CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jung and the Rediscovery of the Soul

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

                                                            — T.S. Eliot

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

I have included a chapter on Jung in this book because he was the primary influence on the recovery of the Feminine and the forgotten dimension of the Soul in the last century. His influence has been far-reaching and profound although many people may not be aware of how his discoveries have affected our culture.
          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 and 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 the historian of culture, 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 invisible world — between the known and the unknown. Descending to us from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece this theme 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 embark on a quest, to enter the “wilderness” of the unexplored depths of ourselves in order to recover our connection with that world, thereby bringing about our awakening, transformation and return to the Source.
          Jung was one of the cultural heroes who made the shamanic journey into the underworld of the soul and returned with a treasure that has enriched our 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. In the field of astronomy, Copernicus and Kepler transformed the medieval worldview by displacing the earth from its position at the centre of the solar system. Jung did the same for the modern psyche, displacing the conscious mind or ego from its central position by introducing the concept of a deeper matrix of consciousness to which the ego is related as child to mother and out of which, in evolutionary terms, it has emerged.
          He reconnected the solar consciousness of the rational mind with the lunar consciousness of the instinctual soul, so healing the dissociation in the psyche and restoring to Western culture in a modern context the shamanic way of knowing that has been increasingly lost over some 4000 years. More specifically, it could be said that he opened the door to the right hemisphere of the brain and to the intelligence of the heart, both of which have been closed off during the course of the scientific revolution of the last four hundred years, leading ultimately to the denial of the existence of the soul. As a potential carrier of consciousness for the whole culture, he had to engage with its need to recover the connection to what he called the spirit of the depths. He knew that ignorance of the tremendous power of the archetypal powers which lie beyond the range of the limited conscious mind, puts us at risk of being taken over by them, falling into fanaticism and the dissolution of our humanity—something that we can increasingly see happening in our world at the beginning of this new millennium.
          Like many titans of innovative thought who are ahead of their time, he has been contemptuously dismissed by many as a charlatan and a mystic and to a large extent, ignored, notably by members of his own profession of psychiatry. But Jung rediscovered the wider meaning of the word ‘Soul’, extending and deepening the understanding of it for the whole culture, rescuing it from the obscurity and neglect into which it had fallen for centuries. In his writings and his practice, Soul becomes not so much something that belongs to us as something to which we belong — a vast and unexplored dimension of reality. He knew that our greatest need was for connection with the transcendent, not through belief and faith, but through opening our minds to the existence of that unrecognized dimension which is the ground of our familiar world. He asked again the great soul questions: What is life? What is God? What is the origin of evil? What is the purpose of our lives on this planet and how can we fulfil it?
          Jung felt that Christianity has become transfixed in its belief system and needed to be regenerated by a deeper understanding of its great myth, interpreted as a metaphor of the soul’s life in this dimension of reality. Belief had not helped Christians nor, indeed, believers of other traditions, to fathom the deeper evolutionary intention of the spirit which he defined as the progressive awakening to awareness of the divinity carried within the human soul. In a late interview with Sir Laurens van der Post, he said, “My work has proved that the pattern of God exists in every man.” However, he wrote,

We are still looking back to the Pentecostal events instead of looking forward to the goal the spirit is leading us to. Therefore mankind is wholly unprepared for the things to come. 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 beginnings 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)

I believe that Jung can be placed among the great astronauts of the soul who have opened our awareness to the existence of another dimension of reality and given us a deeper insight into the unrealized potential of our nature. But he was also a scientist who developed a methodology to connect us with the dimension of the soul and he 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 elements in men and women. As a prophet, he foresaw the dangers for humanity in the decades ahead and felt that only a greater insight into our nature could help us to avoid destroying ourselves and much of the planet through the blind hubris of our ego and our addiction to the demonic power of our weapons:

Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature and has populated it with monstrous machines… Man is bound to follow the adventurous promptings of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, his genius shows the uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide. (2)

