling but essential ego even once deserting me completely to the force of the archetypes. My ego was always present and observing and frequently asking questions about what the hell was going on.
I am here attempting to faithfully describe these things as I experienced them and as I later read Jung describe similar things. That is why his work was genuinely 'life-saving' to me.
The way I had been sincerely taught to literally/physically interpret the Bible stories was of little help to me then. And with my present revised views of the nature of the Bible I am able to see how the Biblical stories and images inform us about such realities of the 'unseen' archetypal world. That in fact imo is what most religious text is symbolically, not primarily literally/historically, describing. It seems very important that modern persons grasp this difference. No doubt my rich Bible-story background was helping more than I realized at the time. I was personally experiencing some of those same archetypal stories/energies which are part of all our common human Collective Unconscious. So their messages are richly more real to me than before this encounter with them.
I am very grateful that I was inadvertently, or in Jungian language synchronystically, exposed to some central Jungian thought before the archetypal energy broke through to me with such authoritative force. I often encouraged people to read Jung if they wished to better understand my story. But I know Jung seems very difficult at first. That is primarily because he is seeking to describe and explain views of life/self/others that are revised from what most Western cultured people have accepted or imagined. I am glad to know Jung is likely to be taken more seriously as the world faces the kinds of personal and societal/mass problems we now have.
Two places Jung can be rather smoothly read are his very late semi-autobiography "Dreams, Memories and Reflections" edited/composed by associate Anelia Jaffe and the book 'C.G. Jung Psychological Reflections 1905-1961"..edited by Jacobi and Hull.
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