To Our Health! (“Historic Steps from Three to Four”)

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Chris


“One, two, three; but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth…?”[1]

MyPlate – 2011

Amid much fanfare earlier this month the United States Department of Agriculture, (USDA) unveiled a new food guide icon with the help of first lady Michelle Obama. Replacing the last two pyramid-shaped images, the new icon – a dinner plate – visually conveys the desired portion sizes of the different components of an ideal meal.  One registered dietitian claimed that this new icon is an improvement over the last two because “it allows people to quickly and visually rate their plate and try to get it to look like the icon without measuring or counting.” She continued: “It may not be the magic bullet to get everyone eating right, but it is a step in the right direction — a simple and clear tool to promote balance, portions, variety and wholesome food at mealtime.” [2]

MyPyramid – 2005

The move from the prior pyramid image with its potentially confusing steps to be taken, i.e. measuring and counting, to the more balanced and “wholesome” iconic round plate might aid not only our physical health but also – at least symbolically – our understanding of a psychological concept discussed at some length by C.G. Jung and later psychologists: the progression of collective Western stages of consciousness as symbolized in the move from the number three to the number four.[3] (To casual readers, the triangular pyramid no doubt readily lends itself to associations with the number three; although Jung wrote extensively on correlations between the number four, or quaternities, and the figure of the circle, the less obvious connection of these two concepts will have to be assumed by the reader for purposes of brevity.) [4]

On the move from three to four, Mythfire would like to quote from Jungian analyst Robert Johnson’s He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, published in 1989:

“In 1948 and 1949, [Jung] was jubilant at the new dogma of the Catholic church which placed the Virgin Mary with the Trinity, all masculine figures, in Heaven. He felt that this completed an earlier, incomplete stage of development that had brought so much unrest and conflict to the western world. The symbol precedes the fact by many years, which indicates that the possibility is now open to us; but the work is not yet done.” [5]

Johnson continues:

“Dr. Jung felt that the work of a truly modern person was to make the expansion of consciousness represented by the evolution from three to four – from the consciousness devoted to doing, working, accomplishing, progressing to that characterized by peace, tranquility, existential being. The heart of the matter is that four can contain three, but three can not contain four.”[6]

He then concludes:

Food Pyramid – 1992

“We are apparently in an age where the consciousness of man is advancing from a trinitarian to a quaternarian view. This is one possible and profound way of appraising the extreme chaos our world is now in . . . . This suggests we are going through an evolution of consciousness from the nice orderly all-masculine concept of reality, the Trinitarian view of God, toward a quaternarian view that includes the feminine as well as other elements that are difficult to include if one insists on the old values.”[7]

If one keeps in mind Johnson’s line that the “symbol precedes the fact by many years,” then we might see how “the extreme chaos our world is now in” continues today to be the struggle to realize the development in consciousness symbolized by the dogma of the Assumption of Mary (which Pope Pius XII actually established as church doctrine in 1950). The riots and revolutions of the Arab Spring, an “historic step” forward by the U.N. in recognition of gay rights, the ongoing New York and California gay marriage legislative and court cases, and debates over “green” energy sources versus fossil fuels  – all ripped from last week’s headlines – give ample testimony of new “elements” and “values” that are being insisted upon as part of this more rounded, balanced, and inclusive stage of consciousness we are collectively struggling to enter. [8]

Johnson captures Mythfire’s idea of the pyramid-to-plate analogy when he later states how “[i]t seems that it is the purpose of evolution now to replace an image of perfection with the concept of completeness or wholeness.” [9] In sum, that which has been rejected, oppressed, missing, or in some way neglected must be recognized and integrated as valuable in its own “portion” because of its diversity or “variety” if a harmonious “balance” and “wholeness” are ever to be realized, i.e. to be made real. This is what it means to make the move from the three of the pyramid to the four of the circle.

