Punctum Saliens

Some day I’ll get back to my series on Edinger’s The Creation of Consciousness, but until then I’ll just leave you with this thought:

Ram Dass agrees with Jung and Edinger that the creation of consciousness is our goal (or should be, at least). From The Only Dance There Is:

Consciousness does not mean attachment to polarity, at any level. It means freedom from attachment. And once you see that the highest mother is the most conscious mother, the highest student, the highest therapist, the highest lover, the highest anything is the most conscious one, you begin to see that the way you serve another human being is by freeing him from the particular attachment he’s stuck in that turn him off to life.

Non-attachment to polarity is Jung’s “tension of the opposites.” Dealing with polarity, paradox, incongruency and not flip-flopping from one side to the other is the process of creating consciousness. “Freedom from attachment” is the middle way that leads to conscious living and an increase in the sum total of consciousness in the universe.

There is still something, nevertheless, that strikes me as very odd about these statements by Jesus and that is the purely gratuitous nature of the exemplary acts he cites as the result of having faith. Of what conceivable purpose could moving a mountain into the sea be? And what kind of God tempts man with such power when the meek are to inherit the earth? These statements are diametrically opposed to Jesus’ main message of humility and servitude and they make me wonder why he made them at all. Would it not be just as powerful yet more in agreement with Jesus’ teachings and life to give examples of faith like bringing rain during a drought or causing crops to grow in infertile soil?

But, Jesus used the words he used. There is no profit in second guessing his motives; only in understanding him do we gain anything. The simplest way to understand is to take him literally and then qualify his statements to make them comfortable. To this end, some will, as The Ryrie Study Bible does and with what seems to be not a little unease in attributing such power to mere mortals, put limits on the conditions under which Jesus’ statements are valid. Others will take Jesus’ words just as literally but then proceed to point out the obvious absence of literal mountain-moving men and consign Jesus’ statements to the dung heap along with all notions of a faith worth more than a single mustard seed.

Indeed, we have no record of Jesus, his disciples, nor the apostles moving either mountains or trees into the sea and there is no other evidence that he was speaking literally. So what would it mean to take his words metaphorically or symbolically? A mountain and the sea can be viewed as opposites on several different levels. Aside from the physical opposites of solid/liquid and high/low, mountains symbolize constancy, stillness, firmness while the waters of the sea are chaotic, continually in flux. Mountains represent the state of full consciousness, full differentiation, the place of renunciation and highest aspirations; water symbolizes the undifferentiated, our material existence. Casting a mountain into the sea can then be viewed as merging contrary or contradictory viewpoints and no longer seeing them as separate entities; it is to transcend dualistic thinking by not seeing a mountain here and a separate sea over there but both, together. It is to not apprehend either/or but both/and.

But, of what use is the ability to transcend dualism? How does it help me in my everyday life? Lisa Alther, American author and novelist, writes: “I happen to feel that the degree of a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic.” This goes right to the heart of the matter. Dualism says, “This is good and that is evil or that is good and this evil.” But when you cast the mountain into the sea, this ceases to be either good or evil and becomes both good and evil. It is seeing both sides of the coin at the same time, it is the middle way, it is embracing paradox. We think of opposites as mutually exclusive. A thing cannot possibly have two opposite characteristics at the same time; it is either right or wrong, good or evil, left or right, black or white. But the world of paradox is not a world of white or black but a world of grayscale.

Holding all sides of an argument in the mind instead of identifying with one to the exclusion of all the others inevitably produces a tension—the tension of the opposites, as Carl Jung phrased it. Edward F. Edinger discusses this tension of the opposites and describes its effect as consciousness-creating:

[I]n the process of creating consciousness we shall at first be thrown back and forth between opposing moods and attitudes. Each time the ego identifies with one side of a pair of opposites the unconscious will confront one with its contrary. Gradually, the individual becomes able to experience opposite viewpoints simultaneously. With this capacity, alchemically speaking, the Philosophers’ Stone is born, i.e., consciousness is created.

This description of the initial stages of dealing with paradox cannot but bring to mind a similar passage in Ephesians 4:13-15:

[U]ntil we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fulness of Christ. As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves, and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects unto Him, who is the head, even Christ …

Paul describes the mature person as one who is not tossed and carried about by ideas and opinions, first clinging to one thing then another to the exclusion of all others. Notice that he places no value judgement on the “waves” and “doctrine” as he does on the latter two; it is not only untrue or false ideas that cause us to keep the mountain and sea separate. The goal of “the unity of the faith” and “grow[ing] up in all aspects” as described by Paul is reiterated by Edinger who describes the mature individual as one “able to experience opposite viewpoints simultaneously.”

[ Parts I, II, III, IV ]

In The Creation of Consciousness, Edinger talks about the “new myth” initiated by Jung with his book, Answer to Job.

On the basis of our emerging knowledge of the unconscious the traditional image of God has been enlarged. Traditionally God has been pictured as all-powerful and all-knowing. Divine Providence was seen as guiding all things according to the inscrutable but benevolent divine purpose. The extent of divine awareness did not receive much attention. The new myth enlarges the God-image by introducing explicitly the additional feature of the unconsciousness of God. His omnipotence, omniscience and divine purpose are not always known to Him. He needs man’s capacity to know Him in order to know Himself.

And I just realized that the rescuing of Lot from Sodom is an excellent example of this. Lot and his wife and two of his daughters were rescued because they were “righteous” in the eyes of God. But, look at what Lot’s family does immediately after being rescued. Lot’s wife immediately disobeys God’s command and turns to look at the burning cities and is turned into a pillar of salt. Both of Lot’s daughters get their father drunk, sleep with him, and bear sons. Furthermore, Lot’s two grandsons are the fathers of the Moabites and Ammonites. Now, God was not fond of either of these civilizations, to say the least. Neither of them were allowed to enter the assembly of the Lord (Deut 23:3). The Isrealites slaughtered the Moabites: they killed 10,000 “robust and valient men” (Judges 3:25) on one occasion and an untold number on another (2 Kings 3:24). Saul slaughtered the Ammonites and scattered them so that “no two of them were left together” (1 Sam 11:11). Jeremiah makes prophesies against both the Moabites and Ammonites.

So, God considered Lot and his family righteous but immediately after he saves them from destruction, they disobey a direct command and father two civilizations that are Israel’s mortal enemies and the cause of many Israelite deaths. This does not seem very consistent with an omniscient God.

What do you think? Why were Lot’s daughters saved only to sin and father civilizations that God hated?

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.

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

I offer you a personal fantasy. Suppose the universe consists of an omniscient mind containing total and absolute knowledge, But it is asleep. Slowly it stirs, stretches and starts to awaken. It begins to ask questions. What am I? — but no answer comes. Then it thinks, I shall consult my fantasy, I shall do active imagination. With that, galaxies and solar systems spring into being. The fantasy focuses on earth. It becomes autonomous and life appears. Now the Divine mind wants dialogue and man emerges to answer that need. The deity is straining for Self-knowledge and the noblest representatives of mankind have the burden of that divine urgency imposed on them. Many are broken by the weight. A few survive and incorporate the fruits of their divine encounter in mighty works of religion and art and human knowledge. These then generate new ages and civilizations in the history of mankind. Slowly, as this process unfolds, God begins to learn who He is.

Edward F. Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness

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.

[ 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.

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.