Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure
of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens
in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.
— C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams Reflections p. 335
We are at this moment participating in one of the
very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside
nature but also of our own deep inward mystery.
— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth xviii
One of the great themes of ancient myth is the hero's journey into the
underworld, his encounter there with a fearsome adversary and his return
to the world of everyday life, bringing with him a priceless treasure.
With this treasure, he is able to regenerate his culture, heal the sick,
free the people from the spell cast on them by demonic powers, release
the waters of life so that fertility is restored to the Wasteland. The
theme of the hero’s journey, so brilliantly defined by the great
mythologist, Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, has its mythic roots
in the sun and moon's nightly and monthly journey into darkness and
their return to illumine our world. It is a timeless theme of life,
death and regeneration and the essential relationship between the light
and the dark, this world and another world, between the known and the
unknown. Descending to us from Egypt, India, Mesopotamia and Greece
it underlies all mythologies which suggest that we have become separated
from our home in the divine world and are, therefore, exiled, fallen,
lost or asleep. It tells of the need to enter the “wilderness”
of the unexplored depths of ourselves in order to recover our lost connection
with that world, thereby bringing about our awakening, transformation
and return to the source-ground.
Jung
was one of the cultural heroes who have made the shamanic journey into
the underworld and returned with a treasure that has enriched his culture.
His greatest longing and his life-long task, as he saw it, was to build
a bridge between the reality we see and know with our physical senses
and another unseen reality. He reconnected the solar consciousness of
the rational mind with the lunar consciousness of the soul, restoring
to modern Western culture the shamanic, instinctive way of knowing that
had been repressed and fragmented over some 4000 years. He knew that
our greatest need was for connection with the transcendent, not through
belief and faith, but through the experience of an invisible dimension
of reality that underlies and coinheres with the world we know.
In
the field of astronomy, Copernicus revolutionized the current state
of knowledge by displacing the earth from its position at the center
of the solar system. Jung did the same for the psyche, displacing the
conscious mind or ego from its central position by introducing the idea
of a deeper dimension of consciousness to which the ego was related
and from which it had emerged. He asked again the great soul questions
that are so neglected today: What is the purpose of life? What is God?
What is the origin of evil?
Like many
titans of innovative thought who are ahead of their time, he has been
contemptuously dismissed by some as a charlatan and a mystic, and to
a large extent, ignored, notably by members of his own profession of
psychiatry. Jung felt that Christianity had become transfixed in its
belief system and needed to be regenerated by a deeper understanding
of its great myth. Belief had not helped Christians or, indeed, believers
of other traditions, to understand the intention of the spirit, an intention
which he defined in the following passage:
Man is
compelled by divine forces to go forward to increasing consciousness
and cognition, developing further and further away from his
religious background because he does not understand it any more. His
religious leaders and teachers are still hypnotized by the beginning
of a then new aeon of consciousness instead of understanding them
and their implications. What was once called the “Holy Ghost”
is an impelling force, creating wider consciousness and responsibility
and thus enriched cognition. The real history of the world seems to
be the progressive incarnation of the deity. (1)
From
my study of mysticism in different cultures, I believe that Jung can
be placed among the great astronauts of the soul who have opened our
awareness to the existence of other dimensions of reality and a deeper
knowledge of our own nature. But he was also a scientist who, through
observation, developed the practical tools to help us to connect with
the dimension of soul and drew up a map to guide us. The terms introvert
and extravert were coined by him as were the concepts of the anima and
the animus—the contra-sexual components of the psyche of man and
woman. Jung felt that greater knowledge of our nature was essential
if we are to avoid destroying ourselves and the planet through the blind
hubris of our ego and the destructive power of our weapons. In my view,
our debt to him is inestimable.
Jung
opened the door to the psyche and to psychic needs which had been ignored
and repressed for centuries and of which he, as a potential carrier
of consciousness for the whole culture, needed to become aware. He knew
through his own experience that the imagination was the key to relationship
with the archetypal ground of the soul. It falls to us to create a relationship
with this ground, developing insight, understanding and wisdom through
listening, observation and dialogue with it. Ignorance of the tremendous
power of the hidden archetypal forces which lie beyond the range of
the limited conscious mind, puts us at risk for being taken over by
them, falling into madness and the dissolution of our humanity—something
that we can increasingly see happening at the beginning of this new
millennium.
In
the prologue to his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
Jung says: “In the end the only events in my life worth telling
are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory
one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences, among which I
include my dreams and visions. These form the prima materia of my scientific
work. They were the fiery magma out of which the stone that had to be
worked was crystallised.”(2)
What
were these inner experiences? Jung parted from Freud in 1912 when he
was thirty-seven. During the next seven years from 1913-19 when he was
trying to develop his own orientation to the treatment of his patients,
he deliberately withdrew from his assigned position as Freud's successor
and turned towards his inner world, setting aside time to respond to
and record a near-overwhelming eruption of visions, dreams and fantasies.
He called this period his Nekyia—a Greek word which
describes a descent into the underworld. It is important to note that
this experience took place just before and during the First World War
whose catastrophic effects he had foreseen in a series of dreams and
visions during the autumn of 1913 and the spring of 1914.