What are additional examples of this epochal shift toward new elements or values of wholeness and completion? See footnote #10 for some of Mythfire’s thoughts.[10]

——

Addendum: Like Johnson, analytical psychologist Edward Edinger stresses that we can experience “the developmental, temporal process of realization,” i.e. the steps of the three without necessarily ever achieving the “structural wholeness” and “completion” of the four, but we cannot achieve or maintain the four without the steps of the three: “Fourness, or psychic totality, must be actualized by submitting it to the threefold process of realization in time. One must submit oneself to the painful dialectic of the developmental process.” So, even if a round dinner plate symbolically serves as the goal of our physical or psychological well-being, we may very well still find that this well-being is only realizable via the measured and not infrequently painful steps indicated in the earlier icons. See chapter 7 in Edinger’s magnum opus Ego & Archetype for more on the move from three to four.

——

Next Monday: The Enigma of Numbers (“From Three to  Four – Part 2”)

[1] Socrates’ opening line to Plato’s Timaeus. Jung references this opening line multiple times when discussing the move from three to four. For a succinct psychological explication of this Socratic opener, see p. 191 in The Enigma of Numbers — a book which is the focus of the following (June 27th) Mythfire post.

[3] The move from three to four also figures into the stages of consciousness of an individual as well as the collective, perhaps most evidently in terms of a person’s typological development. Typologically, the missing fourth is the person’s inferior function which needs to be developed in harmony with the other three functions.

[4] For Jung’s references linking the #4 and the figure of the circle, multiple entries can be found in the Index to the Collected Works under “quaternity,” sub-heading “and circle.”

[5] Johnson, Robert A. He: Understanding Masculine Psychology. Rev. Ed.  New York: Harper & Row, 1989: 63.

[6] Ibid., 63-4. See also above “Addendum.”

[7] Ibid., 64.

[9] Ibid., 64.

[10] The recent worldwide popularity of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code speaks to a deep-seated feeling that the feminine as a powerful energic and emotional dynamic has long been neglected and needs to be recognized and integrated. The increased presence of women as well as gays and other minorities in positions of power – in church, business, government, and military – reflects a similar recognition. Finally, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth resonates in no small part because it too speaks a truth – in this case an ecological one – which has been but can no longer be denied, avoided, wished, or rationalized away.

 

Posted in Culture, Depth Psychology, Symbols | 3 Comments

James Hillman’s Shift to Soul-Making (“From Anima-Mess to Anima-Vessel”)

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Chris

Psychologist James Hillman is best known as the founder of archetypal psychology – a branch of depth psychology that developed out of and has found its place alongside Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and C.G. Jung’s analytical psychology. And if there is one word that is most associated with Hillman’s archetypal psychology it is probably that of soul-making. Originating out of the poetic mind of John Keats, the term soul-making as applied by Hillman refers to a practice through which individuals: slow down and deepen their connectedness to themselves, others, and the world; emphasize being over doing and the present moment over future aspirations; embrace and prioritize one’s woundedness, humanity, and limitations over a quest for perfection, transcendence, and transformation. In other words, soul-making occurs every time we look more closely, more feelingly at the individuals peopling our lives and the ideas, afflictions, and ever-present prospect of death which together give substance and meaning to our hours and days.

One example of how we might go about the activity of soul-making was hinted at in a recent Mythfire post on actor Charlie Sheen. Hillman was quoted in that post on how the figure of the puer aeternus or eternal youth is all too often “afflicted by openness.” Unwilling to admit defect and/or take the time to try and understand why one does what one does, the eternal youth – elsewhere called a “foolish uninitiated being” – acts or speaks without thinking, lacks the reflection needed to avoid repeating past mistakes, has unrealistic expectations about his or her own capabilities, and has difficulty in establishing or sustaining deep and lasting relationships. Instead of turning inward and going deeper into one’s own emotional soul-life, the puer aeternus spontaneously and continually turns outward, looking for praise and meaning from others in the outside world.[1]

