The demons are fighting with angels to snatch the nectar from them, and no one wants the poison, but someone must have the poison. Lord Shiva then resolves the conflict by drinking the poison himself but doesn’t let it trickle down below his throat, hence his throat is depicted as blue.  This is how he saves humanity from the poison.

The unconscious mind  

The unconscious mind is symbolically represented by the ocean, which is the storehouse of all the good, and the earlier is contained in our personality, not just a collection from this lifetime but from our genetic coding (collective unconscious or the karmas from the previous births) handed down to us at the time of our birth.

The unconscious mind is constantly trying to express itself to the conscious mind, and the conscious mind transfers our lived experiences into the unconscious continually. The mind is like a fountain, the water that you can see is the conscious mind, and the water that you can’t as it is in the pond is the unconscious mind. There is a constant circulation between the conscious and the unconscious. What is conscious today will become unconscious tomorrow and what is unconscious today will become conscious tomorrow.

The unconscious mind holds seeds of all the illnesses that we must suffer throughout our life span, some illnesses that are meant to express themselves in our 40s will remain dormant until that age, and the illnesses that are supposed to manifest in our 60s or 70s also remain dormant until that age. However, it is possible that we can churn or stir up the unconscious mind, and what we see is the release of both negative and positive energies. We are constantly fighting negative energy as it can lead to illnesses, restlessness, unhappiness, etc.

The constant battle between the negative and the positive energies within our mind and its outcome can be understood using the model of alchemy. The process of alchemy is borrowed from chemistry but applied to psychology, it can help us understand how negative psychic energies interact with positive energy with the goal of neutralizing the negative one. Carl Gustav Jung briefly discussed alchemy in his writings.

Imagine the negatives are like sleeping volcanoes or snakes that have been locked inside a basket, and our conscious mind is relatively unaffected by their presence in the deeper reaches of our unconscious mind.

• Calcination (Calcinato)– it pertains to fire- it is a process of heating solids to an elevated temperature for the purpose of removing volatile substances, thereby oxidizing a portion of the mass, or rendering it friable. It is considered a purification process. From a psychological perspective, one can burn one’s desires, false identities, and ego by way of consigning them to the flames (fire energy) that can be activated through a certain process of meditation.
• Dissolution (Soluto)– it pertains to water – where the negative is dissolved into a fluid medium as hatred dissolves into love which emanates from the heart and flows outwards.
• Separation: it is achieved by breaking down something into its constituent parts, separating thoughts from their corresponding emotions, which happens all the time in the unconscious mind when we get anxious but don’t know why we are getting anxious. This separation of the thought from the emotion weakens the emotions, which is easier to work on.
• Conjugation: when the separated elements are joined together in a different combination pattern. This process of combining a negative force with a positive one can lower the overall energy of the negative force and increases the stability of the system. Coupling a negative thought about a dreadful situation with a thought about the positive side of that situation can help us manage. Another example, making a well-behaved child sit next to a mischievous child can help us reduce this child’s mischief. Posting police on patrol near a notorious nightclub can help the administration manage law and order in the community.
• Putrefaction is a process by which a negative force is allowed to rot or decompose undisturbed.
• Crystallisation: this can be used to grow the positive. A seed crystal is a small piece of single crystal or polycrystal material from which a large crystal can be grown in the laboratory.
• Congelation or coagulation: It is a process of changing a liquid into a solid by means of heating or cooling, e.g. water turned into ice or milk into curd, egg boiled, etc This is seen in the maturing process when the child grows into an adult, and some of his fluid thinking and personality traits get firmed up.
• Cibation means feeding from outside – it can be for both positive and negative energies, and it can tilt the balance.
• Sublimation (sublimato) – it pertains to air – it elevates solid or water into the air. The distillation process is included here as the water turns into steam and again turns into water thereby purifying it. In psychological terms it turns a negative energy into a positive one, such as a desire to cut up the human body for personal gratification can be turned into surgical skills.
• Fermentation: the first stage is putrefaction where things break down and decompose, they die so that a new thing is born. An ovum and a sperm die so that an egg is formed. During a conversation with someone who thinks the opposite of you, we see that our opinion dies, and that person’s opinion may also die, and a third opinion appears which we adopt as our own.
• Distillation: in distillation, many bitter, Sharp, and acrid things become very sweet and on the other hand, many sweet things can become bitter. An integration between good and bad opinions may result in the dissolution of the bad opinion and only the good opinion remains, and vice versa.
•  The other examples of alchemic processes would be exaltation, multiplication, projection, etc.

When the negative energies win, we become negative towards life, everything becomes burdensome, we become cynical and stressed, and suffer from several different illnesses which do not respond to treatment.

When the positive energies win, we feel hopeful and energetic, life appears beautiful we are happy even when surrounded by lots of problems, the problems don’t seem real, and we can easily forget them.

Harnessing the positive energies and using them to neutralize the negative should be a constant effort on our part, sadly it is not given to us to know the extent of negative energy that is stored in our unconscious mind, and trying to go on neutralizing them can be a tiresome process.

Similarly, we don’t know the extent of positive energies that will be available to us in our battle at the time of need. It’s like you’re fighting a battle and you don’t know your own military resources and those of the enemy, and the war must go on and we get bruised and defeated despite our best planning, whereas at other times we win the battle with very little effort. Resources are made available in the nick of time, and they are snatched away from us when we are relying on them the most.

Conclusion

We may have won thousands of battles and there may be another thousand Battles ahead of us, perhaps millions, there is no time to rest, we need to keep marching. The moment I declare victory over all the negative forces, new demons appear from within and challenge my sanity.

Meditation is like churning up the unconscious mind and facing the unexpected negative, and the unexpected positives as well, ahead of their normal time of appearance.

Meditation is like facing the problems not just on the surface of the mind now at the conscious level, but also the potential problems that are hidden in the unconscious mind and which may find expression at some stage in the future in the form of a physical or a psychological illness or a psychological issue that can hinder our psychological growth.

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