THE MAJOR PROBLEMS OF LIVING TO WHICH ONE
MUST GIVE ANSWER AND THE CLASSIC DRAGONS
ONE MEETS EN ROUTE TO THOSE ANSWERS
Introduction
It is obviously healthy and normal to want to increase one’s capacity to work and to enjoy life. It is all too human to hope to arrive at these goals in an easy way. There is nothing wrong with such a wish. It is neither unreasonable nor unrealistic to want to make things easy for oneself – “things” ranging from making a living to making a life. The trouble lies in the order in which one places these goals. The first drive needs to be toward the accomplishment of one’s ends. Whether that is easy or difficult has to become secondary if one prefers arrival at, or at least approach toward, goals to the pursuit of illusions.
Analysis of problems may seem difficult but it is far less so in the long run than facing up to the complications that inevitably accompany lack of analysis. Let us glance, for instance, at the health situation in an underdeveloped land. It is relatively easy to prescribe medicines to lessen physical pain of the ills that beset such a land. But that road is the ineffectual one. However, both the pain and the cause of it could be eliminated by probing for reasons for them, thus determining that parasitic water is responsible and then undertaking to provide potable water. Why cling to the simple measures that accomplish so little when it is possible to analyze the problem? Analysis leads to elimination of a problem at its roots, thus being not only effective but permanently so.
So too with regard to life’s problems in general. An analysis of the major ones indicates they can be summed up under five headings:
The individual’s relationship to the family in which he was born
His place in the economic scheme of things
The questions of sex and marriage
His place in the community
His relationship to himself
To all of these he must give answer. It is secondary whether that answer be “yes” or “no.” But one of these answers must be given. En route to either the affirmative or negative replies to these challenges mankind has always met with the same order of obstacles, classically called “dragons” or “ruffians.”
Let us proceed to a consideration of the major challenges with which life presents us and to which an answer is demanded, to the “dragons” that classically impede progress toward constructive answers and to the nature of the solutions which timeless wisdom – Wisdom lore – offers.
Inasmuch as the take-off point for the ensuing thoughts is a philosophic one, it is incumbent upon me to make clear in what sense I use the term philosophy.
Most of us tend to think of philosophy as a dehydrated subject, remote from human affairs – a field replete with conflicting opinions between rival schools of thought. In order to rescue the field from hands that have thus distorted it into unrecognizable shape, it is necessary to go back to the root-meaning of the word – namely philo-sophia, love of wisdom. And it is in that original and basic sense, and only in that, in which I use the term. Wisdom lore is a synonym of this order of knowledge. In a continual and continuing stream fundamental ideas are transmitted. They are embodied in traditions, scriptures, the great myths, epics and legends, telling in the code language of symbol and allegory of concrete and everyday human experience. This lore of wisdom concerns itself with experiential knowledge, the highest order of knowledge there is. It confronts the human situation in its totality, in all its complexity, weaving back and forth from the general to the specific. The fabric woven is strong and dependable, with the experience of every era affirming and reaffirming the validity of this order of knowledge time without end.
That which was ever essentially wise in principle, remains so, no matter what waves of intellectualism break over it. The basis from which objective reality is identified as such and evaluated does not change. What changes from age to age is the clothing it wears, the words in which it is conveyed, the verification it receives from each newly uncovered sets of facts and concepts based on them – all things which are requirements for establishing both its validity and its relevance to each era it passes through. Indelible are the tracks it leaves and thus always traceable.
Philosophic thinking, in this basic meaning, illuminates not only the human drama – both individual and social – of its own time but of subsequent times. In fact, that is one of the ways in which it is to be cognized. True philosophy concerns itself with the human condition, the principles which govern it and its development from lower to higher stages. A little further along we shall see how philosophy deals with abstractions such as these.
Despite the obvious chaos of the day on the economic, social and political levels of life, underneath it, order prevails. Were it not for that basic, though not obvious order, scientific research would have nothing to move toward. Philosophy’s central concern is to teach of that order. The central concern of science is to discover that order step by step. There has also been an emotional approach to that search. That is embodied in religions; in fact is the substance of religions down the ages.