How did Jung gain his insight into the existence of the soul? 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.”(3)
          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 designated position as Freud’s successor and turned towards his inner world, setting aside time to respond to and record a near-overwhelming irruption 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 he had during the autumn of 1913 and the spring of 1914. The idea of war did not occur to him at all, 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 unrecognized 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 culture of his day and then discover how to communicate that knowledge in a way that people could comprehend. 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 embody his insights in his daily life, for he realized that this was an ethical obligation of the conscious mind towards the unconscious. (4)
          Some have seen the experience of these years as a psychotic episode and have labelled Jung schizophrenic; others, including myself, see it as a shamanic initiation into the direct experience of a deeper aspect of reality. There are two dangers attendant on this kind of experience. One is the danger of insanity, of being overwhelmed by the material because the conscious ego is not strong enough to contain it and assimilate 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 proclaiming it in the manner of those individuals who have led their credulous followers to a suicidal death or who anticipate 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 outlawed or destroyed by order of the Emperors Constantine and Theodosius during the course of the fourth century AD. But by 1912 Jung knew of these few surviving Gnostic 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 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 contemporary understanding of the need for a relationship between the two separated aspects of the psyche—the conscious mind and the virtually unknown domain of the soul.
          Jung recorded his experience in over 1000 handwritten pages and illustrations, many of which he later bound together in a magnificent volume that he called The Red Book (finally published in 2009), which opens with a page written in fourteenth century German script. (5) Through these beautifully worked pages, we can follow Jung’s quest for the lost dimension of the soul, how it is rescued from neglect and obscurity; how its life is given meaningful expression in meticulously painted images and words, how it becomes a living reality for him rather than a theoretical abstraction. These moving words record his realization that the soul is an independent living entity or dimension of reality, something whose immense range we cannot grasp, whose voice is “the Spirit of the Depths”:

I have returned, I am once again there—I am with you—after long years of wandering. I have come again to you… But one thing you must know, one thing I have learnt, that one must live this life. This life is the way… the way to the incomprehensible, which we call divine…I found the right way, it led me to you, to my soul.

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; much more are my judgment 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. (6)

In the course of listening to the voice of the Spirit of the Depths, Jung encountered a winged figure whom he called Philemon, the being who became his guide to the strange world of the Soul, rather as Virgil was guide to Dante. Philemon taught Jung that this unrecognized dimension was as real as the physical world and that it sought to gain the attention of the conscious mind. Because this idea is so unfamiliar to us, it is something that is extraordinarily difficult for the modern mind to comprehend.
          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.”(7) Near the end of his life, he wrote:

It has taken me virtually forty-five years to distil 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. (8)

The Concept of the Unconscious
Jung’s great contribution to an expanded understanding of our nature is that our psychic life has, as it were, two poles. Beyond the conscious mind lies a vast unexplored hinterland — the unconscious, or the root and rhizome of the soul as he called it, whose existence is, even now, not acknowledged by either religion or science.
          Jung named the aspect of the unconscious that is closest to us and relates to our individual 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, unacknowledged rage which have their origin in early traumatic experience. But it also holds the creative potential—the ideas, longings and creative gifts—which could not be given expression because they were not helped to develop 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 stemming from a rigid internalized structure of control and repression — parental or religious — which may have been passed down in their family or culture for generations or, as is the case today in our secular culture, from the total absence of parental care in childhood and the consequent lack of boundaries and support of any kind.
          The personal unconscious is embedded or nested like a smaller field within the greater transpersonal field of the collective unconscious. Consciousness rests like a lily-pad on this greater substratum of our psychic life which has a “collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.” Jung described the collective unconscious as