The
idea of war did not occur to him at all, he says, and so he drew the
conclusion that he must be threatened by a psychosis. But as events
culminated in the outbreak of war in August 1914, he began to understand
the meaning of these visions and dreams and to take the unconscious
seriously as an unexplored dimension of reality in which all humanity
participates.
The
shaman or visionary has to translate the images and words of an unseen
world into the language and understanding of his time. His conscious
mind, struggling to contain the overwhelming power and numinosity of
the experience, will interpret it according to the level of his own
understanding and the needs of the age in which he or she lives. Jung
had to undergo the original shamanic experience in order to recover
the knowledge that was missing in the science of his day and then to
work out how to communicate that knowledge in a way that people could
understand. He took great care to try and understand every single image,
every item of his psychic inventory, and to classify them scientifically—so
far as this was possible—and to try and embody his insights in
his daily life, for he knew that this was an ethical obligation of the
conscious mind towards the unconscious. (3)
Some
have seen the experience of these years as a psychotic episode and have
labeled Jung schizophrenic; others, including myself, see it as a shamanic
initiation into the direct experience of another order of reality. However,
there are two dangers attendant on this kind of first-hand experience.
One is the danger of psychosis, of being overwhelmed by the material
because the conscious ego is not sufficiently strong to contain it and
decipher its meaning. The other is the danger of becoming identified
with the material, inflated by it, taking it to be absolute, literal
truth and setting oneself up as a messiah in the manner of those individuals
who have led their credulous followers to a suicidal death or who announce
the imminent end of the world and the rapture of the “chosen”.
Prior to
1945 and the discovery of the fifty-two Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi
in Egypt, there were very few texts that had survived destruction when
the Gnostic sects were repressed and their books burnt by order of the
Emperors Constantine and Theodosius during the course of the fourth
century AD. By 1912 Jung knew of these surviving texts and was familiar
with the work of the German scholars who had studied them. This enabled
him to grasp the significance of the images, fantasies and dreams that
presented themselves to him during these seven years. He would have
known that he was writing in the Gnostic tradition of listening to the
voice of the soul and that what he was experiencing was similar to what
the Gnostics and Kabbalists had recorded of their visionary and auditory
experiences. But—and this is crucially important—he also
knew that he had to grow into the meaning of what he had heard. As a
psychiatrist, he had to interpret this raw material and embody it in
a form that people could understand, that could become the basis of
a new and modern understanding of the soul.
Jung recorded
his experience in over 1000 handwritten pages and illustrations, many
of which he later bound together in a volume that he called The
Red Book, which opens with a page written in fourteenth
century German script. In the top left-hand corner, there is a landscape
painted inside a large initial—in the manner of medieval illuminated
manuscripts. Through these beautifully worked pages, we can see how
the dimension of soul is rescued from neglect and obscurity; how its
life is given meaningful expression in images and words. In this way
a door opens from the conscious mind into the deeper dimension of soul.
These moving words record his realization that the soul was an independent
living entity, something whose immense range we cannot grasp:
Then I was still utterly engrossed
in the spirit of the times and thought differently of the human soul.
I thought and spoke much about the soul; I knew many learned words
about the soul; I judged it and made a scientific object of it. I
did not consider that the soul cannot be the object of my judgement;
and knowledge the object of my soul.
Therefore the spirit of the depths
pressed me to speak to my Soul, to call upon it as a living and independent
being whose re-discovery means good fortune for me. I had to become
aware that I had lost my soul, or rather that I had lost myself from
my soul, for many years.
The spirit of the depths sees
the soul as an independent, living being, and therewith contradicts
the spirit of the times for whom the soul is something dependent on
the person, which lets itself be ordered and judged, that is a thing
whose range we can grasp. Before the spirit of the depths this thought
is presumption and arrogance. Therefore the joy of my re-discovery
was a humble one…Without the soul there is no way out of this
time. (4)
In
the course of listening to the voice of the soul, Jung encountered a
winged figure whom he called Philémon, the being who became his
guide to the underworld of the unconscious, rather as Virgil was guide
to Dante. Philémon taught Jung that the unexplored dimension
of the soul was as real as the physical world and that it sought to
gain the attention of the conscious mind.
Jung found
it ironical that he, a psychiatrist, should encounter at almost every
step of his experiment the same psychic material which is typical of
psychosis. “This,” he says, “is the fund of unconscious
images which fatally confuse the mental patient. But it is also the
matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational
age. Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooed
and dreaded.”(5) Near the end of his life,
he wrote:
It has taken me virtually
forty-five years to distill within the vessel of my scientific work
the things I experienced and wrote down at that time...The years
when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important
in my life - in them everything essential was decided. It all began
then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications
of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first
swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime's
work. (6)
Alchemy and the Transformation of Consciousness
One of Jung’s
greatest legacies to us was his insight into the mythological symbolism
of alchemy, whose importance was conveyed to him in two important dreams,
recounted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Most people, when
alchemy is mentioned, think of men working in laboratories, trying to
turn base metal into gold, but Jung understood that for many alchemists,
this image was a metaphor for a process of soul-transformation and that
when they spoke of the “philosophical gold” they were not
referring to what they called the common gold but to the true gold of
the spirit which could, through repeated “distillations,”
“washings” and “cleansings,” be freed from the
dross that had accrued to it in the course of human evolution.
