Let us not be Cyclopes!

The Cyclops is a one-eyed monster in Greek mythology, but the image of the one-eyed giant is a universal image rooted in the collective unconscious of peoples from many cultures. Its narrative forms can be found from northern Europe to Africa and from Japan to Brazil. In Jungian analytical psychology, it can therefore be understood as an archetype.

The Cyclopes are far older than the gods, born of the first generation of Titans: Uranus, god of the sky, and Gaia, goddess of the earth. Yet not all the children of sky and earth, nor all the children of gods and human beings, become Cyclopes. Many gods and heroes are born from such unions in these stories, but the emergence of a Cyclops always remains an entirely possible outcome.

In mythological stories, Cyclopes are portrayed as only partly conscious and lacking in intelligence, with very little attention to their surroundings: angry, cruel, and devoid of feeling, subtlety, or complexity of thought.

The Cyclops has fallen from the greatness of a Titan into a destructive creature of limited intelligence. He has killed what was divine in himself and reduced the vast consciousness of divinity to the narrow vision of a one-eyed monster.

The meaning of the Cyclops’s single eye can be understood as one-dimensional seeing and a closed form of consciousness. To have only one eye open to the world means possessing a limited, one-sided, and inflexible mind. We know that the eye is a symbol of consciousness, attention, and awareness; to possess only one eye means understanding only one thing and failing to see everything beyond it. With one eye, the field of vision narrows, and one thing alone comes to occupy not merely the focus of attention but the centre of the mind. Because Cyclopes see nothing except what lies before that one eye, their understanding of truth is radically limited.

To bring the Cyclops within you fully into being, it is enough to feel that you know so much that your single eye is sufficient to see the truth—and to become angry enough to find within yourself a justification for destroying other human beings.

This is how a heavenly idea, revealed to an earthly prophet, can produce Cyclopes such as the devout torturers of the medieval Church or ISIS; and how the entry of any great philosophy into small minds can produce dangerous and deranged ideologies, examples of which have been anything but rare throughout history.

Whenever, in the name of ethnicity, race, religion, belief, or anything else we incorporate into our identity, we feel that we are completely right and imagine ourselves to possess absolute truth, let us remember that each of us carries within us a one-eyed giant—egotistical, foolish, self-righteous, and angry—with whom we must do battle. Every war that remains unresolved within us becomes a war in the external world, where the one-eyed giant within us becomes the totality of who we are in the world outside.

Let us begin somewhere simpler. In every friendship and family life there comes a moment when we enter into a heated and emotional argument with a spouse, sibling, parent, or friend. Can you remember what you felt the last time this happened? Within each of us lives an “angry I” who is always right, always knows better, always sees others as being at fault, and is always determined to win at any cost. This angry I is the Cyclops within us. When it comes out of its dark cavern, we feel compelled to keep arguing and to win. We want to prove that we are right. It is difficult to accept and admit that there is something about which you may previously have been wrong.

This is a difficult path, but we have only two paths in life: either to remain as we are, or to become something better than what we are. If we choose to travel the second path, then the person we are today is no longer our true Self; our true Self is what we are capable of becoming. To be born again as the person we can become, we must always have the courage to be reborn out of the person we are today.

Aydin Areta