the mighty deposit of ancestral experience accumulated over millions of years, the echo of prehistoric happenings to which each century adds an infinitesimally small amount of variation and differentiation. Because the collective unconscious is, in the last analysis, a deposit of world-processes embedded in the structure of the brain and the sympathetic nervous system, it constitutes in its totality a sort of timeless and eternal world-image which counterbalances our conscious momentary picture of the world. It means nothing less than another world, a mirror-world if you will. But unlike a mirror-image, the unconscious image possesses an energy peculiar to itself, independent of consciousness. By virtue of this energy it can produce powerful effects which do not appear on the surface but influence us all the more powerfully from within. These influences remain invisible to anyone who fails to subject his momentary picture of the world to adequate criticism and who therefore remains hidden from himself. That the world has an inside as well as an outside, that it is not only outwardly visible but acts upon us in a timeless present, from the deepest and apparently most subjective recesses of the psyche—this I hold to be an insight which, even though it be ancient wisdom, deserves to be evaluated as a new factor in building a weltanschaung [worldview]. (9)

Elsewhere 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 – a kind of psychic DNA – 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 and, above all, the basic instinctive patterns which give rise to physical forms as well as to specific patterns of behaviour common to all people on the planet. All of us are influenced by the largely unknown dynamics of this unacknowledged part of our total psyche—the basic archetypal patterns which, he said, are as fixed and immutable as the flight patterns of birds or the migratory routes of animals. We bring these patterns with us when we are born, part of our personal psychic DNA. Because of this immemorial experience, the collective unconscious is, as he said, “the source of all sorts of evils and also the matrix of all divine experience and, paradoxical as it may sound — it has brought forth and brings forth consciousness.”(10)
          One of the most important aspects of his work was his understanding of dreams as a means of reconnecting the conscious ego with this deeper dimension of the unconscious: “The dream,” he wrote, “is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was soul long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain soul no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends… All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night.”(11) As his understanding of his own dreams deepened, Jung realized that the development of the ego and conscious mind was a staggering 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. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light. (12)

While travelling in Africa, and gazing down over the immense plains spread out before him where herds of animals were grazing and moving as they had for countless thousands of years, Jung realized in a moment of sudden illumination, that without the existence of human consciousness, all that he saw that had existed from time immemorial would have had no witness to its existence. Without our consciousness, there would have been no-one to perceive the world, reflect upon it and interact intelligently with it. Realizing this and looking for a myth for our time, Jung found it in the fact that, through the coming into being of consciousness, or the conscious self-reflective mind, man has become

indispensable for the completion of creation, a 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. (13)

“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.”(14) Our individual lives, apparently so unimportant, may, in ways that we do not yet understand, affect the life of the cosmos and the unfolding of its evolutionary intention on this planet. That is perhaps why he felt that “the psyche is the greatest of all cosmic wonders and the sine qua non of the world as an object.”

The Loss of a Living Myth
But, as described in Chapter Six, the emergence of the conscious ego tore us out of nature and a purely instinctive way of responding to life. Its coming into existence involved a great loss, the loss of the state of unconscious participation in the life around us, 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 summarized this loss and it is worth quoting at length because it is so important:

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. These have slowly lost their symbolic implications…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 his symbolic connection supplied. This enormous loss is compensated for by the symbols of our dreams. They bring up our original nature – its instincts and peculiar thinking. Unfortunately, however, they express their contents in the language of nature, which is strange and incomprehensible to us. It therefore confronts us with the task of translating it into the rational words and concepts of modern speech, which has liberated itself…from its mystical participation with the things it describes. (15)