Today, the
word myth is generally used in the sense of describing something that
is false, unreal, unproven—superstition thankfully outgrown. But
myth in its original sense is a great story accepted as divinely revealed
truth which can inspire, contain and structure a whole culture for thousands
of years. Such a myth is central to the belief systems of Christianity
and the other religions of the Axial Age—Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism,
Judaism, and Islam.
Jung was
immersed for years in extensive researches into the myths of the ancient
world, as well as the Christian myth and the lesser-known myth of alchemy.
He realized that these different myths arise out of the soul and are
elaborated and developed over long periods of time. They manifest deep
psychological truths which attempt to explain the mystery of our existence
and the complexities of our lives in this dimension. They demonstrate
the basic archetypal patterns and dynamics of the soul and thus give
us a vital key to understanding human needs and human behavior. The
mythic content is projected onto the figure of an extraordinary individual
who, because of the power of this projection, takes on the mantle of
an archetypal saviour, redeemer or teacher which enormously increases
the power of the myth and the numinosity of the individual around whom
it has constellated.
Because
these great stories are not understood as metaphors of psychic processes,
whole cultures may worship a saviour figure for millennia, not realizing
that this figure personifies a primary content of their own soul or,
in a wider sense, the soul of the cosmos. Because they fail to connect
their myth to an inner experience, they may fall into defending “their”
revelation against those of others or splinter into many sects which
are antagonistic to each other.
Jung came
to recognize in the dreams of his patients many of the symbolic images
and themes that were common to older mythologies and to alchemy. He
concluded that there was an unexplored substratum of consciousness common
to all humanity (the collective unconscious) and that an interpretation
of mythic imagery in relation to the soul could help to reconnect the
modern mind with that deeper archetypal dimension. Belief and faith
had not transformed human consciousness. Something more was needed.
He thought that an understanding of myth as metaphor could help us to
gain a deeper understanding of ourselves. He felt that the imagery of
certain myths, including the Christian one, portrays both the inner
landscape and the spiritual task of the soul and describes its archetypal
powers which can heal, regenerate and guide. “Myth is the revelation
of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks
to us as a Word of God.” (7) Modern consciousness
was, he felt, cut off from its roots, impoverished because of its lack
of connection with them and its ignorance of the undiscovered treasure-house
of the soul.
Like the
great teachers of Kabbalah, Jung knew that the evolution of life on
this planet is a very slow emergence from the organic life of nature.
The whole of humanity suffers because the increase of consciousness
in the human species is so slow and arduous. He realized that the alchemical
images he found in the texts he studied were similar to those in the
dreams of his patients and that they referred to an inner process of
transformation taking place within the soul of humanity as well as the
soul of the individual. His task, as he saw it, was to help people to
become aware of this process so they could co-operate with and assist
it.
Only after I had familiarized
myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process,
and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the
relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious. In individual
cases that transformation can be read from dreams and fantasies. In
collective life it has left its deposit principally in
the various religious systems and their changing symbols. Through
the study of these collective transformation processes and through
understanding of alchemical symbolism, I arrived at the central concept
of my psychology: the process of individuation. (8)
From the alchemists, Jung took the idea of the unus mundus,
a unifying cosmic ground in which both matter and psyche participate
and whose connecting substratum gives rise to what he called synchronicities
as well as to miraculous healings, visionary experiences and sudden
illuminations. I will return to these ideas later.
Jung knew
that the greatest problem facing humanity was the loss of relationship
with the soul. Just before he died he said to a friend: “I am
practically alone. There are a few who understand this and that, but
almost nobody sees the whole…I have failed in my foremost task:
to open people’s eyes to the fact that humankind has a soul and
that there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and
philosophy are in a lamentable state.”(9)
But he did not fail. The seeds sown by him are now bearing fruit,
not only in the branch of psychology which has taken his name but in
the culture as a whole.
Jung asked
the basic question: “Is man related to something infinite or not?
That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing
which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest
upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.”
(10)
He thought
that the dimension of the soul included the two polarities of matter
and spirit, the finite and the infinite. He knew that the archetypal
power of Christianity to hold society together was waning and that we
needed a radically different image of God, one that did not split nature
from spirit; one that included all aspects and levels of life. “It
was only quite late that we realized (or rather, are beginning to realize),
that God is Reality itself and therefore last but not least man. This
realization is a millennial process.”(11)
With these two sentences he offers us a different image of God and a
different image of ourselves. Through the discoveries he made and his
application of them in his practice and in his books, he was able to
say near the end of his life in the famous BBC interview with John Freeman
in 1959: “I don’t need to believe…I know, I know.”
