Punctum Saliens

I am reading Edward F. Edinger’s The Creation of Consciousness (1984) and my goal is to blog all the way through this short but very deep book. (Wish me luck!) The subtitle is “Jung’s Myth for Modern Man.”

Chapter 1, “The New Myth,” begins with a description of the problem:

History and anthropology teach us that a human society cannot long survive unless its members are psychologically contained within a central living myth. Such a myth provides the individual with a reason for being. To the ultimate questions of human existence it provides answers which satisfy the most developed and discriminating members of the society. And if the creative, intellectual minority is in harmony with the prevailing myth, the other layers of society will follow its lead and may even be spared a direct encounter with the fateful question of the meaning of life.

It is evident to thoughtful people that Western society no longer has a viable, functioning myth. … Meaning is lost. In its place, primitive and atavistic contents are reactivated. Differentiated values disappear and are replaced by the elemental motivations of power and pleasure, or else the individual is exposed to emptiness and despair. With the loss of awareness of a transpersonal reality (God), the inner and outer anarchies of competing personal desires take over.

The loss of a central myth brings about a truly apocalyptic condition and this is the state of modern man.

Edinger says “[I]t is the loss of our containing myth that is the root cause of our current individual and social distress” and that the only solution is to discover a new one. Edinger’s claim is that the work of Carl Jung — particularly his discovery of his own individual myth — is the first emergence of our new collective myth.

An example of a functioning central myth was found by Jung among the Pueblo Indians in 1925. He was able to gain the confidence of a chief of the Taos Pueblos, Mountain Lake, who related the following:

“[W]e are a people who live on the roof of the world; we are the sons of Father Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father to go across the sky. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we were to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night forever.”

Jung realized that the Mountain Lake — and the other Taos Pueblos — saw life as “cosmologically meaningful” and therefore had “dignity” and “tranquil composure.”

Now, of course, this sounds like a bunch of poppycock to us “intelligent” folks. And I am in no way trying to suggest that we should take over this sun-god myth — that would be totally ridiculous. The point is that they had a myth and the myth worked for them. It gave them a reason to get up in the morning and made their lives peaceful and meaningful. This is exactly what we are lacking today.

Another important point is that the Pueblos practiced their religion “for the whole world” and this is crucial. Arguments that I’ve heard against religious pluralism, and something that I struggle with myself, is “where do we draw the line?” How can Nazism co-exist with Judaism? How can Fundamentalist Christianity co-exist with Fundamentalist Islam? If we allow religious tolerance, then how can we say that Nazism is wrong? Doesn’t our defense of tolerance mean we need to defend the Nazi’s belief system? Well, the acid test is: is that religion practiced “for the whole world”? Obviously, Nazism is not — it is in direct conflict with and seeks to destroy a part of the world and so it does not have to be lumped in with “valid” beliefs. Of course, I realize that it’s not always so easy. In the case of Fundamentalist Christianity/Islam, for example, I’m not sure either side is practicing “for the whole world.”

Later, Jung started crystallizing the formation of the myth while traveling in Africa and visiting a great game preserve:

From a low hill in this broad savanna a magnificent prospect opened out to us. To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals … There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world. …

Now I know what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence … Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.

I’ll leave you to ponder this until next time …

. . . to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 326

As I paused in my computer programming to take a break after finally getting the regression test to give me the right answer, I spotted one of Anais Nin’s diaries on the floor of my office. It was volume 4: 1944-1947.

I picked it up and opened to a random page and read:

There is an analogy between the bombardment of the atom and the bombardment of the personality by the method of analysis, the dismemberment, separation of the elements of the psyche which may release new energies. I believe scientific principles can be applied to the life of the psyche. . . . The time has come to give the psyche a concrete symbolism.

Another random page led me to:

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualize. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive instruments of discovery. . . . The primitive and the poet never parted company. . . . Intellectual knowledge is not enough. Music, the dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our blood stream. Ideas do not. . . . There is a prejudice against subjectivity, because it is believed subjectivity is a narrowing of the vision. But this is no more true than to say objectivity leads to a larger form of life. Nothing leads to a vaster form of life but the capacity to move deeply inward as well as outward. . . . The most important problem for the novelist is that each generation must create its own reality and its own language, its own images. Each one of us must re-create the world.

