Category Archives: Psychology

July 7, 2016 · 4:13 pm

Psyche, Science, and Subjectivity

“Each individual sees the world a little differently according to… personal interpretations: Jung’s “subjective factor”. He stressed that it is “one of the necessary conditions under which all thinking takes place.” We may agree on certain general ways of thinking, but this in no way relieves them of their subjective quality. It is conscious thought which subjectivizes the ideas we associate. The… advance from collective thinking to individual differentiation accentuates this subjective influence. The tendency toward specialization and the proliferation of “isms” attests this movement.” — A Mid-life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious.

The spirit of the times shapes our assumptions early and generally determines what we see as real and unreal.  Just as thought has developed over centuries, we spend our lives in a fog of belief without really being able to distinguish personal realities from the collective illusions we inherit. Honest people will spend their entire lives learning about themselves.

One assumption of the current scientific belief-system is the idea that we can observe psychic life objectively. Group-identification offers a fixed orientation, a sense of certainty; yet however desirable these may be, they remain wishful compensations for a dream-like interior world of images which is anything but fixed. It’s a shadowy, chaotic realm of uncertainty so foreign in appearance and structure to consciousness, it’s often repressed — even considered meaningless.

But, there are established principles which afford a rough outline of the interior world. I’m convinced that one of the reasons Jung’s work is not more widely accepted is that his concepts are too opposed to our traditional views of how consciousness works. His discoveries are as disturbing and startling as Galileo’s findings were to the Church.

One of the empirical descriptions Jung established was of a purposive psychic system designed to orient us to the unknown, the unpredictable – a world of nature affecting us as much from within as without. Rationalism in this sense can be seen as a defense against the irrational — yet still projected onto an objective nature much as it was centuries ago.

Like anything psychic, the subjective factor has a dual nature. As relative as it may be, without it we’re not much more than herd animals led this way and that, not by governments and media so much as the unconscious instinctual forces working through them. Below consciousness, an individual nature is set against a collective inner world of images which is superimposed on a concrete reality.

This deeper conflict is governed by an instinctual principle which contains the opposites within itself. It shows all the qualities of the will and intention of consciousness, though it works below awareness. Conceived as spirit, it reflects ideas which gravitate around the psyche’s demands on consciousness: where concrete reality meets a symbolic one. It’s impossible to make sense of its truth from the perspective of things and bodies and their perceived effects on one another.

Our reductive thinking is balanced by psychic processes which aim forward. They channel the opposites into a uniform flow, a natural gradient. Viewed the other way around, the conscious capacity for focus compensates the blind will of instinctual nature and allows the sun of individual choice and creativity to peek through its unconscious cloud. It also illustrates the struggle with an objective will which is presupposed in any natural process of development.

Our history is the result of mental functions shaped by a psychic reality which corresponds to an objective outer one, though mirrored in symbolic form and often opposed to the conscious way of thinking. Changes such as the last century has seen reflect new stages of awareness. Though acted out on a physical stage, we evolve according to psychic patterns. On the surface, history is great personalities, wars, and the founding of civilized institutions; but underneath, it’s the gradual coming to awareness of the objective will of nature conceived in all living things.

These are at least partial truths which factor into all activity, and where we’re not conscious of them is where our vulnerabilities are hidden. Our self-images are double-sided, and exaggerated tendencies point to undeveloped functions. In large things and small, an inflated consciousness sees only itself as the vehicle of change, and only then in its positive aspects. Negative ones are always caused by others — yet we, too, are those others.

Though we’re fascinated by our own creative thought and how we’ve changed the world for our biological comfort and convenience, we’re little more aware of our psychological functioning — why we do what we do — than our ancient Greek counterparts. In some ways, we’re surely less aware. The dark wisdom of a mythic psyche lies unseen behind the modern conscious reality, dimmed by the glare of science and knowledge.

But for each perceived gain, a Pandora’s box of negative consequences ensue. Do we will our destructive tendencies? Of course not, yet an objective nature works in us to compensate our conscious choices. Destructive consequences are signals of imbalance, misconception, and unrealistic thinking. Considered solely from the causal viewpoint, each attempt at a solution only brings another set of dangerous consequences with it.

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June 29, 2016 · 4:37 pm

The Soul as a Function of Relationship

“Projection is a fundamental mechanism of the psyche, a strategy derived from the fact that what is unconscious is projected… Jung has written that “the general psychological reason for projection is always an activated unconscious that seeks expression… Projection is never made; it happens, it is simply there. In the darkness of anything external to me I find, without recognizing it as such, an interior or psychic life that is not my own.” —  The Middle Passage, James Hollis.

The nature of conscious focus requires unconscious functions to translate this dark interior life to it. Beyond the intellectual understanding of the concept, projection is so relative to individual perception that only the most intimate experience can describe its effects. Jung’s work was devoted to organizing these subjective experiences into an empirical picture; his studies of how the psyche expresses itself seem especially important today:

“… since the soul, like the persona, is a function of relationship, it must consist in a certain sense of two parts — one part belonging to the individual, and the other adhering to the object of relationship, in this case the unconscious… in relation to the activity of consciousness, the contents of the unconscious lay the same claim to reality on account of their obstinate persistence as do the real things of the external world, even though this claim must appear very improbable to a mind that is “outer-directed.”

“It must not be forgotten that there have always been many people for whom the contents of the unconscious possess a greater reality than the things of the outside world. The history of human thought bears witness to both realities. A more searching investigation of the human psyche shows beyond question that there is in general an equally strong influence from both sides on the activity of consciousness… psychologically, we have a right on purely empirical grounds to treat the contents of the unconscious as just as real as the things of the outside world, even though these two realities are mutually contradictory…“

The two systems comprise a complementary or compensatory relationship. The diffuse and undifferentiated nature of unconscious reality not only indirectly influences a more selective consciousness, it creates the energy for its activities. The conscious mind acts; what are its deeper purposes in relation to the unseen reality behind it? Science, however objectively it works in the external world, without psychological concepts, can only be a partial picture of its conscious intent. Jung wrote: “…to subject one reality to the other would be an altogether unjustifiable presumption.“

The danger today is that consciousness has created circumstances which can’t be understood without knowledge of the unconscious purposes behind them. For that, we need empirical concepts neither religion, philosophy, nor material science can supply. We’ve reached a stage of dissociation from our natural state such that the unconscious is in open rebellion. But, the problems are always caused by others. Who are these ‘others’?

“The peculiar reality of unconscious contents gives us the same right to describe them as objects as the things of the outside world. Now just as the persona, being a function of relationship, is always conditioned by the external object and is anchored as much in it as in the subject, so the soul, as a function of relationship to the inner object, is represented by that object; hence she is always distinct from the subject in one sense and is actually perceived as something different.

