"Though the ego is only one complex of associations in the psyche, it has evolved as a coordinator: what it is drawn to as an object of attention will be where and how its energy is applied. These motives are based on unconscious processes, and only by turning conscious attention to them can we find deeper meaning and purpose beyond the preconceptions of ego and its one-sided, paradoxical intentions." -- A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

Continuing Erich Neumann's discussion of ego-inflation, it's important to note that his observations were written in 1949 as a response to WWII. That spectacle of mass psychosis seems far distant to the current generation, though many of today's decision-makers were shaped directly by the psychic conditions which produced it. It may seem that modern consciousness is accelerating at warp-speed, but this is an illusion created by ego's identification with intellect that has little to do with consciousness in the sense of being self-aware. The tradition of repression which characterized the old ethic Neumann described is not so easily disposed of:

"The instability of attitude which is caused by the presence of the counter-position in the unconscious is not confined to the average man, who, as a constituent member of the mass, makes up the following of all "movements"; it is also found -- and this is even more dangerous -- among so-called leading personalities such as educationists, teachers and politicians."

As compelling as Neumann's insights were in 1949, we're in a better position to gauge their accuracy a generation later. The psychic tendencies he observed then are not only confirmed by the modern political landscape, they follow the same pattern collectively that he and Jung mapped out in individual psychology:

"The incompetence of the politicians, which has become so cruelly... obvious to modern man, is essentially due to their human inadequacy -- that is, to a moral undermining of their psychic structure which culminates in their total breakdown when faced with any real decision. To future ages, the fact that the leading politicians of our period were not required to pass a test of any kind to determine their human and moral qualifications will appear... as grotesque as it would seem to us today if a diphtheria-carrier were to be placed in charge of the children's ward in a hospital."

Perhaps Neumann gave too much credit to the average man of his day; either way, it becomes more painfully obvious with each new change in the governing process, whether by force or election. There are important psychological reasons for this:

"From the point of view of the new ethic, the moral inadequacy of the politician does not reside in the fact that on a conscious level he is not a morally acceptable personality -- though there is no guarantee that he will be that, either! It is his total unconsciousness of the shadow and the illusory orientation of consciousness that accompanies this kind of unawareness which is the decisive -- and often enough, the fatally decisive -- factor."

Here, we enter the new reality show of modern American politics as foreseen by Neumann. The articulate deception which characterized the political process in the last century has devolved into the "downright lying" mentioned in my last post. Because it's an initial stage of ego-awareness, it's rude, undeveloped and appears in negative form. It brings to the surface all that was hidden in the facade personality by exaggerating it to an extent that it becomes visible to all but the most uncritical.

It's that energy of the unconscious counter-pole (the shadow) which, since it exceeds conscious will, pushes the spiritual possession behind the inflated ego into awareness -- but only to a reflecting mind.

"The only person who is morally acceptable in the eyes of the new ethic is the person who has accepted his shadow problem -- the person... who has become conscious of his own negative side. The danger that constantly threatens the human race and which has dominated history up to the present time arises out of the "untestedness" of leaders who may actually be men of integrity as understood by the old ethic but whose unconscious and unheeded counter-reactions have generally made more "history" than their conscious attitudes."

It's an even more dangerous problem today in this new age of exaggeration and warp-speed intellect. What happens when the new leaders are no longer even men of integrity by the old standards, but the negative exponents of a new ego-driven reality that threatens to consume everything, including itself, for the sake its own image?

"It is precisely because we realise today that the unconscious is often, if not always, a more powerful determinant in the life of a man than his conscious attitude, his will and his intentions, that we can no longer pretend to be satisfied with a so-called "positive outlook" which is no more than a symptom of the conscious mind."

"The underlying tension of the individual's relation to culture... is a fundamental conflict of psychic life, a catalyst for development from infancy to old age. If the individual cannot discern him/herself apart from these impersonal forces, he/she is unconsciously carried along by them, and this herding effect only magnifies the dangerous potential of mass movements. All unconscious conflicts have a dual nature: subjective and objective, personal and social, creative and destructive. Their opposing tendencies converge in the psyche, and they determine our actions. How we perceive and evaluate them will decide our future." -- A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

As I wrote in my last post, the political landscape has changed since Jung shared his observations in 1957. Spiritual values, however rudely conceived, appeal to a fast-shrinking minority whose leadership is increasingly irrelevant today. But, the facts of nature that science would educate us to are no more incorporated than were the religious ideals of two thousand years ago.

