Archive for the 'carl jung' Category

The immoral society

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Ken
on July 21, 2008
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It is a notorious fact that the morality of society as a whole is in inverse ratio to its size; for the greater the aggregation of individuals, the more the individual factors are blotted out, and with them morality, which rests entirely on the moral sense of the individual and the freedom necessary for this. Hence, every man is, in a certain sense, unconsciously a worse man when he is in society than when acting alone; for he is carried by society and to that extent relieved of his individual responsibility. . . . Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity. Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. Individuality will inevitable be driven to the wall. This process begins in school, continues at the university, and rules all departments in which the State has a hand. In a small social body, the individuality of its members is better safeguarded; and the greater is their relative freedom and the possibility of conscious responsibility. Without freedom there can be no morality.

Carl Jung
“The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” (1928)
in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. CW 7

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Carl Jung and the problem of evil

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Ken
on May 16, 2008
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[ This is in response to a comment by Mark on my recent post: "The problem with the problem of evil" ]

I couldn’t sleep last night and picked up Volume 9ii of the Collected Works of Carl Jung. Scanning the chapter on Christ, A Symbol of the Self I came across Jung’s thoughts on evil and they are apropos of the discussion in my earlier post.

The fact that God is only good seems to be a doctrine that flies in the face of what we read about Yahweh in the Old Testament but the early church fathers seemed to think it scandalous that there could be anything but good in God. Tatian (2nd century) is the earliest authority for the axiom: “Nothing evil was created by God; we ourselves produced all wickedness.”

Basil the Great said that evil has no substance but “is the privation of good” and “arises from the mutilation of the soul.” Furthermore, “if all things are of God, how can evil arise from good?” In another passage, Basil says:

It is … impious to say that evil has its origin from God, because the contrary cannot proceed from the contrary. Life does not engender death, darkness is not the origin of light, sickness is not the maker of health. … Now if evil is neither uncreated nor created by God, when comes its nature? That evil exists no one living in the world will deny. … Each of us should acknowledge that he is the first author of the wickedness in him.

Jung says that good and evil “are a logically equivalent pair of opposites” and are the premise and co-existent halves for any moral judgment. They do not derive from each other but are “always there together.” Evil is a human value, like good.

Jung continues to say that, as Basil asserts, if evil arises from a “mutilation of the soul” and yet evil really exists then “the relative reality of evil is grounded in a real ‘mutilation’ of the soul which must have an equally real cause.” The real corruption of the originally good soul must be done by something real. Furthermore, how can man be the sole author of evil when Lucifer’s sin proves that evil was in the world before man? What was the cause of the “mutilation” of Lucifer’s heart? Jung points out the logical fallacy in Basil’s argument: “the independent existence of evil must be denied even in the face of the eternity of the devil as asserted by dogma.”

Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, says:

One opposite is known through the other, as darkness is known through light. Hence also what evil is must be known from the nature of good. Now we have said above that good is everything appetible; and this, since every nature desires its own being and its own perfection, it must necessarily be said that the being and perfection of every created thing is essentially good. Hence it cannot be that evil signifies a being, or any form or nature. Therefore it must be that by the name of evil is signified the absence of good.

Evil is not a being, whereas good is a being.

However, Jung points out, not only is darkness known through light but conversely, and as a logical equivalent, light is known through darkness. Cold is merely the privation of heat but does that make cold non-existent?

The privatio boni argument remains a euphemistic petitio principii no matter whether evil is regarded as a lesser good or as an effect of the finiteness and limitedness of created things. The false conclusion necessarily follows from the premise “Deus = Summum Bonum,” since it is unthinkable that the perfect good could ever have created evil. It merely created the good and the less good … Just as we freeze miserably despite a temperature of 230° above absolute zero, so there are people and things that, although created by God, are good only to the minimal and bad to the maximal degree.

