"The Essentials” of the Narcissus Myth

The story of narcissus

In those days there lived in a happy nature a young man of rare beauty. Born of a nymph and a river, of Liriopaeus and Cephysus, Narcissus did not know love. There were many girls and young men who desired him, but he, wrapped in innocent splendour, spurned them. He probably never even saw them! One day, while he was hunting deer, the nymph Echo saw him. Echo, it must be admitted, was an unrepentant talker. To punish her for this inappropriate eloquence, Hera, Jupiter's companion, took away her tongue: "With this tongue," she said, "which has deceived me, you will have only a weak power, and you will use speech only very briefly". Since then, Echo, the nymph with the sonorous voice, can only repeat the sounds and words she hears. Under the circumstances, it was not easy to explain her passion to this young man on the hunt for another prey! But today was his lucky day. Narcissus, who had lost his way, called out: "Is anyone here? "If anyone," Echo hastened to reply. One thing led to another, one misunderstanding to another, and the young nymph finally approached Narcissus and was about to embrace him. The youth fled, saying on his way: "Hands off, no embrace! I will die, he said, before you use me as you wish"... The echo only repeated "use me as you wish". Since that day of despair, the beautiful nymph has been a shadow of her former self, her voice alone echoing through the deep forests and mountain gorges.

The gods promised to punish Narcissus. One day, tired of hunting, he approached a clear spring that no wild animal had ever touched. As he quenched his thirst, another thirst grew within him. Seduced by the image of the beauty he saw, he fell in love with a reflection without consistency. His face fixed, absorbed by this spectacle, "he seemed a statue of Paros marble". Face to face with his watery mirror, fascinated by his incomparable image, Narcissus despises everything but the inaccessible reflection of his beauty. Neither hunger, nor the hunt, nor the echo can divert his attention. Much later, he will lay his weary head on the green grass and close his eyes at night, full of admiration for his master's beauty. And legend has it that Narcissus was still contemplating himself in the waters of the River Styx when he was taken to his infernal abode. When his funeral pyre was built, the nymphs noticed that his body had disappeared. In its place appeared a saffron flower with white leaves around its heart, the narcissus.

The lunar perspective of the myth

Firstly, a Narcissus knows itself through the attention of his mother.

Secondly, by reproducing the warmth of his mother's womb with his group of friends. A Narcissus will conform to the values of the group for one reason and one reason only: the need to be loved. He follows his group of friends without understanding that the path his friends are following is not his own. He tries to serve the light (his ideals). Narcissus has high standards, he is in narcosis and he wants to serve the Light, "only those who are in the Light can serve the Light". A Narcissus has high metaphysical or "other" ideals. He likes to discuss philosophy, go to evening classes, spend long moments talking about theology, remake the world with his friends, but without realising that all his collective hunting systems will not allow him to succeed in his death, to find his sublimating flower, to fulfil his destiny. His spiritual ideal remains the greatest obstacle to his spiritual realisation, for ideals form illusory veils of light that stifle the manifestation of underlying reality and the unfolding of the Self in experience. The Self can only manifest by surprise.

At some point in its life it will lose itself from its friendly representations, its ideals, and be forced to go its own way. If at that moment Narcissus accepts to get lost in the forest of his representations, in the forest of his beliefs, he will surely have one of the most difficult experiences of myth... He who has always been surrounded by his mother and friends will have to accept to lose himself and to move forward alone. If he accepts it, this solitude is fundamental because it will allow him to go further in the direction of his individuality, his inner source.

Fusional love

Subsequently, Narcissus will reject the feminine and/or masculine advance by falling into indifference to the suffering he propagates around him.

He will be confronted with fusional love, first with his mother, then with women or men. Through inner resonances he will attract suitors who want to embrace and care for him. A Narcissus lives for a long time in a sense of unconscious fusional love. The risk is to remain behind the veil, in the comfort and protection of this fusional inattention; if he refuses to change his level of consciousness, a Narcissus may at some point in his life experience a form of psychic destructuring, until the day he realises that he himself is an echo of the world, and that he therefore has the possibility of freeing himself from the fusional loves or friendships that keep him in a veil of illusion.