In a passage Jung wrote in his commentary on the Chinese text, The Secret of the Golden Flower, he describes how, as consciousness gains more and more autonomy and independence from the deeper matrix of the instinct, the whole super-structure of consciousness becomes disengaged from the age-old instinctive base or ground out of which it has developed. “Consciousness thus torn from its roots…possesses a Promethean freedom but it also partakes of the nature of a godless hybris.”(16) This unconscious split creates conflict between the two aspects of the psyche which finds its way into the many conflicts that are acted out in our relationships as well as in the wider arena of the world. Yet what confronts us as an implacable enemy may be a convoluted expression of the dissociated instinct that we, in our conviction that the rational mind should be our sole guide and the ruler of our actions, have ignored.
          Jung realized that the problems of our time are rooted not only in the grip that the mechanistic philosophy of 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 ego 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 acknowledge or understand—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. The goal we need to focus on is reconnecting our conscious mind with the deeper dimension of the soul.
          In relation to what is still a potential within 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 derive from various personal complexes and long-established collective beliefs. Moreover, it is still subject to the immense power of the instinctual drives of the older brain system which will be described in Chapters Twelve and Thirteen. This unconsciousness is reflected in the difficulties and conflicts in our relationships with each other, whether within a nation or as nation states and in the fact that we repeat the same patterns of behaviour without any apparent ability to prevent ourselves doing so or even any awareness of what we are doing. Yet, with insight, we can begin to change these patterns and combat the evils we bring into being by tracing them to their source in our present incomplete concept of reality.

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 defence against anything which threatens the hegemony of its 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. (17)

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.”(18) By this, he meant the death or sacrifice 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 consciously making this sacrifice himself:

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. (19)

Reflecting on the dream, Jung understood that it highlighted a problem that was being played out in the world. He realized that he had to sacrifice his own unconscious identification with the solar hero personified by the figure of Siegfried, and the inflated attitude that seeks power and supremacy. He understood that when we (either an individual or a nation) do not become aware of the existence of two aspects of consciousness — both the known and the unknown, we may project an unconscious power drive onto an opponent and embark upon a crusade to eliminate that enemy. As long as the evil is always ‘out there’ the world will be “torn into opposing ideologies; walls, psychic and material, will be built to separate enemies.”

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own presence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future... It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead. Paradoxically enough, inflation is a regression of consciousness into unconsciousness. This always happens when consciousness takes too many unconscious contents upon itself and loses the faculty of discrimination, the sine qua non of all consciousness.”(20)

Alchemy and the Individuation Process
One of Jung’s greatest legacies was his insight into the mythological symbolism of alchemy, whose importance was conveyed to him in two 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.
          For many decades Jung was engaged 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 deep stratum of the soul that holds the collective memories of our evolutionary experience and are elaborated and developed over long periods of time. They demonstrate the basic archetypal patterns and dynamics carried in both the individual and collective soul and thus give us a vital key to understanding human needs and human potential. The unconscious mythic content may be projected onto the figure of an extraordinary individual who, because of the power of the 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, but are taken literally, whole cultures may worship a saviour figure for millennia, not realizing that this figure personifies an unrecognized content of their own soul. Because they fail to connect their myth with that inner, unknown content, they may fall into literalism, defending ‘their’ revelation against those of others or they may splinter into many sects which are antagonistic to each other. This applies as much to “Jungians” as to any other group.
          Jung thought that the interpretation of mythic imagery as a metaphor of the soul’s life could help to awaken the modern mind to awareness of its deeper archetypal ground. 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 the archetypal powers which can heal, enlighten, regenerate and guide. Modern consciousness was, he felt, cut off from its roots, impoverished because of its ignorance of the undiscovered treasure-house of the soul. At the end of one of his earlier books, Modern man in Search of a Soul, he wrote:

The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men and women in whom it lives and who proclaim it. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree. (21)

Like the great teachers of Kabbalah, with whose tradition he was familiar, and certain of the alchemists, Jung knew that the evolution of life on this planet follows a very slow gradient of emergence from the organic life of nature. The whole of humanity suffers because the increase of consciousness 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 a process of transformation taking place within the collective soul of humanity as well as in the soul of the individual. His task, as he saw it, was to help people participate consciously in this evolutionary process, to set their search for meaning, their suffering and the unfolding of their lives and relationships in this wider context:

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. (22)

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, to some extent at least, to the complex reality of the wider dimension of the soul. Working to create a relationship with this mysterious entity over many years is like an extended meditation which connects us not only to the life of nature but to the inner life of the soul of the cosmos. In his later writings, soul becomes not something that belongs to us but something in whose greater life we unknowingly participate:

