September 4, 2015 · 9:43 am

Nature’s Child: Progress vs. Development

“Why hast thou stolen into thyself, thyself?” — Friedrich Nietzsche

It may seem odd in this age of technology that anyone would suggest the idea of regression amid such fast-paced progress as we’ve seen in the last century. But, not only are the two ideas relative, together they form a complementary process in which neither works without the other. Psychological functions are paired in opposites designed to balance each other. Throughout centuries of shifts in conscious development, progress in one area means decline in another. Jung wrote:

“The child motif represents not only something that existed in the distant past but… something that exists now… it is not just a vestige but a system functioning in the present whose purpose is to compensate or correct, in a meaningful manner, the inevitable… extravagances of the conscious mind. It is in the nature of the conscious mind to concentrate on relatively few contents and to raise them to the highest pitch of clarity. A necessary result and precondition is the exclusion of other contents of consciousness…” which is “… bound to bring about a certain one-sidedness.”

Jung saw the child motif as an aspect of the spirit archetype. As a primordial image, it still functions regardless of our views on science and religion — or, in more general terms, rational and irrational — at a given point in history. Science means progress in the spirit of our times, but it also carries with it a dangerous underside. It’s a flattering image for all who identify with it; but if history is any guide, identification with a single function leads to disaster. Despite our most storied achievements, it remain our Achilles’ heel:

“Since the… consciousness of civilized man has been granted an effective instrument for the practical realization of its contents  through the dynamics of the will, there is all the more danger, the more he trains his will, of his getting lost in one-sidedness and deviating further and further from the laws and roots of his being. This means, on the one hand, the possibility of human freedom, but on the other it is a source of endless transgressions against one’s instincts. Accordingly, primitive man, being closer to his instincts, is characterized by a fear of novelty and adherence to tradition.”

But, as progress in one direction means regression in another, a kind of primitive fear still lurks in re-interpreting the religious function as opposed to simply dismissing it as fantasy against the literal truths of science. Obsession with novelty in one sphere compensates the fear of it in another, and though much is admirable in the technical creativity celebrated today, it makes for a perilous illusion of a darker psychic reality.

Erich Neumann’s description of the dissociability of the personality reads like a who’s who of the contemporary individual: “This betrays itself in many ways… as a technologist he may be living in the present, as a philosopher in the period of the Enlightenment, as a man of faith in the Middle Ages and as a fighter of wars in antiquity — all without being in the least aware how, and where, these partial attitudes contradict each other.”

Superstitious beliefs in the unity of conscious multiplied by seven billion subjective ideologies and the ceaseless speculations of experts on cable news are only so many contradictions. Solutions are generally superficial opinions based on immediate causes and effects which have little to do with the wider development of personality suggested by Neumann. The military man may be a man of faith and even a scientist, too — all his knowledge filtered through a subjective philosophy rooted in the pride of personal identification. Jung:

“But our progressiveness, though it may result in a great many delightful wish-fulfilments, piles up an equally gigantic Promethean debt which has to be paid off from time to time in the form of hideous catastrophes.” Nature decrees that the “fore-thinker” owes something back to the unconscious for the fire he stole…

“The symptoms of compensation are described, from the progressive point of view, in scarcely flattering terms. Since, to the superficial eye, it looks like a retarding operation, people speak of inertia, backwardness, skepticism, fault-finding, conservatism, timidity, pettiness… But inasmuch as man has, in high degree, the capacity for cutting himself off from his own roots, he may also be swept uncritically to catastrophe by his dangerous one-sidedness.

“The older view… realized that progress is only possible Deo concedente [granted by God]… The more differentiated consciousness becomes, the greater the danger of severance from the root condition. Complete severance comes when the Deo concedente is forgotten…  it is an axiom of psychology that when a part of the psyche is split off from consciousness, it is only apparently inactivated; in actual fact it brings about a possession of the personality, with the result that the individual’s aims are falsified in the interest of the split-off part. If, then, the childhood state of the collective unconscious is repressed to the point of exclusion, the unconscious content overwhelms the conscious aim and inhibits, falsifies, even destroys its realization. Viable progress only comes from the cooperation of both.”

As I quoted Jung in another post, the narrow door of inner confrontation is enough to frighten most people away — but how on earth could it be more frightening than the world spectacle confronting us today?

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August 29, 2015 · 7:32 am

Science, Religion, and Psychology: A Depth Perspective

At the end of my last post, I referred to what modern science and psychology are selling. For those interested in a more poetic expression, this excerpt begins on page 123 of A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious:

