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"I'm
not so sure, I agree with you, Art," said the previously unnamed woman,
Tammy, whose
last name I later learned was Winthrop. "I tend to get the impression Jung was, to
some extent, favorably disposed toward religion for several reasons that had nothing to do
with Divinity or our relationship with Divinity.
"On the
one hand, as I suggested previously, religion was, for Jung, a fully adequate mythological
medium that provided the individual with a means of making contact with the archetypes of
the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious represents the collected wisdom of
human experience concerning the completion of personality and development rather than a
repository of Divine wisdom.
"Consequently,
one's contact with the archetypes of the collective unconscious is not necessarily a
process of reaching out to, or for, Divinity, nor does one enter into dialogue with the
archetypes for the purposes of coming to know, love, worship or serve God. Instead, one
makes contact with the archetypes of the collective unconscious with the intention of
coming to know, enrich, balance and integrate one's sense of self, identity and
personality in order to complete a process of psychological, not spiritual, development -
although Jungians, including the master, himself, sometimes seem inclined to use a
spiritual-like vocabulary as a way of speaking about such a psychological project.
"One
might argue, I suppose, that part of the wisdom that we psychologically inherited through
the archetypes of the collective unconscious could have involved the thoughts and emotions
of previous peoples concerning the properties which they believed a relationship with some
transcendental, Divine Being should have if an individual was successfully to bring to
completion the psychological project of creating a balanced and integrated personality and
identity. However, these kinds of beliefs are not at all the same sort of thing as saying
that such a Divine Being exists and that our attention and efforts should be directed
toward making some sort of realized contact with this Being rather than the archetypes of
the collective unconscious.
"Another
reason behind Jung's praising of religion and its framework of discipline may have been
connected with his very healthy respect for, and wariness concerning, the tremendous
powers he believed to be inherent in the realm of the collective unconscious. As David
pointed out earlier, Jung personally had witnessed the overwhelming character of such
forces and had experienced, first hand, this dimension's capacity to confuse, if not
mislead, individuals who, either intentionally or accidentally, wandered into it.
"Conceivably,
for Jung, the rituals, practices, discipline and regimen of religion served as so many
psychological buffers between the individual and the forces of the collective unconscious.
By exerting control over the individual's interior life, religions were, in effect,
helping to protect individuals from potentially disastrous and destructive encounters with
the collective unconscious.
"If
religious adherents were not prepared to undertake a serious journey into the realm of the
unconscious, then better for them to be surrounded with a set of religious constraints and
restraints that were likely to keep them out of harm's way. In other words, the practices,
beliefs, rituals, art, and so on, of their religious tradition would provide the less
venturesome of these people with a limited, gradual, somewhat superficial method for
making contact with at least some of the archetypes of the collective unconscious through
the symbols inherent in their tradition.
"On the
other hand, these same symbols of a given religious tradition would serve as hints for the
faithful with respect to the psychological wisdom which could be found by anyone bold
enough to journey inwardly in a rigorous, sincere fashion. Moreover, until such time as an
individual was ready for, from Jung's perspective, a serious, inward journey, the symbols,
myths and other aspects of the religious mythology still could offer its adherents some of
the materials necessary for working toward completion of some facets of the psychological
tasks involving the self, identity, personality, and so on.
"As far
as the developmental challenges of the second half of life are concerned, Jungian therapy
is intended to take the individual on a guided encounter with the forces and wisdom of the
collective unconscious in a way that is both different from, as well as similar to, the
modalities used in the mythological processes of religion. As such, not only did Jungian
therapy provide an avenue for helping non-religious people to address the unfinished
psychological business of developing the self, identity and personality in a complete and
proper fashion, but his modality of therapy also could be held out to religious believers
who didn't seem to be able to obtain, within their religious tradition, the help they
needed for tackling the problems surrounding the completing the tasks of psychological
development.
"Sometimes,
when reading Jung, I even get the distinct impression he may have felt his brand of
therapy was a much more efficacious way of gaining access to, and deriving benefit from,
the archetypes of the collective unconscious than was religion. In any event, Jung, within
certain limits, may have been tolerant of, and somewhat positively disposed toward,
religion simply because he felt it was trying, in its own way, to help individuals
accomplish some of the same kinds of goal concerning meaning, self, identity, personality,
harmony, balance, integration and enrichment of the psychological soul, as he himself was
attempting to do through his own therapeutic methodology."
Melanie
Teasdale jumped in at this point with an observation for our consideration. "What I'm
about to say may sound strange, but I've found myself wondering, from time to time,
whether what we call normal, waking consciousness, is, in reality, the unconscious realm.
"Many
of us, including myself, seem to want to take the modality of consciousness we use in
everyday life or the modalities of consciousness that we tend to associate with abilities
- such as creativity, language, insight, and reasoning - that we believe set human beings
aside from the rest of animal and plant life, and we place these forms of consciousness at
the very apex of a chart of evolutionary or cosmic accomplishment. Yet, I think few, if
any of us, really understands how creativity, or insight or reasoning or language actually
operates.