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. (23)

Jung knew that the modern psyche was in a state of suffering and alienation because the conscious ego 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 or ego protect itself from being possessed or taken over by archetypal elements, having no experience in how to recognize, relate to or integrate them—a situation that is one of the most dangerous features of our time. 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 or ego with the unconscious through paying attention to dreams, synchronistic events and engaging in a dialogue with the Spirit of the Depths. Just as a child develops the ability to read and explore, thereby gaining access to an immense field of information relating to the physical world, so he thought we could gain experience of the dimension of the soul that lies beyond the threshold 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 left-hemispheric mind, it is likely to degenerate into destructive, even pathological fantasies and behaviour. If we seek proof of the sickness of the modern psyche, we need look no further than the constant celebration of violence on our television screens, the growing arsenal of our weapons and the fundamentalist and polarized stance of so many who claim allegiance to a specific religion and promote their agenda in terms of a battle between good and evil.
          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 synchronicities as well as to miraculous healings, visionary experiences and sudden illuminations. In his Seven Sermons to the Dead (included in The Red Book) the Gnostic teacher Basilides describes this primary ground of being as the Pleroma, the root of all, present within all yet beyond all—a boundless, indefinable and totally transcendent dimension of reality which nevertheless permeates our world in the way that sunlight permeates air. (24) There is no clearer description of the cosmic dimension of soul.
          Just before he died Jung 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 man has a soul and that there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state…”(25) But he did not fail. The seeds sown by him are beginning to bear fruit, not only in the branch of psychology which has taken his name but in the culture as a whole. He 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…The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy… In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. (26)

Jung believed that the wider dimension of soul included the two polarities of matter and spirit, the finite and the infinite. But these were not separate as we had been taught but were two poles of the underlying spectrum of reality which interact with each other. He knew that the 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 and matter from spirit. “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.”(27) With these two sentences he offers us a different image of God and a radically different image of ourselves—neither of which have yet been considered by our culture. 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: “The only real danger that exists is man himself ” and “Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” He begged us to become more aware of the psyche so that we could understand the events of our time more intelligently, because, as he realized,

It is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious. The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled…It is therefore in the highest degree desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them. Not by arming to the teeth, each for itself, can the nations defend themselves in the long run from the frightful catastrophes of modern war. The heaping up of arms is itself a call to war. Rather they must recognize those psychic conditions under which the unconscious bursts the dykes of consciousness and overwhelms it.”(28)

The Emphasis on the Feminine
In the last chapter, I suggested that the word ‘Feminine’ stands for a totally different perspective on reality and for the feeling values which might reflect, support and confirm that different perspective. The constellation or activation of the feminine archetype in our very masculine culture was to a great extent due to Jung who saw the urgent need to bring balance to the psyche and the culture. His emphasis on the feminine concept of soul (as opposed to spirit) was the most important aspect of this need for balance. His emphasis on the deep unconscious as the feminine matrix which gives birth to the conscious ego as its “son” was another important aspect of this emphasis on the Feminine but he extended this emphasis to include woman’s important role in the re-balancing of the culture when he said, “The woman of today is faced with a tremendous cultural task — perhaps it will be the dawn of a new era.”(29) Jung foresaw that as woman had access to education, financial independence and a wider role in society, developing and giving expression to the masculine qualities of her soul, she would find the words and the channel of expression to articulate what is of supreme importance to her and the strength to insist that her voice is heard. Equally, he foresaw that as man, who is more focused on logic alone and deeply suspicious of anything ‘psychic’ and ‘unconscious’, becomes aware of his anima — represented in his dreams by a feminine figure — and the feeling values carried in his soul, he would play a more conscious, balanced and enlightened role in the world.