Wow, I thought, this sounds a lot like Carl Jung! So, I did a quick search and found out that Nin actually underwent therapy with Jung! Talk about synchronicity!

The second quote is very meaningful today. In this age of science, many people think that “intellectual knowledge” is enough but it’s not. Objectivity is sought in everything and expected everywhere and it’s thought that this leads to a more complete picture of our reality but it doesn’t.

I would emphasis the “its own images” part of the second to last sentence. Symbols and images are extremely important as they are the mediators between us and the archetypes or collective unconscious. They are how we deal with our “inner world” which is there whether we believe in it or not. We need symbols and myths for our age of science and science itself is not giving them to us. Trying to use the symbols from yesteryear is not working either — simply look at the rejection of all the “old time religions” that is going on. This is not to say that religion is wrong or bad; on the contrary religion is exactly what supplies the symbols and images we need. But we need symbols that are meaningful to us today in this age of science and not the symbols from earlier generations.

Polarized sunglasses work by letting through light that is aligned in only one direction. This acts to reduce the number of photons getting through and therefore reduce the intensity of the light. Polarized sunglasses work very well to reduce the intensity of light being reflected off (and therefore polarized by) a lake or highway. Polarized sunglasses also work very well to reduce the intensity of God and that’s exactly what religion does. As Carl Jung said, “One of the main functions of formalized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.” After all, Moses could only see the fleeting arse end of God without being instantly killed and just that tiny peek was enough to make him glow.

Another interesting aspect of this analogy is the effect of holding two polarized lenses with one in front of the other and then rotate one of them 90°. What happens? Everything goes black! This is because the first lens is letting light through that is only vertically polarized whereas the second is letting light through that is only horizontally polarized (or vice-versa). The result is nothing gets past them both — they are mutually exclusive. Kind of like Christianity and Islam, for example. The trick is to realize that they are both looking at the same sun but have selected different aspects of that sun while the other aspects have been removed for our own protection.

… unless we’re already there and just don’t know it.

It seems to me that there is a disconnect in salvation. If we are totally depraved and can do nothing good without God then how can we receive the gift of God’s son? How can we, as sinners, bring ourselves to realize that we even need God let alone bring ourselves to find God? Through the urging of the Holy Spirit? I think not because the Holy Spirit needs to appeal to something in us which can know God and we in our sinful state cannot.

By way of (obviously imperfect, as all examples are) example, let’s say that I am trying to get Joe, who has been blind from birth, to understand the color red. He has been separated from color all his life (born color-depraved, so to speak) and so has nothing within himself with which he can begin to understand color. No matter how hard I press and explain and urge him to understand the color red, it isn’t going to happen. Any understanding of the color red at which Joe does arrive will, obviously and necessarily, be extremely different from the understanding that I have.

Isn’t that the predicament we are in? If we are 100% separated from God and always have been (and I’m talking about each person and not “man” and “woman” as created by God) then there is no way we are going to understand anything about God no matter how hard the Holy Spirit urges. Unless there us a bit of God in us — a seed or a kernel — then there is no way we can understand our need of God’s salvation and no way we can receive it. This reminds me of something C.G. Jung said:

For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.

We all have a “divine life” in us. We all have the image of God within. Sometimes that image is buried quite deeply and we have absolutely no recollection of it but it’s there. It has to be there in order for the Holy Spirit to work. So we are not given the image of God when we are “saved” but that (perhaps tiny) part of us that already is the image of God is brought to our attention.

I just started reading Who Dies? by Stephen Levine. Tim Freke recommended this book and I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj to a mutual friend and I am deeply indebted to him. Tim is an amazing person and if you ever get the chance to attend one of his events I highly recommend doing so. Here are a few paragraphs from Chapter 2 of Who Dies?:

There is so much of ourselves we wish not to experience. So much fear, guilt, anger, confusion, and self-pity. Sop much self-doubt, so many weak excuses. Is it any wonder, considering the bizarre insistence of our conditioning — the conflict of one value system with another in the mind — that we feel so incomplete. One moment the mind is saying. “Take a big piece,” and then the next it says, “I wouldn’t have done that if I were you.” No wonder we are all crazy, so fractured, trying to protect ourselves from who we fear we are. We dare not share out minds with anyone, even ourselves. We are so frightened of who we might , of not being loved or lovable for the convolutions of our thoughts.