“In the same way as a man who surrenders entirely to the outside world still has the world as an object distinct from himself, the unconscious world of images behaves as an object distinct from the subject even when a man surrenders to it completely. And just as the world of mythological images speaks indirectly, through the experience of external things, to the man who surrenders wholly to the outside world, so the real world and its demands find their way indirectly to the man who has surrendered wholly to the soul; for no man can escape both realities.”

For those who perceive the soul, Jung wrote, it’s ambivalent, even demonic “because the inner object, the suprapersonal, collective unconscious with which she is connected as the function of relationship, gleams through her. The unconscious, considered as the historical background of the human psyche, contains in concentrated form the entire succession of engrams (imprints) which from time immemorial have determined the psychic structure as it now exists. These engrams are… function-traces that typify, on average, the most frequently and intensively used functions of the human psyche.“

Jung described psychic ambivalence as “borderline phenomena” afflicting those devoted to either the inner or outer world. The so-called normal individual, he wrote, “knows nothing of these cruel enigmas. They do not exist for him. It is always only a few who reach the rim of the world where its mirror image begins. For the man who always stands in the middle the soul has a human and not a dubious, daemonic character…“

Yet, it is just these ‘normal’ individuals who are the disaster humanity has become for the world today. Conditions have changed dramatically in the last century. A neglected inner world, whether perceived or not, now supports an entire industry dedicated to relieving ‘normal’ individuals of the unconscious ambivalence designed to dissolve our projections. We can’t say what’s normal today. The idea is so subjective, so relative, changes in consciousness so diverse and fast-paced that what was ‘true’ for the last generation is false for the modern one. 

That “no man can escape both realities” is evident in our fascination with the material world and the unconscious response to it. We are as primitive in self-knowledge as we are sophisticated in the knowledge of objects. A sense of spirit, one of the “most frequently and intensively used functions of the human psyche” has become unconscious — only to re-emerge as dangerous ideological obsessions, compulsive consumption, and bi-polar projections so one-sided that human life can’t be described as normal but through its own projections.

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June 1, 2016 · 10:36 am

The Search for Subjective Truth

“I tried to give expression to the process as it formed in me. I followed the unconscious directives without preconception as to where they might lead, allowing them as far as possible to create their own picture. The result was both a story and an example, an analogy, of Jung’s model: a description of how psychic energy flows toward unconscious aims through the elaboration of ideas.” —  A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

Jung began his empirical investigations of the psyche over a hundred years ago. He’d long been drawn to philosophy and religion in accordance with the spirit of the times and his upbringing. While he was intellectually inclined, his father was a country pastor who believed devoutly in man’s service to God; his mother leaned toward the occult and even held seances.

As a psychiatrist at the turn of the last century, he saw an increasingly scientific world-view coming into open conflict with a religious outlook that had changed little over centuries. He was intuitively drawn to balance the schism and so began the task of reconciling a rational scientific method to an irrational psychic reality. It was largely misconstrued — and no wonder:

Science was in full swing. The fruits of its method had gained rapidly since the Renaissance. New ways of thinking excited inquiring minds as never before, and rational science split from philosophy. Once the printing press freed knowledge from the clutches of the Church, and hungry souls peered beyond its veil, thought began to expand at exponential rates. So long had the natural mind been repressed by other-worldly fixations, nature became an oyster to be devoured in the sauce of a thousand new discoveries.

Jung’s intellectual breadth straddled both views at a time when a major shift in consciousness was altering the way we see the world in unprecedented measure. His studies afforded him a wider historical perspective than the narrow rational approach of his clinical contemporaries.

A rigorous empiricist, he applied his comparative method to all things psychic. Myths, artifacts, dreams, art, and literature concealed unconscious processes invisible to the causal eye. Jung condensed his knowledge of symbols into core ideas and concluded that experience is shaped by pre-conscious forms which reflect psychic functions. Such ideas weren’t new, but his empirical studies laid the groundwork for concepts which went beyond philosophical speculation.

He introduced his landmark theory of psychic energy in 1912. His, Symbols of Transformation, caught the new reductive psychology off-balance. It traced the flow of unconscious energy forward through symbolic ideas which compensated the causal method of medicine.

He saw causality as applicable only up to a certain point. Beyond its limitations, a prospective, goal-oriented viewpoint is necessary to discern the unconscious purposes of our motives. His ideas separated him from the more subjective biases of his mentor, though he later remarked that his psychological education began not with Freud but with Nietzsche.

He illustrated his efforts to reconcile a statistical, personalistic psychology with the historical facts of its nature through changes in philosophical and religious ideas. Below ego’s temporal perspective, they reflected inner conditions which compensated consciousness. The objective orientation of the modern intellect is only the most recent addition to an animal psyche with its own innate demands. 

His, Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, amplified the model he advanced in 1912. Based on the laws of energy and the unconscious clash and cooperation of the opposed forces underlying its production, his adaptations of physical laws to psychology were verifiable and predictable — but in a way logical thought was not accustomed to.

Symbolically, the facts of psychic opposition are projected in many forms: gods and devils, conflicts between the sexes, instinct and reason, the individual vs. society, progression/regression, and on through religious wars and ideological and political disputes. The compensating structure of conscious/unconscious reverberates in every human activity. These opposites reflect the dual nature of psychic energy. 

Because the unconscious puts a premium on the development of the individual as “the only real carrier of life”, an increasing subjectivity accentuates certain functions to the exclusion of others. Jung outlined them in his, Psychological Types. Cultural changes reflect shifts in consciousness that can be compared historically to show trends in development.

Jung traced conditions which initially appeared as basic social structures but gradually dissolved into personal qualities. The enslavement of the masses in antiquity for the advantage of a privileged few was only one phase in a fluid process of psychological differentiation which re-emerged centuries later in the individual as a subjective function. The bias of type and attitude proved to be a new stage in the evolution of consciousness.

Just as a privileged few enslaved those subject to their tyranny, the preferred individual function grew focused enough to repress other functions. It expanded the creative abilities of individuals to contribute to cultural advancement. As consciousness sharpened its ability to focus, however, it also narrowed. The new gain in focus began to repress a more diffuse spiritual instinct. For every gain, something was forfeited.

Jung showed how instrumental to human development the unconscious force of the Christian message really was: the idea of the soul, the psychic stability of the smallest unit, the real carrier of life. It took root over centuries as a subjective function — the not-so-conscious task of the individual in its most recent form.

Continue reading below for a review of A Mid-Life Perspective.