Despite the logical fallacy of the “privation of good” argument, Jung recognizes that it is used and believed and this cannot be disposed of easily. “It proves that there is a tendency, existing right from the start, to give priority to ‘good,’ and to do so with all the means in our power, whether suitable or unsuitable.” In the end, Jung says:

The privatio boni may therefore be a psychological truth. I presume to no judgment on this matter. I must only insist that in our field of experience which and black, light and dark, good and bad, are equivalent opposites which always predicate one another.

I’m sure I have not done Jung’s argument justice, but I hope it’s at least comprehensible.

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The Creation of Consciousness: V

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Ken
on April 26, 2008
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We know turn to Jung’s amazing work Answer to Job. At the outset, the reader should be aware that Answer to Job is offensive. Edinger warns:

These are the two most common sources of offense to the readers of Answer to Job. Either one is offended that Jung describes Yahweh so outrageously, in contradiction to the dogmatic God-image in which he believes, or one is offended that Jung takes so seriously the primitive, anthropomorphic image of God that has long since been discredited by the rational intellect. I venture to assert that every person on first encounter with Answer to Job will be offended to some extent in either on or the other, or perhaps both, of these ways.

Whoever is gravely offended will have nothing more to do with Answer to Job, and that is proper since one man’s meat can be another man’s poison.

So, if you’re still with me, lets get to being offended!

Jung wrote Answer to Job during an illness. He said that the book “came to me” and that he felt “its content as the unfolding of the divine consciousness in which I participate.”

Edinger could not have put more emphasis on Answer to Job. He felt that “it has the same psychic depth and import as characterize the major scriptures of the world-religions.” Edinger also considered the book as a new dispensation. (I warned you that this would be offensive!)

Jung identifies the audience for the book:

I am not . . . addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. For most of them there is no going back, and one does not know either whether going back is the better way. To gain and understanding of religious matters, probably all that is left us today is the psychological approach. That is why I take these thought-forms that have become historically fixed, try to melt them down again and pour them into moulds of immediate experience.

The central theme of Answer to Job is “the relationship between man and Yahweh.” Jung’s psychological approach to the issue requires us to understand two things. First, we must understand that Jung recognized “the full reality of all psychic phenomena.” [1]

For Jung the psyche is not less real than the body. Though 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.

Whatever we know of the world or our own being comes to us through the mediation of the psyche. [2]

Second, we need to understand what Yahweh means psychologically. Edinger summarizes this point thusly:

. . . Yahweh as a psychic reality is a personification of the collective unconscious especially in its aspect of center and totality, the Self. It expresses itself in dreams and fantasies of an archetypal nature; in affects, instincts and intense energy-manifestations of all kinds; in psychic and somatic symptoms; and in its specific quality of “otherness” which goes contrary to the desires and expectations of the ego. Since the phenomena of synchronicity imply a fluid boundary between inner and outer reality, the unconscious can come to us from without as well as from within. Hence Jung can say, “God is reality itself.”

We’ll start looking at the Edinger’s commentary on the book next time.

—————————————————
[1] Jolande Jocobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung, 1973, p. 1.
[2] Ibid.

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Misunderstanding Myth

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Ken
on April 20, 2008
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It’s all the rage these days. Misunderstanding myth, that is. In the Was Jesus Wrong post at Chrisendom, the comment string contained a lot of misunderstanding of myth. Many believe that if the creation story in Genesis is wrong, then Christianity falls apart. And by wrong, they mean factually, scientifically wrong. If there was not a single, original man and woman (aka Adam and Eve) created some 6000 years ago — and most scientific evidence says there wasn’t — then how can Christianity be taken seriously? My answer is that these people totally misunderstand myth.

Here are some thoughts from Richard Heinberg’s Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age …

In most conversation, the word myth is interchangeable with lie. We speak of exposing myths, dispelling them, and laying them to rest. This equation of myth with fiction is not particularly new; indeed, it can be traced back at least as far as the sixth century B.C., when the earliest Greek philosophers undertook a critical evaluation of Homeric mythology.