The idea of turning inward is an important part of the psychological notion of containment. Whether referring to the “container” created by a psychologist and his or her patient in the therapy room or referring more generally to an individual’s psyche as a “container,” personal growth and development require the holding of energies and emotions by concerned parties until these same psychodynamic forces can be experienced consciously, i.e. acknowledged, understood, and owned as important in some way to one’s wholeness and well-being. Hillman notes that this process of containing or soul-making can only occur when we emotionally open ourselves to our own wounds and afflictions:

“Building the psychic vessel of containment, which is another way of speaking of soul-making, seems to require bleeding and leaking as its precondition. Why else go through that work unless we are driven by the despair of our unstoppered condition? The shift from anima-mess to anima-vessel shows in various ways: as a shift from weakness and suffering to humility and sensitivity; from bitterness and complaint to a taste for salt and blood; from focus upon the emotional pain of a wound – its causes, parameters, cures – to its imaginal depths; from displacement of the womb onto women and ‘femininity’ to its locus in one’s own bodily rhythm.” [2]

The “shift from anima-mess to anima-vessel” mentioned by Hillman in this quote concerns a psychological concept, namely the anima, which essentially is equivalent to the soul. The anima is that energy which inspires or motivates one to reflect upon, to deepen, contain, and connect with the soul within oneself as well as others and one’s surroundings. The anima also animates a person to move, to act, and emote — a combination that transforms otherwise mundane events into experiences of soul and beauty.

To further unpack Hillman’s above quote, perhaps it would be best to look at one of the oldest, sorriest, most beautiful experiences known to humankind, i.e. “the love problem.” To fall head over heels in love, to become a blubbering fool in front of the object of one’s affections, to get lost in obsessive thoughts of him or her – who has not wished at times such as these for some sort of “stopper” with which to plug the leaking vessel of our despairing lovesick soul? (Nobel Prize-winning poet and essayist Octavio Paz has it right: “Love is a wound, an injury…Yes, love is a flower of blood.”).[3]

Whether requited or not, when love turns our world upside down, it is a safe bet that we are caught up in anima fantasies and projections directed toward another person. We see in her or him the promise of soul-deepening and connection which we are presently missing and for which we secretly long. As indicated above, Hillman shows that the solution to this “problem” of lovesickness requires a general shift from openness to containment, “from anima-mess to anima-vessel” – a move which itself depends on the four more precisely defined “shifts” he goes on to name:

  • From weakness and suffering to humility and sensitivity
  • From bitterness and complaint to a taste for salt and blood
  • From focus upon the emotional pain of a wound – its causes, parameters, cures – to its imaginal depths
  • From displacement of the womb onto women and ‘femininity’ to its locus in one’s own bodily rhythm

Reflection upon each of these “from-to” shifts yields deep profound insights. The first shift reminds Mythfire of something a female co-worker said the week this post was prepared: there is nothing more unattractive than an “insecure” man. (Hopefully, she didn’t have me in mind when she said this!) Really, all four of these shifts offer clues as to how we might make the desired move from insecurity to a much more secure sense of self. For instance, in addition to moving from weakness and suffering to humility and sensitivity, the supplanting of self-centered bitterness and complaint by “a taste for salt and blood” is also instructive. For instance, on the field of sports when we notice that there is blood on our lips, sweat on our brow and, (after a defeat or setback), tears in our eyes we know that we are engaged in something worthwhile, something worth fighting for. Something that matters deep down in our soul. Is this “soul matter” any less powerful when the field of engagement is one of love instead of sports?