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May 19, 2016 · 4:24 pm

A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations with the Unconscious — Book Review

Breaking Jungian Psychology Out of the Ghetto of Intellectual Containment

by Klemens Swib

Individuation, the blossoming of individuality, is one of the major themes of Jungian psychology. Jung’s empirical observations of his own and his patients’ interactions with the unconscious contents of the psyche led him to conclude that the concept of individuation was a key to understanding and making sense of this experience. He also recognized the self-realization derived from this phenomenon inevitably gave purpose and meaning to his own and his patients’ lives. Individuation constitutes a force that allows us to develop our potential as both individuals and human beings.

Jung’s empirical observations led him to conclude that the blossoming of individuality particularly occurred during the second half of our existence. I unequivocally agree. I would only ask: how can individuality blossom before the individual exists? Ergo, the synthesis of the individual may well constitute the essence of the individuation process in the first half of the human life cycle. I believe Jung implied as much when he wrote of the young sometimes needing to be caustically disillusioned of their fantasies in order to focus on meeting the demands of adulthood. Establishing one’s own ‘individual’ position and place in the world is definitely a Herculean task taken on by the young.

In any event, Jung did not attempt to write a general theory of individuation. He had too much respect for this dynamic, living and open-ended concept to prematurely limit it to a simple and sterile formula that prospective analysts could memorize and apply by rote. He did, however, leave a record of his own personal encounter with individuation. He did so in his posthumously published Red Book. He also hoped others would follow his lead and record their own experiences with this phenomenon. In this way, a consensus and perhaps even a general theory of individuation could eventually emerge. To that end, he encouraged his patients to document their own personal encounters with the individuation process.

In his book, A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations with the Unconscious (A Subjective Study of Science, Religion, and Consciousness), Evan Hanks has taken up Jung’s challenge. He has supplied us with a unique, retrospective take on his own personal individuation. It is his effort to make sense and deepen his understanding of the profound personality transformation emanating from that encounter — a subjective one as he indicates in his book title, and one that will undoubtedly deepen and extend our understanding of individuation. I will have more to say on Evan’s revolutionary and historic contribution to the study of individuation in due course.

Individuation not only transformed Jung’s personality and character but proved to be a primary source of his creative genius as well. Otherwise, he would not have attributed the genesis of most of his psychological concepts to ideas he originally formulated in the Red Book. The same applies to Evan Hanks. His experience of the individuation process opened up his own unique creative capacity. His metier lies in the realm of narrative poetry. Goethe is his heroic role model. Even a Philistine such as I can sense the beauty inherent in Evan’s poetry. Fortunately, he also included a descriptive, interpretive framework to support his poetic visualization.

“My head is crowded, night and day are one;                                                                     I search in vain the reasons for the things I’ve done.                                               The lion’s courage in my heart I thought was real                                                       Is now the frightened victim of the pain I feel.                                                               A dark entanglement surrounds the steps I take;                                                             I stumble through the maze of each new choice I make.                                     Emotions once repressed have broken through their guise;                                       Faces once familiar I no longer recognize.                                                                       A strange force has turned around the world I used to know;                                 Right is wrong, the sun is gone, the stars are down below.                                 The mannequin of yesterday lies far behind me:                                                       The tattered remnants of a man who once defined me.”

At this point, I would be remiss if I failed to re-emphasize that Evan Hanks’ work is a retrospective effort to make conscious sense of a life-altering psychological transformation. It is a subjective effort, and there are times the reader may temporarily lose sight of the trail. With that said, this particular Philistine’s own incapacity for poetic visualization may be the ultimate source of this critique. If not, individuation is a mystery: a mysterious blossoming of individuality occurring in the second half of the adult life cycle, and one that gives meaning and purpose to an individual’s existence. Yet, it is an experience that is so profound, far-reaching and transformative that the uninitiated may not always be able to fully follow the writer’s effort to integrate it.

So, what makes Evan’s book a revolutionary and historic document? How will he deepen and extend our understanding of individuation? It all stems from the intensity of his poetic perception. That will ultimately provide us with the battering ram to break Jungian psychology out from the ghetto of intellectual containment it currently resides in and into the literary and civilizational mainstream.

In the first part of the chapter, An Objective Evaluation, Evan mercilessly and relentlessly exposed his perceived failings as a human being. His critique was so intense and visceral, it vividly reminded me of another powerful self-critique I had previously encountered in literature. In the Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky’s central character performed a similar searing, self-analytical deconstruction. There is no way around it. The persona and the maladapted and collectivist aspect of the ego must give way before individuality can blossom. I fully understand where Evan and Dostoevsky were coming from. However, this led me to wonder whether Dostoevsky documented any other aspects of his own encounter with the individuation process.

Dostoevsky’s very next major publication was, Crime and Punishment. Gone is the 40-year-old Underground man, and a university student of exceptional talent emerges onto the stage. Yes, there definitely was a lot more to the underground man’s self-flagellating character than one might first imagine. The new hero’s youthful character is attributable to his individuality which is just beginning to blossom. He lives in an era before the concept of the unconscious was fully elaborated. Thus Dostoevsky placed the struggle to individuate within a real-world temporal context. As Edwin Muir succinctly put it:

“Dostoevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem ‘pathological’.”

His hubris and his poverty lead him to commit a morally reprehensible crime. This is a literary character you must remember; one Dostoevsky undoubtedly was using to make sense of his own encounter with the individuation process. Heinous as his crime was, he did not feel guilty over murdering the pawnbroker. He was a superior man — a future Napoleon in desperate need of ‘material’ sustenance — and he would perform many benevolent acts to compensate for his transgression. Yet, his action propels him into an unbearable world of suffering and pain. He doesn’t understand why. How could a superior human being, a veritable Napoleon, be tripped up by his own superior prerogative?

During the course of his mad meanderings, he meets his beaten-down anima projection, Sonya. She eventually helps him to admit defeat and accept his punishment. Only after he is imprisoned does his rehabilitative transformation begin. He finds his faith and then starts the long journey toward his own resurrection. The Jungian characters are all there: the shadow, along with the moral dilemma it inspires, the anima, the psychological change and turmoil of life-altering intensity. Dostoevsky had the genius to depict the life-altering, transformative state of mind of the individuate. Jung also experienced tremendous psychological turmoil during the initial stages of his own individuation. This turmoil led him to question his own sanity.

Connect Jung’s and Dostoevsky’s acknowledgement and understanding of the individuation process together, along with Evan Hanks’ and a host of other individuates’ accounts, and we are well on our way to breaking Jungian psychology out of the ghetto of intellectual containment created by mainstream academia and the psychological establishment. Evan Hanks’ pivotal role in the process makes his book, A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations with the Unconscious (A Subjective Study of Science, Religion, and Consciousness), well worth the read.

Klemens Swib is the author of, Dionysos Archetype of Individuation.

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April 1, 2016 · 11:55 am

The Other Side of Science

“What we call “psychology” today is a science that can be pursued only on the basis of certain historical and moral premises laid down by Christian education in the last two thousand years. A saying like “Judge not that ye be not judged,” inculcated by religion, has created the possibility of a will which strives, in the last resort, for simple objectivity of judgment.” — Carl Jung.

