The Face of the Universe: Exploration of the Existential Sense beyond Primary Attachment

When everything goes quiet. 

When all ideas about yourself and your life dissipate. 

When it is you and existence itself. 

What is the feeling? 

The sensation in your body? 

The sense? 

For many, it is a rather uncanny, uncomfortable, or outright horrifying experience.

I first heard about the concept of existential attachment from a Jungian analyst and 5Rhythms teacher, Mackenzie Amara. She speaks of how early experiences with our caregivers imprint in us the feelings and meanings we associate with existence, i.e. how the universe relates to us. It makes sense that at the time when we exist outside of time, in the eternity (infancy), and when the formation of our reference points is in complete dependence on how our relational environment treats us (early childhood), we internalise the felt sense of and derive conclusions about what existence is like. A somatic Jungian psychoanalyst, Jane Clapp, similarly holds that the image of god is formed based on early attachments. In her decades of working with clients who had experienced severe developmental trauma, she saw that in such cases, people only know the ‘dark side of god’, i.e. the kind of god they experienced in trauma. In such cases, her work was about helping the clients access the ‘light side of god’, so that the two could form a whole image.

Regardless of the supposed degree of adversity, for many people, early relationships are marked by abandonment and/or engulfment. A nullifying, cold emptiness and/or a destructive, impinging chaos. This internalised unconscious understanding is then projected onto self, others, and the world, onto life and death. The caregiver’s failure to provide, in Winnicott’s words, a sufficient holding environment, i.e. one in which the baby is protected, felt, seen, and attended to in an attuned way, results in a defective sense of self, a lack of an intrinsic meaning, a profound disconnection, and existential dread.

Therapy often stops here, delighted that it has reached the bottom of the ocean of pain, the core of all our struggles. We work with the inner child, rage and grief over our unmet needs, internalise the therapist’s abiding presence, and employ our adult compassionate self in giving us the very thing that we were once denied. Sometimes, we broaden the scope and realise that the problem is systemic, extending beyond our family of origin. We might grieve the intergenerational trauma and see how the pain and the relational patterns that deny us connection, safety, and authentic expression run through the very fabric of our society.

Yet there is another — enormous — piece in all of this, determinedly coming into collective consciousness: our philosophical, scientific, and felt understanding of the universe itself and how this understanding manifests in our entire culture. 

The Stone-Faced Mother

In the phenomenal ‘The Passion of the Western Mind’, Richard Tarnas explores how our modern understanding of the universe came about. It may seem that our philosophical/scientific/religious view has little to do with how we feel in life, but it can’t be further from the truth. To simplify obnoxiously, the book traces our modern understanding of the universe from Copernicus’ cosmological decetring of the Earth, through Descartes’ schism between the personal and conscious human subject and the impersonal, unconscious, material universe, culminating in Kant’s constructivist resignation: independent reality is inaccessible, and the only thing we can study is its refraction in the human mind. This direction of thought has led to what Tarnas calls ‘the prison of modern alienation’: a cosmological, ontological, and epistemological estrangement from the universe. The universe is fundamentally alien and unknowable; the human being is a peculiar circumstantial phenomenon, and h/er soul has no foundation in it. Although mathematics and modern physics acknowledge hard limits of this positivist presupposition, it is the frame of mind we have been functioning in for the last half a millennium and the one that dominates our perception to this day.

This understanding creates an unresolvable conflict: on one hand, we have a human being with h/er psychological and spiritual predispositions, h/er longing for existential belonging and meaning, and on the other — a soulless, nullifying, unintelligible universe revealed by the scientific method. When the things a child sees, hears, and senses do not correlate, such as loving words of the mother against her stone-cold facial expression, the result is confusion, alienation, and a psychic split.

This stone-faced mother has become our image of the universe. 

We have no way of knowing what is going on in her ‘head’, and we most certainly can’t be ‘seen’ or ‘felt’ by her, however much we long for it. To put it simply, she is both indifferent and dead. 

My take on it is that the Existentialists of the soul-crushing 20th century looked this stone-faced mother in the eye and accepted her silence as absolute. They courageously attempted to come to terms with the reality marked by the finality of death, maddening freedom, meaninglessness, and ultimate isolation, constructing meaning in a vacuum. This perception is not entirely wrong: it is certainly part of the human experience — a finite experience of the infinite. But just as only the dark side of god is imprinted in people with severe developmental trauma, so is this ontology of separation incomplete. 

Animated Cosmos

In the first half of his career, the scientific method-conscious Jung mirrored this separation too. Even as he discovered the primordial foundations of the psyche, he repeated Kantian epistemological alienation and rendered metaphysical implications impossible. To this day, much of how Jung’s work is perceived focuses on projections: the external reality mirroring or being interpreted in accordance with what transpires in the psyche. Later in his life, the more unleashed/unhinged Jung introduced the concept of synchronicity — the idea that there is one underlying reality underneath psyche and matter (the psychoid), which sometimes breaks through, simultaneously and acausally expressing itself both psychologically and concretely. What initially was a purely psychological concept was expanded into a full-fledged ontological position through Jung’s collaboration with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Jung and Pauli suggested that the same archetypal structures organise both psyche and matter. 

For example, the sense of turbulence, chaos, or anger when we look at a stormy sea is understood as a projection by standard psychology. The sea is a dead, consciousness-less matter, and all the fiesta of meaning is happening in the human brain exclusively. This ‘just a subjective meaning’ solipsistic bubble creates a culture of profound loneliness: we can’t communicate with the world, and it can’t communicate with us. 