Divided thinking leads at last to conflicting goals:
To the two-way mirrors in the depth of all men’s souls;
Reflecting dual minds in which the opposites prevail
Yet only one can be observed through the conscious veil.
Even in the lofty labs of science this exists
Its subjective basis proven by the physicists:
The uncertain observations Heisenberg asserted
Were the limitations of their minds their thought perverted;
Though even these do not reflect the dark uncertain forms
Imposed by thought’s restriction to objective norms.
The conditions of the soul determine what men seek
The probable statistics are a modern double-speak.
What natural reality makes any sense at all
Without a concept of the purposes inherent in it?
Life would never have arisen on this earthly ball
Without the spirit everywhere apparent in it.
The faithful picture of the world such concepts have defined
Still are psychic products with conditions of their own;
And symbols weave their purpose through the conscious mind
In the secret depth to which itself remains unknown.
The uncertain relativity of modern science —
The deepest of realities the mind has yet discerned —
From the smallest particle to planetary giants
Reflects as well its two-way mirror when the glass is turned.
Such ideas are not conceived as psychic intuition
Though perceived to be the ground reality requires.
Even physics can’t escape the basis of cognition
Revealing inner aspects of the knowledge it acquires.
Through these secrets half-described in man’s imagination
Spirit, too, participates in matter’s dark foundation.                                             Nature’s secrets are elusive as her properties require —
Most of all within the matter of the soul’s desire.
The truths in her images the scientists have won
Lead below the world of things inside a deeper one.
Faust said long ago, “Two souls are dwelling in my breast” —
Now a proven fact the oldest atom will attest.
At the same time as Einstein a Swiss psychologist
Informed objective science of the very thing it missed:
The subjective factor – provable empirically —
Was a psychic analogue for space-time relativity.
This factor hides a deeper law than instruments reveal
For the law of man’s being is a factor he must feel…
Alas two psychic truths are dwelling in his head
Based on opposition like the physicists said.                                                                       “Each is feign to leave its brother,” just as Faust opined;
And one denied the other for the concepts it divined.                                                     The older one — the matrix men’s awareness can’t concede —
Is the very god-likeness their consciousness decreed
As an image of themselves and the wonders they begat
Perverting their own reason as a price for that.
A deeper opposition yet resides within
The partial values in the minds of thinking men:
Like salesmen they construct a future shopping mall
At the same time hoarding weapons to destroy it all…
Men are only objects in these dark imaginings;
Themselves reduced to ciphers in a world of Things.
What man if he had ever drunk from spirit’s well
Could quench his thirst with the technologic brew they sell?
Are the scientific prophets merely profiteers?
What human soul has been enhanced by their inventions?
Strange desires cloud the lens through which this science peers:
The subject of the object now confuses its intentions;
Though men are left to struggle with the same old human fears
As once claimed Eve’s and Adam’s and the snake’s attentions.
No problem is beyond this objective human quest
Except the small subjective one in a man’s own breast;
Yet still all forms of superstition will suffice
To convince him of his distance from his own inner vice.
This same collective border Christianity constructed
Repels a man from seeking what his nature has to say.                                             Though now it’s on the other side of heaven life’s conducted
It has still the same objective to explain the world away                                             And only understand enough to serve the greed created
By the hallowed histories of pious people long since gone;
Driven still by inner forces Nature arbitrated
That science and religion both have turned their backs upon…
For this man to free his mind he must consider things
Quite the opposite the paradigm instilled in him;
For the intellect inflames a man with waxen wings
Soaring far beyond the nature being willed in him.
This will is not his own and not obsessed with other men
But strives below the known to seek a world within;
For the re-creation of an older mystery
And he is only driven there by hard necessity.
He views his thinking through the glass of self-importance;
The wonders he beholds are mystical possessions.
They bewitch and stupefy in mythical accordance
With the ancient laws established by a man’s obsessions.
A man must have a counterweight to these Platonic spheres
Like giant shadows crouched behind his small and modest fears.
He loves these fears too in his own clandestine way:
Such is the bargain struck by men who cannot pray.
He barters spirit-life for dark and fleeting pleasures
To flatter only Image’s obsessive measures.                                                                       But a man who cannot pray must worship nonetheless
The gods of his disorders whom his fantasies confess.
Such are the idols of a space-age mythology
Until recently the ones the heavens once concealed;
Now the orphans of a modern-day psychology
Yet not much less divine and not much more revealed.
For gods have ever issued from this psychic netherland
In any form interpreted to make men understand
That a greater spirit hides within the human mind
Than by science or the intellect will ever be defined.
But the prophets of today are focused on the brain
Able only to connect with what they touch and see.
No man yet has seen a god in the physical domain                                                         Except the demons lurking in the body’s chemistry.
The gods are demons now to this enlightened man
Whose only world consists of what his thought can understand.
The psychic history on which his life is based
By the shining light of Consciousness is now erased.
What was once a sacred sphere by which this man was graced
Has been reduced to symptoms and by chemicals replaced.
What once were ancient deities have now become disease —
Their double-nature no objective science can appease.
How could such a troubled culture now have come about
But that its egotism turned its thinking inside-out?
Denied the things its own spirit thundered long ago
For self-deceptive mysteries its science couldn’t know.
A bi-polar syndrome underlies the Western mind
For these neglected opposites are moving to the fore;
Just as they comprise the nature science has defined
So also do they form the nature scientists ignore.
They force a man inside himself though willed or not;
They urge him to consider things his modern mind forgot.
They sometimes even make him pray though on a thinking level
Not the least discernible from praying to the Devil…

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August 20, 2015 · 11:28 am

Spirit and Water

“The Hebrew word for the ark, teba, occurs only twice in the Bible: in the flood narrative and in the Book of Exodus, where it refers to the basket in which Jochebed places her son, the infant Moses… In both cases teba has a connection with salvation from waters. It is made of “gopher” wood, a word which does not appear elsewhere in the entire Bible, and is divided into qinnim, a word which always refers to birds’ nests elsewhere…” — Wikipedia

The association of spiritual salvation with water, arks, baskets, gophers, and birds in this biblical context is not so strange as it may appear. In another post, I referred to Brian Greene’s, Elegant Universe. In it, he cited the four dimensions orienting us to physical reality: three in space, “left-right” (say, a street address), “back-forth” (an intersection), “up-down” (a floor number); and time, or “future-past” (my weekly sessions with Dr. Drowse).

Though Einstein demonstrated how time and distance make events relative to the observer in the external world, Jung described the internal conditions of the psyche — with all the qualities of spatial dimensions but in the form of symbolic ideas designed to orient us inwardly. Left-right, back-forth, up-down, future-past are subjective coordinates which make the perception of reality relative. What if I showed up to Dr. Drowze’s office at the wrong time?

The quote from Wikipedia is an example of water’s relation to spirit, and the association of gophers with birds’ nests is striking. It may be readily seen how an ark or basket might represent conscious refuge from the waters of untamed instinctuality; or that a Celestial God was once needed to guide us out of them. But, how does the blind rodent burrowing under the earth connect to the bird soaring above it?

This special instance of biblical symbolism even described both as having the same spiritual function. But, weren’t we in a different stage of development then? Modern culture, whether seen through the eyes of preachers, pundits, or politicians suggests that we may have forgotten that a serpent was also needed to circumscribe the original human condition: “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God…”

In general psychological terms, Jung saw water as a symbol of psychic energy; but in a religious context as spirit — or more specifically, unconscious spirit. Symbolically, a flood or deluge is a powerful influx of unconscious energy, and it’s natural that consciousness would seek refuge from a force more powerful than itself. Jung’s empirical studies, however, show a different picture than the traditional one of a “Spirit” from above:

“… while from below comes everything that is sordid and worthless. For people who think in this way, spirit means the highest freedom, a soaring over the depths, deliverance from the prison of the cthonic world, and hence a refuge… But water is earthly and tangible, it is also the fluid of the instinct-driven body, blood and the flowing of blood, the odour of the beast, carnality heavy with passion.” Faust echoed civilized man’s recurrent plea, “Wherefore the stream so soon run dry and I again thus thirsting lie?” Jung elaborated it:

“The unconscious… reaches down from the daylight of mentally and morally lucid consciousness into the nervous system that for ages has been known as the “sympathetic.” This does not govern perception and muscular activity like the cerebrospinal system, and thus control the environment; but, though functioning without sense organs, it maintains the balance of life…” Hmm. Dr. Drowse didn’t say anything about that.

“In this sense it is an extremely collective system, the operative basis of all participation mystique, whereas the cerebrospinal function reaches its high point in separating off the specific qualities of the ego, and only apprehends surfaces and externals — always through the medium of space. It experiences everything as an outside, whereas the sympathetic system experiences everything as an inside.” Joseph Campbell described the snake as a symbol of the cerebrospinal system, connecting it to consciousness. Jung:

“The unconscious is commonly regarded as… a fragment of our most personal and intimate life — something like what the Bible calls the “heart” and considers the source of all evil thoughts. In the… heart dwell the wicked blood-spirits, swift anger and spiritual weakness. This is how the unconscious looks… from the conscious side. But consciousness appears to be… an affair of the cerebrum, which sees everything separately and in isolation, and therefore sees the unconscious in this way too... Hence it is believed that anyone who descends into the unconscious gets into a suffocating atmosphere of egocentric subjectivity…” Dr. Drowse showed me that in his diagnostics manual.

