Until you make your unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. – Jung

Scientists have long speculated… there is additional matter we don’t see – dark matter- that exerts an additional gravitational pull, holding the galaxy together. – Brian Greene

For the most part the universe is invisible. We only see about 5% of what’s out there. Because we are unable to see most of what actually exists, our idea of reality doesn’t even come close to resembling what actually is. Physicists call this invisible material dark matter, and it comprises about 25% of the universe. The only reason we know it’s there is because of the effect it has on it’s surroundings. Dark matter is sort of the unseen hand of the universe that makes what’s visible behave the way it does. I know you’re sitting there doing the math and thinking where’s the other 70% of it. The remainder of what makes up the universe is called dark energy, and it’s thought to be everywhere accelerating the expansion of the universe, a cosmic anti-gravity that can’t ever really be seen or known. Unseen and everywhere, sounding familiar?

All that endless empty space we thought was nothing is actually a something. And strangely, or synchronistically, there is something quite similar playing out in our psyches. What’s most visible in the psyche is the ego. We process the world around us through the ego and make sense out of our life with its help. But both Jung and Freud, and all the depth psychologists to follow, believed the ego to be only a fraction of what the total psyche holds. Freud likened it to an iceberg, the ego being the small tip that we can see jutting out of the water, with the greater part resting below the surface. Jung went a bit farther to say that the ego isn’t even the center of our psyche, that there are many more unseen aspects that effect the way we think and feel. So you might be asking if the ego is only a fraction of who we are, where’s the rest of us?

Jung had a term to describe part of that too, it’s called the shadow. It’s all the things we don’t recognize within ourselves but that still exert an influence on how we behave, especially when we ignore its subtle proddings. What’s usually lurking in our shadow are the things the ego doesn’t approve of, the feelings, desires, and thoughts that seem inferior. We can all relate to how these unseen aspects effects us because most likely each of us has encountered someone we just don’t like. There’s no rational reason for it, they didn’t do anything to us, they just get under our skin. In reality they are a trigger for the unseen things within we don’t acknowledge, all the things we don’t like or that irritate us about ourselves. (It can also behave just the opposite when we find someone we are incredibly drawn to, a person that exerts an almost otherworldly pull.) But what is true for both is that the strong feelings that are invoked come from somewhere deep inside of us, and have been unnoticed by us up until this point. It’s our dark matter, all the underlying, unseen forces that influence our lives.

Jung went beyond the shadow, saying there are still deeper aspects influencing us. These are the things which we may never be able to see or understand, and yet they shape the overall picture of who we are. Jung called it the archetypes of the collective unconscious, those symbols and cross-cultural ideas that are alive in all of us within the deepest recesses of our psyche. Archetypes can’t be seen on their own but can be understood through myths, dreams, art, and examining our behaviors. It’s much like the dark energy that pervades the universe. We may feel their effects on us because they operate through us, and within us at all times, but we can’t really know them.

There will always be deeper layers to knowing anything. And the truth is we will always know less, rather than more, about the true reality of our inner and outer universes. Perhaps the truth of knowing doesn’t rely as much on the mind as it does on the heart, the gut, and the hunch. Maybe instinct and intuition tell us more about the truth of ourselves and the world we live in than a testable equation ever could. Just like simple observation leads physicists to a greater understanding about the strange ways the universe works. And there is something so funny about the truth, it always tends to be more far out than what we could’ve ever fabricated. We don’t have to look that deeply into physics to have our mind blown by the workings of the universe. That is Nature revealing Herself, and it isn’t quite what we expected. It is the same for us, the truth of who we are might not be quite as illustrious as we would have it, but we have our own sublime sensibility that unfolds as we look deeper into our own nature. This dark, unseen matter is part of the larger picture. It’s where all the transformation takes place.

We have the opportunity to tap into this dark matter, and see the role it has in influencing our lives. It’s all the inner work. (I’d say we’re a little bit like the CERN super collider, but I think we’ve had enough metaphor for one day.) Our discovery of our own dark matter comes from more writing, dreaming, meditating, drawing, and silence. This is how we put ourselves in touch with the inner recesses that can reveal the biggest secrets.

Sometimes the darkness reveals more about our true nature than the light ever could. Here’s to exploring all that’s unseen.

kb