Echo of the world

Narcissus is someone who talks a lot in order not to reveal himself, he pours out speeches that he himself has borrowed from books, and he confuses talking with revealing himself. Narcissus talks to feel important and he talks about his personal experiences, which are actually veils that protect him from his deepest nature. In order to pierce the veil, it is necessary to accept his suffering, his fear. Narcissus carries within himself an original suffering linked to his intra-uterine life or birth. In some cases a Narcissus will have to go through situations such as the breakdown of a family situation, a feeling of emptiness leading to depression, or having to go through his suffering through the sensation of a physical handicap or illness in order to force him to experience his loneliness. C.G. Jung said that an event occurs when its meaning is not metabolized by consciousness," 1’ the supplement reads.

If a Narcissus can accept solitude as an essential key to his myth, life will allow him to distinguish between his idealistic search for a lost paradise through the chattering echo of the world and the great silence that allows him to be with his being behind the veil of his illusions.

Love as victim

There is also victim love, the love of the martyr. This kind of love is very powerful, the martyr is the one who takes power without wanting to acknowledge it. A Narcissus will encounter victim love, but at some point he will undo the power that his martyrs have over him by recognising that he is sometimes in that position in relation to others, and he will be offered the opportunity to undo this martyr role that he has and that he carries in resonance.

In fact, Narcissus is very ambivalent, at first he is not aware of the suffering he causes around him, he rejects his suitors with total lack of consideration. In a second phase, when he begins to feel his suffering, the temptation is great to use it as an instrument of power. He will try to bring all his suffering into the relationship by becoming tyrannical, because he needs to be taken care of and treated with attention. He will play on his suffering to maintain his influence.

The experience of lack, the thirst for one's own search

At a given moment of his journey, Narcissus will become aware of the lack that there is in letting himself be guided by the upheavals of his life, by his victimized loves, by a carelessness of events, by others or by ideals that he confuses with a true spiritual quest. The feeling of lack gives narcissus the thirst for something else, and it is this thirst that will allow him to get out of narcissism. At this stage of the myth, it is essential that he asks himself: what is my lack, what is my thirst? Once his needs have been identified, he can finally embark on his true quest.

Now Narcissus has finally rid his life of the three great utopias: those of spiritual desire (his ideals), explanatory discourse and prison love. He can now begin to die, that is, to 'know himself'.

Beyond memory

There comes a time when Narcissus must not only lose himself, but also give up his memories, his stories, in order to enter the process of death and rebirth. Why is it difficult for him to be without memories? Simply because he is a being of memory! He carries within him all the traces of his past history, he remembers all the places he has passed through. For a Narcissus, accepting to enter a process without memory is as crucial and difficult as losing his group of friends. To enter a dimension without memory means to be in non-knowledge, to accept the unknown of the second to come, to stop calculating to get the best place or to be loved, to get rid of the refusal to be touched by love, that is, by what is there, present in this moment... All this means remaining free of all memory, of all expectation, of all preparation, it means being available to what is present in the moment.

This is the condition sine qua non for looking at oneself at the source, in the true mirror of one's own being.

There is no map, only suffering, which can truly awaken Narcissus from his narcosis. He must annihilate the forms that come from his outer world in order to contain an essence of experience and to elaborate the subject. He must develop an intimate sense of observation, a creative sense of criticism. He must transform an exterior into an interior. He must learn to give symbolic meaning to his experiences and gradually work on the events of his life until he reaches their deep essence. That is to say, to derive an essence of meaning from his experiences, to grow in maturity and to move away from external illusions. 3" in the Appendix.

But if instead he becomes attached to his memories, he develops a narcissistic pathology called nostalgia. He must work to preserve, not the memory, but the essence of the memory, the experience that the memory has created in him, in order to grow as a subject and not as a representation in the world, and this can only be done by abandoning his memories.

The connection with the memories is there, not to remember a past, but to let a feeling grow, and when the feeling is integrated, the memory fades. Feeling is the intelligence of the body expressed through the feeling of the spirit. A Narcissus must learn to dissociate himself from the mind (echo) because he can only die before he dies if the consciousness is dissociated from the functioning of the mind. If he succeeds in letting his thoughts flow before him, knowing that they are not him, he will free the brain from the pressure of the mind, thus freeing the whole body, and the sufferings will reappear. All his sufferings buried in the body are emotional charges associated with memories; if the emotional charge is eliminated, purified, the memory becomes harmless and acquires an objective value.