“True, whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see… his own face. Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation… This confrontation is the first test of courage on the inner way, a test sufficient to frighten off most people…” I think Dr. Drowse forgot that part.

“The meeting with oneself is… a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well… For what comes after the door is… a boundless expanse of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It’s the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic nervous system, the soul of everything living begins…” 

Well, I can tell you that this confrontation is no easy sell today, and I’m no salesman. But, you can peek behind the curtain of what modern science and psychology is selling you — right here.

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July 30, 2015 · 1:26 pm

The Image of the Black Dot

In my last post, I discussed the black dot, or circle, and the role it played in mathematician John Nash’s psychosis, along with Hippolytus’ description of the Gnostic idea of the indivisible point. For those who may be interested, I’d like to share my personal experience of it:

Around age three, I dreamed I was tucked up inside the head of an adult body, peering out through the eyes. The little me watched as the body walked by itself, away from town. At the outskirts, my eyes were drawn to a vacant lot on the left, the last sign of civilization before a wild and forbidding mountainous terrain stretched out before me. It had no man-made structure on it but was filled with a great mound of excrement, and flies began gravitating to it.

More flies swarmed, covering it completely. Their cumulative buzzing created a deep, reverberating hum (scroll the comments to Sue Dreamwalker) which fixed my vision on the horizon. Suspended like a distant planet just above it hung a small black dot, barely visible through the trees. I was mesmerized by it as the hum pulsed in me.

Suddenly, it was right before me, blanketing my vision. Frightening, paradoxical feelings about time and eternity, life and death, and the incomprehensible nature of existence seized me. I was struck by how small it was at first and how large and overwhelming it suddenly became.

Jung called it a complexio oppositorum: it contained the opposites within it. For years, I was almost too afraid to think about it for the dread it evoked. Like a cautious animal, afraid yet curious, I circled around it in my mind, drawn to its ineffable mystery. Its dizzying complexity scared me, filled me with awe; but beyond its stark paradox, I was unable to discern any personal meaning in it.

It hung there through the years; not only on the horizon of my childhood but on the horizon of my future as well. After a divorce at thirty-five, I sank into a profound depth as black and unconscious as my dream prescribed in the dawn of my awareness…

Years of evasion found me with other men lost in the same transition. We drank together, commiserated, carped, and criticized; none of us any more aware of a mid-life change than the so-called “crisis” of aging men trying to retrieve a lost youth via sports cars and younger women.

The deeper psychological purpose of mid-life regression, though, is a symbolic journey through history: an unconscious description of the psychic reality beneath the social one which governs the first half of life. Fantasies of death and finality swept over me in a sea of emotion. Like my youthful dream, I felt trapped inside my head, isolated and alone. My adult body was walking itself away from town.

One night, a voice in my head whispered to me as I was dozing off, “You’re going down.” Suddenly, the black dot was upon me. Its irresistible force pinned me to the bed. Such a tension gripped me that it took all my might to remember where I was and observe what was happening in me. That state persisted through the night and into the next day, and I went to work driven by an exhausted attempt to release myself from it.

For weeks, the image of the black dot persisted. I knew intuitively that my efforts hinged on the few Jung books I’d puzzled over years before and had begun to read again. Slowly, I set about studying what was going on inside me.

I read of an alchemist in the sixteenth century whose dream depicted that same black dot hanging above the horizon, just as I’d seen it in mine: the black sun of alchemy, the dark core of inner illumination. I read as many ideas as I could find from those driven to record the mysteries of the same process I was in.

The Hebrew conception of Adam as the Original Man, the Gnostic idea of the indivisible point, Democritus’ atom, the alchemists’ soul-spark, the big bang, black holes: all contain historical reference points that establish the archetypal context of psychic experience.

It was Jung’s work that precipitated a spiritual experience beyond any collective god-concept. That is the archetype: its conscious insignificance makes it smaller than small, even as its unconscious influence makes it greater than great. To Jung, I will always be grateful for the opportunity he provided in my confusion.

Goethe said it eloquently in Faust: Mephistopheles (Faust’s shadow) discovers Wagner (his intellect) in his laboratory busily working to create life in a tube (!). He succeeds, but the little homunculus in the retort flies out and hovers illuminated above them. Mephistopheles makes plans with it for a great journey; but Wagner is excluded. “And I?” he asks. The little life he thought was his own creation responds:

 “Well, you /Will stay at home, most weighty work to do, /Open the parchment-sheets, collect/Life-elements as the recipes direct./With caution, fitting each to other. Ponder/ The What — to solve the How still harder try;/While through a little piece of world I wander/To find the dot to put upon the i.”

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July 23, 2015 · 3:09 pm

Science and Psyche: The Paradox of Consciousness

I’m as impressed by science and technology as anyone. Tremendous focus and organization are required to achieve the astounding changes of the last century. Think about it: as a boy, my grandfather saw Indians squatting across the river waiting to trade venison with his father. As a teenager, my father remembers soldiers returning from WWII teaching the town-folk to form lines at the theater to relieve the mob-like clamor at the box-office.

The age of the scientific method has seen the organization and consolidation of consciousness accelerate exponentially. There is, however, a big downside to it: the conscious mind tends to identify with what it’s focused on. When it does, it’s susceptible to possession by contrary unconscious factors. If history teaches us anything, it’s how easily conscious intent is changed into its opposite.

It’s natural to think highly of our achievements, but pride and self-awe are such subtle vulnerabilities that gods (along with a little belief and reflection) were once needed to remind us of their consequences. Consistent with such ideas, Jung described ego-consciousness as only one complex among many in the mind’s constitution, and unconscious complexes influence it beyond perception.

Some years ago, I read The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene: an informative, well-written book which discussed how the universe works compared to the quantum world. Scientists can accurately predict the movements of planets, but on the sub-atomic level, they can’t predict how particles behave (unsettling, I know). They appear in contradictory form — as particles and waves, depending on the type of experiment.

Position and velocity, for instance, can’t be measured at the same time, and the concept of complementarity describes a “duality paradox” where the mode of observation determines the data. Einstein wrote: “We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena…”

In Jung’s collaboration with German physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, they agreed that psychology and physics had something in common: when one thing is viewed, its complement, or opposite, is obscured. Both sciences proved empirically that even under the most rigorous conditions, observation is relative to the psyche.