It was not that long ago (maybe an hour in the life of a modern mind?) from the standpoint of the ‘million year old man‘ that consciousness was able to speculate an idea of objectivity. From that perspective, it was only a few minutes ago that it yielded the facts of subjective development sufficient to distinguish it; though the search for objective truth still doesn’t account for it.

Jung expressed the problem philosophically in terms of ideas having “reality-significance”. We know that an objective reality exists, but consciousness can only infer it. His ‘subjective factor’ describes unconscious processes that the will to objective judgment has yet to address: “the necessary condition under which all thinking takes place.”

Let’s follow these empirical psychic facts back in time an hour or so (from the million year old man’s perspective) and look at some ideas contemporary with the logic which birthed the scientific method. They have reality-significance, but of a different kind than science fancies.

(From, Figures of Earth, the re-telling of a medieval folk-tale by James Branch Cabell in 1919, concerning ‘Manuel the Redeemer’, a folk-analogy of Christ: the unconscious, intuitive side of the collective value-judgments of the time. This conversation is between Manuel and the ‘Fire-Bird’, Zhar-Ptitza, a spirit-figure beyond the sensual ‘clay figures’ Manuel has fashioned from the conventional religious ideas that form his conflict.)

“The frivolous question that Manuel raised as to his clay figures, the Zhar-Ptitza considered a very human bit of nonsense: and the wise creature… felt forced to point out that no intelligent bird would ever dream of making images.

“But, sir,” said Manuel, “I do not wish to burden this world with any more lifeless images. Instead, I wish to make… an animated figure, very much as, they say, a god did once upon a time — “

“… you should not try to put too much responsibility on Jahveh,” protested the Zhar-Ptitza… “for Jahveh made only one man, and did not ever do it again. I remember the making of that one man very clearly, for I was created the morning before, with instructions to fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven, so I saw the whole affair. Yes, Jahveh did create the first man on the sixth day. And I voiced no criticism. For of course after working continuously for nearly a whole week… no creative artist should be blamed for not being in the happiest vein on the sixth day.”

“Well, well, I do not assert that the making of men is the highest form of art, yet, none the less, a geas is upon me to make of myself a very splendid and admirable young man.”

“… To what permanent use could one put a human being even if the creature were virtuous and handsome to look at? Ah, Manuel, you have not seen them pass as I have seen them pass… in swarms, with their wars and their reforms and their great causes, and leaving nothing but their bones behind them.” 

“Yes, yes, to you, at your age, who were old when Ninevah was planned, it must seem strange; and I do not know why my mother desired I should make myself a splendid and admirable young man. But the geas is upon me.”

It may be today that these questions are more styled by biology, genetics, or evolutionary anthropology, but the ‘geas’ of Manuel is the psychic urge of an instinctual nature that proscribes its own laws irrespective of clime, culture, or common sense …

“The Zhar-Ptitza sighed. “Certainly these feminine whims are not easily explained. Yet your people have some way of making brand-new men and women of all kinds… otherwise the race would have been extinct a great while since at the rate they kill one another. And perhaps they do adhere to Jahveh’s method, and make fresh human beings out of earth, for… I have seen the small, recently completed ones, who look exactly like red clay.”

“It is undeniable that babies do have something of that look,” assented Manuel. “So then… do you think I may be working in the proper medium?”

“It seems plausible, because I am certain your people are not intelligent enough to lay eggs, nor could, of course, such an impatient race succeed in getting eggs hatched.  At all events, they have undoubtedly contrived some method or other, and you might find out from the least foolish of them about that method.”

“Who, then, is the least foolish of mankind?”

“Probably King Helmas of Albania, for it was prophesied by me a great while ago that he would become the wisest of men if ever he could come by one of my shining white feathers, and I hear it reported he has done so.”

“Sir,” said Manuel dubiously, “I must tell you in confidence that the feather King Helmas has is not yours, but was plucked from the wing of an ordinary goose.”

“Does that matter?” asked the Zhar-Ptitza. “I never prophesied, of course, that he actually would find one of my shining white feathers…”

“But how can there be any magic in a goose feather?”

“There is this magic, that, possessing it, King Helmas has faith in it, and has stopped bothering about himself.”

“Is not to bother about yourself the highest wisdom?”

“Oh, no… I merely said that it is the highest of which man is capable.”

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March 10, 2016 · 5:07 pm

The ‘Miracle of Consciousness’

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all… to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22

(I owe the title of this post to Ruben Bolling, whose satirical cartoons I’ve long enjoyed.)

Heller’s observation illustrates an inescapable truth. Though he described it in what most would see as an extreme form, the general psychic facts of the human predicament confirm that most of God’s children do, indeed, revile their own natures such that their professed values will somehow turn into their opposites and yet they will still see them as ideals. How does it happen?

“Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all.” It’s in the nature of the beast Bolling facetiously characterized as “the only animal that can be the master of its own destiny.“

Beneath the literary license Heller and Bolling used to make their points lies a more complex psychological picture than truisms or cartoons express: not only can anybody do it — everybody does it. It doesn’t require brains (see the pigeons in the cartoon): an instinctual spirit-condition which, as Jung stated, is a primary one in which consciousness must actively mediate the contradictory impulses it perceives. Whether fate or choice (or maybe both?) dictates our decisions is a paradox neither science, philosophy, nor religion will resolve.

“It merely required no character.” — an integral part of the subjective equation, but this is where the more complicated picture departs from the truism; such judgments are so relative to the individual, so personal, they generally land on those we don’t like or can’t understand for more intimate reasons than opinion or ideology: projections of subjective tendencies incompatible with conscious ideals.

“char·ac·ter

ˈkerəktər/

noun

  1. the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.”

Even in its simplest form, character is defined as individual; but the psychic facts state also that we are products of human history. How we came to acquire these individual traits is a complicated evolutionary process as subjective as it is objective. Only knowledge of how the unconscious works can give us a sense of an internal opposite and how we perceive it — if we perceive it at all.

As a concept, Jung described projection as a primary function which design is to relate consciousness in two directions, an original psychic condition. Our entire human history can be seen in terms of the conscious dissolution of projections in the development of the individual as well as the species.

This idea is far-fetched only to the ego who believes itself to be outside the laws of nature. Biology long ago described it: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” — the individual relives the developmental stages of the species in condensed form: an analogical concept that applies to psychology in the most profound ways.

Only an inflated and disoriented ego could conceive such an outlandish notion as the Christian idea that man was “not of this world” — a stage of development in which consciousness is still under the direct influence of mythic images and projects an internal reality onto an external one. Physics and astronomy proved its concrete impossibility; Jung, its psychic probability. Few conceived that the inner reality was of the same fundamental objective nature as the outer one.