What might the third shift – from obsessing over the causes, parameters, and fantasy cures of the love wound to focusing on its “imaginal depths” – look like for the foolish and uninitiated would-be lover? Ultimately, each person must answer this question for him or herself. However, this shift is essentially from a destructive use (or waste) of energies to a constructive one. We choose to creatively add to the soul as something of substance rather than subtract from it with “empty imaginings” and hours frittered away in fantasyland. We set out to build a psychic vessel or body that no longer leaks and bleeds but instead acts as a container and sustainer of soul. What this looks like concretely will probably depend on the individual’s personality, talents, interests and life circumstances.[4]

And finally, what is meant by the fourth and final shift “from displacement of the womb onto women and ‘femininity’ to its locus in one’s own bodily rhythm”? In the section under discussion, Hillman effectively links the centuries’ old belief that hysteria was somehow rooted in a woman’s womb with his present day argument that the womb and femininity should instead be understood psychologically and something which men have as well as women. The leaky hysterics of the love-struck soul are not to be displaced or denied as “something only women have” but instead owned as the source from which one’s own feelings and connectedness to the deep roots of things can grow. Hillman writes that “Without a proper feminine vessel, we can gestate nothing, nourish nothing, bring nothing to complete birth.” He then reiterates that the womb is the psychic container within which we reflect upon our own woundedness. As suggested above, through the process of reflection, both wounds and womb become “the very ground and carrier of fecundity.”[5]

In other words, whether our wounds concern “problems” of love or the “mess” of other strongly felt emotions, if honored and held as within a womb, they may become in time the very ground, carrier, and even maker of soul.

——

Note: James Hillman passed away October 27, 2011. His most successful book is the New York Times Bestseller The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. However, a better place to begin exploring his ideas is probably A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman which is introduced and edited by Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul. Previously published articles, lectures, interviews and essays by Hillman (as well as one or two books) are currently being re-released as individual installments within his ten-volume Uniform Edition. The volume titles and contents may be found here: http://www.springpublications.com/uniformedition.html. Finally, Hillman’s most critically acclaimed book is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Re-Visioning Psychology.

——

Next Monday: The Move from Three to Four…

[1] Hillman, James. Senex & Puer. Ed. and Intro. by Glen Slater. Putnam, Conn.: Spring Pub., Inc., 2005: 228. According to Hillman, the phrase “foolish uninitiated being” is from Plato’s Gorgias.

[2] Ibid., 232.

[3] From Paz’s The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, page 197 in my (1995?) edition.

[4] For anyone interested in the I Ching, Mythfire finds that Hillman’s section from 228-232 of Senex & Puer correlates most profoundly with Hexagram 4 (“Enveloping”) as described in Stephen Karcher’s Total I Ching. Additionally, the opposite to Hillman’s imaginal depths may just be “empty imaginings” as found in changing line 4 from Hexagram 4 in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching: “For youthful folly it is the most hopeless thing to entangle itself in empty imaginings. The more obstinately it clings to such unreal fantasies, the more certainly will humiliation overtake it.” Hillman’s soul-making arguably requires a shift from empty imaginings to full-bodied, expressive, meaningful, and constructive imaginal depths.

[5] Senex & Puer, 229-230.

 

Posted in Archetypal Psychology, Depth Psychology, Puer Aeternus, Tributes | 4 Comments

Copulative Conjunctions & Other Natural Phenomena (“Is Philosophy Dead?”)

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Chris

Self and World

Last week’s post took its inspiration from an interview Stephen Hawking gave just before the latest Google Zeitgeist conference where he made yet another bold proclamation: “Philosophy is dead.” Perhaps professor of philosophy Justin E. H. Smith was secretly voicing a similar fear in his equally recent New York Times “Flight of Curiosity” op-ed where he bemoaned the lack of curiosity in today’s philosophical academy. Although Smith doesn’t go so far as to say that “the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater,” it is clear that he believes that something substantial which gave birth to philosophy in the first place has been lost thanks to contemporary philosophers’ preference for “sharp distinction[s]” between their style of thinking and that of natural and social scientists (as well as the type of thinking we ordinary folk utilize for everyday tasks and hobbies). [1]

Psychologically, the problem being discussed here is one common not only to philosophy but to much of our way of living in the post-Enlightenment Western world: individually and collectively, our ego-centric Cartesian rationalism has identified with the energies of the spirit and placed them above and before those of the soul (to the extent that we acknowledge the existence of the psyche or soul at all).  Thinking and intellect take precedence over feeling and sensing. The inner world of the mind trumps the outer world of the body and environment. Put mythologically, disembodied Apollonianism rises above and triumphs over embodied Dionysianism here-and-now.