When a thing becomes consious, it changes according to the way we see it. It’s no longer objective in the sense it was before we became aware of it. As an object of thought, it’s incorporated into the psyche and becomes subjective. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Einstein’s relativity, Jung’s subjective factor: all describe the nature of cognition.

Instruments minimize subjective influences under controlled conditions; though they’re considerably magnified under natural ones. Often more important than the knowledge itself, the psyche prescribes what we see and how we see it. Add to it the egocentric qualities of individual complexes, and you can imagine how difficult it is to observe ourselves with any objectivity.

How we interpret and apply knowledge is as fundamental as its acquisition. The deeper we look, the more perception contrasts with reality, just as the attempt to reconcile general laws of the universe with those of quantum mechanics show.

You might remember A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar: a biography of the mathematician, John Nash. He ostensibly “cured” his schizophrenia through sheer willpower — at least, that’s how the Hollywood movie-version depicted it. The book tells the real story behind the conscious fantasy.

I saw an interview with Nash on PBS, where he was asked to summarize his experiences. He shrugged, as if it made no sense, and said he was left with this image: his “rational thinking had blocked my view of the universe.”

Nash’s psychosis became evident to his wife when she found him busily painting large black circles on the walls in his study. Though it seems bizarre, its symbolic content becomes more comprehensible when viewed in its historical context. The deeper meaning hidden in the black circle which grew so large to Nash that it overwhelmed him, was examined by Jung:

The black dot is an archetypal idea similar to the Greek atom. Jung showed its relation to the Jewish-Christian idea of Adam as a symbol of wholeness, the Original Man. The Greek historian Hippolytus described the Gnostic idea of this indivisible point in the second century A.D.: “This point, being nothing and consisting of nothing, attains a magnitude incomprehensible by thought… this mustard seed which grows into the Kingdom of God.” Physicists’ theories of black holes and the big bang derive from this prototypal image.

Jung described it as the symbol of a profoundly unconscious organizing function which seeks to unify the personality, something like a primitive god-image; it appears during periods of disorientation: the psyche’s response to a dissociated consciousness.

For Nash, it symbolized not only the split condition his rational mind created but also the healing factor which would gradually guide him back over some thirty years to his emotional foundations.

Nash’s proclivities left him with a vulnerability as extreme as his talent. Not all are predisposed to such creative, hard-to-reconcile differences, but his example highlights the increasing value of a science of symbols.

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July 16, 2015 · 11:49 am

Archetypal Dreams

Jung saw dreams as objective statements by the psyche about itself. There’s no question they express a different reality than the waking mind sees. Despite claims by certain materialists that they’re residual neuronal activities of a re-charging brain, those who sense meaning in them know they contain information about life they couldn’t otherwise know.

Reflection on a dream unearths a complex web of associations, and moods can change perceptibly even with no understanding. Their compensating role was an early discovery of Jung’s and presupposes an unconscious balancing function aimed at unity or wholeness.

Their apparent personal level is a paradox: beneath it, instinctual patterns of behavior shape the most intimate private needs around the pre-existing forms required for the regulation of development. Who chooses his own growth?

Though Jung outlined the general process, how the personal grows out of the impersonal and the role dreams play in mediating it to consciousness is a deeply subjective mystery. From day-dreams and nightmares to gods and devils, what may appear as fantasy is a ceaseless stream of symbolic creative activity aimed at consolidating the personality for the fulfillment of  its destiny.

“Archetypal” describes our functioning as a species. Historical associations give context to personal conflicts, and primitive images sometimes depict graphic violence and/or sexuality mixed with profound spiritual and philosophical ideas with little or no personal experience behind them: the reason Jung stressed the value of religious symbols — only history provides their reference points.

Since they come from the “old brain”, they often appear disgusting or repulsive. Their organic aspects are a reality modern life will avoid when possible. There are men who can’t bear to see their own children born. When I was a child, men weren’t even allowed in the delivery room. Nature appeases no whim of man in the creation and maintenance of life — including weakness, disease, and death.

Consistent with our earthly natures, biological urges reflect the dark regions of prehistoric religious functions. We worry little about such living paradoxes in the frenzied pace of life today, though unconscious diversions contribute to our anxieties. By the middle years, we may feel such dreams as frightening, hostile, even as an “alien will”.

They may appear startling and bizarre. As a teen, I dreamed of a naked woman, arms open, raised as if to a deity, an erect penis protruding between her breasts. I thought I was crazy. Only much later did I read Erich Neumann’s assessment: the developing masculine principle was emerging from the unconscious matrix of the creative feminine.

Their depth is as philosophically sophisticated as it is primitive. Contemplation leads far beyond the brute world they often portray: analogies which embrace the whole of man’s development, and they change shape as quickly as thought pursues them. There’s no doubt they’re inherited ways of perception for anyone willing to inspect them.

Jung and Neumann, along with many others, have documented them — much to the chagrin of modern science: tangible proof that we’re conditioned by factors extending back to the animal world, inconceivable without an orientation to history.

Jung established a comparative model to interpret this history. All of science depends on its symbols but lacks the knowledge to understand them. I read of a team of anthropologists studying cave paintings in France. They wasted untold resources searching out aboriginal peoples who would tell them what the symbols meant. This is backwards, for the knowledge was never conscious. As my last post implies: what do such assumptions say about the scientific intellect?

Who’s ever had an archetypal dream will sense its profundity — if he/she doesn’t dismiss it as too foreign and incomprehensible for reflection. Emotion dictates, however, that it can never be completely repressed. Of course, it is foreign; its perspective is far from the contemporary one. The more convinced one is of an artificial truth, the more frightening nature’s images appear. Archetypal dreams have very different notions of life than our conscious appraisals.

While going through the youthful process of separating from home, I had a dream in which a voice stated: “I am my father, my father is me.” I was having conflicts with my father, and it helped me to understand the projections we were trading — but I had no knowledge at the time that it echoed almost verbatim a religious idea straight out of Egyptian mythology.

Such dreams are of a still-living psychic history — regardless of what we think or believe. The emotions they evoke feel divine, leading some to believe that God speaks directly through them. They’re almost always misinterpreted by those anchored in certainty, ego-security, and fear of the unknown. They derive from an unconscious authority outside any culture or belief and tend to isolate and confuse those who experience them — however…

If you trust collective assumptions to make moral decisions for you; if you trust the direction culture is taking to forge a sane future for your children, then beware these unsettling voices in the stillness of your soul — they mean inner conflict. If exposed to enough of them that you question the culture you live in — you may be deranged.

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June 5, 2015 · 11:56 am

Instinct in the Human Animal

Austrian ethologist (animal behaviorist, different from the human ego-version), Konrad Lorenz, was of a class of empiricists whose integrity stood out in the field of observational science. His book, On Aggression, was a model in his discipline. His dedication to understanding nature equaled his love of animals, and his book was a tribute to both.

