“Life is change. How it differs from the rocks.”

In 1968, Jefferson Airplane released Crown of Creation, their fourth album, in which the political facet of their psychedelic rock became clearly visible. The album’s title track, written by Paul Kantner, blends philosophical insight with countercultural attitude in a song that, in the end, turns out to be a love song. The song’s closing lines express the whole complex of thought and emotions:

Life is change.
How it differs from the rocks.
I’ve seen their ways too often for my liking.
New worlds to gain.
My life is to survive,
And be alive … for you.

Although the first lines seem tautological, and they offer a conclusion that from a geological perspective isn’t really accurate (rocks change, too), the poetic insight they express has the legs to last and enough depth to remain evocative. The next set of lines suggest the archetypal tension between generations, which leads finally to a declaration of personal commitment.

Life is change. It’s dynamic. It’s full of transformation, of growth and decay, of expansion and contraction. Spirituality, too, is dynamic. It seeks to transform and expand consciousness.

Consciousness is a funny thing. We rarely give it much thought. It’s always just there (except when it slips away). As a constant of our experience, we aren’t usually aware of how consciousness changes (except when it slips away). It does change, however. In fact, consciousness is a protean shapeshifter. When we shift into an altered state of consciousness, the world itself is altered.

One thing seems to remain as consciousness goes through its changes: its dualism. Consciousness differentiates one thing from another. An apple is not an orange. Pleasure is not pain. You are not me. Mystical experience swims in the ocean of nondual unity, but returning to consensus consciousness brings even the mystic back to a differentiated, dualistic mode of reality.

From a psychological and phenomenological (Jungian) point of view, both unity and duality are archetypal patterns of conscious experience. They are products of the judging functions of consciousness, which Jung called thinking (differentiating) and feeling (evaluating).

Problems arise when we let one archetypal current take over. That’s when we become one-sided. The Isha Upanishad says, “In dark night live those for whom the world without alone is real; in night darker still, [those] for whom the world within alone is real” (lines 9-10, Eknath Easwaran translation).

The wise hold outer (duality) and inner (unity) together in dynamic and creative tension. Jesus tells us to be “perfect” like the Father (Mt. 5:48); and the Greek word used in the text connotes perfection as completeness or wholeness. Daoism expresses this wisdom in the taiji, the dynamic symbol of yin and yang in their paradoxical dance of “differentiated” unity.

If we now circle back to the countercultural politics of Kantner’s song with which we began, I think I see a hint of this wisdom in the tension it expresses. Young and old, progressive and conservative, change and stability — each is one side of an archetypal pair of opposites. Together each pair and all the pairs together dance a dance of dynamic wholeness. Both sides are necessary. Each side influences the other. Problems always arise when a one-sidedness that insists on excluding the other makes creative compromise all but impossible.

Life is change. How it differs from the rocks.