Smith states that whereas philosophy in its earlier form of natural philosophy was concerned with (and curious about) the world around it – the plants and animals, the earth as much as the heavens – today’s philosopher has little time for such “impure” activities; or at the very least he or she is unwilling to view these activities as valuable and relevant to philosophy. Furthermore, to the extent that philosophy undertakes the study of these activities or other fields of study, they do so by utilizing “that succinct preposition, of — as in ‘philosophy of physics,’ ‘philosophy of law’ — which permits philosophy to stand apart, and implicitly above, the mundane objects of its attention.” This is the classic logocentric move of the ego which shirks “impurities” so as to better dissect and even colonize whatever lays within its ken.

Analytical psychologist Russell Arthur Lockhart notes that this problem is not unique to philosophy but also concerns other fields, including the broader one of psychology:

“Psychology seems still too caught up in its own ‘of-ness’: psychology of this or of that. There is considerable significance in [Swiss psychiatrist C.G.] Jung’s using the copulative conjunction ‘and’ in so many of his titles: psychology and religion, psychology and alchemy, archetypes and the collective unconscious, Freud and psychoanalysis. These are not accidental titles. Of tends toward hierarchical understandings and traditions; and tends toward generation of something ‘other.’”[2]

One gets the sense from reading Smith’s op-ed that he longs for the generation of something “other” out of a historical understanding of philosophical traditions. On the surface this may sound somewhat limiting and even incestuous. However, his entire point may just be that earlier traditions of philosophy were bound to fields within the social as well as natural sciences from which philosophy has only in time become separated or, to employ a revealing turn-of-phrase, “out of touch.” A re-thinking of or rather reconnecting to these earlier relationships may generate new ones more appropriate to a postmodern world born not of “of” but of the copulative “and.”  In other words, not hierarchical separation “from” but mutual interpenetration and relatedness “with,” i.e. conjunction.

In short, to the extent that it has not yet done so perhaps philosophy’s new “generation” needs to learn from the conjunctive approach of depth psychology. Not only might this signal the way back to curiosity as Smith wishes, but it may also just be at one and the same time the only way of avoiding Hawking’s ominous pronouncement of death.

——

Next Monday: James Hillman’s Shift to Soul-Making

[2] Henderson, Robert and Janis. Living with Jung: “Enterviews” with Jungian Analysts. Vol. 1. New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2006: 151. Lockhart also discusses copulative conjunctions on page 60 of his book Psyche Speaks: A Jungian Approach to  Self and World, the cover of which is shown above.

Posted in Culture, Depth Psychology, Philosophy | Leave a comment

Heaven: Many Hints, One Hypothesis (“Paging Dr. Hawking”)

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Chris

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

Perhaps the most distinguished and renowned theoretical physicist alive today, Stephen Hawking caused something of a stir recently when in an interview with England’s Guardian newspaper he included the above statement in answer to the question “What, if anything, do you fear about death?” This follows on the heels of his assertion last year that the universe exists and operates according to fixed discernable laws and therefore need not have been put in motion by a creator, a.k.a. God. The present Mythfire post takes up the more recent of Hawking’s two claims and compares it with those made by C.G. Jung in “On Life after Death,” a chapter in the latter’s autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections.[1]

On certain key points these two intellectual giants seem to be in complete agreement. Most basically, perhaps even obviously, Jung agrees with Hawking that the physical body – including the brain – does not survive beyond the point of death. Jung also believes that because of our understanding of the afterlife we must – as Hawking states in answer to another question – “seek the greatest value of our action.” And yet, of course, it is with this understanding of the afterlife that the two great men diverge.