One study he recounted was an experiment by Wallace Craig on the effects of loneliness in the blonde ring dove. He separated a male in a cage to see which objects might elicit courtship activities when deprived of a female:

After several days he was ready to “court a white dove which he had previously ignored. A few days later he was bowing and cooing to a stuffed pigeon, later still to a rolled-up cloth, and finally, after weeks of solitary confinement, he directed his courtship to the empty corner of his boxed cage where the convergence of the straight lines offered at least an optical fixation point.”

Lorenz explained that the inner threshold of release sinks in proportion to the lack of external stimuli. Instinct regulates specific energies according to natural imperatives. Lacking the specific object of its intent, the energy is expended on the closest available analogy to it.

Many have difficulty admitting that humans are subject to the same instincts as the rest of the animal kingdom, though anyone seeking company in a bar can relate to the dove in the cage. It seems “the girls all look prettier at closing time.” But, whether we’re talking about birds, bars, babies, or bibles, similar functions are at work. That’s just the body, though, right? God gave it to us (only once-removed from His image) not only to tempt us but to: “Be fruitful and multiply… and subdue the earth…” However haughtily science may deride religious belief, it still operates on that very assumption.

Conversely, we’ve long been dangerously over-populated, and an unconscious science has also devised quick and terrible remedies for it when nature deems it no longer sustainable. Aims differ according to higher needs, and biological impulses contain the seeds of psychic functions on higher levels.

Lorenz quoted from the witch’s kitchen scene in Faust where Mephistopheles proffers the potion which will enable Faust to fall in love: “With this drink in your body, soon you’ll greet/A Helena in every girl you meet.” — an example of the mythic complexities of the sexual instinct in a conscious animal.

Jung showed that the gulf between the natural intent of an unconscious function and its conscious fulfillment is compensated by longing — libido, his term for psychic energy, from the Latin, lust or desire. He showed in his, Symbols of Transformation, how the energy originally arising from the sexual instinct is converted into higher cultural aims through symbolic ritual.

But, he also argued that rational concepts can’t replace living experience: the value of symbol and ritual. He compared it with the knowledge of a disease as opposed to having it. History shows, too, that even the most ardent believers experience the doubt and conflict which fill the divide between a function’s natural intent and conscious ideas about it — a process of discovery none deny except they be trapped in the past.

Like the dove’s courtship to the rolled-up cloth, an instinctual need must be acted out in some form. If consciousness deviates too far from it, its energy is expended in compensating activities: exaggerations, compulsions, obsessions, “isms”, and all the rest of the litany of modern psychic conflict.

Compare Wallace Craig’s observations with the changes reflected in today’s shift from theology to science to technology to media diversion. Like the dove in the cage, Jung showed that the religious function can’t be deprived of its energy even where there’s no conscious outlet. It re-appears in substitute forms which resemble the original intent but don’t satisfy it.

Even when we profess spiritual beliefs, however sincerely, we have difficulty recognizing that we also identify with them; and in the identity, we worship the belief through its object. An unconscious opposition then creates unintended consequences designed to re-direct it — like the unconscious effects of the creation/destruction problem on science and religion.

It’s difficult enough to reconcile any ideal with a psychic reality, however truly believed in — how much more so when one has forfeited the spiritual reflection intended to inform it? Inner responsibility is compensated by an extraverted group-think as contradictory as it is unconscious.

The dizzying complexity of information today is indigestible without the feeling-values needed to orient and organize it. Science and technology feed commercial innovation, and a deceptive media markets it to keep us from reflecting on what we’re doing; if we can be induced to identify with things, we’ll need more and more of them to fill the psychic void. We sit staring at “the empty corner… “

Jung demonstrated that the only faculty that makes sense or meaning of the world is the reflective instinct; that its religious and philosophical nature is a reality and will not be altered: an individual function that no group possesses but is possessed by through identification.

Unconscious conflicts, however, produce symptoms. They appear in relief in the individual, but also reflect cultural undercurrents. To a rational, scientific psychology which has rejected the study of religion as psychic experience, symptoms mean “disease”. A simple animal analogy can’t tell us how doves feel, but we could learn a lot more about stuffed pigeons with a little knowledge and reflection.

Read more on the symbolic aspects of instinct.

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May 28, 2015 · 12:42 pm

Philip Wylie: An Essay On Morals

Philip Wylie was a preacher’s son; mainly, a fiction writer in the 40’s and 50’s. His keen intellect tackled the controversies of his day through the characters in his novels. He was self-educated in that he had no degree, though he’d studied physics and psychology at Cal State and Princeton, “beyond the point at which doctorates are given.” He was a critical thinker in pursuit of subjective truth. 

I stumbled onto An Essay on Morals in high school. It was dedicated to C. G. Jung’s psychology, the conceptual underpinnings of Mr. Wylie’s philosophy. His social critique became a guiding thread in my own search for a subjective truth. These are some of his ideas:

“What shall we do?” he asked, concerned for the deepening psychic split he saw reflected in the conflict between science and religion. He described its resolution as an inner search: “The answer for the individual is clear. Through the use of his conscience, and with insight into natural law, he can extend his awareness as far as he will.

“To be conscious of the instincts and conscious in the instinctual sense is his chief function. Learning psychological law and meditating it in the intellect is of little avail. It must be applied by the man to every thought and notion, dream, fantasy, memory and motive. The illumination that ensues takes the form of inward experience, of heightened consciousness, of the fulfillment of the newly educated mind through performance.”

He explored the possibilities of a society oriented to understanding its nature in the interest of collective consciousness and not just for the benefit of a few: “I think… education could profit if it were to embark upon the serious, subjective instruction of wisdom in the order man has learned it. Anthropology provides the proper schedule for subjective study by the child.”

These are things mature, intelligent beings ponder when they envision their children’s futures. When did you last hear a politician or preacher express such ideas? Very different notions of profit drive today’s leaders.

“The great advantage of the deep, inner realization that man is an animal lies in the fact that it reveals the amount of work and effort he must expend to accomplish his good purposes — to use his virtues creatively and his destructive impulses for the destruction of that which impedes his consciousness, beginning with his ego. The very acceptance of our animal nature and origin and state is, in itself, the biggest blow to the ego. We have imagined that, as super-beasts, as animals with souls, or animals made superior with reason, there ought to be for us a quick and handy way to personal perfection and the achievement of Heaven on Earth. But if we know we are animals, we see how we must evolve, and that the more conscious we make ourselves, the sooner shall we evolve.”

He saw exposing the myth of racial purity as basic to a modern education in a global community: “… national and racial prejudice is founded upon ignorance and fear… he is afraid of other races because he is afraid of himself.

“…to protect himself from the knowledge of his constant panic, he develops an arrogance of race… and nations. This, he passes on to his son, generation after generation…  its attending facts ought to be taught to the ten year old, and not just in college to a few candidates for philosophical doctorates.