Indeed, the early Greeks faced a dilemma not unlike our own. “[T]heir culture was suffused with rituals and stories of great antiquity, but the meaning behind those traditions had largely evaporated. How to make sens of them?” Sound familiar? It sounds like modern Christianity to me. Ritual and stories that hold no pertinent meaning for modern man and are clung to in desperation to retain the “true meaning” (whatever that means). Indeed, Heinberg says

Mythology is inseparable from religion, and so Western civilization’s changing attitudes toward the mysterious and universal sense of the sacred have also deeply affected both popular and scholarly ideas about the nature of myth.

There has been a long history of condescending attitudes towards myth and tribal peoples which culminated in the idea that all religion must be approached with a skeptical attitude and that trying to understand the philosophical meaning of a culture’s myths was useless. But “they had ignored or eliminated the vivifying principle in the object of their study—a principle that would be defined by the next generation of mythologists as the sense of the sacred.”

Recently, a new appreciation of myth has developed which sees them as “ways of conveying universal truths” and are, therefore, “profoundly meaningful.” The work of Carl Jung is especially relevant in this context. “For Jung, the characters and actions of myth are simply expressions of universal archetypes.”

The French philosopher René Guénon considered all traditions as “paths for the practical realization of innate spiritual principles in the lives of human beings” and warned that excessive materialism threatens to “destroy the West if it does not recover itself in time and if it does not consider seriously a ‘return to the source.’” Mircea Eliade took this thought even farther and “emphasized the primacy of the experience of the sacred in all traditions.” Jung, Guénon, Eliade and others have reacquainted us with the ancient idea that “every event was meaningful” and that “even the most mundane activities had an overarching significance and were performed … as part of a cosmic drama.”

Sacred is, I think, also misunderstood today. “To say that a thing or an act is sacred is to imply that it has relevance in a universal plane of values and ideals, and that it is therefore a point of contact between two worlds.” The ancients considered matter itself to be sacred and, to them, the sacred dimension was experienced reality and not just speculation.

As long as researchers denied its importance and based their explanations entirely in earthly terms, we were effectively denied the possibility of fully understanding or benefiting from myth. Worse, by discounting the sense of the sacred we disassociated ourselves from a universal, timeless dimension of significance whose point of access lies deep within the human psyche, where the individual and the collective, the ancient and the modern, merge indistinguishably.

So, back to myth … Jung and Joseph Campbell, in particular, tended to see myth “as allegories for inner processes of spiritual transformation—that is, as stories that are symbolically but never factually ‘true.’” Myths, then, serve to “connect two realities—the visible and the invisible, Earth and Heaven.” Others, such as Immanuel Velikovsky, argue that “myths may contain more than metaphorical content” and originated as descriptions of factual events but have been metamorphosed into mythical events and heroes.

In any case, the great problem with which we must deal is the “worldwide similarity of mythic themes.”

As Campbell and Eliade have shown, there is really only one story, translated in the traditions and circumstances of myriad peoples. It is the myth of a lost idyllic Time of Beginnings, and of a hero’s journey to restore the world to its pristine condition of paradisal splendor.”

How could this have happened? Heinberg says there are only two possibilities. Either the fundamental themes were distributed among the world’s peoples before they had migrated to their present location or “similar motifs … occurred independently to people already living far apart.”

Jung, I think, would agree with the latter and reason that it was due to the archetypal content of the myths which is, essentially, hardwired in our brains because of our humanity. And this is one of the primary reasons myth should be important to us, modern, people. If basically all cultures have the myth of a Paradise, or “Garden of Eden,” then it is part of our humanity and denying or excluding this part of ourselves—our human heritage—is dangerous. We lose touch with an important aspect that unites the physical with the spiritual.

