To rediscover the Mystery, Wonder and Magic of a Symbolic Life
To Explore the Universal Realm
To develop the faculty of Imaginative Thinking
To facilitate the process of Individuation
The difficulty in leading a Symbolic Life, is that merely to be in favour of meaning in human existence does not make knowledge of it a reality. It becomes then a wish that is intellectually supported but not a fact of experience. The meaning of life cannot be told - it has to happen to a person. A symbolic life where meaning is present in any moment of one's life, a meaning that may be completely divorced from cause and effect can only be evoked by a change in attitude, which means a return to our origins - the unconscious, or in religious terms, God.
We at the Alpha Centre aim to invoke the power of the symbol to connect each individual to the universal, to the open ended mystery of the human psyche and to the unknown cosmos, bringing a sense of wonder and awe into everyday life. By its focus on the symbols which arise in dreams, the Alpha Centre hopes to correct modern man's exaggerated reliance on the reasoning process, through invoking a symbolic attitude which stresses image-making, image-using, and the non-rational functions of sensation and intuition.
To Explore the Universal Realm
The existence of the collective unconscious was the most basic and far-reaching discovery of the eminent psychoanalyst, Dr Carl Jung. Through his researches we now know that the individual psyche is not just a product of personal experience, but carries a pre-personal or transpersonal dimension. Dr Jung understood that this reservoir of information, which precedes the individual existence, contains memories of the entire universe of space and time. These universal memories live within everyone, waiting for discovery and translation into virtually any frame of reference, and into any symbolic language.
Symbols are the means through which meaning discloses itself. They elicit a response and involvement from the depths which cannot be evoked by reason. The psyche speaks in symbols and to understand it we must learn its language. The great symbol systems Mythology, Alchemy and the I-Ching could be seen as projections of the Collective Unconscious, providing a matrix and a language to explore the world within.
With the contents of the Collective Unconscious we are dealing with the mystery of the creative ground of being, of everything that is. One of modern psychology's central concerns is that modern man has become alienated from this mythopoeic substratum of his being, and therefore his life lacks meaning and significance for him.
One task of the Alpha Centre is to assist in the building of a bridge to this absolute or "divine ground" as Aldous Huxley would have called it. Through studying symbols, that which is unknown within can be invoked and made perceptible, bringing a revitalisation of the Inner Life.
To develop the faculty of Imaginative Thinking
Symbols are natural and spontaneous products. No genius has ever sat down with a pen and brush in hand and said "Now I am going to invent a symbol." No-one can take a rational thought reached by deliberate intent and give it a "symbolic" form. A word or image is symbolic only when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider unconscious aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. One cannot hope to define or explain it, for as the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.
Imaginative thinking, Dr Jung showed, is subconscious, spontaneous and non-directed; it pursues aims which are not yet conscious and adapts to an inner reality which is expressed in images. It is concerned with creating an image world; it is individual in its orientating and all but incommunicable, except through images that evoke rather than describe the reality they express.
The Alpha Centre emphasises the validity of the non-conceptual, undirected image-thinking which attempts to describe inner reality, because loss of contact with the image-making functions results in loss of meaning in life as it is immediately lived.
To facilitate the process of Individuation
Dr Jung was deeply disturbed at the possibility of the outbreak of a new barbarism as we seem actually to be faced with today. He realised that modern man is possessed by something that robs him of his free choice. A state of unconscious possession or mass-mindedness.
A cursory glance at history should be sufficient to convince us of what human beings are capable, and whatis in store for us if the mass psyche gets the upper hand. Consequently, if one is to be delivered from the evils and dangers of the mass, one must focus upon and heal the individual, as the individual psyche is the only place where life is being lived.
The collective is influenced and fecunded by the creative activity of those of its members who act as individuals, and not merely photostat copies of the social group to which they are subservient. Through its activities the Alpha Centre aims to contribute to individuation as a way of offsetting the trend towards mass-mindedness.