“Next on the public curriculum should come that significant finding about man which next occurred in history: the discovery of the unconscious mind… The home and the schools of an animal that knows its universal kinship with beasts will be ready to receive the ideas. Sex symbols, totems, tabus… all the hidden, ageless patterns and data of sex should be taught so they are incorporated in the common mind and the common behavior.

“Society by then would be sufficiently conscious… productive of responsible individuals, and sufficiently understanding of its own instincts, to govern itself on a world basis and maintain at the same time, peace and liberty. Half of the ill — the psychosomatics — would heal. Prisons and asylums would empty. Common knowledge of psychology would supplant the shortage of psychiatrists. These gentlemen bemoan the incidence of neurosis and madness today. The idea that their science could become the property of home and school would irritate and maybe amuse them: they are haughtily learned.” (Whether they bemoan it as much as exploit it today is another question.)

Is it just another ideal in our search for meaning? Maybe, but it may also be more realistic than any we’ve so far conceived; one that would incorporate the highest achievements of man through education. The subjective complement to objective knowledge, our psychic history, however, is still buried deep in an unconscious religious heritage, far below scientific inquiry, now to peer back at us through fractured ideological and political interests. Only the conflicts and prejudices of the past remain; that we never absorbed its wisdom is plain. 

Wylie saw Jung’s model as a way to heal the schizophrenic effects of ideological differences though attention to our own natures; that we study ourselves as ardently as we study objects. Self-study indicates that we value who we are. That subjective “truth” is, in a scientific age, still defined largely by ideology and ego reflects an undeveloped soul (Russian philosopher, Gurdjieff, described it in the corporate businessman of the 1950’s as a “small, deformed thing”). Why would we give attention to something we don’t value?

As Wylie suggested, the recovery of the soul begins in the confrontation with ego. A recent shift in values was all that was needed to strip the bright veil of Christian ego-worship and expose its underside. The new spiritual authority is now the naked god of technological materialism. Sadly, for the modern scientific world: “… meditating it in the intellect is of little avail.”

How can we be educated in a world where competing ideological interests seek only to capitalize on our lack of development? How do we recover the subject in a world of objects?

Don’t read here if you’re not concerned about the future.

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May 12, 2015 · 9:05 am

Alchemy: Intellect in Transition

The modern shift from a traditional religious view to an increasingly scientific one drew Jung to alchemy. He saw the psychological aspects of metaphysical symbols as vital counterweights to the literal truths of science in confronting the dangerous challenges of nuclear technology. Why it’s important is rooted in the historical nature of our mental functioning.

His studies led him back to a time when science and religion were not mutually exclusive. Natural philosophy was the unconscious gradient for development in an inquiring medieval mind driven to new ways of thinking about itself and the world.

As many alchemists were invested in the religious and philosophical side of their work, psychic processes were projected into physical analogies. Jung’s in-depth studies of medieval symbolism were an important advance in how we conceive the creativity of the religious factor, its symbolic forms, and their projection onto concrete reality.

For Jung, alchemical philosophy formed a natural continuity in the shift from religion to science. Intuitive ideas pushed it outside Church dogma; less collectively developed and more expressive of natural tendencies. New forms of centuries-old conflicts took shape in a new transitional phase. Modern science now find us at the crossroads of two opposed realities: the causal, material world of the senses and the unconscious psychic energy specific to inner development. Natural law tells us consciousness is relative to both.

Transition means conflict, and the unconscious psyche is ceaselessly engaged in presenting traditional problems in new guise. But, as natural philosophy showed, the depth of relation to an unconscious nature lies far below a dualistic Christian philosophy. It’s not surprising that the medieval search for subjective truth reflects modern conflicts; the new scientific world-view is as collective as the religious one. This psychological translation by Jung of an obscure alchemical allegory expresses it:

“The more you cling to that which all the world desires… you are Everyman, who has not yet discovered himself and stumbles through the world… For desire only burns in you in order to burn itself out, and in and from this fire arises the true living spirit which generates life according to its own laws, and is not blinded by the shortsightedness of our intentions or the crude presumption of our superstitious belief in the will.”

Jung added: “The unconscious demands your interest for its own sake and wants to be accepted for what it is. Once the existence of this opposite is accepted, the ego can and should come to terms with its demands. Unless the content given you by the unconscious is acknowledged, its compensatory effect is not only nullified but actually changes into its opposite, as it then tries to realize itself literally and concretely.”

The mystery of the psyche isn’t a convenient subject (or object) in a scientific age overwhelmed by the vast accrual of technical knowledge. Nature’s wisdom speaks through broad analogies, whether in religious parables or dreams. Its dark uncertainties mean development. Jung examined the thief, a shadow-figure of unconscious individuality:

“The thief… personifies a kind of self-robbery. He is not easily shaken off, as it comes from the habit of thinking supported by tradition and milieu alike: anything that cannot be exploited in some way is uninteresting — hence the devaluation of the psyche. A further reason is the habitual depreciation of everything which one cannot touch with the hands or does not understand.”

The modern techno-commercial market mentality would steal for itself the very foundations of individuality, negating centuries of spiritual effort. Subjective experience is sold back to us through projected emotions which consume more and more of the energy reserved for inner development. Mass ideological conflicts mask a lack of introspection:

“Anyone… who thinks in terms of men minus the individual, in huge numbers, atomizes himself and becomes a thief and a robber to himself… infected with the leprosy of collective thinking…”

Alchemy described the symbolic function of relations between a “masculine” consciousness and a “feminine” unconscious as the “arcane substance”: a mysterious psychic design which mediates the opposites on ever higher levels. The earthly human form was “hermaphroditic and even feminine.” It wasn’t the transsexual image of today but a single body with two heads, male and female, a symbol of spiritual consciousness:

“Because the arcane substance always points to the principal unconscious content… its nature shows in what relation that content stands to consciousness. If the conscious mind has accepted it, it has a positive form, if not, a negative one. If on the other hand the arcane substance is split into two figures, this means that the content has been partly accepted and partly rejected; it is seen under two different and incompatible aspects and is therefore taken to be two different things.”

Alchemical philosophy was an unconscious response to a one-sided Christian philosophy — too collective, otherworldy, and inflated to accept a natural reality: the hidden opposite of earth’s little god. Jung wrote:

“It is the age-old drama of opposites, no matter what they are called, which is fought out in every human life. In our text it is obviously the struggle between the good and the evil spirit, expressed in alchemical language just as today we express it in conflicting ideologies.” The opposite, through concentration: “becomes “fixed” through the mystery… in which the extreme opposites unite, night is wedded with day, and “the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female.” This apocryphal saying of Jesus from the beginning of the second century is indeed a paradigm for the alchemical union of opposites.”