So, whether or not Adam and Eve existed is not the correct question. The correct question is: what do we do with the myth? How do we integrate it—incorporate it—into our lives today? Those who say the Garden of Eden is useless child’s play and those who say it is only a factual, historical place are both missing the point and totally misunderstanding the purpose and power of myth. It is an essential and undeniable part of our psyche and so requires that it be recognized for what it is—a way to understand and convey universal truths.

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Total understanding: an unattainable goal

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Ken
on April 8, 2008
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An ideal understanding would ultimately result in each party’s unthinkingly going along with the other’s experience—a state of uncritical passivity coupled with the most complete subjectivity and lack of social responsibility. Understanding carried to such lengths is in any case impossible, for it would require the virtual identification of two different individuals. Sooner or later the relationship reaches a point where one partner feels he is being forced to sacrifice his own individuality so that it may be assimilated by that of the other. This inevitable consequence breaks the understanding, for understanding presupposes the integral preservation of the individuality of both partners. It is therefore advisable to carry understanding only to the point where the balance between understanding and knowledge is reached, for understanding at all costs is injurious to both partners. [C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, pp. 63-64, emphasis mine]

Understanding and knowledge are, in a way, complementary. When you try to understand someone’s point of view, you begin by applying “principles based on general experience.” But, inevitably, you will find that these principles do not completely describe the particular situation at hand. There are always outside factors and other variables to consider. The more you seek an understanding the further away from principles—the foundation of objective knowledge—you must go and the more subjective the situation becomes. This subjectification is what “feels” like understanding but it is, at the same time, a disadvantage because it isolates you from the environment. This is not a desirable result because it removes knowledge from the equation altogether—the only thing that is relevant is the subjective experiences of the other. There is no longer a balance between understanding and knowledge.

So, what does it all mean? For me to really, truly understand your point of view, I will need to take on all your biases, prejudices, preconceptions, etc.—all your subjective content—which will necessarily require me to throw out all objective knowledge. In essence, I must become identified with you—assimilated by your individuality—so that I no longer exist. Only then can I have total understanding. But this is, needless to say, highly undesirable.

The rub is, as Jung points out, we have a preconception, an expectation, that we can reach an understanding without losing our individuality but this is not the case. We think that total understanding is an attainable goal and fuss and fret (or worse) when it’s not reached but we resist at each step along the way the very understanding we desire by demanding that we retain our individuality.

So, what is the answer? Ultimately, I think, the answer is to adjust our expectations and, rather than seek complete understanding, seek a balance (this “tension of the opposites” is classic Jung) between knowledge and understanding. Of course, this will hardly seem a very satisfying answer to most for there really is no resolution in this goal. No one has changed their mind; no one has been convinced they are wrong; we still have two individuals with differing opinions instead of a consensus. We still have Darwinists and Creationists. We still have Atheists and Evangelicals. We still have Capitalists and Communists. But, is it not better to have two individuals living in a balance between understanding and knowledge than to have one individual totally assimilated—totally against his will—into the other?

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The Creation of Consciousness: IV

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Ken
on April 4, 2008
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We know turn to the meaning of consciousness. Etymology indicates that consciousness is made up of two factors: knowing and withness. That is, it is the experience of knowing together with an other.

Edinger tackles the act of knowing from a psychological-empirical approach rather than a philosophical approach. Through the former approach, says Edinger, “the experience of knowing can be at least descriptively elaborated.”

The psychological function of knowing or seeing requires first of all that undifferentiated, diffuse experience be split into a subject and an object, the knower and the known. . . . As [Erich] Neumann says, “This act of cognition, of conscious discrimination, sunders the world into opposites, for experience of the world is only possible through opposites.”

This is exactly Jung’s individuation process which is realized through the experience of the tension of the opposites. Each new increment of consciousness that we collect requires a repetition of this same process of separating object from subject. Schopenhauer talks about the ability for a man to step away from his struggling, suffering life and observe it as if he is a spectator to a play. All the things that were intensely emotion are now cold, foreign, and strange. It is this process that turns an “unconscious complex which has one by the throat into an object of knowledge” and is “an extremely important aspect for increasing consciousness.” The myth of Perseus and Medusa also demonstrates the power of reflection. Once cannot look upon Medusa directly but one can view her via the mirror-shield — the process of human culture or art.