"Consciousness,
at least the everyday-waking-variety-sort of consciousness, does not so much appear to
generate these kinds of ability as much as it seems to be a recipient or beneficiary of
talents and abilities that are transpiring in some other realm or dimension. In reality,
our work-a-day consciousness is the last to know what is going on within us, and whatever
it is which our everyday consciousness comes to an awareness of, such awareness really
only seems to have a very partial, fragmented, shallow and indirect sort of relationship
with the centers of awareness that actually have the responsibility for regulating and
governing a whole variety of complex operations and processes involving so-called 'higher'
human functions and functioning.
"The
productions of language, or creativity, or insight or reasoning are so fantastically
complex, intricate and innovative that I have difficulty with the idea they are a function
of unconscious processes. In fact, I find far more believable the possibility that the
everyday consciousness in which we like to take so much pride is actually, relatively
speaking, quite dumb and unconscious with respect to most of what is going on in reality.
"Only
the human ego's inclination to appropriate these capacities and abilities as its own
prevents us from realizing the absurdities inherent in our attempting to lay claim to
those processes and functions that, for the most part, take place beyond the horizons of
our everyday, waking consciousness. We seem to be zombies who operate from within a firmly
entrenched delusional system which portrays our normal modalities of awareness as being
the cat's meow of consciousness.
"I
wouldn't be surprised to find out someday that our everyday consciousness is really just a
residual, trickle down effect of far more advanced activities going on beyond the horizons
of our so-called normal, waking consciousness. In other words, our work-a-day form of
consciousness is not so much an instance of emergent properties as it is a expression of
divergent properties of some sort which have become separated off, like a dissociative
mental condition or fugue state, from its original source or context.
"In
some ways, the relationship of our everyday modes of awareness to the real consciousness
which seems to be going on in some other realm or dimension of being is sort of
reminiscent of certain science fiction movies or novels. You know, the ones where Earth
gets visited by beings who are so far more advanced than humans are that the aliens either
have great compassion for our pathetic condition and keep sending us anonymous gifts of
consolation so we won't get too depressed about the rather abysmal condition of our waking
consciousness, or, they adopt us as dumb but, on occasion, lovable pets and give us
trinkets every so often with which we can amuse ourselves like so many kittens with a ball
of string, or, they consider us to be only marginally different than the insect life on
this planet but their moral values will not permit them to exterminate us and put us out
of our misery."
"Thank
you, Melanie, for gracing us with these thoughts," said Vince Ardello, with mock
gratitude. "I'm sure everyone else found them as uplifting and inspiring as I did,
especially the part alluding to the aliens.
"All
kidding aside," Vince added, "what you say strikes some sort of sympathetic
chord within me. I have often felt we humans have got this consciousness and
unconsciousness distinction all inverted and twisted around.
"If one
considers how impoverished our waking consciousness has become with all of our routines,
habits, biases, prejudices, psychological defenses, emotional blind nesses, preoccupations
with our fantasy life and so on, I really am surprised any of us can do much more than
walk and chew gum simultaneously. Given the wretched condition of the waking consciousness
in which we spend so much of our time, the miserable state of the world is not all that
hard to understand."
"I
would like to get back to Jung, for just a moment," indicated Colby Shaw.
"Maybe, some of you can answer a few questions I've been carrying around with me for
awhile.
"Ever
since college days, I've been trying to figure out the logistics of certain aspects of
Jungian theory. For instance, I've always wondered where the collective unconscious was
located.
"If one
says it is located in psychological space, whatever that is, then, the question just
resurfaces in slightly different forms. Where is psychological space, and where can one
find the collective unconscious in such space?
"I
guess this gets back to the sorts of thing that Ben and Andrea were talking about earlier.
We have a hard enough time trying to speak of the nature and location of just the plain
old unconscious, without complicating matters and bringing the collective unconscious into
the discussion.
"Even
if one were to argue, for example, that the regular unconscious is a function of certain
kinds of brain activity, this option seems not to be available to Jung, at least as far as
the collective unconscious is concerned, since he seemed to want to distinguish between
the mechanisms of biological and psychological inheritance. So, one returns to questions
such as: where is the collective unconscious, and how did it originate, and why,
apparently, did only certain kinds of archetypal forms, rather than others, get deposited
there, and what was the mechanism of the formation process of archetypes in which the
particularized experiences of individuals got transformed into a generalized categorical
form, and why should one suppose the potential of the self is limited to the possibilities
inherent in the archetypes, and why is there so much power and force associated with
archetypes, and what precisely is the character and nature of such power or force, and how
do we know that Jung's interpretations of the significance, meaning and function of the
archetypes is what he claims to be the case?"
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