Why Disharmony Attracts Us - The Way of Phi in Practice -

Consider these two symbols. Which is more balanced? Which one attracts?

Dear friend,

I was very young, perhaps four years old, and we were living in a calm villa neighbourhood in Lund, southern Sweden. I remember the street clearly, including one day when I was looking at the parked cars and one of them, a BMW, struck me. There was something about its logo that felt off. Out of balance.

For the blue and white are positioned in a way that makes the whole thing unstable. Supposedly the logo was inspired by the Bavarian flag, but deliberately made in a different pattern to avoid infringing on intellectual property. However, that does not explain why the colours are where they are. If, for example, the blue were top and bottom and the white left and right, the whole thing would signal balance. However, I don’t think that was ever the idea.

A Car Moving Backwards

All systems have a longing to restore balance. However, the process is not just about restoring balance, because then not much would happen. Indeed, the life process includes reaching out and returning in. Like breathing. Without imbalance, there is no movement. Without balance, there is no sustainability. Like waves on the ocean, constantly moving out of and into equilibrium, thus maintaining a higher order of Dynamic Balance.

Let’s consider where the logo “wants” to go. If we look at the colours, the blue is “heavier” than the white, which makes the whole thing want to turn to restore balance. Thus there is a built-in tension which makes it want to move. A pretty good idea for a car, right? I mean, the idea of a car is to move and take people and things somewhere, not just to be parked.

Now, the funny thing is that the logo wants to turn counter-clockwise. If we imagine that the logo is a wheel attached to a vehicle, then said vehicle would be propelled left. This typically means going backwards, which is a bit odd, since the whole vibe of BMW seems to be going forward. The designers and decision-makers might not even have considered this, but perhaps on some level it reveals an unconscious contradiction: the pride in racing forward paired with a hidden undertow pulling back. A psychological deep dive might shed some light on this.

A Symbolic Psychological Interpretation

If we consider the logo as a direct representation of the brain with its two hemispheres, each having a “higher” cognitive (neocortex) part and a “lower” emotional (limbic) part, then the logo is clearly highlighting the left neocortex and the right limbic parts of the brain with blue.

While analysing a car logo based on the structure of the brain might seem arbitrary, symbols often reveal themselves in the mirror of the psyche, and in this case the correspondence is striking.

– What does this mean?

The left neocortex is the part of the brain responsible for solving problems and what we often attribute to the thinking part of the brain. The part that learns from the past and plans for the future. This is often called the Ego and is fuelled by pride, the need to be validated, and the need to be right. This part is usually available to us, although with varying levels of awareness.

The right limbic is the happy and playful child, untroubled by the past or the future. This corresponds to the Animus/Anima, an archetypal inner entity of the opposite sex, i.e. a man has a female Anima and a woman a male Animus. On the journey towards individuation, as Jung called it, the Anima/Animus needs to be discovered and integrated.

Accessing this part of ourselves can typically happen in two ways:1. Through consistent deep psychological work, essentially going through the Shadow, which is related to the left limbic part. This is the emotional part that deals with the past and the future. In other words, that’s where many of our most challenging emotions reside, e.g. guilt, shame, worry, anger, sadness, and fear. Going through all that can be very tough and take years or even decades.

2. By bypassing the Shadow. This could be done in various ways, none of which are sustainable or lead to a harmonious way of living. However, people who want to have fun now might prefer drinking alcohol or ingesting other substances rather than spending years in therapy. This is a way to go forward by essentially going backwards, accessing things that are beyond our current state of development but paying the price of a more splintered soul.Over the years, whenever I have seen the BMW logo, it has made me feel uncomfortable. Growing older and learning more about the type of people who drive these cars has added relational levels of understanding, but at its core it’s the logo that puts me off. Seeing that only two out of four parts of the brain are represented, and especially in such a skewed way at that, does give some clues.

Why Are We Talking about This?

You might wonder why I have spent an entire issue on a car logo, so let me explain:

We are surrounded by symbols that communicate more directly than words. While words are processed through the cognitive parts of the brain (i.e. the left neocortex), symbols move us because they bypass our rational filters, speaking directly to the unconscious. So even though a symbol could be interpreted in many ways, it’s not as arbitrary as one might think. Rather, we live in a society that has symbols at every corner. Just consider how many logos you have already seen today. Probably too many to count. You might not even notice them consciously anymore. However, at some point you did see them for the first time, like when I saw the BMW logo on that street.

Returning to how something as abstract as a logo feels deep inside can give valuable insights into who we are. And perhaps that is why, decades later, that BMW logo still unsettles me, not because of what it says about the company, but because of what it hints at beneath the surface.

Looking at the logos in the image above, the top one stands for Dynamic Balance, which is the core concept of my work. By uniting the Linear/Masculine and the Circular/Feminine, we can learn the noble art of Dynamic Balance – or Surfing on the Edge of Reality, as I also call it. No bypassing, but inspiration, harmony and play. And lots of excitement!

Do You Want to Make It Personal?

If symbols can unsettle us, they can also awaken and inspire. If you'd like to engage in these kinds of conversations, and you are in or around south Sweden, I invite you to the Philosophical Café in Lund. We'll meet on the first Wednesday of every month, starting 1 October. Click here for more information and to book your ticket.

With gratitude, 

Christopher