That there has been some progress – at least on the surface – from chaos toward order is evident. But it has, for the most part, been accomplished by trial and error. Not only is that procedure painfully slow but also far more wasteful than it has to be – wasteful of human lives, of human well-being and of natural resources.
The thinking age we are advancing into is pointing toward a wiser way of solving the multitudinous social and individual dilemmas of the day. Many the good mind that is searching for answers to such central questions as: Does basic order exist? If it does, how is one to find it? Is there a basic direction life can and should take in order to be deeply constructive, a direction validated by scientific findings, independent of wishes or fears? Can the individual gain knowledge of it? Is there an evolutionary process, on levels additional to physical evolution? If so, is it discernible and verifiable?
Knowledge about the evolutionary process which is taking place on all levels of individual life – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual, is becoming increasingly available and is putting the intelligent inquirer in the way of finding answers to these vital questions.
The greatest of minds of all ages have taught about the evolutionary progressions in their philosophic and religious teachings – instructions which generalized their insights into developmental processes. It remains for the analytical minds of today to add the specifics about them. Thus to the profound insights of philosophy and religion are being added those gained from science and psychology, the other two main fields of human endeavor.
Philosophy has summed up the ills and evils of mankind under three classical headings – greed, lust and pride, and has symbolized them by the three classical animals – the wolf, the leopard and the lion respectively. For thousands of years it has used them – singly or as a composite – to stand for those elements in human nature which stand in the way of growth. Modern psychology – the psychology of the unconscious – fully accepts the insights of philosophy and adds to them two further forces that impede progress – the father-dragon, which epitomizes authority, and the mother-dragon, which represents inertia, love of the comfortable – constituting the five forces in life which block progress. They are called, for short, the five classic dragons, and they allegorize the common and the dominant experiences of mankind – experiences no one can escape or evade. One may prefer not to talk of them but they are no more to be avoided than death. Thus, in a sense, all humanity, in being faced with the same situation, is fused into one – a realization which could enhance one’s sense of brotherhood with all humanity if the dynamics of this philosophic and psychological fact could become operative.
Philosophy and religions have always addressed their teachings to the forces standing in the way of man’s growth. Generalizations about them, exhortations and preachments warning, threatening, pleading that mankind push them aside, remove itself from the temptations these forces offer have done a little to hold down the devastation they cause. But, despite the good intentions to control them, despite the prodigious labor expended in the hope of overcoming them, the facts force one to grant that the efforts toward progress have been relatively ineffectual.
The problem is a complex one, and it is immature to hope that there can be simple solutions for it. There can be solutions but they must be based on an understanding of the many-sidedness of the problem. The breaking down into its component parts is the easiest, because most effective, way toward finding solutions of complex matters. Happily one of the contributions of this scientific age is its concern for analysis, its acceptance of the need to move from generalities to specifics. So let us move toward specifics about the five classic dragons and the winning of mastery over them in the normal course of the evolutionary process.
We will the better be able to see what part they play in the everyday living of any time and place by considering the problems every adult must give answer to, for it is en route to these answers that everyone encounters the five dragons. So much by way of generalities which see things whole. And now as to specifics.
The major problems are:
1) The individual must find a satisfactory relationship to the family in which he was born – either staying dependent upon it or not but making a conscious choice. It is unimportant whether he stays with the family physically or moves away. What is important is that he decide as a psychologically independent person.
2) He must find a place in the world of work. This problem concerns itself with his finding his place in the economics of his time and place.
3) He must face the questions of sex and marriage, and if he or she marries, the question of the setting up of the new family. Again it is relatively unimportant whether he answers this set of questions “yes” or “no”. What is important is that he evade no part of it out of either fear or weakness.
4) The fourth problem concerns itself with his standing in the community, his struggles, his decisions re finding his place in relation to his environment and thus paying some part of his debt to society – all to be faced consciously and forthrightly.
5) The fifth and last has to do with the individual’s relationship to himself. Here the questions to be faced up to are along such lines as “When I call upon myself, do I find someone home?” “What responsibility do I carry to grow up?” “How is this responsibility for myself to be seen as something wholly other than narrow self-centeredness?” “Do I accept responsibility for all that I both am and am not, and how do I follow through on that recognition?” “Do I distinguish between ‘aloneness’ and loneliness?” “How do I move away from chaos and confusion in my being and toward order and clarity?”
