The Sound Inside

In the last issue, we noted that the collective unconscious plays at least two vital roles for living: the archetypes enable us to experience life out there in the world and they enable us to grasp intangible meanings and values in there, from the unconscious.

To be oriented to meanings and values is quintessentially human. We could think of the guiding attributes of the unconscious as a feeling-toned sound inside to which each of the introverted types is oriented.

“Listen to the sound inside!”

I recently attended a brilliant new play on Broadway, “The Sound Inside.” With stunning simplicity, the play opens as a vast empty stage with one actor. Echoes of Dostoyevsky weave through the play’s questions of crime and punishment, morality and immorality, one-sidedness and wholeness, creativity and stagnation, relationship and isolation.

We discover in the play that the “sound inside” is vital for life. As in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, to attempt to flee from that sound inside is to be chained to it; to abide by it is to find liberation.

The “sound Inside” is the ineffable collective source of inner consciousness to which the introverted dispositions are each singularly oriented. It is an animating fabric, an empowering framework that includes recognition of values and meanings while it serves as a source of imagination and vision. Civilization would not exist without it.

The hubris of ego-centricity opposes this collective overarching framework. But “listen to the sound inside” the actor repeats over and over. “Listen to the sound inside,”

In the play, and in life, when this intangible feeling-toned fabric, this “sound inside”, is ignored or repressed, when people stop “listening,” serious damage ensues. For the individual it is the destabilization of personality; for the culture it is the destabilization of community; for the nation, it is the destabilization of civilization itself.