Psyche Speaks: A Jungian Approach to Self and World

by Russell Arthur Lockhart

What Jung called the symbolic life is life directed by the symbol. In this sense, the symbol is not an intellectual or conceptual understanding, but an engine pushing for realization and manifestation in this life, in this world.

Verbs relativize the ego, immersing it in something else: "He shadows you," "she animates you," "it projects you." Verb language takes the is out of the superior position, emphasizing not the existence of things, but the relationship between things.

Too often we are left reflecting on life rather than living it.

In this sense the new age is not so much an age of consciousness as it will be an age of the poet—not the poet as noun, not the poet as career, but the necessity of poetry, the seeking by each one of us, a finding and drinking the waters and the milk of the Muses: poetry as verb, poetry as what we do.