He also warned that “The only real danger that exists is man himself
” and that “Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”
The Concept of the Unconscious
The word
“unconscious” does not mean much to most people when they
first hear of it. It doesn’t conjure up a specific image that
relates to something of which they have knowledge. I much prefer to
use the word soul rather than unconscious because soul is a word that
relates us to older cultures and mythologies but in this chapter I need
to respect Jung’s terminology. Jung's great contribution to an
extended understanding of ourselves is that he expanded the field of
the conscious mind’s awareness so that it was able to relate to
the deeper and unrecognized levels of the psyche to which he gave the
name “the unconscious”. Beyond the conscious mind lay a
vast unexplored hinterland – the root and rhizome of the soul
as he called it - whose existence was not yet acknowledged: “Contemporary
cultural consciousness has not yet absorbed into its general philosophy
the idea of the unconscious and all that it means. The assimilation
of the fundamental insight that psychic life has two poles still remains
a task for the future.”(12)
The Personal Unconscious
Jung named
tThe aspect of the unconscious that is closest to us and relates to
our personal experience of life the personal unconscious—those
feelings and tendencies which may have been repressed due to parental
and cultural conditioning, religious indoctrination, social and tribal
custom as well as parental complexes and sibling rivalry. In this part
of the unconscious that is closest to consciousness may be found feelings
of fear, guilt, anxiety, unexpressed rage which have their origin in
early traumatic experience, as well as creative potential—ideas
and longings—which could not be given expression because they
were not considered acceptable or because there was no cultural container
to receive and develop them. Many people grow up utterly unaware of
how complexes in the personal unconscious may direct and constrain them—perhaps
with a rigid internalized parental or religious structure of control
and repression which may have been passed down in their family for generations.
The Collective Unconscious
The personal unconscious
is embedded or nested within the archetypal, transpersonal or suprapersonal
dimension of the soul to which Jung gave the name of the “collective
unconscious”. In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
he explains how he defined the collective unconscious: “In addition
to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature
and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack
on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic
system of a collective, universal and impersonal nature which is identical
in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually
but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes...
which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” (13)
In dreams, this may manifest as the image of the ocean. Jung referred
to it as the “mighty deposit of ancestral experience accumulated
over millions of years.” At other times he called it the two-million-year-old
man or woman in whose house we live but whose acquaintance we have not
yet made. The collective unconscious is like a vast memory field which
holds the experience of all that has transpired since the beginning
of our evolution as a species on this planet. But more than this, it
embraces the whole of what other species have experienced—the
total species and planetary memory. Because it contains all this millennial
experience, it is, as Jung described it, “the source of all sorts
of evils and also the matrix of all divine experience.”(14)
Consciousness in the personal sense rests on this greater substratum
of our psychic life and is open to influence from it—influence
that can be bearer of both good and evil, both illuminating and deceiving.
All of us are influenced by these largely unknown archetypal dynamics.
In his writings and his practice, soul becomes not something that belongs
to us but something in whose greater life we unknowingly participate.
“The unconscious…is as natural, as limitless, and as powerful
as the stars.”(15)
If the human soul is anything,
it must be of unimaginable complexity and diversity…I can only
gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic
nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images
which have accumulated over millions of years of living development
and become fixed in the organism. My consciousness is like an
eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic
non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images
are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors…Besides
this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens
at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe
without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the
body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. (16)
Jung
knew that the modern soul was in a state of suffering and alienation
because the conscious mind knew nothing of this deeper ground and, therefore,
could not grow to its full potential, its full stature, through the
creation of a relationship with it, nor could the conscious mind protect
itself from being possessed or taken over by archetypal elements, having
no experience in how to recognize, relate to or integrate them. He defined
sickness or neurosis as a state of incompleteness, and health as a state
of wholeness brought about through the reconnection of the conscious
mind with the unconscious through paying attention to dreams, synchronistic
events and the cultivation of the art of listening to and engaging in
dialogue with the soul. Just as a child develops the ability to read
and thereby gains access to an immense field of information relating
to the physical world, so he thought we could develop the imagination
as a vital faculty that helps us to gain experience of the dimension
of the soul that lies beyond the horizon of the conscious mind.
The conscious
mind can listen, interpret, assess, and apply what is discovered through
that experience. It can also challenge or disagree with the content
of what is brought to its attention. But if it does not accept the existence
of such a dimension, it can also block access to it through ridicule,
denial or overt repression. If the imagination is allowed no access
to what lies beyond the current parameters of the rational mind, it
is likely to degenerate into destructive, even pathological fantasies
and behaviour. If we seek proof of the sickness of the modern soul,
we need look no further than the constant celebration of violence on
our television screens, the growing arsenal of our weapons of mass destruction
and the fundamentalist and polarized stance of so many who claim allegiance
to a specific religion.
The Importance of the Conscious Mind or Ego
As his understanding
of the psyche deepened, Jung realized that the development of the ego
and conscious mind was an incredible evolutionary achievement. A dream
showed him the importance of consciousness per se:
It was night in some unknown
place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty
wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped
around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment.
Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive…This
little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. My
own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest.
(17)
It
is an salutary thought that without the existence of the conscious mind,
we would not be able to perceive the world, reflect upon it and interact
with its reality. Looking for a myth for our time, Jung found it in
the fact that, through the existence of the conscious mind, man has
become “indispensable for the completion of creation:”
…he himself is the second
creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective
existence – without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating,
giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions
of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being
down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective
existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the
great process of being. (18)
“As
far as we can discern,” he observed, “the sole purpose of
human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the
increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.”(19)
The Loss of a Living Myth
But the
emergence of the ego and the development of the conscious mind tore
us out of nature. Its coming into existence involved a great loss, the
loss of the state of unconscious participation mystique with nature,
the loss of a different kind and quality of consciousness and the instinctive
sense of belonging to a greater whole. In his last book, Man and
His Symbols, Jung summarizes this loss:
As scientific understanding
has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself
isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature,
and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with
natural phenomena…No voices now speak to man from stones, plants,
and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His
contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional
energy that this symbolic connection supplied. (20)
When
Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God at the end of the nineteenth century,
he was describing not so much the literal death of God as the decay
of a belief system and an image of spirit that was worn out, because
it was no longer numinous and therefore relevant to millions of people.