But, many still live the unconscious ego-demands of the mythical image. I knew Christians in high school (living examples of the phylogenetic stage of symbolic medieval thought) who denounced me as a ‘natural man’ (I couldn’t fight the statement) — a contrast to their own ‘other-worldly’ spiritual desires which even then science (and an empirical psychology) had proved to be the products of its own imagination.

Science, too, is a product of human imagination. However far it may project itself, it will sooner or later come to understand that worlds are born from the forces of nature and not our contradictory notions of an anthropomorphic deity — whether as ideas of a concrete body or a body of concrete ideas. Even as its symbolism re-appears in the scientific imagination: ‘the God-Particle’, ‘the End of Science’, the ‘Theory of Everything’ — they remain the mythic image of an inflated ego which would know all the constituent parts of an objective reality yet little of its own or the whole or its effects on either.

You may read a synopsis of my book on Amazon. Also, I recommend John Ferric’s website, Jung2.org. Check out his Article Library for an interesting collection of Jung-related subjects.

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March 2, 2016 · 10:12 am

A Mid-life Perspective: Preface — Part III

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”  — Genesis

This post concludes the main themes of A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious. Jung noted the above quote as a reference to the original bisexuality of the matrix of consciousness.

“Religious Images

Because it consists of a living history of our mental functioning, Jung wrote that any serious inquiry into the unconscious leads straight into the religious problem. This theme fully emerges in the second part of the book. As the poem proceeds, the intuitive side of religious ideas is explored. Job was the older anticipation of the individual who confronts the collective background to discover his or her own way; in so doing, a dialogue is entered into with the unconscious.

Job had achieved the material tasks of the first part of life. His faith, his connection to the Deity, was then tested through Jehovah’s bargain with Satan. The bargain represents the interplay of opposites: the deeper unconscious process which precedes awareness. Job’s sufferings comprised the circumstances which compelled him to reflect on, to make conscious, this inner exchange. According to the analogies of that time, Job’s afflictions were depicted physically; today we would interpret them as projections of psychic conflicts. If we take the concrete qualities out of the figures and translate them into ideas, as we might attempt to do with our dreams, we can begin to see how they analogize psychic processes.            

When we reflect on these stories, we may grasp their symbolic meanings by relating them to our own emotional conditions. Christ, as the Son of Man, was a later anticipation of development; an ideal image of the individual which emerged from the spiritual darkness and brutality of antiquity for the purpose of further transforming our animal natures. His crucifixion is a powerful analogy of the tension of psychic opposites encountered by one who turns inward, away from the material world, and begins to discern his/her personal values apart from prevailing views.

As with Job, it is no coincidence that the myth of Christ revolved around his crucifixion at the mid-life point. Today, the spiritual changes reflected in the tasks of individuation stand, too, as a prototype of development in a new age. Just as these tasks make demands on those compelled to confront them, so they reverberate in the collective unconscious. Psychic reality is coming to bear on our times.

Alchemy

Jung’s devotion to the study of alchemy was an attempt to illustrate it as a connective stage between our historical religious outlook and the emerging scientific one. Alchemy was the intermediate form of the two views that later diverged. Like those of theology, alchemical ideas were psychic projections, though less collectively developed and therefore more expressive of natural tendencies.

As a science, alchemy paved the way to our modern conception of the world, but as a philosophy it expressed the very ideas missing in a one-sided Christianity: the problem of opposition between spirit and nature; the “evil” of the material world, of the repressed feminine and its dark urge toward a re-orientation to matter – to Mother Earth and the body and all that the patriarchal myth rejected. Alchemy connected to the inner counter-pole intended to balance and direct a distorted conscious view.

Jung’s work parallels alchemical philosophy in that he sought a symbolic solution to the unconscious conflicts they represent today. The soul is a fact of emotional experience, a psychic reality. It can be seen as a natural function if we have some understanding of symbols. The symbolic view relies as much on feeling and intuition as thinking. For the intellectual standpoint, feeling is the opposed function designed to balance its orientation. The blinding of inner perception by an increasing outer-direction suggests the repression of confusion which occurs in any shift in perspective. Coming to terms with the soul means the development of emotions which would supplement the “masculine” rational viewpoint and relate it to the greater value of goals beyond its narrow focus.

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The themes highlighted above are the core ideas of this book, and they carry something of the form of unconscious language with them. The analogies elaborating it are more circular than linear. Associations throng around the ideas to be explained as they compel attention, gradually becoming clearer with increased concentration. Images weave around and through one another to form deeper connections as they thread their opposing tendencies toward a uniform flow.

The compensating nature of the unconscious revolves around an objective organizing function which is presupposed, not only in dreams but in all natural processes. A subjective consciousness is filled out by its circular complexes of ideas; the urge to wholeness gives us a rounder and more complete picture of an inner reality which is just as objective as the outer one….”

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February 22, 2016 · 10:24 am

A Mid-life Perspective: Preface — Part II

“Everything psychic is pregnant with the future.” — Carl Jung

“Ego and Intellect

The identification of ego with intellect contributes to this problematic conception of nature. It long slumbered in Christian theology as identification with an otherworldly God and a disdain for natural life: an image of self-rejection – one of the reasons guilt weighs so heavily in traditional religious ideas. Both are compounded through this identity, the idea of a Deity now yielding to science as it dissolves the metaphysical projections. For all our rational knowledge, we remain driven by the repressed “natural man” who serves the sensual world of material desire – just as he did many thousands of years ago. He personifies the unconscious need for a wider psychological perspective than just an intellectual one – and the internal guilt we never came to terms with because we never understood the reasons for it.

The uneven advance of self-knowledge finds no adequate ideas that would relate us to the ancient symbols and their functions, their irrational truths repressed for lack of understanding. They sink back into the unconscious where they become hostile adversaries. Due to changes in consciousness, they resurface in different guise today, though we remain possessed by their “suprapersonal” powers – paradoxically more distant now than ever. As our relation to ourselves is no longer expressed in the old images, the humbling effects of a higher authority dwindle into vague personal beliefs with no real emotional experience to support them. The result is a “puffing up of the ego-sphere” and the “brutish egotism” to which Neumann referred: an exaggerated urge to individuality which has lost its relation to itself and the world.

From the scientific perspective, religious images are only fantasies. For the less developed intellect of the past, they served to influence thought’s exclusive tendencies. The objective trend today requires a new interpretation of the values they represent. The conflicts of the soul, the emotional tensions determining our deepest relations in the context of a greater whole, are projected onto fractional interests and ideologies with ever more threatening consequences.