The compensations for the repression of the soul, the reality of the individual, are reflected in impersonal ideologies: emotional harbor for the mass social units under the direction of those manipulating them for their own ends. But, as Jung wrote:

"The rulers... are just as much social units as the ruled... distinguished only by the fact that they are specialized mouthpieces of the State Doctrine. They do not need to be personalities capable of judgment, but thoroughgoing specialists who are unusable outside their line of business. State policy decides what shall be taught and studied."

Today, rather than a "State policy", we might say a "majority ideology"; though those vying for it are so polarized that a single policy can't describe the conflicting ideas in them. Jung's observations still apply:

"The... doctrine is for its part manipulated in the name of... policy by those occupying the highest positions in the government, where all the power is concentrated. Whoever, by election or caprice, gets into one of these positions is subject to no higher authority; he is the... policy itself and within... limits... can proceed at his own discretion... He is thus the only individual or, at any rate, one of the few... who could make use of their individuality if only they knew how to differentiate themselves from the... doctrine.

"They are more likely, however, to be the slaves of their own fictions. Such one-sidedness is always compensated psychologically by unconscious subversive tendencies. Slavery and rebellion are inseparable correlates. Hence, rivalry for power and exaggerated mistrust pervade the entire organism from top to bottom... to compensate its chaotic formlessness, a mass always produces a "Leader," who... becomes the victim of his own inflated ego-consciousness."

Modern conditions are more complicated than George Orwell's 'Big Brother' once suggested, though their effects are the same. The concentration of power is more diffuse; the "Leader" more a figure-head for those behind the scenes dictating policy through the buying and selling of influence. Mass media and commercial manipulation accomplish the same goals more easily through benign subversion than threat and intimidation. Still, the facts of its unconscious reality will sooner or later be impressed on an inflated ego.

"This development becomes logically unavoidable the moment the individual combines with the mass and thus renders himself obsolete. Apart from the agglomeration of huge masses in which the individual disappears anyway, one of the chief factors responsible for psychological mass-mindedness is scientific rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity. As a social unit he has lost his individuality and becomes a mere abstract number in the bureau of statistics. He can only play the role of an interchangeable unit of infinitesimal importance."

It's an historical fact that only the individual's creative responses to collective conflicts point the way to different perceptions of them. The personal "neuroses" of today are the conscious psychic functions of tomorrow, and as more and more individuals are forced to confront themselves through them, so they may create a new attitude to the psychological facts of our conditions. But:

"Looked at rationally and from outside... it seems positively absurd to go on talking about the value or meaning of the individual. Indeed, one can hardly imagine how one ever came to endow individual human life with so much dignity when the truth to the contrary is as plain as the palm of your hand...

"Under these circumstances it is small wonder that individual judgment grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized... and delegated to a corporate body. In this way the individual becomes more and more a function of society... whereas, in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea... The State [the ideology] in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it."

"Beneath our scientific preoccupations, we remain in the stage of psychological awareness reflected in our religious heritage. Behind the curtain of moral judgment lurk the split figures of good and evil: a model of how we relate to our unconscious natures. Jung has described how those ideas reflect the positive and negative poles necessary to produce psychic energy: the sliding scale along which consciousness fluctuates in its on-going efforts to define itself. Just as it forms the path of collective history, so in the growth of the individual in the first half of life, the repression of the unconscious required for ego to strengthen and develop now creates circumstances which signal the need for a new relation to it -- to balance conscious direction; to relate it, make it relative to the counter-pole of inner development." -- A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious.

The world today is in crisis. Though the Western mind has pursued it unaware for millennia, it has now created a dangerous tipping point. As we continue to live out the unconscious myth of God-likeness, so we make illusions of our highest ideals. We don't know what Nature's purposes are, but the conscious assumption is clear: "We would be as Gods"; whether knowing good and evil is not so certain.

The unconscious counter-pole (the inner value) which defines what we do that we don't know we're doing is a recent insight that goes deeper than ego and intellect. That we're driven to subjugate nature is plain: it's the law of ego-compensation, and all our creativity and resources are devoted to it. That it threatens to destroy us, we're coming to understand but lack the self-knowledge to stop it.

It's not as if the warning signs appeared out of nowhere with modern technology. The primitive nature of our destructive capacity is only brought into relief by it. But, if we would indeed be God-like in our self-appointed dominion over the earth, a more comprehensive view of life seems worth the effort.

Historically, we've given much lip-service to the biblical parables that describe the roots of our problems. Man's hubris is a major theme of myth and religion. Ego-inflation is a dangerous form of possession. Intellectually, we may know that, but without higher values, ego is blind to itself.

