Punctum Saliens

Jung states the new myth more succinctly in Psychology and Religion: West and East where he says:

Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody. That is why the Creator needs conscious man even though, from sheer unconsciousness, he would like to prevent him from becoming conscious.

and

Whoever knows God has an effect on him.

Edinger states the basic idea as “the purpose of human life is the creation of consciousness” and then acknowledges that talking about consciousness is a difficult task. In the next chapter, Edinger clarifies that his approach to consciousness (and the inevitable tie-in with epistemology) is “not philosophical but psychological-empirical” and this should be kept in mind throughout.

Edinger calls consciousness a “psychic material” and this must be understood in light of Jung’s conception of the psyche. As Jacobi explains in An Introduction to the Psychology of C.G. Jung, the psyche is something “not less real than the body” and “[t]hough it cannot be touched, it can be directly and fully experienced and observed. It is a world of its own, governed by laws, structured, and endowed with its own means of expression.”

So, our purpose is to create consciousness and this creation is the process of individuation — the process whereby psychic contents (complexes and archetypal images) “become actualized and substantial” … “when they enter an individual’s conscious awareness and become an accepted item of that individual’s personal responsibility.” This process involves the “encounter of opposites” such as subject and object or myself and the “other.”

The encounter of opposites is a big part of Jung’s psychology and he points to a long history of mythical ideas and to alchemy (which was not really about turning literal lead into literal gold just as Moby Dick was not really about a literal whale and its literal pursuer) as evidence of how pervasive this idea is in human history. Psychologically, the creation of consciousness — the process of individuation — involves being confronted by the unconscious with the contrary when the ego identifies with one of a pair of opposites. This confrontation happens over and over and over again and we find ourselves tossed “back and forth between opposing moods and attitudes.” But, the one who deliberately seeks out these encounters — who deliberately tries to resolve inner and outer conflict by coming to terms with the opposite and experience both, opposing, viewpoints simultaneously — is creating a new increment of consciousness.

The key, as the alchemical myth tells us, is the union of opposites, the coniunctio.

Contrary to the implications of the erotic imagery, the coniunctio of opposites is not generally a pleasant process. More often it is felt as a crucification. The cross represents the union of horizontal and vertical, two contrary directional movements. To be nailed to such a conflict can be a scarcely endurable agony.