Only the hard work of introspection can free the individual from the self-flattering and contradictory influences of ego. The recognition of a higher inner authority beyond will and intellect is a philosophical and religious process meant to bind us to humanity and our natural environment. For science to serve those greater purposes, its aims must be subject to a broader conception of psychic life.

Causality and Purpose

The causal thinking which orients our perception is opposed to the heavy, symbolic language of the unconscious. The one leads backward in time to a cause that produces effects, and the other leads forward to a purpose or goal without conceiving a cause. As a concept, the latter allows the thoughts, feelings, and intuitions evoked by images and symbols to shape themselves; to relate their associations to the pursuit of aims beyond conscious preconception.

Jung saw the idea of time as a primitive concept of energy, a gradient of potential, in that it flows forward in an irreversible way. This is an approximate analogy for his model of psychic energy and the reason time is capitalized in the text when referred to by the figures representing the unconscious. We can reverse it in our minds as in casual thought, but we should be aware that we are projecting subjective ideas onto the objective behavior of processes outside consciousness.

Each individual sees the world a little differently according to his/her personal interpretations: Jung’s “subjective factor”. He stressed that it is “one of the necessary conditions under which all thinking takes place.” We may agree on certain general ways of thinking, but this in no way relieves them of their subjective quality. It is conscious thought which subjectivizes the ideas we associate. The historical advance from collective thinking to individual differentiation accentuates this subjective influence. The tendency toward specialization and the proliferation of “isms” attests this movement. Though still veiled by symbolic mythical influences, the undeveloped seeds of individuality are gradually emerging through the dense fog of collective history – or at least attempting to.

The opposition between causal thought and the forward movement of the unconscious, along with the projection of subjective viewpoints, create contradictions in our thinking. When looking inward, one of the most perplexing ones is the backward flow of dream-images as they draw on past experience. This paradox reflects the double meaning inherent in unconscious imagery, just as it is the basis of the causal view. The opposites are still fused together in the unconscious; it is the discriminating effect of consciousness that splits the original image and reveals only the partial aspect of its focus. Only the two forms of perceiving combined can give us a wider sense of who we are beneath our one-sided presumptions.

Past, present, and future are a single dynamic process in the unconscious. One of the functions of dreams is to express this creative flow through analogies with present circumstances. Since analogies describe how different sets of experiences conform, dreams often express immediate concerns through memory-images. They reveal the conformities of past and present events, our reactions to them, and the anticipations of tendencies which shape our futures. Jung stated: “Everything psychic is pregnant with the future.”

Next post: Religious Images, Alchemy.

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February 14, 2016 · 1:34 pm

A Mid-life Perspective: Preface — Part I

“The world hangs on a thin thread; that thread is the psyche of man. How important is it to know something about it?” — Carl Jung.

Jung analogized the difference in time-perception between consciousness and the unconscious through the idea of a million year old man. How would the time-awareness of such a being differ from our more temporal viewpoint? How do we treat him; how does he react to the changes taking place today?

In my last post, I outlined the major themes of my book as stated in the preface. In the next three, I’ll offer the full text. These are the “facts of the case” for the million year old man as I understand them:

“The Human Animal

Civilization is a comparatively recent product when weighed against the immense stretch of time required for consciousness to emerge from the depths of instinctual nature. The beast tokens our animal ancestry, and the eons-long climb through the darkness of pre-history yet finds it just below the threshold of culture. As a symbol, it relates not only to our biological heritage through the body and its functions but to our sense of individuality, as it is through our bodies that we first experience ourselves as distinct and separate from others.

As humanity developed, the snake in the Garden evolved into Satan in the Old Testament, and both symbolize the opposition needed to distinguish conscious from unconscious. Each toddler repeats this contrary “no” stage in its development, and that opposition is a vital factor in the growth and consolidation of consciousness. It is a basic conflict between a “god-like” self-awareness set against a split-off instinctual heritage. The horns and tail of the Devil later became a graphic description of the animal urges repressed for their gradual conversion into the more humanizing social instincts embraced by Christian ideals.

As the newer myth took hold, the spiritual aim of building the soul, the personal relation to the Deity, sank beneath the weight of a still-developing and over-compensating collective ego, emphasizing the long, serpentine conflicts required for individual evolution. Psychologically and spiritually, ego-effects are a gauge of self-knowledge. Despite centuries of religious exhortation, they remain in much the same state now as in the past. The writer, Philip Wylie, described this idea as “the fatuous awe of the ape with the mirror.” The ape points not only to a stunted inner life but to regressive tendencies which both conceal and reveal the psychological dawn of those who would recognize and act upon their own inner opposition.

Nature and the Unconscious

This theme revolves around the image of the earth as a natural symbol of the unconscious. The earth and sun are the sources of all known life, suitable metaphors for the masculine and feminine forces which conceive it. Jung and Neumann have demonstrated that artifacts and symbols dating back to pre-patriarchal cultures intimately associate masculinity with light and consciousness, just as feminine images are associated with unconscious darkness and fertility: the earthly and the feminine, the creative matrix which bears and fosters the child of consciousness. Symbolically, masculinity refers to the heady principles of thought, the organizing of consciousness; the feminine principle dissolves separate tendencies to form emotional and physical relationships – properties of the soul.

The primitive mind long ago conceived the sun as spirit, reflecting processes which urged the coming of light to the dark, unconscious void of human origin. Earth and sun are psychological analogues for “feminine” relatedness — the oneness of the unconscious, the body, and the individual — and the dissecting, masculine character of consciousness. Together, they express the intermingling pairs of opposites and the penetrating form of their relationship. Male and female, spirit and matter, mind and body: all describe the two poles required for conscious orientation.     

Primitive sun-worship anticipated a Christian myth “not of this world”. Both signify the urge to distinguish conscious from unconscious, just as it is repeated in the individual. The movement away from nature toward an artificial fantasy-sphere is a projection of over-extension. Jung and Neumann suggested that the natural process of separating the two psychic systems has deepened into such a division today that we can no longer relate to our instinctual foundations – a kind of collective mid-life change in the centering and organizing processes of the psyche. Our intellectual inflation only accentuates our historical opposition to nature and the corresponding functions designed to relate us to earthly reality.

As the momentum of this drive toward conscious identity finds us alienated from ourselves, the unconscious attempts to re-orient us in the current swing by steering us back to itself, to nature and the earth, to our physical/emotional ground. The swing toward natural science describes a symbolic movement. The spiritual unfolding of our natures speaks only indirectly through its own language.

The creative spirit turns destructive when it is restricted to conscious aims and remains unconscious for too long, when a new stage is signaled. Our systematic abuse of the earth reveals an inner conflict: the oscillating poles of spirit and matter seek the undeveloped functions still in the sway of the old stage. The artificial environment we have created in the relatively short swing back to the material world exposes our Christian disdain for nature as a symbol of our animal heritage and a “god-like” ego which cannot accept its origins or its subjection to natural laws. We are literally poisoning ourselves and our children, even as exaggerated fantasies pursue grandiose notions of “conquering” space — still driven by an inflated and unanchored ego which sees itself as “not of this world.”