Whatever truths the old religion holds, the contradictions are too transparent for modern sensibilities. Maybe the old adages only echo the hypocrisies of the past. But, if we reflect on our history with the new insights available, we may relate to some of the old truths we've left behind. Jung's discussion of this parable from the Koran is found in his, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, from which the following quotes are taken:

The story concerns Moses' life-quest for meaning, as he related to his servant: "I will not cease from my wanderings until I reach the place where the two seas meet... though I journey for eighty years." They reach their ostensible goal only to discover that a mishap has occurred. Moses said: "Bring us our breakfast, for we are weary from this journey.

"But the other replied, "See what has befallen me! When we were resting... I forgot the fish. Only Satan can have put it out of my mind, and in wondrous fashion, it took its way to the sea... Moses said: "That is the place we seek... and they went back the way they had come..."

We get an idea here of how the unconscious operates. Leaving things behind is a motif that expresses the progression and regression involved in the stages of development. Consciousness can't see beyond its own state, and the end-purpose appears first as Satan -- but later proves to be indiscernible from the God-image:

"And they found one of Our servants, whom we had endowed with Our grace and... wisdom. Moses said to him: "Shall I follow you that you may teach me for my guidance... the wisdom you have learnt?

"But he answered: "You will not bear with me, for how should you bear patiently with things you cannot comprehend?"... Moses said: "If Allah wills, you shall find me patient; I shall not... disobey you..." He said: "If you are bent on following me, you must ask no questions... till I myself speak to you concerning it..."

"The two set forth, but as soon as they embarked, Moses' companion bored a hole in the bottom of the ship... "A strange thing you have done!" exclaimed Moses. "Is it to drown her passengers that you have bored a hole...?"

"Did I not tell you," he replied, "that you would not bear with me?"... "Pardon my forgetfulness," said Moses. "Do not be angry with me..." They journeyed on until they fell in with a certain youth. Moses' companion slew him, and Moses said: "You have killed an innocent man, who has done no harm. Surely you have committed a wicked crime."

"Did I not tell you," he replied, "that you would not bear with me?" Moses said, "If ever I question you again, abandon me; for then I should deserve it."

"They travelled on until they reached a certain city. They asked the people for some food, but they declined... There they found a wall on the point of falling down. The other raised it up, and Moses said: "Had you wished, you could have demanded payment for your labors."

"Now the time has arrived when we must part," said the other. "But first I will explain those acts... which you could not bear with in patience... Know that the ship belonged to some poor fisherman. I damaged it because in their rear was a king who was taking every ship by force." (Elsewhere, Jung described how a fisherman happened upon them, rescued them, and took them to the city.)

"As for the youth, his parents are true believers, and we feared lest he should plague them with his wickedness and unbelief. It was our wish that their Lord should grant them another... more righteous and more filial.

"As for the wall, it belonged to two orphan boys... whose father was an honest man. Your Lord decreed... that they should dig out their treasure when they grew to manhood. What I did was not done by caprice. That is the meaning of the things you could not bear with in patience."

For a modern, poetic experience of the confrontation with the opposites from a psychological angle, click here, or visit Amazon.

"The individual is the only real carrier of life." -- Carl Jung

The undeniable fact that the body is regulated by nature, along with the absurd idea that humans had otherwise freed themselves from the bondage of instinct, dominated psychology throughout most of the last century. That view loosely fit together certain facts while ignoring others. Such self-inflated notions were not seen as projections of a split condition -- nor are they much more acknowledged today.

The complicated nature of its own subjectivity pushed psychology to statistical measurement in an attempt to apply the scientific method. The idea was that emotions could be studied rationally -- like objects. The studies did reveal certain strained facts, though many were based on assumptions which only obscured the very processes they tried to illuminate. Fundamental questions as to how the mind worked were thought to have been answered.

But, the scientization of the psyche quickly turned into a paradox. Because the material view saw physical processes as primary, it was forced to concede certain euphemistic 'drives' and 'reflexes'; though because consciousness was no longer presumed to be subject to natural laws, instinct was denied. Observations were unconsciously influenced by subjective assumptions that had been argued for centuries but which history was also refuted.  

Statistics would resolve the contradictions by providing objective data, though it lacked the concepts to evaluate the unconscious processes which influenced their interpretation. Appraisals, based on biology and rationalized by ego, conceived the psyche as secondary, yet consciousness as somehow primary -- with no real evidence to support either.

To separate mind and body for purposes of examination was necessary, but its literal conception created contradictions which could only be seen in terms of either/or but not both. What was philosophical speculation was thought to be objective -- each partial truth supported by a partial fact.

Notions of free will, self-determination, and the independence of consciousness coexisted with the primacy of physical processes with no functions to mediate them. It was as if thought ruled itself, and the body was a separate entity that intruded only under pathological conditions.