The mirror of projections

One of Narcissus' dilemmas is to see that what he sees on the outside is a reflection of himself. When he sees that what is happening to him is a reflection of his innermost thoughts, he begins to enter into self-knowledge. Life presents to narcissus with all the thoughts he does not want to see and/or all the depths of himself that he does not know. In other words, what he admires in others represents a potential in him that he has not developed, and what he hates in others resonates with a violence in him that has not been purified. He attracts the situations and events that he carries within him. When Narcissus sees that the world is a mirror of himself, that hell is no longer the other, others become precious aids to his self-knowledge. Whether they are pleasant or not, life brings like a grace all the attitudes revealed by the events of his existence. At this point he can become aware that he does not need to protect himself from others because of his hypersensitivity.

(The narcissist protects himself from the world because he is afraid of his own suffering, and it is because he does not welcome his suffering that he makes others suffer. He doesn't allow himself to be reached, and to protect himself he creates a great veil of gossip. )

Thus, when Narcissus realises that it is his own image that he sees in the images of the world, he will first try to grasp himself. The myth allows him to perceive that he is trying to grasp himself, because the memories of his men and women who tried to grasp him come back to him. The message here is that every time he tries to grasp himself he escapes himself. He simply has to look at himself and let the furtive images of the sensitive mirror of his inner self pass.

Accepting that he must detach from the object of his love gives him the opportunity to detach from the other in order to let love be in movement. At the same time he understands that when he tries to DEFINE WHAT HE IS, he begins to deceive himself again in a self-identification of what is happening to him. 4' read in the appendix

At this point he begins to realise that he must become as solid as stone, he enters the reality principle and the time principle. He knows that his quest may take a long time, that it may be difficult, that he may die, but he continues, determined to follow his path. He is sometimes tempted to turn back, but it is with this determination to do nothing and to remain there, in the pure observation of his inwardness, letting everything arise without grasping anything, that he penetrates his true metamorphosis. It is by looking into the lake of his emotions that he enters the ontological dimension and sees the luminous windows of the presence of his soul. From this moment on, there is no going back.

Narcissus sees for the first time the power of life within him, the power of creation, the power of vitality. Narcissus realises that he is winning two victories, the victory of consciousness, of looking himself in the eye, not running away, not cheating, not escaping into the imagination, and so an expanded consciousness begins to emerge within him.

He also realises that the engagement with the energy of the living is more powerful than the fear of his own suffering. By being in total openness he will be able to allow pure light, pure consciousness and pure energy to manifest within him.

He can begin to die by freeing his consciousness from all his identifications, from the jungle of his representations, and because he has gone to the end of his narcissism, he can feel something of the universal order.

In other words, because Narcissus has gone to the end of his singularity, he will produce a universal work, the work being the sublimating flower, Narcissus himself.

Conclusion

1' To get rid of echoes is not only to get rid of chatter, but also to get rid of all the thoughts that are constantly arguing with each other in our head.

This is the state in which consciousness is self-sufficient, in which the process of death is transformed into a process of rebirth.

2' To follow one's mythological path is to blindly follow the path that destiny has laid out for us, deconstructing the meaning of our existence that we have built for ourselves out of fear of suffering, dying from old patterns of substitution in order to be reborn in authentic spiritual values.

3' Moving from a psychological life to a mythological life means letting the meaning of our existence reveal itself by deconstructing the false meaning that is linked to beliefs and other things that are external to our reality. To let ourselves be carried by our myth is to let ourselves be carried by the universe, to stop calculating the course of our life, to gradually learn to mourn the loss of experiences in order to preserve only the essence.

4' Suffering represents all the resistances that we have created and that obscure the pure light of the Self. Suffering is a psychological or external attachment that is triggered when we lose the object of our attachment.

Suffering is precisely this process of renouncing our ego, for it is only the ego that suffers. It is a detachment from our own identifications, from our own belief systems which, if we do it to the end, will allow us to reconnect with joy, with life, with our astrological sun, with the Self.

PS : The astrological correspondences of the Narcissus myth will be added later.

Translated and adapted from Luc Bigé's https://reenchanterlemonde.com/ by @SatyamAstro/Nicolas Roessli and supported by DeepL.com

To go further, a book in French has been written by Luc Bigé and translated into English by Google, THE AWAKENING OF NARCISSUS (EBOOK) 

https://reenchanterlemonde-com.translate.goog/produit/leveil-de-narcisse-ebook/?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fr