While Hawking seemingly leaves no possibility for the existence of an afterlife, Jung begins his chapter “On Life after Death” by admitting his own reluctance to consider such an idea:

“It is not that I wish we had a life after death. In fact, I would prefer not to foster such ideas. Still, I must state, to give reality its due, that without my wishing and without my doing anything about it, thoughts of this nature move about within me. I can’t say whether these thoughts are true or false, but I do know they are there, and can be given utterance, if I do not repress them out of some prejudice. Prejudice cripples and injures the full phenomenon of psychic life.”[2]

In other words, when discussing the afterlife (or for that matter other phenomena such as dreams, synchronicity, etc.) we need to begin with an awareness of our own prejudices. Prejudicial ways of thinking and perceiving stem less from the “reality” we see around us than from our own conditioning and life experiences. More to the point and apropos of the present post, our prejudices regarding these non-rational matters so often evolve out of our reliance on the rational/scientific mindset which has dominated the collective discourse these last few “Enlightened” centuries, a fact Jung also notes:

“Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with so many other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves….Rationalism and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers.” [3]

To be sure, if Jung were sitting across from Hawking in a  point-counterpoint type of conversation no suggestion would be made by the former that critical rationalism should itself be eliminated. However, it does need to be expanded:

“Mathematics goes to great pains to create expressions for relationships which pass empirical comprehension. In much the same way, it is all-important for a disciplined imagination to build up images of intangibles by logical principles and on the basis of empirical data, that is, on the evidence of dreams.”[4]

It is interesting to consider this quote in light of the answer Hawking poses to the first of the Guardian interviewer’s questions: “What is the value in knowing ‘Why are we here?’” Here is Hawking’s reply:

“The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can’t solve the equations, directly in the abstract. We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those societies most likely to survive. We assign them higher value.”

While Mythfire does not claim to fully comprehend Hawking’s answer it would seem that looked at broadly he is saying much the same as Jung in the second sentence of the “disciplined imagination” quote. In Hawking’s case, science is the disciplined imagination by which we “build up images of intangibles by logical principles,” and to the extent that any gaps or uncertainties exist in our equation-solving other sources of empirical data need to be turned to as potential or plausible, i.e. “effective” filler. For Hawking and the question of the value of life, this data can be found in Darwin’s theory of natural selection; for Jung and the question of the value of the afterlife, this empirical data can be found in dreams and other psychic phenomena which offer what Jung calls “slender hints of the unknowable.”[5]

In his chapter, Jung includes at least ten relevant instances of these empirical data “hints” in the form of dreams, synchronicities, and premonitions. One example involves Jung’s long-deceased father appearing to him in a dream asking for marriage counseling. At the time Jung did not know what to make of this dream visitation. Only when Jung’s mother passed away several months later did the dream’s meaning come into focus. [6]

Here is another longer example Jung offers for consideration:

“Not only my own dreams, but also occasionally the dreams of others, helped to shape, revise, or confirm my views on a life after death. I attach particular importance to a dream which a pupil of mine, a woman of sixty, dreamed about two months before her death. She had entered the hereafter. There was a class going on, and various deceased women friends of hers sat on the front bench. An atmosphere of general expectation prevailed. She looked around for a teacher or lecturer, but could find none. Then it became plain that she herself was the lecturer, for immediately after death people had to give accounts of the total experience of their lives. The dead were extremely interested in the life experiences that the newly deceased brought with them, just as if the acts and experiences taking place in earthly life, in space and time, were the decisive ones.” [7]

Again, as with Hawking, Jung, too, believes that we should “seek the greatest value of our action” while alive. Ironically, Hawking takes this viewpoint because he doesn’t believe in an afterlife and Jung because he does. These and other experiences convinced Jung that in addition to the dimensions of space and time of which we are conscious there is at least one space-less, timeless dimension of which we are mostly unaware or unconscious – at least until (and possibly to a certain extent even after) our deaths. And yet we are able and even obligated to add something by our actions here and now to the general knowledge and completeness of this life after/life.