Under Jung’s Dual-Aspect Monism, however, mind and matter aren’t separate but are two complementary manifestations of a single, underlying reality he called the Unus Mundus (one world). In this way, the ‘Archetype of the Storm’ (or irruptive power) is a fundamental pattern of the universe, which can manifest physically as high-pressure systems, kinetic energy, and fluid dynamics and psychologically as intense affect, rage, or the shaking of the ego’s foundations. Under the Pauli-Jung framework, the turbulence of the ocean is the physical instantiation of an archetype that the human mind experiences psychologically as emotional upheaval or chaos. They are two different ‘readings’ of the same underlying archetypal dynamic. The psyche and matter are isomorphic. 

If the archetypes structure the galaxy just as they structure our DNA and our dreams, then studying the stars is a form of self-discovery, and studying dreams is a form of cosmology. We and the universe are made of the same ‘stuff’. In Tarnas’ proposed participatory epistemology, ‘nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind’, which, through the lens of ecopsychology, is extended to the minds of all living beings. This perspective shifts the task of the scientist from detached observation, as in positivism, or the construction of meaning, as in constructivism, to a dynamic revelation of meaning together. The relationship to the inherent multiplicity of revelation that ensues is culturally defined. Dylan Francisco, a core faculty member of the Jungian and Archetypal Studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, speaks of the search for and belief in the acquisition of absolute truth as a phenomenon of Western culture, which I would extend to all eschatological religions. In Indigenous cultures, which of course birthed many of the frameworks for working with sacred plants, the search for ultimate truth is lacking — many perspectives can exist simultaneously, not in a constructivist but ontological sense. Both contemporary transpersonal psychology and the Indigenous worldview see transpersonal states as valid ways of knowing, and the reality accessed through them as multifaceted and unfurled relationally through each individual or collective. 

The eco-depth psychologist and founder of the Animas Valley Institute Bill Plotkin advocates for imaginal ontology. Imagination, understood as a sensory organ for a real, mythic dimension of existence, is an essential part of comprehending reality, without which the picture we receive through our senses is woefully incomplete. Numinous experiences, including those that are psychedelic-induced, reveal that our lives are not random streams of events, glued together by the human compulsion for meaning-making and made possible by what cognitive science calls ‘confirmation’ or ‘attentional’ biases — the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that aligns with one’s existing beliefs and present states. Instead, 

Our lives are currents of meaning unfolding synchronistically in the concrete and psychic realities.*

Attachment in Life and Death

Mystical experiences also reveal that consciousness exists beyond the ordinary ego consciousness navigating the consensus reality. 

The cup of reality is not full without death in it 

— whether death is understood as what lies beyond the ego, beyond physical death, or both. 

That is why secure attachment in life does not automatically translate into secure existential attachment. That is why when everything goes quiet, the insecure feeling may remain, despite how well we have been loved. This is not to say that human love can’t penetrate beyond the ego — it can, and it does. But human love is to a large extent attached to the ego, which is partly why it is so painstakingly beautiful. When there is no concrete separate self who is relating to concrete separate others, what we are faced with is the universal consciousness itself. Even acknowledging the seamless continuity between the Self and the ego, and the universe embracing all parts, someone who is attached to the ego and afraid — which is most people in the modern world — will feel complete abandonment or a forced dissolution — engulfment. But Grof understood the painful state of separation and alienation that birthed ego consciousness after an undifferentiated unity as a necessary stage on the journey of becoming both one with and a distinguished self relating to the universe.What is often discovered on the other side of torturous trials of mystical experiences is an indestructible consciousness underneath. The rootedness in this paradox in the face of existence is where the true sense of safety and belonging lies. 

A Call for Cultural Transformation

Our attachment blueprint is shaped by far larger forces than our family of origin, structural injustices, or intergenerational trauma. It is rooted in our perception of the nature of reality itself. Attachment — the cornerstone of psychotherapy and the root cause of all psychological issues — can’t be secure within the dominant philosophical and scientific worldview, the relational patterns of our culture, and the state of collective consciousness that birthed it. Our all-pervasive attachment issues are a fundamental ontological wound calling for the evolution of consciousness and cultural transformation. The realisation of the fundamental unity and relationality between humanity and the universe re-animates and re-enchants the cosmos, healing the profound wound of separation and putting us in right relationship with existence.

We have spent five centuries living as orphans in a house we thought was a machine. We were looking at the stars and the sea, convinced that it was a void that could never look back, indifferent and annihilating towards all we can love. But if the storm in the sky and the storm in our soul are the same movement of the same consciousness, then the stone-faced Mother/Father/Lover of modern science is an illusion. Healing our attachment to the universe means stopping the desperate attempt to create meaning in a vacuum and instead learning to listen for the meaning that is already there. We find that we have never been alone, and we have never been un-held.

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Stay tuned for more unconventional aspects of attachment, such as the internal feminine/masculine dynamics, kink sexuality as an expression of the relationship with existence, and the image/affect/sensation/meaning split.

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*Differentiation between participatory consciousness and psychosis: In participatory consciousness, the ego remains intact as a vessel for transpersonal experience; meaning is perceived symbolically and archetypally, and the individual retains agency, often resulting in increased empathy and ecological connection. Conversely, in psychosis, the ego structure fragments or dissolves; internal meanings are experienced as concrete, literal, or paranoid hallucinations; and the individual loses volition, typically leading to social withdrawal and a breakdown in functioning. (See: Wilber, K. Eye to Eye, 1983; Grof, S. Spiritual Emergency, 1989; Jung, C.G. The Red Book, 2009).