Being known as object is the other half of the process of knowledge. The ego as “knower” is only providing simple knowing. “To achieve authentic consciousness the ego must also go through the experience of being the object of knowledge, with the function of the knowing subject residing in the ‘other’.” This “other” must ultimately be the inner “knowing one,” i.e., the Self or inner God-image. The “Last Judgment” is the ultimate experience of being the object of knowledge. It “can be understood psychologically as a projection into the afterlife of the ego’s encounter with the Self and the archetypal experience of being the known object of a transpersonal subject; it is an awesome experience, as the myths make clear, an experience that man has understandably tried to postpone as long as possible by transferring it to the afterlife.”

We all begin as the known object and slowly, as the ego develops, become the knowing subject. This is a tranquil and powerful state since the subject dominates the object and the object is the victim of the knower. But we must give up our relative freedom as we realize that we are also the known object, once again, to the Self. So, we alternately must play the role of subject and object. The real key to the process is the realization of the “dynamism of connectedness, the relationship principle” that is knowing with. It is a coniunctio, a union, of Logos (knowing) and Eros (withness) and, as such, we are simultaneously playing both parts. Furthermore, this process also applies to the Self which must also be the known object to the ego’s subject. In Answer to Job, Jung 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.

What we see in Job is that “because Job has seen Yahweh’s amoral nature, Yahweh is obliged to change.” In other words, God — or the Self — needs man to promote the Self’s consciousness.

This reciprocal relation between the ego and the Self — in which both are object and subject — has some interesting implications. The unconscious provides the material of our dream life and thus the Self becomes visible to the ego. But what if the life dramas of the ego are the dreams of the Self, the process of God becoming aware of himself?

In this modern age, religion is the Eros, or withness, factor and seeks the maintain man’s connectedness with God and is Self-oriented. Science is the Logos, or ego-oriented, factor and seeks human knowledge at the expense of the connection with the other. Science alone inadequate to the needs of the whole man and the intellectually naive standpoint of religious faith is equally inappropriate for us today. It is the synthesis and linking of these two factors that will increase consciousness in the universe.

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The Creation of Consiousness: III

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Ken
on April 3, 2008
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[ Finally getting back to this book. I actually lost it for a while in the black hole residing in the center of my office. But I've managed to rescue it from the event horizon and now we'll continue... ]

It is the union of opposites that is the essential feature:

Consciousness is the third thing that emerges out of the conflict of twoness. Out of the ego as subject versus the ego as object; out of the ego as active agent versus the ego as passive victim; out of the ego as praiseworthy and good versus the ego as damnable and bad; out of a conflict of mutually exclusive duties — out of all such paralyzing conflicts can emerge the third, transcendent condition which is a new quantum of consciousness.

It is in “paralyzing conflicts” that we grow, learn, and mature. It is the no-win situation that makes us confront our passive, un-examined beliefs and prejudices and figure out what we truly believe. Being in a rut — physically, emotionally, mentally — simply atrophies our being. Nothing new comes from one-track thinking and avoiding to actually make the tough decisions.

Edinger then goes on to talk about the Trinity and how the Holy Spirit could only come after Jesus’ death in which the opposites of the Father and the Son collided on the cross. In this respect, the Holy Spirit embodies the creation of consciousness and thus the indwelling of the Parachlete “thus anticipates the new myth which sees each individual ego as potentially a vessel to carry transpersonal consciousness.”

As two archetypal figures who both represent the idea of a carrier of consciousness, Christ and Buddha give us the opportunity for comparison and objectivity.

As long as there is but one figure embodying supreme value he can only be worshipped but not understood. With the presence of two we can discover the separate third thing which they both share; understanding and greater consciousness then become possible.