Next post: Ego and Intellect, Causality and Purpose.

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February 5, 2016 · 4:14 pm

The ‘Doomsday Clock’ and the Midnight Transition

“It is still three minutes to midnight,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote… announcing an update to its famous Doomsday Clock, whose estimate of the risk of global catastrophe has been ticking back and forth since 1947… The time has not changed since 2015, however, when the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board last moved the minute hand, from 11:55 to 11:57. As the Bulletin’s somber, sometimes scathing public letter makes clear, that is not cause for celebration.” — The Christian Science Monitor.

In my recent post on the ‘Anthropocene Epoch‘, I tried to bring into relief a few ideas that point to the causes, effects, and purposes of the shift in values taking place today. They’re not simple; they represent fundamental changes in the way we’ve traditionally seen ourselves and the world.

I’ve quoted Jung, Neumann, and Wylie extensively in my attempts to accent the importance of tackling this transition with a mindset that inspects itself: one of the first steps in dissolving the projections that find our rational, outer-directed thinking increasingly unsustainable. Their ideas are well known; but here I’ll relate some of what I understand of them through the preface of my book:

“Beneath our scientific preoccupations, we remain in the stage of psychological awareness reflected in our religious heritage. Behind the curtain of moral judgment lurk the split figures of good and evil: a model of how we relate to our unconscious natures. Jung has described how those ideas reflect the positive and negative poles necessary to produce psychic energy: the sliding scale along which consciousness fluctuates in its on-going efforts to define itself. Just as it forms the path of collective history, so in the growth of the individual… the repression of the unconscious required for ego to strengthen and develop now creates circumstances which signal the need for a new relation to it — to balance conscious direction; to relate it, make it relative to the counter-pole of inner development.“

The inner counter-pole is a function of relation, not just in the religious sense of self-reflection and introspection, but for the individual to impact the world with creative reflections the group does not possess. This, as Jung has shown, is vital to understanding the unconscious demands that set the stage for changes in consciousness. Here, as stated in the preface, is a brief synopsis of the major themes in my book:

“The Human Animal

Civilization is a comparatively recent product when weighed against the immense stretch of time required for consciousness to emerge from the depths of instinctual nature. The beast tokens our animal ancestry, and the eons-long climb through the darkness of pre-history yet finds it just below the threshold of culture. As a symbol, it relates not only to our biological heritage through the body and its functions but to our sense of individuality, as it is through our bodies that we first experience ourselves as distinct and separate from others….

Nature and the Unconscious

This theme revolves around the image of the earth as a natural symbol of the unconscious. The earth and sun are the sources of all known life, suitable metaphors for the masculine and feminine forces which conceive it. Jung and Neumann have demonstrated that artifacts and symbols dating back to pre-patriarchal cultures intimately associate masculinity with light and consciousness, just as feminine images are associated with unconscious darkness and fertility: the earthly and the feminine, the creative matrix which bears and fosters the child of consciousness. Symbolically, masculinity refers to the heady principles of thought, the organizing of consciousness; the feminine principle dissolves separate tendencies to form emotional and physical relationships – properties of the soul…

Ego and Intellect

The identification of ego with intellect contributes to this problematic conception of nature. It long slumbered in Christian theology as identification with an otherworldly God and a disdain for natural life: an image of self-rejection – one of the reasons guilt weighs so heavily in traditional religious ideas. Both are compounded through this identity, the idea of a Deity now yielding to science as it dissolves the metaphysical projections. For all our rational knowledge, we remain driven by the repressed “natural man” who serves the sensual world of material desire – just as he did many thousands of years ago. He personifies the unconscious need for a wider psychological perspective than just an intellectual one – and the internal guilt we never came to terms with because we never understood the reasons for it…

Causality and Purpose

The causal thinking which orients our perception is opposed to the heavy, symbolic language of the unconscious. The one leads backward in time to a cause that produces effects, and the other leads forward to a purpose or goal without conceiving a cause. As a concept, the latter allows the thoughts, feelings, and intuitions evoked by images and symbols to shape themselves; to relate their associations to the pursuit of aims beyond conscious preconception…

Religious Images

Because it consists of a living history of our mental functioning, Jung wrote that any serious inquiry into the unconscious leads straight into the religious problem. This theme fully emerges in the second part of the book. As the poem proceeds, the intuitive side of religious ideas is explored. Job was the older anticipation of the individual who confronts the collective background to discover his or her own way; in so doing, a dialogue is entered into with the unconscious…

Alchemy

Jung’s devotion to the study of alchemy was an attempt to illustrate it as a connective stage between our historical religious outlook and the emerging scientific one. Alchemy was the intermediate form of the two views that later diverged. Like those of theology, alchemical ideas were psychic projections, though less collectively developed and therefore more expressive of natural tendencies…“

Visit Amazon for a general description of my book. See, also, this post for an example of the poetry.

(Note: the themes described under the headings contain only the first paragraph of elaboration.)

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January 28, 2016 · 2:12 pm

World in Transition

“A major shift in perspective accompanies today’s fast-paced super-highways of information. Jung’s and Neumann’s comparative studies of consciousness revealed patterns — evolutionary swings in its focus throughout history. They saw such shifts as reflections of unconscious organizing and centering functions. Their purpose is to re-orient us at certain critical stages to the more diffuse aims of spiritual and psychological development. Until recently, those aims were the province of religion and philosophy. That has changed. The beginning of the new stage is marked by a revolutionary discovery in the trend toward objective inquiry: the old metaphysical images proved to be the symbolic language of an unconscious psyche.” — A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious.

As much of my effort concerns what I see as the increasing relevance of Jung’s work, this quote from the preface of my book is a continuation of my last post on the cultural changes taking place today. While it’s important to reflect on their origins and effects, this often reinforces the causal thought that only drags us further into the rut of conscious reasoning responsible for an increasing unconscious opposition — the more threatening the more we depend on it. Few took note in 1954 when Erich Neumann wrote:

“Typical and symptomatic of this transitional phenomenon is the state of affairs in America, though the same holds good for practically the whole Western hemisphere… The grotesque fact that murderers, brigands, thieves, forgers, tyrants, and swindlers, in a guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time. Their unscrupulousness and double-dealing are recognized — and admired. Their ruthless energy they obtain at best from some stray archetypal content that has got them in its power. The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because in its one-track primitivity, it suffers none of the differentiations which make men human.”