But states of mind, though uninvited, are constantly coming and going, and some we wish would ever come again. They do, and we find ourselves scrambling for leverage to keep our fear down, experiencing the nausea of our immense insecurity and self-loathing.

This persistent elimination from awareness of unwanted states of mind leaves us constantly feeling threatened as we look and say regretfully, “That can’t be me, that fear isn’t really who I am. Anger isn’t me. That self-hatred, that guilt, can’t be who I am.” But there it is. And you wonder who you really are. How do you open to that which you deny? That which you think somehow shouldn’t be there even though it is?

We wish we were otherwise and that is our hell, our resistance to life.

It is almost as though we have become a fractured image of our original being. Our experience with the world has become like looking into a mirror that a great stone has fallen on and shattered into hundreds of pieces, broken from a single unified reality into some splintered reflection of what is seen, of what is imagined to exist. As we look at this fractured reality, we notice with dismay certain parts of the reflection are not what we wish to see or want to be seen. “I don’t want anyone so see my lust; that’s not such a good thing to have. I’m not supposed to be like that. No one’s mind is as crazy as mine.” So we take a piece out. “Oh, there I am really sorry for myself. If they only knew what my life had been like! Ah, but they don’t.” And that piece is removed as well. You notice your greed and self-interest, the sexual fantasies, the competition and confusion of the mind. And you start picking these pieces out. Because these are unacceptable parts of who you think you are supposed to be.

But I think it is very useful, and indeed more accurate, to call it “the mind” instead of “my mind.”

Because when you call it “my mind” you start removing so many pieces that when you look down at this fractured mirror it reflects back very little of what is real. It only displays those qualities you wish to project as being who you are, eliminating all the rest, eluding your wholeness. We thing we have something to hide. Yet this self-protection is our imprisonment. Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear “your” thoughts and fantasies, “your” dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgemental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of mind itself?

To be whole we must deny nothing.

What Levine is saying here really fits in well with the Jungian idea of “the shadow” and how we must integrate our shadow into our lives instead of continuing to repress and deny it. Robert Bly has a marvelous book called A Little Book on the Human Shadow. It truly is “little” — you can easily read the whole thing in one short sitting. In it, Bly compares our shadow with a bag that we drag around behind us and into which we put all the things from ourselves that don’t “work.” All our “negative” traits that we are not “supposed” to have or that are not “socially acceptable” or that are not “religiously acceptable” are shoved into our bag. The problem is that when something happens that triggers the release of one of these emotions — and that inevitably will happen — it comes roaring out of the bag like a sumo wrestler on PCP. If we don’t integrate our shadow it reacts out of our control and that’s not a pretty sight.

As C.G. Jung said: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”

There is an alternative to the “Christianity is right” versus “Christianity is wrong” scuffle. The virgin birth, the resurrection, the Holy Spirit, etc. can be other than literal realities or literal horse pucky. The alternative is that they are myth. Now, I’m not being pejorative with my use of the word “myth” which is greatly under-rated and almost entirely misunderstood in today’s world of science.

I found what C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien said about myth here:

Myths, Lewis told Tolkien, were “lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.”

“No,” Tolkien replied. “They are not lies.” Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic “progress” leads only to the abyss and the power of evil.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung said:

For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.

And in Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith said:

Science provides a useful analogy here. The entire scientific worldview has been spun from a relatively few crucial experiments, which can be likened to the numbered dots in children’s puzzles that (when they are connected by a line that is drawn through them sequentially) produces the outline of a giraffe or whatever. Myths are like the lines traditional peoples collectively and largely unconsciously draw to connect the “dots” of the direct disclosers that their visionaries report.

If number is the language of science, myth is the language of religion. It does not map literally onto the commonsense world — biblical literalists’ mistake is to think that is does …