In short, Jung’s experiences provided enough empirical data for him to formulate a “hypothesis” of the afterlife which he freely admitted could not be proven. However, just as on the outer physical plane Hawking’s Darwinian theory of natural selection was turned to because “effective,” so too on the inner psychological plane is the similarly unprovable hypothesis of heaven turned to for its own effective qualities, especially those of a healing nature. [8] To put it differently and return to the opening quote, Hawking dismisses the idea of heaven as a “fairy story”; Jung says that the idea or hypothesis of heaven is important in small part because it is a fable or fairy story:

“Unfortunately, the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays. He can no longer create fables. As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutary to speak also of incomprehensible things. Such talk is like the telling of a good ghost story, as we sit by the fireside and smoke a pipe.” [9]

Jung goes on to reiterate that – prevalent across all times and cultures – such mythologizing or story-telling is “a healing and valid activity” and “gives existence a glamour which we would not like to do without.” He finishes by saying: “Nor is there any good reason why we should.” [10]

Interestingly, Hawking’s interview with Guardian hit the press the same week that results of a “huge” new study were published in London. Co-directed by Professor Roger Trigg of Oxford University, the three-year project “incorporated more than 40 different studies by dozens of researchers looking at countries from China to Poland and the United States to Micronesia.” Essentially, these researchers concluded that ideas such as the existence of God, of divine agency and purpose in the universe, and the idea or hypothesis of the afterlife are all “universal, prevalent, and deep-rooted.” Trigg states: “If you’ve got something so deep-rooted in human nature, thwarting it is in some sense not enabling humans to fulfill their basic interests.”[11]

If Jung’s hypothesis of heaven is correct, then in the final analysis the fulfillment of  these basic interests is germane to both mortals and “immortals” alike. Readers are encouraged to (re-) visit Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections for more.

——

Note: A YouTube clip of Jung addressing several of the above ideas can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-Ab3tlpvYA&feature=feedrec_grec_index. Also, similar to Jung’s “hints,” his colleague Marie-Louise von Franz discusses “speculations” about death and “glimpses” into the afterlife in an exceptional 1978 talk entitled “Archetypal Experiences Surrounding Death.” A recording of the talk was made available on CD for the first time last month and can be purchased here.

—–

Next Monday: “Copulative Conjuctions & Other Natural Phenomena”

[2] Jung, C.G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe. New York: Vintage Books, 1989: 299. Italics added. MDR was originally published in 1963.

[3] Ibid., 300. Italics added.

[4] Ibid., 310.

[5]Ibid., 322.  Jung repeatedly uses the word “hints” in the chapter under discussion. See also pgs. 301, 302, 303, 304, 312, and 316.

[6] Ibid., 315.

[7] Ibid., 305. Italics added.

[8] Jung uses the word “hypothesis” on pages 301 and 302.

[9] Ibid., 301. An earlier Mythfire post discussed the idea of imagination in terms that are pertinent to the present discussion. Footnote #3 in the same post specifically references the vital role fairy stories (or tales) as well as myths play in our lives.

[10] Ibid., 301-2.

