Monthly Archives: July 2014

July 23, 2014 · 1:46 pm

A Reason for Religion: Subjective Views in an Objective World of Illusion

After watching a program on Caligula, I found myself thinking about a quote from Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, in which he set out his theory of psychic energy. Historians have written volumes on the decline of cultures, the reasons, parallels with modern ones, etc. But, historians aren’t psychologists, and few psychologists are historians. Jung’s historical studies are what distinguished his work:

St. Augustine described the fate of Alypus in his, Confessions, in 398 A.D.: “But at Carthage the maelstrom of ill morals — and especially the passion for idle spectacles — had sucked him in, his special madness being for gladiatorial shows… As a result of what he had heard me say, he wrenched himself out of the deep pit in which he had chosen to be plunged and in the darkness of whose pleasures he had been so woefully blinded. He braced his mind and shook it till all the filth of the Games fell away from it and he went no more…”

Augustine told how Alypus went to Rome to study law, turned from the games, and detested his former passion:  “But it happened one day that he met some friends… coming from dinner: and though he flatly refused and vigorously resisted, they used friendly violence and forced him along with them to the amphitheatre on a day of these cruel and murderous Games. He protested: “Even if you drag my body to the place, can you force me to turn my mind and my eyes on the show? Though there, I shall not be there, and so I shall defeat both you and it.”

When they found their seats, “… the whole place was in a frenzy of hideous delight. He closed up the door of his eyes and forbade his mind to pay attention to things so evil. If only he could have stopped his ears too! For at a certain critical point in the fight, the vast roar of the whole audience beat upon him. His curiosity got the better of him, and thinking he would be able to treat the sight with scorn… he opened his eyes, and was stricken with a deeper wound in the soul than the man he had opened his eyes to see suffered in the body.”

He wrote that Alypus’ weakness was his self-reliance (the illusions of collective ego) when he should have trusted only in God (the unconscious urge for unity and wholeness in the symbol). “Seeing the blood he drank deep of the savagery. He did not turn away but fixed his gaze upon the sight. He drank in all the frenzy with no thought of what had happened to him, revelled in the wickedness of the contest, and was drunk with lust for blood. He was no longer the man who had come there but one of the crowd to which he had come, a fit companion for those who had brought him.”

To end the passage, Jung wrote: “One can take it as certain that man’s domestication cost him the heaviest sacrifices. An age which created the Stoic ideal must doubtless have known why and against what it was set up.” He compared the age of Nero four and a half centuries earlier with a quote from Seneca’s forty-first letter to Lucilius: “We push one another into vice. And how can a man be recalled to salvation, when he has none to restrain him, and all mankind to urge him on?”

Jung saw Christianity as a deep need for “… the founding of a community united by an idea, in the name of which they could love one another… a mediator in whose name new ways of love could be opened, became a fact, and with that human society took an immense stride forward. This was not the result of any speculative, sophisticated philosophy, but of an elementary need in the great masses of humanity vegetating in spiritual darkness… evidently driven to it by the profoundest inner necessities, for humanity does not thrive in a state of licentiousness.”

In the West, the age of sacrifice for anything much more than our biological natures is fading, though a frenzied new mass greed finds us still with just enough self-knowledge to keep us above a tide of unconscious emotion which can ignite as surely as history dictates who we are. Today, over thirty wars are being fought worldwide, and whole cultures are drawn into the frenzy of the spectacle just as in Augustine’s day.

Consciousness is changing quickly, but a deep part of the new mass individual remains stuck in an era already in decline before it developed. What happens when the ideas constituting humanity’s “immense stride forward” sink into oblivion, no longer visible through its illusions of objectivity; when the deeper image, too, is repressed by an ego which cannot of itself relent in its unconscious efforts to destroy its own hubris with its own creations?

The beast of historical regression rages openly in the Middle East; the mass mind compelled into its global implications. It’s what religious ideas were meant to counter: to develop the animal lurking beneath ego-ideals. To confront it requires an inward struggle — to keep the twenty-first century from becoming an immense stride backward.

Read more about the symbolic entanglements which would turn the confrontation with ourselves into an image of the individual beyond the illusions created by the modern greed of mass media, diversion, and deception.