Jung realized that that the problems of our time are rooted not only
in the grip that scientific materialism has on our culture, but above
all in the loss of a living myth which would give meaning to our lives.
He saw that the dissociation of the conscious rational mind from what
he called the primordial or instinctual soul presented a growing and
unperceived danger to humanity. The more we emphasized reason and the
supremacy of the rational mind, the greater the danger that instinct—whose
power we have failed to recognize—would drive, possess, delude
and overwhelm us and the more we would fall victim to secular and religious
ideologies and utopian goals which could ultimately lead us to destroy
ourselves.
At present
the conscious mind or ego necessarily has a restricted field of vision.
We cannot hold the totality of the conscious and unconscious aspects
of our psyche because our field of awareness is so limited. The extent
of the unconscious is as great as life itself, while the focus of consciousness
is a restricted field of momentary awareness that is heavily dependent
on memory.
In relation
to what is still a potential in us to be developed, the conscious mind
is in what could be called a pre-conscious state, characterized by unconscious
identifications and projections of every kind that arise from various
personal complexes and imprinted collective beliefs. Moreover, it is
still subject to the immense power of the instinctual drives of the
older brain system, as described in Chapter Four. This unconsciousness
is reflected in the difficulties and conflicts in our relationships
with each other, whether as individuals or as nation states and in the
fact that we repeat the same patterns of behavior without any apparent
ability to prevent ourselves doing so or even any awareness of what
we are doing.
Jung’s
concept of the process of individuation was to extend or expand the
field of our awareness so that we are able to relate, at least to some
extent, to the deeper levels of the complex totality of the soul. Working
at this deep level for many years is like an extended meditation which
connects us not only to the life of nature but to the immensity of the
inner life of the cosmos—what could be called the soul of the
cosmos.
The Danger of an Inflated Ego
Jung hoped
that if awareness of the fact that there are two poles or dimensions
of consciousness could spread through our culture, this would mitigate
the dangers of a further inflation of the modern ego, or “rational”
mind, which has set up a phobic defense against anything which threatens
the hegemony of its own current level of understanding. Jung developed
this theme in Man and His Symbols where he writes:
Modern man does not understand
how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity
to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the
mercy of the psychic “underworld.” He has freed himself
from “superstition” (or so he believes), but in
the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively
dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated,
and he is now paying the price for this break-up in world-wide
disorientation and dissociation…We have stripped all things
of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer.
(21)
Nowhere is this hubris of the conscious mind more apparent and more
dangerous than in the sphere of politics and religion. And no-one
was more aware of the dangers of this state of inflation than Jung when
he wrote: “We are threatened with universal genocide if
we cannot work out the way of salvation by a symbolic death.”(22)
By this, he meant the death of the omnipotent stance of the conscious
mind or ego. On the eve of the outbreak of the First World War,
as he recounts in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung had a
vivid dream which showed him the necessity of his consciously
making this sacrifice:
I was with an unknown, brown-skinned
man…in a lonely, rocky mountain landscape. It was before dawn;
the eastern sky was already bright, and the stars fading. Then I heard
Siegfried's horn sounding over the mountains and I knew that we had
to kill him…On a chariot made of the bones of the dead he drove
at a furious speed down the precipitous slopes. When he turned a corner,
we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck dead… Filled with
disgust and remorse for having destroyed something so great and
beautiful, I turned to flee, impelled by the fear that the murder
might be discovered. But a tremendous downfall of rain began, and
I knew that it would wipe out all traces of the dead. (23)
Reflecting
on the dream, Jung understood that it pointed to a problem that was
being played out in the world. He realized that he had to sacrifice
his unconscious identification with the solar hero personified by the
figure of Siegfried, and the inflated attitude that seeks power over
others. He understood that when an individual or a nation does not become
aware of both the light and the dark, the conscious and unconscious
aspects of his/its nature, the individual or nation may project an unconscious
power drive onto an opponent and embark upon a crusade to eliminate
that 'enemy'. The evil is always 'out there'. Therefore, the world is
torn into opposing ideologies; walls, psychic and material, are built
to separate enemies.
The Self
Jung and
the other men and women who have devoted their whole lives to the study
of the psyche, have greatly expanded our understanding of the relationship
between the two aspects of our psychic life — the rational and
the transrational — which together constitute the wholeness of
the psyche and which function as a self-regulating system, rather like
the earth’s biosphere. Of crucial importance is Gerhard Adler’s
redefinition of the unconscious as the greater consciousness or super-conscious.
(24) The word “unconscious” might suggest that it
is something inferior to consciousness whereas the true situation is
the reverse. The conscious mind is unconscious of something that is
infinitely greater than itself, the matrix out of which it has evolved.