 

Posted in Depth Psychology, Dreams, Imagination, Myth | 4 Comments

Reverence for Life (“Ethical Fundamentalism”)

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Chris

Last week’s post attempted to place us inside the Chauvet caves in France so that we might once again stand awestruck, surrounded on all sides by thirty thousand year-old cave paintings and the ultimate mystery they represent.  The way of the animal powers. Believe it or not, this week’s post strives to connect this ancient yet eternal mystery with recent events involving, of all people, Osama bin Laden. To make our desired move from natural art to ethics, however, we  must first ask philosopher, theologian, medical missionary, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer for help:

“Slowly we crept upstream, laboriously navigating – it was the dry season – between the sandbanks. Lost in thought I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal concept of the ethical that I had not discovered in any philosophy. I covered sheet after sheet with disconnected sentences merely to concentrate on the problem. Two days passed. Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase ‘reverence for life.’ The iron door had yielded. The path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the principle in which affirmation of the world and ethics joined together!”[1]

Later, Schweitzer adds: “All thinking that penetrates to the bottom arrives at ethical mysticism. What is rational reaches eventually the nonrational. The ethical mysticism of Reverence for Life is rational thought that derives its power from the spiritual nature of our being.” [2] Perhaps Schweitzer’s sentiments here and elsewhere represent the evolution from a predominantly nonrational experiencing of spiritual nature as displayed in the Chauvet cave to a more rational and ethical understanding of the same nature today. Needless to say, as Schweitzer’s own “herd of hippos” experience reveals and as his quotes make clear, this rational/ethical stance does not supplant the nonrational “spiritual nature of our being” but rather stems from and is completely dependent upon it.

But what, if anything, does this have to do with Osama bin Laden? First, one might argue that fundamentalism as generally understood occurs when the process just described by Schweitzer is thwarted or even reversed. Out of a never-ending jockeying back and forth between superiority and equally fearful inferiority, the rational ego anxiously places itself above and before any experiences of the nonrational. In other words, if any power or meaning is granted to the “spiritual nature of our being” it is most certainly derived from our very carefully, rationally defined construction of ourselves. The rational determines the nonrational, not the other way around as with Schweitzer and his fundamental sense of ethical mysticism. [3]

According to “Growing up bin Laden: Osama’s Son Speaks,” a 2009 Time magazine article, when bin Laden’s children complained about their austere life in al-Qaeda camps, he would tell them, “My sons, your limbs must react to my thinking as though my brain was in your head.” To a certain extent we can see in this quote the prioritizing of rational thought over the nonrational instincts of the body and its limbs. Focusing on Osama’s son Omar, the article goes on to show how Omar eventually left the rationalistic authoritarianism of his father for a more natural and spiritual way of being:

“Intelligence agencies and scholars of extremist movements might do well to pay attention to Omar’s al-Qaeda childhood for clues about how to inoculate young people against radicalism. His remarkable achievement — to have maintained humane beliefs despite being pulled from school at the age of 12 and exposed to a near constant deluge of hateful propaganda, isolation and family pressure — seems to have been helped by a love of animals. A constant collector of pets — against his father’s wishes — and an avid horseman, Omar’s awareness of the madness of al-Qaeda was fueled in part by several acts of animal cruelty by his father’s men. When they lived in Sudan, one of the family guards killed Omar’s pet monkey by running it over with a truck, explaining that the creature was in fact a Jew turned into a monkey by the hand of God. Later, Omar learned that it was his father who taught the guard that monkeys were Jews.”[4]

Reverence for both animal and human life is horridly missing in the above. To be blunt and risk stating the obvious: reverence for life and life’s nonrational aspects separates an Omar from an Osama bin Laden.

Let’s give Schweitzer the last word:

“[T]he man who has become [an ethical] thinking being feels a compulsion to give to every will to live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own. He accepts as good preserving life, promoting life, developing all life that is capable of development to its highest possible value. He considers as evil destroying life, injuring life, repressing life that is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of ethics, and it is a fundamental postulate of thought.”[5]

——

Next Monday: Paging Dr. Hawking…

[1]Schweitzer, Albert. Out of My Life and Thought. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins UP, 1998: 155.

[2] Ibid., 204.

[3] Schweitzer also points out that this is an inherent error in Descartes’ famous dictum “I think therefore I am.” See p. 156.

[5]Ibid, 157.

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