Comments Off on A Reason for Religion: Subjective Views in an Objective World of Illusion

Filed under Psychology

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

July 16, 2014 · 2:14 pm

Mid-Life and Psychic Regression

I ended my last post with broad references to Christian ideals, our animal heritage, intellect, the urge to wholeness, and how they relate to mid-life. They were vague to anyone not familiar with depth psychology; I’m aware that rational viewpoints dismiss as nonsense anything that doesn’t logically follow their reasoning. Images and symbols weave through our lives as fleeting dreams which dissipate upon waking, leaving only traces of ideas and emotions soon forgotten in the frenzied rush of contemporary life.

To the youthful mind, they’re of little importance — the first half of life is designed to strengthen and consolidate consciousness. Over its course, however, those same fleeting, soon-forgotten emotions gain energy and themselves begin to coalesce and consolidate to reveal a greater perspective.

They form complexes of ideas revolving around philosophical questions and religious uncertainties clamoring to be resolved. When they attain a certain degree of unconscious development, and we can’t relate consciously to the ideas informing us of where we are, they appear to doctors as mental disorders.

These are symbols of transition, and they can only apparently be repressed. To medically oriented psychologies, when they’ve attained enough energy (value and purpose) to openly oppose conscious intent, they require drugs to further repress. Causes are usually hypothesized around unalterable conditions: genes, inherited traits, past trauma, even the body’s chemistry.

The intended soul development remains trapped in the body, in the unconscious, where the stress and tension eventually disrupt its natural rhythm. The unrelieved tension, the reinforcement of the biological viewpoint, and the treatments themselves all conspire to effect real physical problems which then prompt this reassuring statement from the physician/therapist: you’ll probably have this condition for the rest of your life (indeed)  — but there are treatments which can alleviate the symptoms (but not the cause).

My step-father was a very intelligent, rational man. He confided once when I was a mid-teen that he didn’t dream any more. In the Freudian haze of his wishful assessment, he thought he’d mastered the “subconscious” and was living fully consciously. Ten years younger than my mom, he was thirty at that time. Five years later, he and my mom divorced, he married his high school sweetheart, and I never saw him again.

However — my younger sister lived with them while attending college, and she later described those years. He only drank two or three times a year when I lived with him and my mom — on festive occasions, maybe a Christmas party or a visit from an old college friend. My sister was adopted after I’d gone to live with my father, but we established a close friendship through family visits which we still maintain.

Because of her reserved nature, we didn’t fully discuss those years until he died at fifty-eight from a heart attack. She’d left after her undergraduate work, and procured loans for her graduate studies, visiting him only sporadically over the years, trying to forget the things she revealed after he died. She was so angry at the end, she didn’t want to attend his funeral — though she did.

He and his high school sweetheart bickered constantly and got shit-faced every night. Later, when my sister took her fiancee to meet them, he passed out at the dinner table and his face just plopped down in his plate, drunk. He had to be picked up, cleaned off, and taken to bed like a baby.

I didn’t have to be there to know what people said after he died. “He was a drunk, an alcoholic… his father was an alcoholic… he had the gene… he should’ve gone to rehab…” Yet, he’d been a vital and productive man, however closed off in himself, before the unconscious repression of mid-life consigned him to his slow demise. Because he had no concept of the regression of psychic energy and its purposes, he was stuck confronting his own soul concretely through the projected adversary he both loved and hated in his “real” life.

His is not my only experience of the repression of mid-life psychology which sometimes begins the slow unraveling (or constriction and stiffening) of an ego which has no concept of what’s happening to it — and nowhere to turn when it takes hold. Fortunately, mid-life doesn’t always end in the catastrophes I’ve seen in my admittedly limited personal experience.

Still, as I studied Jung and became conscious of my own catastrophe, I began to see their effects in most everyone I knew. Few, in fact, were spared these trials of Job, and most who navigated them were probably lucky not to have had the money or inclination to seek professional help.

Over the years, they yielded to the inner demand to confront themselves at least on some level. It was the unconscious which guided them through the confusion and distress, though they had little concept of it other than “just getting older”.

How much more meaningful could our development be if we actually had conscious knowledge of the emotional twists and turns this process takes in its natural course? Actually participated in it with some conscious sense of its profound importance in our lives? Jung outlined it for those would be aware of it, and we need those ideas to relate to ourselves. My step-father needed them desperately and never knew it.

You may read an example of the ideas and emotions provoked by the mid-life process and how it can become conscious through the value of Jung’s work in my book, A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious.