This redefinition aligns Jung’s discoveries with the far older
tradition of the cosmic dimensions of soul that developed from Egyptian,
Platonic, Gnostic and Kabbalistic roots. In India, Vedic teaching has
always described seven realms or planes of reality which can become
accessible to human consciousness as it deepens its experience.
This greater
consciousness or greater dimension of soul has a focus within the unconscious,
functioning there as an autonomous intelligence — a dynamic, structuring,
ordering and integrating principle that Jung called the Self. In his
view, this deeper intelligence (even when unrecognized) initiates and
oversees the alchemy of the transformation of consciousness—whether
in the individual or in our species as a whole—whereby the center
of gravity gradually shifts from the personal to the transpersonal or,
to put it another way, where the conscious personality grows and expands
through a deepening relationship with the unseen ground of life.
The Self can inform the ego
of realities that have never been part of conscious reality. Thus,
for example, in the case of an individual who has been struck
with a life-threatening illness, and whose conscious attitude
toward the illness might be despair and hopelessness, it is
the Self that can constellate the archetype of healing in the individual
and that may unleash a flood of dreams, some of which may point directly
towards specific healing approaches above and beyond those being
employed. In some cases the Self appears to stimulate the self-healing
dynamics of the body’s auto-immune system. (25)
In
the Abrahamic religions the image of the Self has been projected onto
the image of God and in Christianity onto the half divine, half human
figure of Christ, but both images have been defined as being outside
or beyond ourselves. There was the possibility of dialogue and relationship,
even of a numinous experience of the Self in the form of dreams and
visions, but the Self was rarely experienced as a deeper dimension or
intelligence that is the ground of our own consciousness. Today, in
a secular culture such as our own, the conscious ego has banished any
dimension of reality beyond this physical world and there is, therefore,
no possibility of dialogue and relationship with the Self: dreams, messages,
warnings and synchronistic events go unnoticed. The danger of this is
that people – particularly political and religious leaders –
can become inflated by an unconscious identification with the Self and
claim god-like powers for themselves, their religion, their ideology
or their nation.
My own visionary
dream of the figure of a woman reaching from earth to heaven can be
understood as an image of the Self. Her message to me was to develop
and extend my consciousness, to center the wheel in my abdomen as hers
was centered. Had I not been in analysis at the time, such a vision
might have destabilized or inflated me. In a secular culture, I would
not have known how to relate to that experience but might have either
ignored it or used it for my own purposes, rather than seeking to serve
it and integrate its message over many years. Nor would I have understood
that my vision personified both the Self in the Jungian sense as well
as the macrocosm—the vast hidden matrix of cosmic soul.
An encounter
with the Self can be both terrifying and incomprehensible as well as
life-transforming. One cannot communicate the experience to someone
who has never had such an experience any more than one can communicate
the feeling of falling in love or the near-death experience to someone
who has not had that experience. One can describe it, but to communicate
the numinosity of it is almost impossible. The Self might be thought
of as the archetype of wholeness, and its intention is to restore to
wholeness the human psyche that has been so fragmented—even through
means which appear to us to be destructive. The process of individuation
is an enormous cultural task, made more difficult in a culture that
shows no inclination to acknowledge the need for it. Anyone who enters
onto the lonely path of individuation, through whatever door, becomes
deeply aware of the suffering of the world and is drawn to respond to
it.
The general
ignorance of the existence of the cosmic dimensions of soul and our
lack of relationship with them goes far to answer the question of why
the suffering of humanity — despite a phenomenal improvement in
our health, longevity and standard of living, at least in some of the
industrialized nations — appears to be ineradicable. This ignorance
also sheds light on why people, despite their religious beliefs, continue
to behave in such unconscious, brutal and destructive ways that injure
or destroy their own lives as well as those of others. So much of this
brutality springs from deep psychic wounds — many of them culturally
imposed — of which people are unaware and which, therefore, remain
inaccessible to healing. Religious indoctrination, such as the belief
in original sin, a punishing, judgmental God, or the inferiority and
dangerous sexuality of women, may inflict such wounds, many of them
delivered centuries ago but still carried in the memory field of the
transpersonal collective unconscious.
In the midst
of their suffering, millions have cried out, “Why does God allow
these things to happen? Why does He allow us to suffer? Why can't He
intervene to help us?” But Jung knew that God cannot prevent human
suffering any more than He can prevent human cruelty, avarice and greed.