Unlike objective discussion and the verification of facts, a human relationship leads into the world of the psyche, into that intermediate realm between sense and spirit, which contains something of both and yet forfeits nothing of its own unique character. Into this territory a man must venture if he wishes to meet woman half way. Circumstances have forced her to acquire a number of masculine traits, so that she shall not remain caught in an antiquated, purely instinctual femininity, lost and alone in the world of men. So, too, man will be forced to develop his feminine side, to open his eyes to the psyche and to Eros. It is a task he cannot avoid…(30)

The Self
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 invisible psychic aspect of the cosmic and planetary matrix out of which it has evolved. This redefinition aligns Jung’s discoveries with the far older tradition of the cosmic dimension of the soul that developed from Egyptian, Platonic, Gnostic and Kabbalistic roots and is concealed within the medieval idea of the Holy Grail. In India, Vedic teaching describes seven realms or planes of reality which can become accessible to human consciousness as our insight deepens. Kabbalah offers a similar multi-dimensional view of interconnected planes, fields or levels of reality. Jung was familiar with both of these traditions.
          This greater consciousness or greater dimension of the soul has a focus or centre of consciousness within it, 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 centre of gravity gradually shifts from the personal to the transpersonal or, to put it another way, where the conscious personality or ego grows and expands through aligning itself with the unseen ground of life. The creation of this relationship over the span of a life is the quintessence of the process of individuation.
          In the Abrahamic religions the image of the Self has been carried by the image of God and, in Christianity, by the part divine, part human figure of Christ—images defined as being outside or beyond ourselves. The mystics bear witness to the fact that there can be a direct experience of the numinous ground of reality. Today, in a secular culture such as our own, the conscious ego has long ago banished visionary experience and any dimension of reality other than this physical world. There is, therefore, no possibility of dialogue and relationship with an interior Presence: dreams, messages, warnings and synchronistic events go unnoticed or ignored. 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 centre the wheel in my abdomen as hers was centred. Had I not been in analysis at the time, I would not have known how to relate to that experience and might have either ignored it, thought I was mad or developed an inflated view of my own importance rather than seeking to integrate its message over many years. Nor would I have understood that my vision personified the macrocosm—the vast hidden matrix of the Soul of the Cosmos in which, as microcosm, my own life was embedded and which it was called upon to serve.
          An encounter with the Self can be at once terrifying and 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 being in love or the near-death experience to someone who has not had that experience. One may describe it, but it is almost impossible to convey its numinosity. The Self might be thought of as the archetype of wholeness, and its intention is to restore wholeness to the human psyche that has been so fragmented—even through means which may at first appear 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 the lonely path of individuation, through whatever door, is drawn to respond to the suffering of the world. Working at this deep level for many years creates a bridge between two dimensions of reality. Through this work we are connected more deeply not only to the life of this planet but to the invisible dimension of the cosmos. Marriage might best describe this relationship.
          The general ignorance of the existence of the cosmic dimension of soul and our lack of relationship with it 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 — is so difficult to eradicate. This ignorance also sheds light on why people, despite their religious beliefs and often because of them, 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 cruelty 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, judgemental God, or the inferiority and dangerous sexuality of women, may inflict such wounds, many of them originating centuries ago but still carried in the memory field of the collective unconscious.
          In the midst of their suffering, millions have cried out, “Why does God allow these things to happen? 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 and its power both to create and destroy 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.”(31)
          Jung’s recognition of our huge potential, both for good and for evil, opened for us a new avenue for self-transformation, no longer through belief but through insight into our own nature. He wrote these prophetic words in the same letter:

We have become participants of the divine life and we have to assume a new responsibility, viz. the continuation of the divine self-realization, which expresses itself in the task of individuation… 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. (32)

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.”(33)