Comments Off on Mid-Life and Psychic Regression

Filed under Psychology

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

July 9, 2014 · 4:08 pm

Mid-Life: Psychic Evolution

Scan some of the online literature about mid-life, and you’ll be impressed by the volume and variety of signs and symptoms associated with it. Such mild regressions as chasing the gray away, face-lifts and tummy-tucks, sports cars and younger lovers, however, are only surface reflections of what’s happening unconsciously.

One thing is gaining recognition: transitional changes begin in the body but also have profound psychological effects, as mind and body are not separate by nature. Instincts once conceived as physiological for lack of a psychological perspective were euphemized as “drives” by ego-based psychologies unable to deny them — this, despite the sweeping psychic changes attending puberty and young adulthood. It was as if ego’s current state of knowledge relieved any further development save the rote learning of facts.

But, instinctive needs are generated by emotions portending more than just biological imperatives. I know I was raised with the fearful need for security — especially by staid adults whose knowledge and authority masked a deeper uncertainty —  in a world that is as relentlessly irrational and ever-changing internally as it is externally.

Mid-life is a profound test for a consciousness that would know everything but its own nature, and it’s usually repressed to whatever extent possible to mature while still nursing a youthful pose. The mystery of nature requires an increasingly complex organ of perception to manifest itself, and the urge to wholeness will never be fully comprehended by a partial consciousness. Psychic changes merge with physical ones on the smallest scale, however imperceptible to an ego fascinated by its own image.

The processes symbolized in these images, though, must already have attained a high degree of energy-intensity (value and purpose) and complexity to register consciously. How symbols originate and how we perceive them are a great mystery, but the greater confusion may be due to an older, more literal form of perception.

Since Jung began outlining his psychology over a hundred years ago, the mystery of symbols and their effects have been struck a heavy blow by material science. Yet, we’ve been driven by symbols, inspired by them, and instructed by them from time immemorial. This newer knowledge of the profound role they play in our psychology would, with reflection, allow an opportunity to re-connect with them on a more conscious level than the older metaphysical interpretations of who we once thought we were.

Depth psychology is acquainted with the focus and direction of consciousness as against the diffuse and irrational demands of the unconscious. Though the difference between the two ways of perceiving are naturally at odds, they’re also intended as complements.

They attract and repel at the same time, and only the weight of nature’s purposes decides which will prevail. Jung wrote that a very powerful attraction is needed to overcome the often hostile opposition between the sexes. The same is true for the mid-life transition — only here, consciousness is pushed to assume a greater responsibility on a higher level for its inner relations, just as couples adjust psychologically long after the unconscious attraction has initiated the still-sleeping urge to wholeness.

The greater problem of adjusting to the inner opposite certainly has its origin in the dual forces compelling the union of the sexes. Their profound demands for reconciliation find us making concessions we never conceived in our youth. Religious symbols have always drawn upon those analogies to describe their purposes.

Marriage is revered as a religious symbol for that reason, yet how many cling to the old ideal today for unconscious reasons they would rather not concede? We’re being pushed to make concessions to newer values, broader ways of seeing than the conventional, one-sided interpretations of the past. It’s not by choice or accident that old values are losing the efficacy they once had.

Though many contend that our religious heritage has only made for rivers of destruction (as it undeniably has, looked at only through that lens), our history must refer more to our interpretations of ourselves and our ideals than to anything inherent in the values themselves. One need only reflect to see that their intent is far distant from what we’ve achieved. The problem doesn’t lie with values or principles.

Aside from our rational ability to focus on the most minute details (science) to the exclusion of a broader picture (life), there is another factor which exaggerates the rift between the real and the ideal. The tendency of ego to see anything outside its own interests as suspicious and dangerous is an even older part of our natures than the relatively recent Christian precepts of love and acceptance which at least set us a definable task through the latest stages of our evolution.

As I interpret Jung’s efforts, this task is not dissolving as much as it’s changing form due to the growing complexity of consciousness — and an expanding intellect fastened onto images of objectivity unimagined by the emotional cast of previous generations. Yet, this new sense of objectivity must remain compulsively tied to the material world to divert the fear and uncertainty which defines psychic development.

The new intellect is would further refute the primitive animal who lives beneath it. We can see in our history how the religious ideal failed to significantly change it except in our minds: the very illusions which compel its rebellion. Who today would know the spiritual side of this billion year old Leviathan?

This primitive side of our natures is in need of development for us to contend with its destructive power. But, we need examples to learn how to do it. Read more about the process here.

2 Comments

Filed under Psychology

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,