Depression, obsessions, compulsive behaviors, and their origins and effects were treated as physiological problems, since no unconscious mental processes were admitted into its view. Instinctive psychic functions were reduced to biology. The partial explanations piled up with no threads to connect them.

Since the unconscious psyche wasn't directly observable and expressed its reality in the form of diffuse and contradictory images, logical methods could not be applied to inner experience. Science knew only a causal, material truth; religious ideas became mere fantasies. Unaware of the symbols hidden in its own images, it was fixed on a consciously conceived external reality.

Pre-conceived rationalizations filled the void of projection; all contrary evidence was dismissed, theory accepted as fact. The semi-conscious images beneath the assumptions -- the historical nature of all things psychic -- were ignored.

The psychological relations between image and object were invisible to a concrete science; the projected inner experience reflected in religious images rejected as meaningless. It was the mind/body equation in symbolic form. Without a concept of unconscious functioning, image and object formed an irreconcilable pair of opposites, much as Aristotle and Plato argued.

Jung showed that the causal viewpoint was only half the picture; that the two worlds of experience couldn't be evaluated in the same terms. Religious images contained descriptions, not of external reality, but of an objective inner reality that subjective interpretation can only approximate.

He described the fundamental problem with the statistical view: if there are a hundred pebbles, and the average weight of each pebble is .5 grams, there may not be a single pebble which weighs .5 grams. If there is, it’s no less an exception, and the exception becomes the rule. The focus is on the sameness of the pebbles, though it is nowhere apparent; more importantly, their differences disappear. Thought distorts the natural picture to conform to its preconceptions.

In this sense, statistics is an extension of our historical way of thinking. Christ represented a collective ideal, a model Christians strove to emulate. He seems to have been the only pebble in the lot which conformed to this picture (a profound symbol of the individual), yet viewed concretely, he appears only as an inflated, inhuman ideal, an image of conscious desire.

Statistics establishes standards which may broadly orient thought, yet the ideals they represent remain collective assumptions which not only do not acknowledge individual qualities, they devalue the human nature beneath them. The reality of the exception is a universal truth as well: the subjective sense of identity through which we all operate.

In psychology, statistical evaluation is subject to unknown factors in addition to the increasing welter of known ones which must be excluded for the purposes of isolating those for study (the nature of consciousness). The selection of which factors to observe is an assignment of value by the investigator. Value judgments are personal, emotional prejudices which are then infused into the studies.

Interpretations are further removed from objectivity, not just because of their isolation from a living context and the guise of subjective value-judgments, but the unconscious factors inherent in the initial assumptions. Though they may yield certain facts in a prescribed and limited way, they give little information about how we experience life as individuals. 

Statistics lead back to standardized formulas which only reinforce our collective natures and ignore individual truth. Such a model is the most unachievable by the average it was meant to reflect; the psyche fades into the background — lost in the paradox of rules, exceptions, and false ideals.

Click here for information about my book.

"The emotional confusion generated by... a major shift in values is only enhanced today by a profound lack of introspection. The “suprapersonal factors” embodied in religious images are intended to orient us inwardly; to center and protect us from being swept away by mass contagion. Our ideas of religion are changing, and there is no return to the old ways. Deep in the throes of unseen psychic forces, consciousness is being pushed in a new direction. The possibilities for further development hidden in the older ideas require a re-interpretation of the peculiar language of the depth from which they spring and the symbols it produces." -- A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

It seems undeniable to anyone raised in the religious atmosphere of a generation ago that cultural values are changing. Whether praised or lamented, the current transition was an integral part of Jung's work; what he described were historical changes in consciousness.

Sunday morning religious services still fill the airways; but, as mega-churches replace smaller communities of worship, and populations become more mobile and anonymous, religious devotion takes on a similarly impersonal character. 

The Bible remains the world's best-seller, but does it reflect the personal values we espoused fifty years ago? Who doesn't question the contradictions science has raised in its literal view of religious symbols? 

Political correctness has tempered public conversation in the face of increased diversity, but don't most still believe in their religion with the same intensity of a generation ago? Though once-traditional spiritual views continue to splinter into increasingly diverse factions, doesn't that mean further differentiation, a more nuanced perspective? A new dawn on a centuries-old collective horizon?

Panderers, preachers, and pulpiteers fall from the heavens like little Lucifers as they yield to their more animal natures -- but, hasn't that always been so? Isn't it just more publicized as we tear away the veils of fading idols? Isn't it the same old inflated image revealing human vulnerabilities to the natural facts beneath our ideals? A new struggle on a new psychic frontier? 