Only insight into our own nature can change our deeply ingrained habits
of aggression and therefore our suffering. As he comments:
Individuation does not
only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal,
but that he is to become partially divine as well. That means
practically that he becomes adult, responsible for his existence,
knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also
depends on man. (26)
Of
the Self, Jung wrote, “Even the enlightened person remains what
he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who
dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses
him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as
the sky.”(27)
The Shadow
Jung’s
understanding of the shadow is one of the most important aspects of
his work and will be explored in more detail in a later chapter. He
was deeply aware of the need for us to become aware of the unconscious
drive for power and dominance that affects so much of the way we conduct
ourselves in the world and our relationships with other nations. This
drive is reflected in unconscious habits of behaviour which perpetuate
war, oppression, and suffering. In relation to the urgent need for us
to become aware of our shadow behavior he commented:
None of us stands outside humanity’s
black collective shadow. Whether the crime occurred many generations
back or happens today, it remains the symptom of a disposition that
is always and everywhere present – and one would therefore do
well to possess some “imagination for evil”…harmlessness
and naiveté are as little help as it would be for a cholera
patient and those in his vicinity to remain unconscious of the contagiousness
of the disease. On the contrary, they lead to projection of the unrecognized
evil onto the “other”. This strengthens the opponent’s
position in the most effective way, because the projection carries
the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil
over to the other side and considerably increases the formidableness
of his threat. What is even worse, our lack of insight deprives
us of the capacity to deal with evil. (28)
Jung
repeatedly spoke of our power to destroy not only our species but even
the planet. One of his closest colleagues, Marie Louise von Franz, said
in the film Matter of Heart that near the end of his life,
Jung had a vision of terrible world destruction, and another just before
his death of which he said, “Thank God, it wasn't the whole planet.”
As long
as we have no insight into shadow behavior, we run the risk of falling
under the spell of beliefs that cause us to repeat old patterns. As
Jung observed:
Today, humanity as never before,
is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological
rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens
outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided
and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must
perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. (29)
We
have seen how, in the last century, psychopathic individuals were able
to seize power through casting the spell of Utopian myth on millions
of followers, inflicting an orgy of murder and blood-lust on the people
of Europe, the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia. There is a danger that
the pattern will continue to be repeated unless we become more conscious
of the dangers involved in destroying an old order and instituting a
new one. Nothing illustrates this better than the naïve belief
that God would approve of removing Saddam Hussein from power because
he was “evil” and instituting a new democratic order in
Iraq. The danger, as Jung pointed out in his book, Civilization
in Transition, is Utopian ideologies (whether religious or secular)
that seduce people into believing that destroying an old order by violence
will usher in a new and better world. As John Gray acidly comments in
his book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia,
“Preserving the hard-won restraints of civilization is less exciting
than throwing them away in order to realize impossible dreams. Barbarism
has a certain charm, particularly when it comes clothed in virtue.”(30)
If this
transformation of our nature does not happen, the addiction to power,
primacy and control and the struggle over territory and dwindling resources
such as oil, food and water will continue as before—leading to
ever more suffering, perhaps even to our extinction as a species. As
long as we remain unconscious of the immense power of that addiction
we are condemned to repeat the habits of the past, aligning ourselves
on the side of good and believing that we can overcome evil by fighting
it with the force of arms. If we can become capable of recognizing and
restraining our own capacity for evil, we can rescue ourselves from
this predicament, which is at the same time God's predicament, since
God’s power to intervene in human affairs is dependent on the
maturation of our own consciousness—the only channel through which
this intervention can be expressed.
Jung was
far in advance of his time in recognising the need for a new definition
of our relationship to God or Spirit. His understanding of the shadow
and of our huge potential, both for good and for evil, opened for us
a new avenue for psychic transformation. This is what he wrote in a
letter:
We have become participants
of the divine life and we have to assume a new responsibility. The
responsible living and fulfilling of the divine love in us will be
our form of worship of, and commerce with, God. His goodness
means grace and light and his dark side the terrible temptation of
power. Man has already received so much knowledge that
he can destroy his own planet. Let us hope that God's good spirit
will guide him in his decisions, because it will depend on man's
decision whether God's creation will continue. (31)
At the end of The Undiscovered Self, Jung wrote:
A mood of world destruction
and world renewal has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself
felt everywhere, politically, socially and philosophically. Coming
generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation
if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own
technology and science. As at the beginning of the Christian
Era, so again today we are faced with the problem of the moral
backwardness of our species which has failed to keep pace with our
scientific, technical and social developments. So much is at stake
and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern
man. Is he capable of resisting the temptation to use his power
for the purpose of staging a world conflagration? Is he conscious
of the path he is treading and what the conclusions are that must
be drawn from the present world situation and his own psychic
situation?… does the individual know that he [or she] is the
make-weight that tips the scales…that infinitesimal unit
on whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the
Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal? (32)
In Answer to Job, he wrote: “Everything now depends on
man: immense power of destruction is given into his hand and the question
is whether he can resist the will to use it, and can temper his will
with the spirit of love and wisdom.”(33)
What Jung offered was not a new belief system but a spirituality grounded
in self-knowledge—particularly awareness of the shadow, so freeing
ourselves from possession by it. This could lead to a greater sense
of ethical responsibility towards life in all its aspects, seen and
unseen. He knew that we did not have much time in which to accomplish
this momentous task because he saw the dangers of the god-like power
that had been put into our hands through the development of our weapons,
our fixation on scientific and technological progress and our ignorance
of how the conscious mind can be directed by the power drive of the
unconscious shadow.
Jung realized
that the problems of our time are rooted not only in the grip that scientific
rationalism has on our culture, but in the loss of a living myth and
the increasing dissociation between thinking and feeling, conscious
mind and instinctive soul. This inner dissociation, magnified by the
inflation of the ego and projected onto countless situations of tension
and conflict in the world draws all of us closer to catastrophe.
