How the Fire of an Engaged Life Will Transform Your Identity - A Jungian Perspective
Fire represents the intensity of an engaged life.
Without the fire of love or desire, hatred or conflict, there’d be little change or movement.
Neuroses are bound to arise when you smother your fire, sapping your energy and filling you with resentment.
Fire can bring suffering, but it can also bring growth.
It’s destructive and creative: it is life itself.
The moth and the phoenix are both associated with fire. For Jungian analyst Bud Harris, they represent metaphors for transformation.
Harris’s message is this: fully engage in life like the moth, and you will transform like the phoenix.
A weird sentence, admittedly. Let’s explore it in more detail.
The moth
The moth seeks out the flame until it’s devoured by it.
This image is often used as a metaphor for the mystical path – one seeks some form of divine love or being that will fully consume them, allowing them to transcend this life.
However, for Harris, it’s a shallow metaphor, a form of ‘narcissistic mysticism’ that betrays a longing to be swaddled in love or security.
In Jungian discourse, the true mystical path involves transformation through self-knowledge.
The Self is the divine guide that points us towards the things we need to face and carry to reach wholeness. Achieving this wholeness requires that we’re ‘twice born’.
What does it mean to be twice born?
Jung used the term 'twice born' to refer to the second 'birth' that's necessary for transformation. We're all first born from our parents. Our second birth comes if we can return to our unconscious and be born again transformed.
Before being twice born, you live inauthentically and fail to craft an identity separate from that of your family or culture. You demand approval, blindly follow convention, and are driven by some form of spiritual impoverishment.
Unconscious and fearful, you may seek security in the ‘good life’ of your culture, ignoring or repressing that inner sense that you’re living an illusion. Your life is carefully controlled, and you avoid confronting your fears and insecurities.
How to become twice born
Jung defined God as that which challenges you to transformation when you least expect it. So, from a Jungian perspective, your suffering can be understood as divine intervention, challenging you to seek the consciousness required to change.
As the Self is the divine within you – that which longs for growth and wholeness – it will put things in your path that demand a heroic response. These things will be based on your unconscious elements, your fears, your insecurities, and other repressed or unintegrated parts of yourself that are preventing your transformation.
To become twice born, you must carry the burden of these challenges, not try to overcome or control them. This means addressing fear and discomfort when they arise, as well as willingly venturing into your unconscious to meet the darker parts of your psyche.
As you develop your consciousness through self-knowledge, you separate yourself from the symbolic parents of your culture and your instincts, emerging from the illusion of your identity the way a butterfly emerges from its chrysalis.
Only self-knowledge will transform your complexes and the desire to regress to the comfort of convention when faced with difficulty. Once twice born, you understand that the divine creates by transformation, and you can become co-creator of the world with the divine.
Becoming twice born demands an unrelenting attraction to life akin to the moth's attraction to the flame. You must pursue the adventure and purpose of your life until nothing remains.
Therefore, the image of the moth represents full engagement in life.
The phoenix
The mythological phoenix is a symbol of rebirth and renewal. When it feels its time of death nearing, it builds a nest and sets it on fire with the heat of its own body, allowing itself to be consumed by the flames. Out of its ashes, a new, young phoenix rises, beginning the cycle again.
The phoenix represents the destructive and creative process inherent in all transformation. An old self must burn away before a new one can emerge. Destruction can bring new perspectives, meanings, and inspiration that initiate unexpected transformations.
Therefore, the phoenix represents the transformation that occurs as a result of full engagement in life.
To summarise, fully engaging in life by growing in self-knowledge and integrating your unconscious elements will bring transformation.