Continue reading for an example of the living process of coming to terms with the opposite.

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May 4, 2015 · 2:50 pm

The Devil’s in the Details

In Christianity, the mystery of coming to consciousness is represented as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden. Jung described the serpent as a symbol of nature’s transformation in a twilight half-human which gradually came into opposition to itself. It didn’t happen suddenly.

Myths contain an ambiguous wealth of unconscious information which can’t be explained discursively. The psyche is a diffuse organ of perception whose wider perspective is supplemented by the focus and detail of consciousness. Beyond rational science lies an irrational pre-history of sensory, emotional, and intuitive functions that point back to a remote past — but, also to the future: the psyche is is a mysterious continuum in which past, present, and future co-exist outside our conscious conception of time. 

In its most urgent sense, the function of life is adaption to immediate reality, though the value of memory-images confirms that an orientation to the past is indispensable for it. But, time-awareness implies possibilities as well. As myths also portend collective tendencies, dreams sketch out possibilities for individual development; it’s how the unconscious deity of wholeness reflects our fate — pardon the subjectivity.

Jung demonstrated how the snake symbolizes instinctual wisdom: the winding by-paths of earth-bound existence, the frightening hidden nature of an animal reality which strikes suddenly from unseen places, the forked tongue of a dual nature which deceives as it yet speaks the truth. As we evolved, so did the image — into a part-human figure as did older animal deities which described the dawn of humanity.

Over the many centuries of evolution depicted in the Old Testament, the serpent reappeared as Satan, much as the Sphinx symbolized the humanization process in Egyptian mythology. It seems crazy to me today that as a youth I was instructed to believe literally in such a mythical figure as had the tail, horns, and hooves of an animal yet to realize its full human potential; though, I see it in myself and the world, still.

For many, it’s difficult to identify anything real in it. To the rationalist and the atheist, it’s merely silly. To the politician and the preacher, it’s more a tool for manipulation. But, even the true believer is coming to doubt its significance in an age of literal material truth. A major shift in consciousness finds it mostly in the museum of outdated fantasy — diffused back into the unconscious — waiting to be re-defined. But, historical analogy is essential for a sense of the symbolic blueprint of unconscious functioning.

In the biblical context, snake and devil condense into one idea the opposition required to accept or reject; to choose amid a world of possibilities in a human prototype slowly awakening from a dreaming instinctual awareness. Expulsion from the garden signified that fateful split from unconscious nature, its secret relations eloquently and poetically portrayed as the drama between god and man.

The last collective image describing the dark side of our natures is that figure of the Devil. Whose mind doesn’t respond to the leering mythical half-beast’s evil grin, the long arrow-headed cat’s tail, the beastly horns, the cloven hooves? These attributes demand to be reassembled in a new way to form any meaning in the strange guise they present. He’s now the scattered and undefined anxiety of fear, chaos, confusion, and projected hostility in the new dawn of an uncertain technological future.

The horns of this fading fantasy figure equate with the forked tongue, and both point to a dual nature: the fork in the head, a form of awareness, though a primitive one; the tongue, an ancient reminder of an opposed consciousness which would question even a god (a property the snake possessed, too, in the ancient trinity of animal, man and deity) — and at the same time, the earthly opposite of the Word of humanity’s highest aspirations.

Someone once told me of a dream he had of this very picture of the devil, its tail twitching like a cat’s tail as it grinned eerily in its sphinx-like repose. It’s this cat-like, feminine quality of repressed emotion which the unconscious seized upon to inform him of his dissociation. The arrow-head on the tail was the piercing depth his unconscious nature intended to point out his rational misconceptions of himself.

The Devil’s unconsciousness is symboled by his dark nature, though his defining color is red. Erich Neumann described redness as instinctual excitation; and the sensuality of material desire now bids our loftiest scientific minds to uncover all its depth — in concrete form. The beast would become human — but it needs the assistance of other psychic functions. Goethe expressed something of the sort in the witch’s kitchen when Faust was in need of a magic potion to make him fall in love: “It’s true the Devil taught her how to do it. And yet the Devil cannot brew it.”

His hooves describe the instinctual foundations of herd-like collective instincts which can easily overpower the freedom of the individual. Jehovah’s commands, however, forbade the eating of herd animals with split hooves, reinforcing the idea of dissociation, but also the need for union which the myth of the garden decreed was the central theme of an individual spiritual life.

These ideas lie in the images as symbolic pointers to our division and the need for a spiritual reconciliation. The depth psychology which unearthed this new way of looking at our histories has only recently been established. The science of it is not yet recognized. 

For an example of how this associative process works below the surface of consciousness, continue reading or visit Amazon.

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April 27, 2015 · 6:34 am

Science and Technology: The New Dogma of Repression

“Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war…” — Carl Jung

It’s been a century since Jung introduced his theory of psychic energy. It seems little more acknowledged today than then. His psychological adaptation of the laws of physical energy appears as arbitrary to scientific thought as do religious figures or the philosophical paradoxes that occupied minds long ago.

In terms of psychic energy, however, the objective study of things presupposes a subjective fascination which is inseparable from human use and intent. The purposes and direction of a nuclear technology now charge a young psychology with guiding us out of the religious and philosophical cul-de-sac a dissociated intellect proffers in a new atomic age.

What scientists saw as Jung’s mysticism was a new philosophy of science and religion; a comparative history of consciousness with a conceptual view of psychic functioning that stretched the limits of causal thought. His intuitions of humanity’s dark side drew him beyond rational method’s surface applications; for, the “method enjoys greater intellectual recognition than its subject.”

A new dogma of objectivity replaces the old religious one; its images dissolved into a dark, fathomless universe of impersonal and unspeakably violent cosmic forces. Where did the emotional energy we invested in the projections go?

“The matter now seems turned about; the Devil’s in the house and can’t get out.” As Goethe’s Faust echoed two centuries ago, a stark new heavenly mirror stares back at us from a timeless eternity. But, it was Jung who brought a metaphysical religious philosophy down to an earthly psychic reality:  

“… the psyche is so infinitely diverse in its manifestations, so indefinite and unbounded, that the definitions of it are difficult if not impossible to interpret, whereas the definitions based on the mode of observation and on the method derived from it are — or at least should be — known quantities. Psychological research proceeds from these empirically or arbitrarily defined factors and observes the psyche in terms of their alterations. The psyche therefore appears as the disturbance of a probable mode of behavior postulated by one or the other of these methods.”

He stated that “everything depends on the method and its presuppositions and that they largely determine the results.” The method itself is “disturbed by the autonomous behavior of the psyche…” The partial nature of thought can never anticipate instinctive processes; they’re “really unconscious” and will always defy conscious description. 