Under one or another of these five headings fall the problems confronting everyone in the course of a lifetime. Few meet them all successfully or in such a way that they find peace and happiness in their answers to them. Usually there are frustrations of one kind or another. All too often there are conflicts with the environment and/or within oneself. Either we dodge the challenges of the surrounding conditions of life or we succumb to them too weakly, becoming conformists to the coloration of the moment and so not meet the challenges in the self. Unless the effort is made to find one’s way between the too little or the too much in relation to the environment one is likely to be beset with conflict, indecision, frustration, discontent, boredom and restlessness.
We may become swamped in the economic struggle becoming absorbed in material interests when either financially successful or trying to be or envying those who are. In other words, we can be positively or negatively consumed by the economic picture. If negatively attached to this problem – i.e., by lack of fulfillment – a feeling of inferiority can easily present itself.
Type has much to say as to what part of things we tend to stress. The materialist will devote the major part of his energy to becoming a financial success in order to gain power and possessions. The sensualist may become enmeshed in sense experience and sex. He may then get into difficulty not only with people around him but also within himself or herself for there are likely to be other trends, other faculties pulling in other directions, often repressed or ignored. Or one may be a mental type and may have learned quite a few facts about the world. One may even have organized them into a small field of knowledge. The behavior of such a type may be quite acceptable on the surface but be subject to eruptions from the re-pressed side, the emotional life. Perhaps bursts of anger, or envy, selfishness or malice may overthrow his conscious control, often causing embarrassment if not shame.
We may be held by appetites here, fears or ambitions there, and endless desires – now in this direction, now in that – for pleasures, for clothes, for status, for learning, for power, for love. Thus, groups of feelings and trends of one kind and another build the motley selves which conflict and are the source of disorder in the self and in society.
Our interest at this point is not in specific behavior patterns or conflicts or psychological types. Rather, we shall try to see how these problems and dilemmas block the life that should grow out and expand, become rich in experience, how values are to be drawn from experience and added to evolving life. The behaviors referred to in this swift review of average human conditions are really all examples of un-balance. This uncomfortable state is the undesirable, yet inevitable concomitant of the expenditure of either too much or too little of the self in response to life’s challenges. They are not distinctive of our times. They have always been known and are summed up in what are called the five classic dragons. To make headway in the kind of answers we give to life’s problems, we need to know how to conquer the dragons which beset our path.
It is important, first of all, to keep in mind that these dragons are not to be seen as repulsive animals as one ordinarily thinks of them. In this context we are using the term in its allegorical sense which carries the implication of “guardians of treasure.” The first of the dragons we will consider is The Leopard, symbolizing lust. People who are victims of this dragon are always searching for what we might call love-objects. This does not mean always a sex partner, although that is its most direct expression; but they are seeking something that is derived from.a love-object – even possibly candy or cigars. Earlier stages of expression of this dragon’s hold may be on the negative side, as in fears of sex. In either case, this dragon blocks progress.
The psychologist makes a valuable contribution when he points out that much of the hold lust has, comes from the suckling habit, often in the process of weaning. If the child does not wean easily from either breast or bottle, he then is always looking for something to suckle. The psychologist keeps reminding us that the ones who are constantly smoking cigarettes or chewing gum or chomping on cigars, have simply replaced one suckling object with another – so early in life do the sources of these peculiar tendencies come to light.
Some of the cruder aspects of lust have to do with autoeroticism; or sucking of the thumb. The process of growth entails their surrender for another love object. Often that is found in a cause – perhaps a church, a society, social service, something in art – something upon which devotion is expended. It may be quite acceptable to the world. That is not the point here. The point resides in the hold it has. The danger lies in attachment, identification with the love object. Wherever you are caught, whether social or asocial, the dragon, lust, leaves the imprint of the paw upon you. Philosophically speaking, if the love-object has you, whatever it is, it has you; and this is the sign that you are not fighting the dragon.
The dragon’s object is to serve as a beckoning finger for the life force to emerge more and more. Its purpose is to call you out, and out, and out – to ever greater love objects.