I think this is exactly the situation of the Old Testament God versus the new Testament God. In the Old Testament, there was only the one God and so he could only be worshiped; there was no point of comparison from which he could be understood. It took Jesus, as the wrathful, jealous God’s opposite in order for us to be able to put them both in perspective.

The new myth suggests that man is an experiment in the process of creating consciousness; “that the sum total of consciousness created by each individual in his lifetime is deposited as a permanent addition in the collective treasury of the archetypal psyche.” There are many mythical images that talk about the transfer from the personal life of the ego to the eternal realm: the early Egyptian idea of the dead being turned into stars and the translation of dead kings to the heavenly realm; Christian symbolism of the righteous ascending into Heaven; the promise in Revelation that the victorious will be a pillar in the temple of God.

This new myth gives meaning to our mundane life:

Every human experience, to the extent that it is lived in awareness, augments the sum total of consciousness in the universe. This face provides the meaning for every experience and gives each individual a role in the on-going world-drama of creation.

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C.G. Jung on the purpose of religion

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Ken
on February 18, 2008
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But the collective unconscious is a very irrational factor, and our rational consciousness cannot dictate to it how it should make its appearance. Of course, if left entirely to itself, its activation can be very destructive; it can, for instance, be a psychosis. Therefore, man’s relation to the collective unconscious has always been regulated; there is a characteristic form by which the archetypal images are expressed. For the collective unconscious is a function that always operates, and man has to keep in touch with it. His psychic and spiritual health is dependent on the co-operation of the impersonal images. Therefore man has always had his religions.

What are religions? Religions are psychotherepeutic systems.

C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Its Theory & Practice

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C.G. Jung on Fanaticism

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Ken
on February 14, 2008
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Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt. You can study that in the history of the Church. Always in those times when the Church begins to waver the style becomes fanatical, or fanatical sects spring up, because the secret doubt has to be quenched. When one is really convinced, one is perfectly calm and can discuss one’s beliefs as a personal point of view without any particular resentment.

C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Its Theory & Practice

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Now that’s a REAL God

Published
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Ken
on January 14, 2008
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This quote from Just Genesis via a comment on Chris Tilling’s blog:

The silence was broken again, this time by a middle-aged man. “I’ll tell you the meaning this story has for me. I’ve decided that I and my family are looking for another church.”

“Why?” I asked in astonishment. “Why?”

“Because when I look at that God, the God of Abraham, I feel I’m near a real God, not the sort of dignified, businesslike, Rotary Club god we chatter about here on Sunday mornings. Abraham’s god could blow a man to bits, give and then take a child, ask for everything from a person and then want more. I want to know that God.”

If you read the rest of the post, you’ll see a classic example of an archetype at work. A Sunday School class views a movie about Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac and the reaction is unexpected, unfounded, and totally un-comprehended — all the tell-tale signs that something from the unconscious is rearing its ugly head.

But the man’s reaction I quote above is particularly interesting to me. This man essentially is longing for a return to the monster-God of the O.T. If he characterized any human with the same words, that human would be a merciless tyrant. But that’s what this man expects from a God. Why would someone long for the kind of God who “tests” people the way the Christian God “tested” Job? Or Abraham? Why regress so far into the past when we have the God of the N.T.? Is it because it is easier to follow the O.T. concept of God in the same way that it is easier for a toddler to obey his parents? The toddler, you see, has no relationship with his parents because there is not enough consciousness for a relationship. There is simply a list of rules to follow and a list of consequences if the rules are not followed, a.k.a. The Law. (Having just written that statement, I’m instantly reminded of The Island of Doctor Moreau where the “beasts” are reciting The Law.) There is less freedom and so we don’t have to be conscious in order to please that kind of God. Of course, we also don’t have much of a relationship with that kind of God — what relationship there is is simply awe and fear and trembling and worry that our sacrifices are not good enough. We’ve come so far in our relationship with God but that means it’s harder work and so some would rather go back to the way it was.

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