Allowing the material he observed over decades to form its own picture, Jung postulated his theory of types: sixteen fundamental “realities” in which each can be considered as valid as the others. He emphasized that it was only one of many possible (or “probable”) modes of observation — and again, Goethe’s words echoed in the background: “It’s been a fact of ancient date that men make little worlds within the great.”

He stressed that in practice no classification appears in ideal or abstract form. All things psychic are protean, shifting. They disappear and reappear according to their own laws; one of the reasons psychology is, in the final analysis, more philosophical than scientific. But, such a fluid view allows a timeless psyche to express itself. To relate to this reality on its own terms is to enter a dark world of uncertainty:

“Fear and resistance are the signposts that stand beside the via regia to the unconscious, and it is obvious that what they primarily signify is a preconceived opinion of the thing they are pointing at. It is only natural that from the feeling of fear one should infer something dangerous and from the feeling of resistance something repellent. The patient does so, the public does so, and in the end the analyst does so too… this view naturally conceives the unconscious as consisting of incompatible tendencies which are repressed on account of their immorality.”

But, unconscious compensations presuppose objective functions. Hidden in the religious guilt and the philosophical reflection which would bind together two opposed realities are the images designed to supplement our preconceptions: the dark side of the mental inheritance which makes consciousness relative to a greater mystery. Thanks to an inherited morality and the threat of extinction behind the new technology, we now procreate exponentially faster than we kill each other; though the compulsions for both have not been appreciably altered by either.

The facts of unconscious compensation are a fundamental discovery that lies at the heart of human conflict: the role of consciousness, will, choice, emotion, perception, the Deity; all the ways we relate to ourselves and the world. The depth of human functioning so transcends conscious morality that no statistics, studies, or standardized methods will reveal its unconscious influences on our behavior. 

Psychologically, the incompatible tendencies which disturb our ideals are the most objective appraisals we have, just not quite yet in serviceable form. The new “objective” dogma still sees them in moralistic terms, however: disease, disorder, defect, pathological, and sick are the new good and evil of today’s self-estrangement — and the labels only stick further into the open wound of our religious history…

For an example of how Jung’s energic theory can be applied to the mid-life search for meaning, read more or visit Amazon.

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April 7, 2015 · 12:29 pm

Jung on the Religious Factor

In Psychological Types, Jung traced the development of Western theology from the East-West schism in the eleventh century to Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation in the 1500’s to such a proliferation of isms today as would rival the world’s entire mythological pantheon. Add a legion of political ideologies and as many personal beliefs as there are hairs on the Cosmic Cow’s body, and you get an idea of evolution’s tendencies. 

Historically, religion is so intimately bound to individual development that the idea of the soul was integral to its philosophy. That’s changed. Ideal falls short of reality in all human behavior; today, however, the pretense has been dropped altogether, and the church is more a social-commercial institution than a path to spiritual communion.

A new collective ego-ideal now replaces the older view, and the higher spiritual authority once presupposed in the soul now yields to the science-fiction of objectivity and its shadow-side: the lures of commercial need-invention, social marketing, object-identification, and sensual gratification. But, below these reactions to the cult of reason, where do the real changes originate?

Jung wrote in The Practice Of Psychotherapy: “The positive meaning of the religious factor in a man’s philosophical outlook will not… prevent certain views and interpretations from losing their force and becoming obsolete, as a result of changes in the times, in the social conditions, and in the development of human consciousness. The old mythologems upon which all religion is ultimately based are… the expression of inner psychic events and experiences… they enable the conscious mind to preserve its link with the unconscious, which continues to send out… primordial images just as it did in the remote past.

“These images give adequate expression to the unconscious, and its instinctive movements can in that way be transmitted to the conscious mind without friction… If, however, certain of these images become antiquated, if… they lose all intelligible connection with our contemporary consciousness, then our conscious acts of choice and decision are sundered from their instinctive roots, and a partial disorientation results, because our judgment then lacks any feeling of definiteness and certitude, and there is no emotional driving force behind the decision.“

Psychologically, divine (numinous) refers to the unconscious feelings that attract consciousness to its development. Despite its negative connotations, instinct means natural functioning, and “animal” and “divine” are two opposite poles of an age-old psychic continuum. Without a sense of the symbolic function that would reconcile conscious contradictions to psychic reality, inner conflicts are projected onto external situations.

When enough people project enough unconscious emotion into ideological differences, they more closely resemble animals than divine beings. Somewhere in between the two lies a divine animal, and the extremes require an individual function to mediate them. We know how the unconscious group mind reacts to them.

“The collective representations that connect primitive man with the life of his ancestors… form the bridge to the unconscious for the civilized man also, who, if he is a believer, will see it as the world of divine presences. Today these bridges are in a state of partial collapse, and the doctor is in no position to hold those who are worse hit responsible for the disaster. He knows that it is due far more to a shifting of the whole psychic situation over many centuries, such as happened more than once in human history. In the face of such transformations the individual is powerless. The doctor can only look on and try to understand the attempts at restitution and cure which nature herself is making.

“… the unconscious produces compensating symbols which are meant to replace the broken bridges, but which can only do so with the active cooperation of consciousness. In other words, these symbols must, if they are to be effective, be “understood” by the conscious mind… A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood, it becomes a living experience.“

Intellectual comprehension and emotional experience are different forms of understanding. The soul is a function of relation to both worlds; when it loses value as a guiding idea, the loss is compensated by an exaggerated certainty and a dangerous over-confidence in consciousness: the “partial disorientation” to which Jung referred:

“I therefore consider it my main task to examine the manifestations of the unconscious in order to learn its language. But since, on the one hand, the theoretical assumptions we have spoken of are of eminently historical interest, and, on the other hand, the symbols produced by the unconscious derive from archaic modes of psychic functioning, one must… have at one’s command a vast amount of historical material; and secondly, one must bring together and collate an equally large amount of empirical material based on direct observation.

“… I have come to the conclusion that the most individual thing about man is surely his consciousness… but that his shadow, by which I mean the uppermost layer of his unconscious, is far less individualized, the reason being that a man is distinguished from his fellows more by his virtues than his negative qualities. The unconscious, however, in its principal and most overpowering manifestations, can only be regarded as a collective phenomenon… and because it never seems to be at variance with itself, it may well possess a marvellous unity and self-consistency, the nature of which is at present shrouded in impenetrable darkness.“

As an intellectual function, science must repress emotion — and with it, the role it plays in conscious value-formation. When the soul is twisted into an impersonal object without a history, the individual’s creative attempts at solutions to inner problems is lost to the collective. The dialogue between them — a mirror of exchange between conscious and unconscious — is shut off.

The commercial deception and manipulation; the political double-talk, violence and ideological greed, the exaggerated certainty of the new extraversion: are these the spiritual legacy the Sons of Abraham will leave for their children?

Read a poetic example of how this inner dialogue begins.

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