Sex, in which lust has its roots, is for two purposes: for the production of bodies and for the production of those overtones of union in the sex act that give the ecstasy of the physical experience. The overtones are the beckoning finger that has to do with the merging of masculine (drive, initiative for instance) and feminine (receptivity, wisdom) principles of life in both the male and female to the making of a new state to productivity on higher levels. Most people unaware of the expansion of life available to them, are content with the literal aspect of sex. And so they are caught by the non-fighting of this dragon. Other signs of not doing battle with this dragon, beside non-production of new stages of life beyond the physical are jaded appetites, satiation and depletion.
The leopard, the symbol of lust, the dragon of sense experience, has curious treasures which he is guarding. All manner of friendships, for instance, are love objects of a higher order. This dragon guards such treasures as fellowship and affection, and he beckons life toward them. If the beckoning goes unheeded because the being is still in the too early stages of evolution, this dragon continues to exercise sovereignty over the material and physical aspects of life as if they comprised totality. Not until battle with him is undertaken, not until he is challenged as to whether his claims of totality are valid, does he reveal the treasures he is guarding and hiding.
As the leopard represents lust, that overdrawn account on the outgoing side of life, so the wolf symbolizes greed, the over-expenditure of energy on the intake side. Both tendencies, carried to extremes, undercut the purpose of life. Wordsworth epitomizes the destructive power of these two dragons thus, “Getting and spending we lay waste our lives.”
Greed, symbolized by the wolf, runs a gamut from mild to extreme. All the tendency to have, to acquire, carried to extremes, becoming an end in itself, is to be seen as greed.
In psychology, biology and physiology it is noted that man is the only animal that eats when it is not hungry and indulges in sex when he is not in heat. Having these propensities he is in great danger of the wolf. The greeds are many, sometimes open, sometimes secret. They may have started in childhood with the possession of toys. If the child has not been happily or progressively led on to other things, possession gets them. And then there may be throughout life a wolf-like craving for more and more, to get and keep getting. Such folk may end up by being a miser, hoarding gold or possessions.
They may collect stamps. If a person is too much identified with his collections – be it stamps, antiques, seashells – and it is a compulsion for him, he is greedy, though outwardly he is doing no harm. The measure is what these experiences are doing to the soul. The stamp-collector may be as greedy in the matter of stamps, with as much danger to his soul as is the case with gold. If he collects for pleasure or relaxation, it is fine. It is when collections are a compulsion, something which “has” him instead of a person having the collection, that we see the mark of the dragon. It is a fallacy, however, to think the opposite approach of not seeking to possess anything is the answer. This is a denial of life and its challenges. Evasion stems out of weakness and has never been the means toward fuller, richer living.
Sometimes greeds run along unbridled and are asocial – like the hoarding of gold, clothes or even newspapers. These we call pathological. But there are many that go unrecognized that society does not object to as the collectors of stamps, for instance. Wherever the zeal to collect is on the too-much side, the dragon has you. He has you when you fail to see the signs of his presence, or when seeing them, do not fight him. In proportion as you begin to fight him he does not have you.
Greed may be for candy, handkerchiefs, furniture, automobiles. It may be for something immediate – like food, or to put into the house – knick-knacks or paintings. There are, however, people who are greedy on other levels of life – for instance, greedy for praise. Such people go about trying to do acts, seemingly selfless even, or make statements, that will bring praise.
On the mental level there are those who are greedy for facts. There we have both greed and pride. Sometimes pride is stronger, sometimes greed. In either case, their main reason for reading book after book on many a current topic is more for the sake of making a good impression than to learn.
All five dragons are on stage simultaneously. It is not a case of one or another of them offering a threat or challenge. They are all knocking at everyone’s gate. We do not do well to give major attention to one and neglect the others. If we are too acquisitive, for instance, life becomes sour to us. We get that way because there is not enough of other experience. With too many eggs in the one basket – greed or its forerunner – then the domains of the other four dragons may receive less attention than is their due. We need the dangers and the promise of expanding life implicit in all five vast areas of life.