The Shadow
Jung’s understanding of the shadow is one of the most important aspects of his work and will be explored in the next chapter. He was deeply aware of the need for us to become aware of the unconscious drive for power and dominance and the obsessive need for control that affects so much of the way governments conduct themselves in the world and their relationships with other nations as well as the people they govern. This drive is reflected in our unconscious habits of behaviour which perpetuate war, oppression, and suffering. He repeatedly spoke of our power to destroy not only our species but to create widespread devastation on the planet. One of his closest colleagues, Marie Louise von Franz, said in the film Matter of Heart that towards the end of his life, Jung had a vision of enormous stretches of the earth devastated, and another just before he died of which he said, “Thank God, it wasn’t the whole planet.” At the end of The Undiscovered Self, he 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 general moral backwardness of our species which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical and social progress. 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 he know that he is on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner man which Christianity has treasured up for him? Does he realize what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall him? Is he even capable of realizing that this would in fact be a catastrophe? And finally, 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? (34)

In one of his last books, 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.”(35) 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, he felt, 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 unprecedented scientific and technological discoveries and our ignorance of how the conscious mind can be possessed by the power drive of the unconscious shadow.
          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. But it also holds the predatory habits of behaviour inherited from our mammalian and reptilian past. Becoming aware of this dimension and the immense range 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 we are unaware 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 and 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 limited 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 what he called a psychoid dimension of reality which underlay both psyche and matter, by which both are permeated and in which both participate—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.
          In a letter to Miguel Serrano, written shortly before he died, Jung gave us 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… Thus an old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.”(36)

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 which we always were without knowing it.”(37)

Notes:

1. Jung, C. G. (1976) Letters 2 1951-1961, ed. Gerhard Adler, Letter to Rev. Morton Kelsey, p. 436
2. (1964) Man and His Symbols, Aldus Books, London, p. 101
3. (1963) Memories Dreams, Reflections (MDR), Collins and Routledge & Kegan
Paul Ltd., London, p. 18
4. ibid, p. 184
5. (2009) The Red Book, Liber Novus, edited and introduced by Sonu Shamdasani, W.W. Norton & Co, New York & London
6. Extract from The Red Book, Liber Novus, p. 231-2. I have used the translation in Aniela Jaffé’s book (1989), From the Life and Work of C. G. Jung, trs. by R.F.C. Hull and Murray Stein, Daimon Verlag, p. 171-2 
7. MDR, p. 181
8. ibid, p. 191
9. CW8 (1960) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, par. 729
10. CW18 (1977) The Symbolic Life, par. 1586
11. CW10 (1964) Civilization in Transition par. 304
12. MDR, p. 93
13. MDR, p. 240-1
14. MDR, p. 301
15. Man and His Symbols, p. 95
16. (1931) The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated and explained by Richard Wilhelm, with introduction and European commentary by C.G. Jung, p.85
17. Man and his Symbols, p. 94
18. CW18, par. 1661
19. MDR, p. 173-4. This is also found in The Red Book, p. 241
20. CW12 (1953), Psychology and Alchemy, par. 563
21. (1933) Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, final paragraph
22. MDR, p. 200
23. Man and his Symbols, p. 103
24. The Seven Sermons to the Dead was originally privately published in 1925, then by Random House 1961 and in England by Vincent Stuart and John M. Watkins 1967. The reference to the Pleroma is in the section of the Red Book Scrutinies, page 347
25. From an unpublished letter written by Jung in 1960, quoted by Dr. Gerhard Adler in Dynamics of the Self, Coventure, London 1979, p. 92
26. MDR, p. 300
27. CW11 (1958), Psychology and Religion, East and West, par. 631
28. CW18, par. 1358
29. CW10, par. 275
30. ibid, p. 125
31. Letters 2, p. 316, letter to Elined Kotschnig
32. ibid, p. 316
33. Answer to Job in CW11, last paragraph 758
34. The Undiscovered Self in CW10, par. 585-587
35. Answer to Job in CW11, par. 745
36. Letter to Miguel Serrano, 1960 in Letters 2, p. 595
37. CW10, par. 722

For further reading I would recommend Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections and Man and His Symbols. Also a beautifully illustrated book written by Claire Dunne called Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul. She has captured the quintessence of his legacy in both word and image.

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