A scant generation later, the dire conditions of WWII the New Science created but was also expected to save us from finds us in the wake of effects which threaten in different ways than the old ideological perspective of good vs. evil. That view is gradually giving way to a new stage of psychological awareness. The consciousness of today is more diverse and complex than ideological absloutes can sustain. Neumann:

“Not only power, money, and lust, but religion, art, and politics as exclusive determinants in the form of parties, sects, movements, and “isms” of every description take possession of the masses and destroy the individual.”

What “takes possession of the masses” is an expression of human need, though in unconscious forms so undefined and inarticulate that good and evil no longer express life as we once conceived it. The understanding of symbols, however — because they’re also individual and express personal needs — is relative to subjective interpretation (as if no one ever knew what religious thought was for). I stated in the preface to my book:

“Our ideas of religion are changing, and there is no return to the old ways. Deep in the throes of unseen psychic forces, consciousness is being pushed in a new direction. The possibilities for further development hidden in the older ideas require a re-interpretation of the peculiar language of the depth from which they spring and the symbols it produces.“

Not only are they changing in the West, but in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, too. It’s not really remarkable that Neumann’s observations on the greed and opportunism which for centuries defined the unconscious opposite beneath Christian ideals have finally become apparent to the rest of the world.

Beyond politics — the subjective clash of “isms” reflecting the opposed nature of unconscious regulating processes — what are the unseen forces pushing conflict in the Middle East? Radical extremism is a new awareness, not of its own religious history, but of the West and its exaggerated moral superiority; the underside of its professed principles: negative projections which bind opposed yet inter-penetrating ideas of progression and regression into mutual conflicts. But, the unconscious intent is to destroy such attitudes as repress its creative aims. When projected, they’re lived concretely.

The purposes revealed in the current forms of ideological idolatry can’t be seen through the lens of ego, reason, and belief. Listen to the “rational” solutions today’s leaders offer: they lead only deeper into conflict. The reasoning hasn’t changed — only the consequences.

Conscious objectivity cannot reason itself out of its subjective prison without a sense of purpose beyond temporal desire. Whether some see progress only through a single aspect of their personalities or are completely consumed by spiritual regression makes little difference. The fact is: all will be drawn into the conflicts for their own material investments in them: the nature of a global consumerism. History attests its primitive collective nature.

I quoted Philip Wylie in my last post: “It is the individual of whom the mass is composed, and if he is of poor character, the group will have that quality… The individual represents the whole. To be changed, he must change himself.”

For a literary example of how one begins the psychological process of coming to terms with the unconscious, visit Amazon.

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January 14, 2016 · 8:03 pm

The Anthropocentric Effect

“Overwhelming evidence found by an international team of scientists have shown that humans have altered the Earth to the point that the Earth has entered a new geological time period, a press release by the Australian National University (ANU) said on Friday… The exact starting date of the Anthropocene remains uncertain, although it is likely to be around the middle of the 20th century, at the start of the nuclear age and a time of accelerating population growth and rapid industrialisation.”  (Read here.)

The story of the momentous shift in human consciousness taking place today continues to unfold in every facet of modern life. Whether we trace its roots to such ideas as the divine gift of earthly dominion or the psychology of in-fear-irority which drove the violent physical conflicts of our ancestors to master each other and the environment, the most consistent core, cause, and calamity of human history can be summed up in one word: vanity.

There’s no doubt it was a powerful and effective compensation for an animal whose only real natural defense was the capacity to think creatively, to organize that thought and to act collectively. Without claw, fang, or physical prowess the only compensation Nature provided to balance a natural world with the new subjective experiment can also be summed up in one word: conscience.

Moral reflection is as fundamental to the spiritual imperative as the vanity which twisted our history into its present state — the fate of every collective ideal since Daniel interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s fate. This is the same theme as Jung’s dream of the turd which shattered the church: a symbol of the rejected function; what ego sees as waste and disgusting. (See also my post on the black dot.)

This wasted symbolic function, which is designed to recycle old forms into new life, is now excreted in such concrete and consuming mass that it collects on our shorelines by the tons, poisons our air and water — even circles our planet like a swarm of biblical locusts. Reflection is painful; it’s the psychological equivalent of the brute physical conditions of a natural world. Our present fate hangs on our ability to confront this strange, new psychological realm. It’s the opposite of the one we fancy we’ve achieved:

“So, he is an evil animal, turning reason into the admiring mirror, instead of admiring reason. His nations take on the whole appearance of logic — with courts and laws and constitutions and high principles: then the collective ego — the instinct vanity makes blind — takes their helm and the most elevated and noble nations make a daily business of such things as the lowest huddle of savages  would shun or kill a man for.“

So wrote Philip Wylie in 1947. Many may sense the contradictions, though more often than not they appear everywhere but in ourselves. Yet, we are the parts that make up the whole:

“So, with Everyman’s ego… First, the layer of familial vanities — the false pride of his homes and parents. Next, the vanities of his school, his clubs, and lodges. Always, the vanities of his church and nation. He incorporates them. He calls them his faiths, his convictions, loyalties, friendships, codes, beliefs, and the noble appurtenances of his soul. They are logical to him and just. He is the court and the interpreter. They are his shining armor. (What  a way to meet subjective life, in armor!) They are his weapons, too — the weapons of his righteousness…”

Thus life appeared in the mid-twentieth century. Its essence is still there, but each small pride is today becoming smaller and more diverse. The provincial fealties uniting a country half the population of today are breaking down, not just under the influence of technology in an increasingly interconnected global community but under an increasing subjectivity which signals a new stage of consciousness. Wylie saw it coming:

“The conscience is there and will always be. The reason is there. But they are not allied, in the man or his state or his church. Instead, because of temporal regard, of vanity, there always seems to be… a special condition, which appears to give leave… (backed by a myriad of private motives) to compromise some measure with principle…. Yet, one exists for the other — or the older for the newer — conscience for reason. To use the latter in any form limited by the ego is to set in motion, through conscience, and through instinct, the opposite danger.”

That the new emphasis on objectivity and science is a compensation for an unconscious increase in subjectivity is not considered by either the sciences or the religions. Those in whom we entrust our futures, the politicians, are the nearest examples of the “greed and opportunism” (Wylie’s words) with which this new subjective ego-stage replaces the collective values of the past:

“A world made to seem great by a few centuries of objective reasoning approaches, for want of equal subjective honesty, a state of uninhabitability — not just from wars, from bombs, from deliberate plagues, or from the disastrous sequelae of wars — but from its own psychological conditions… It is the individual of whom the mass is composed, and if he is of poor character, the group will have that quality… The individual represents the whole. To be changed, he must change himself.”

This uncertain subjective realm is a symbolic one; yet we make, with everything in our power, concrete realities of it. To confront it requires introspection and a re-evaluation of everything we’ve been taught. My book (see also, Amazon) is just one small example of the way an individual begins to examine what we are.

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