If, then, greed plays too large a role and life has lost its savor, the accompanying emotion is pessimism. In compensation for that feeling, such persons tend to be over-critical of others. They worry greatly about money and are often sick about it, about status, about their standing in the community, etc. Extreme cases become pathological. One of the aberrations of the greed- or hoarding-tendency is melancholia – a typical resort of people too much interested in themselves. They have become too absorbed in what they are getting or trying to get – and are giving too little of themselves. The wolf remains the classic symbol of this imbalance.
Understanding the nature of the inroads this dragon can make leads toward finding the treasure he guards. He is an ideal guide for helping mankind find the middle of the road. A healthy amount of experience in his domain teaches that we are to be not too greedy but must also be greedy enough; to be wisely acquisitive; not too much spending but wisely disbursing the powers of the self.
The dragon we next come to – pride – is less obvious than lust and greed. When there are blatant prides there is no trouble identifying them as such. It is the subtle prides that often elude discovery. They are not any less operative and destructive for all that. Pride derives from what has already been accomplished. This tendency to identify oneself with work done enlarges ego-feeling and inflates a notion of self-importance. We have a right to be happy about the amount of work done but not proud. An understanding appreciation of what we have accomplished, which makes for self-respect, is different from pride. Closely associated with ego-feeling are the inferiority and superiority complexes – exaggerations either way; envy, fear and anger also accompany pride. In the superiority complex, where people identify themselves with having achieved much, they tend toward delusions of grandeur and either consciously or unconsciously scorn others. Sometimes they really have achieved things but they exaggerate in order to gratify the egotistic feeling.
The hunger in the deeps of everyone’s being is to achieve great things, to be the hero. The lion is more the symbol of this drive than any of the other dragons. His role is to challenge the individual to evolve as much of the potentialities of his soul as he possibly can. When we do not do that there is such pain, such sorrow in the deeps of one’s being that one does either of two things: either struts, so as to fool oneself as well as others; or else depreciates himself and his powers and says he cannot. They only cannot because they do not. Instead of drawing out their possibilities they have all sorts of antagonisms, are filled with hate toward others and continuously seek ways of pulling others down. All these negatives, added to the sense of guilt over not doing what it is theirs to do, deprive them of the ability to mix well with others. Not having done much, there is nothing much they can stand on. Insomnia is one of the signs of this dragon’s hold and is more intimately connected with him than with any of the others.
The object of the lion is to beckon us on to do more and more and at the same time to help us learn to avoid identification with the qualities and/or deeds achieved en route. The fruit of engaging the lion in battle is an understanding appreciation of what one is – in other words, self-respect. The lion hides this treasure, yielding it only when the individual has matured enough not to identify himself with his accomplishments but to be able to recognize the valid place to which his labors entitle him.
The pride-aspect of the lion recedes when we accept the challenge his preliminary role offers. Then there emerges, instead, his hero-aspect – the hero in us – and he becomes the symbol of courage.
The psychology of the unconscious contributes much insight into two further roadblocks in the path of growth – the father-dragon and the mother-dragon. They have been, of course, identified as such in ancient wisdom but it has remained for the modern psychology to become specific about their everyday workings.
cannot avoid carrying the earmarks of non-fighting – namely ignorance and its concomitant inferiority feelings.
As we do our part in replacing unconsciously accepted standards with those we consciously arrive at, we are gaining more and more understanding of the father-dragon’s later role. That role is to reveal the treasure it has been his to guard. When the readiness and strength is at hand to replace lesser authorities with ever greater ones, the beneficent nature of the treasure stands forth. Gradual conquest of the father-dragon releases capacity for self-reliance and sound, independent thinking, aspects of the hero-stuffs present potentially in everyone.
The fifth and last of the classic blocking forces of life is known to us in terms of modern psychology as the mother-dragon. She represents the alluring figure behind us who would keep us comfortable. Often a hidden cooperation operates between this power and that of the father-dragon. When we fear going forth into self-reliance and independent thinking, and fall back into safety – or so we think it -, we are being thrown from the “father” into the arms of the “mother.” To consent to this buffeting, however unconscious that consent may be, is to stay as we were. We become smug, immune to all those things that would incite us out into danger and then rationalize that it is better so.
