CHAPTER TEN

Jung and the Recovery of the Soul

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

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