One
recent example of ego inflation was the decision of the American and
British governments to invade Iraq in 2003. So sure were their leaders
that their cause was a righteous one and that they would be welcomed
by the Iraqi people, that they went into Iraq like a bull into a china
shop, totally unprepared for the much harder task of securing the peace.
The suffering and loss of life they caused (151,000 civilian lives by
2006 and four million exiled and destitute) did not apparently matter
in relation to the prize of “victory”. This is one example
of how we can be taken over by the archetypal forces which lie beyond
the conscious mind and succumb to an inflation of the ego.
Jung repeatedly
drew attention to the fact that the fate of the earth depends on the
individual, on our capacity to create a relationship with our soul,
to become aware of and to value that part of ourselves we know least
— our deepest feelings and instincts which are the root of our
creative imagination. This instinctual dimension of ourselves, so dissociated
from consciousness, so little explored and understood, is the matrix
of our creative life, and is immeasurably older and sometimes wiser
than the more recently developed aspect of ourselves we call our rational
mind. Becoming aware of this instinctual dimension and the immense field
of relationships and experience it embraces constitutes an evolutionary
advance. For, until we learn how to relate to it, how to integrate it
with our more familiar, focused ability to think, we remain immature,
living on the surface of life, falling prey to events which we bring
into being because of our ignorance of the habits that compel us to
repeat the mistakes of the past. We are then easily manipulated by political
and religious leaders who think in terms of accruing power to their
own particular group or ideology, rather than in terms of what truly
benefits the people they are meant to serve or the wider needs of the
planet itself.
Jung revived
and recovered the lost dimension of the soul for our culture. He knew
from his own shamanic encounter with this dimension that the conventional
view of a personal soul was too shallow to be able to hold his experience.
From his first moving description of his encounter with this deeper
dimension of reality, as recorded in The Red Book until his
realization, after years of observation, that there must be a dimension
to which he gave the name “psychoid” which underlay both
psyche and matter and in which both participated—so giving rise
to his concept of synchronicity, the whole focus of his work from 1913
until his death in 1960 was on the recovery of the soul.
“We
are partly fated and partly free,” he wrote, “and the measure
of our freedom is our capacity to relate to our fate.”(34)
We cannot relate to or comprehend our fate, let alone change it, unless
we integrate the two separated aspects of our soul—the conscious
mind and the unconscious. In a letter to Miguel Serrano, written shortly
before he died, Jung said something which gives hope for the future,
reminding us that what seems of supreme importance to one’s own
life path may ultimately have value for the world as well:
In each aeon there are at least
a few individuals who understand what man’s real task consists
of, and keep its tradition for future generations and a time
when insight has reached a deeper and more general level. First the
way of a few will be changed and in a few generations there will be
more…whoever is capable of such insight, no matter how isolated
he is, should be aware of the law of synchronicity. As the old Chinese
saying goes: “The right man sitting in his house and thinking
the right thought will be heard a 100 miles away. (35)
In
answer to the question “What can I do?” Jung said, “Become
what you have always been, namely, the wholeness we have lost in the
midst of our civilized, conscious existence, a wholeness that we always
were without knowing it.”(36)
Notes:
1. C. G. Jung, Letters 2, p. 436 Letter to Rev. Morton Kelsey
2. Prologue to Memories Dreams, Reflections, London: Collins
and Routledge & Kegan
Paul, London, 1963, p. 18
3. Memories Dreams, Reflections p. 184
4. Chapter II in The Red Book, Liber Novus: The Re-discovery of
the Soul, edited and introduced by Sonu Shamdasani, W.W. Norton
& Co, New York & London, 2009
5. Memories Dreams, Reflections p. 181
6. Memories Dreams, Reflections p. 191
7. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 340
8 . Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 209
9. From an unpublished letter written by Jung in 1960 quoted by Dr.
Gerhard Adler in Dynamics of the Self, Coventure, London 1979,
p. 92
10. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 300
11. Collected Works 11, par. 631
12. find reference
13. CW 9, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, par.
90, p. 43
14. CW 18 par. 1586
15. Man and his Symbols, Aldus Books, London, 1964, p. 103
16. CW 4, Freud and Psychoanalysis, p 331
17. MDR
18. MDR p. 240-1
19. MDR, p. 301
20. Man and His Symbols, p. 95
21. Man and his Symbols, p. 94
22. CW 18, par. 1661
23. MDR, 173-4
24. Gerhard Adler, Dynamics of the Self, p. 129
25. Jerome S. Bernstein, Living in the Borderland, Routledge,
2005, p. 57-8
26. Letters 2, p. 316, letter to Elined Kotschnig
27. CW 11, Answer to Job, last paragraph (758)
28. The Undiscovered Self, par. 572, p. 297
29. CW 9, Part 11, par. 126
30. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of
Utopia, Allen Lane, London, 2007, p. 192
31. C.G. Jung, Letters, Vol. 11, p. 316 - letter to Elined Kotschnig,
quoted in C.G. Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul, p. 199, by
Claire Dunne, Parabola Books, 2000
32. The Undiscovered Self, p. 110-112
33. Answer to Job, CW 11, p. 459.
34. passed on to me by my analyst who knew Jung personally.
35. Letter to Miguel Serrano, 1960 in Letters Vol. 2, p. 595
36. CW 10, par. 722