Thus the mother dragon which lures and seems so comforting and “beneficent” is, to use the terms of modern psychology, “terrible” – the more terrible because it is outwardly so deceptive, so subtle and so harmful. She stands for inertia, the hold of the comfortable and the familiar. People who pine for past happiness, for protection or safety are in the grip of this dragon. It represents the Edenic pull and is the psychological explanation of laziness. Fussiness is another sign of it. Evading the challenge not only of the father-dragon but of any of the other ones tends to throw the individual back into the arms of the mother. When he starts to fight, the difficulty can become worse for the moment; and then it is important to watch out. In the early stages of the effort to move away from the pseudo-comfort of the old and toward courageous thinking and living in more valid terms, there is a tendency to wish one’s eyes hadn’t opened. When the difficulties of newer, sounder ways present themselves, and one becomes inclined to think, “I wish I hadn’t started this,” this is the time to take heed. This thought is sounding the warning that one has fallen back into the arms of the mother. To quote Jung on this point, “Every obstacle which blocks life’s path and threatens the individual’s ascent, wears the shadowy features of the terrible mother, who paralyzes his energy with the consuming poison of the stealthy, retrospective longing.”
The workings of this dragon are so numerous and powerful because it is self-evident that it is easier to slide down-hill than to make the effort to climb uphill. To remain comfortable in ways of old – to be in one’s own little room, to hark tack to the past, to hope for the return of security one had in the old – is to proclaim loyalty to non-growth and the mother-dragon.
Sometimes the literal mother fosters and intensifies these tendencies. All too often she smothers the child’s drive toward independence by solving his problems for him, by encouraging too long his dependence on her, by approving his tendency to go along lines of least resistance. She is lulled into enjoyment of prolongation of the child’s need for her ministrations. Blinded by that pleasure, she is unaware of the fact that she is making a psychological cripple out of him.
This dragon, like the others, also guards treasure. The precious prize it zealousy guards is re-birth. In proportion to one’s letting go of the hold the longing for ease may have on one, to the gradual replacement of sloth, laziness and inertia by pioneering into new paths of learning and living, to that extent one brings about the birth of new stages of consciousness.
Mankind has always experienced the same major problems of living and has always been aware of the dragon-forces impeding progress on the way toward constructive answers to those challenges. In ancient times wise leaders have told of them in allegories.
Let us consider some of the generalized ways of old for they do much to shed light on the role the dragon-forces play in life.
Everywhere in the old traditions these forces are allegorized as animals. The animals differ. Sometimes the first three dragons are compacted as in the Judgment Scene, the ancient Egyptian mural to be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. Behind the figure of Thoth is a creature made up of three parts – a crocodile, a leopard and a hippopotamus – the Egyptian version of the three dragons, lust, pride and greed. In this mural the soul, upon passing, is being judged. If it fails to pass the test – a most delicate weighing by means of a feather-weight – the soul is given to this triple being – Ammit – to be devoured. What does that allegory mean? It is picturing forth the fact of life that if the soul has not overcome these three guardians of treasure, he again falls victim to them; that is, he is devoured by his desires for these things the dragon-forces offer as lures instead of having overcome them. Ammit seems like a monster because, in old allegories, the winning of the treasure dragons hide, is seen as the ideal; and the forces lying across the path toward the ideal are pictured as monstrous. It is in our modern times that we have lost the insights into these processes because we are so enmeshed in the literal, in the study of the immediate, in the physical sciences that we forget the drama taking place behind the obvious. That drama concerns itself with the evolution of life. Conquest of dragons stands for coming upon the treasure they hide, which releases new life. Failure to do battle with the forces that block growth places the dragons in the role of devourers of evolving life.
In modern psychology the father and mother dragons are clearly the devourers of life, for to succumb to the authority of the old is not to advance; and to be content with the state in which one is, is to be in the arms of the “terrible mother”, in a state of fixation. It is in such terms that psychology identifies the deadly influence of non-victorious combat with the dragons.
Among the many pictures out of old myths which illustrate ancient comprehension of our subject, is the Greek story of Pegasus and his rider, Bellerophon. This hero goes out to slay the Chimera, a composite of dragons – a monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a dragon’s tail. The handicapping nature of the dragon-forces is an illusion – chimerical – and yet, paradoxically, remains so only as long as they are not faced and battled with. Bellerophon, the hero-forces in Everyman, is mounted on Pegasus, the winged steed who had been bridled, subdued, disciplined by Athene, the goddess of Wisdom. The horse, Pegasus, represents the power inherent in higher stages of development, a power tinctured with the wisdom normal to expanded consciousness, serves the hero in his undertaking to slay the Chimera. The allegory epitomizes man’s battle with the classic obstacles to progress. When he matures to heroic stature, he can recognize the dragon-forces as an illusion set up to frighten children. At that stage of his growth, – called “the hero” in legend – he has the courage and strength to destroy the illusion – “slay the dragon” – and to come upon the treasure the dragon conceals. Theseus and the Minotaur; land-breathing serpent guarding the pearl – Hymn of the Robe of Glory (Syriac-Gnostic); Jason and Golden Fleece. Jung sums up the hero-nature thus, “The hero is a hero because he sees in every difficulty of life, resistance to the forbidden treasure and fights that resistance with the complete yearning which strives toward the treasure.”
In early stages we are unaware of these forces as dragons but once we perceive their significance, we must learn to overcome them. Not combatting them leads increasingly to feelings of inferiority and fear. Refusal to battle against them inevitably brings with it a sense of futility, a sense of emptiness symptomatic of sickness of the soul. The conquest of them is not an act; it is a process, a matter of degrees. To work on them is to .find them to be means toward helping one arrive at the middle of the road between the pouring of too much of one’s substance into a segment of life and, on the other hand, permitting weakness and fear to cause one to be niggardly about involvement. To accept this training toward balance is to find the way to conscious evolution of stature.
Condensed versions of the blocking factors in life are to be found in many traditions besides the Greek. For instance in the Buddhistic teachings, Gautama referred to them as the five great “hindrances” and classified them as lust, anger (or ill-will), torpor and sloth, restlessness and doubt. In the medieval Christian tradition the forces impeding growth were called sins. Under the heading, the seven deadly sins, Gregory the Great formulated them thus: Gluttony and Avarice (the wolf), Lechery (the leopard), Pride, Anger and Envy (the lion), and Sloth (the mother). The father is not mentioned because the Church stood for authority and naturally it did not teach opposition to itself nor the seeking for authority other than it represented.
Still another way in which the blocking forces are seen is to be found in the Hermetic tradition where they are described as the 12 Ruffians:
- Ignorance 7. Error
- Grief 8. Envy
- Intemperance 9. Guile
- Concupiscence 10. Anger
- Unrighteousness 11. Rashness
- Avarice 12. Malice
Thus it becomes evident there is nothing new in the problems of life nor in the obstacles in the path of constructive answers to them. What is perhaps new is the light modern psychology (psychology of the unconscious) sheds on two important questions they give rise to:
(1) the nature of the blocking forces – dragons
(2) the necessity of battling with them so as to discover the gains resulting from gradual conquest of them.
As first in unconsciousness, we are hapless victims of the dragons. They can and do toss us about at will. It is their role to lure us into indulging too heavily here, into withholding too much there. After whatever amount of buffeting is necessary to catch the point, we begin to note that our blindness has caused undue suffering. It is then that a bit of the hero-stuff in us emerges. Taking courage, we turn to face and question what has, often against our will, been driving us – that unhappy stage described by Paul, “The evil I would not that I do.” Determined to put a stop to the dark toll extracted from us and the bondage we had submitted to while the dragons held sway, there comes the stage, that advance step in evolution, when we undertake to slay them. It is then, and not until then, that what had been devourers of the best in us, help us realize their true nature. Growing insights enable us to see the dragons as the forces that entice the life in us out into experience, beckoning us to develop more and more of our potentials. That part of their work finished – slain – we discover the dragons had been guarding treasure. That treasure – more correctly, those many and varied treasures – reveals itself in terms of quality of being. Conquest of dragons releases to new life, to the production, out of one’s own being, of new states, to further stages of evolution. The point about experience is not merely its essentiality for physical survival but its heightening of awareness so that eventually we can fulfill the obligation to become conscious participants in our own evolution.
Thus the validity of the term “dragon” in relation to the process of maturation begins to be clearer. Its use as a symbol is less for the sake of brevity – although such use has its value – but to convey deeper significance than appears on first glance.