One man's god is another man's devil, but one fact still remains: an unknown deity drives us relentlessly forward -- more compelling in the changes today than centuries of reflection have kept pace with. We may not choose it or even believe it, but isn't that what history is? The slow coming to awareness of a psychic reality which defies comprehension beyond the rational knowledge of its parts?

So confusing is the symbolic nature of this mystery; so convincing our powers of rationalization, nothing seems certain to an honest mind but the false certainty of others. Objective knowledge has replaced subjective wisdom as the ultimate truth. Modern diversions only obscure the mystery further, hiding the dark face of inner reality.

On one side are the commercial mega-churches and their glitzy re-makes of the same old story, little changed. The personal relation to a deity seems only more impersonal through them. Is it a new improved product they sell or a diluted one -- an unconscious image of belief, an indirect appeal to their own egos? Only another facade of certainty amid the unknown changes pushing from within?

Conversely, churches are driven to compete with a science that refutes the old truths with each new datum; it only gets more sophisticated. It's no wonder they're at odds; as ideologies, neither is aware of its own subjective bias. In the unconscious conflicts of one-sided ideals, they trade barbs like hostile brothers (or a stale-mated political process), neither bothered with the task of a greater good beyond its own partial concerns. 

What they believe in is plain enough; not words, but an irrational zeal defines it. Where is the humble soul in search of a truth which acknowledges its own inner opposite? If today's consumer mindset and its object-philosophy are what we're looking to for solutions, we're in trouble. The buying and selling of partial truths and the mass marketing designed to manipulate unconscious emotions is not the way to consciousness. 

As ominous as the cultural changes have been in the last generation, we remain fixed on rational argument, cause and effect, and a concrete view of our behavior. Is the confusion beneath the facade a dim perception of a newer, darker deity? The unforeseen consequences, the off-spring of an irrational nature? 

Jung laid the basis for a science of the psyche through the study of its history: religion, philosophy, and science, too; a real psychological inspection of ideas, their origins, development, purposes and effects. His method was empirical, though not strictly rational. His comparative approach was a new way of examining our subjective natures within the context of an objective reality. Many sense the contradictions, though none can explain them.

The relativity of values is a more difficult reality to locate than any material fact. The scientist's model of the atom as an analogy of the unfathomable depth of the smallest unit hints at Jung's discoveries: physics has revealed a strange quantum world beneath the surface, just as the universe of institutional religious ideals hides a subjective truth. 

Jung's symbolic view elaborated the nature of these opposed realities in terms of an unconscious opposite: thinking/feeling, rational science vs. the irrationality of a spiritual reality. Awareness of our dual natures signals neither the decline of religion nor the advance of science, but a new way of looking at both in which each becomes relative to the other.

For an interesting statistical look at the changing religious beliefs in America, see this link:  http://religions.pewforum.org/reports. 

"I tried to give expression to the process as it formed in me. I followed the unconscious directives without preconception as to where they might lead, allowing them as far as possible to create their own picture. The result was both a story and an example, an analogy, of Jung's model: a description of how psychic energy flows toward unconscious aims through the elaboration of ideas." --  A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

Jung began his empirical investigations of the psyche over a hundred years ago. He'd long been drawn to philosophy and religion in accordance with the spirit of the times and his upbringing. While he was intellectually inclined, his father was a country pastor who believed devoutly in man's service to God; his mother leaned toward the occult and even held seances.

As a psychiatrist at the turn of the last century, he saw an increasingly scientific world-view coming into open conflict with a religious outlook that had changed little over centuries. He was intuitively drawn to balance the schism and so began the task of reconciling a rational scientific method to an irrational psychic reality. It was largely misconstrued -- and no wonder:

Science was in full swing. The fruits of its method had gained rapidly since the Renaissance. New ways of thinking excited inquiring minds as never before, and rational science split from philosophy. Once the printing press freed knowledge from the clutches of the Church, and hungry souls peered beyond its veil, thought began to expand at exponential rates. So long had the natural mind been repressed by other-worldly fixations, nature became an oyster to be devoured in the sauce of a thousand new discoveries.

Jung's intellectual breadth straddled both views at a time when a major shift in consciousness was altering the way we see the world in unprecedented measure. His studies afforded him a wider historical perspective than the narrow rational approach of his clinical contemporaries.

A rigorous empiricist, he applied his comparative method to all things psychic. Myths, artifacts, dreams, art, and literature concealed unconscious processes invisible to the causal eye. Jung condensed his knowledge of symbols into core ideas and concluded that experience is shaped by pre-conscious forms which reflect psychic functions. Such ideas weren't new, but his empirical studies laid the groundwork for concepts which went beyond philosophical speculation.

He introduced his landmark theory of psychic energy in 1912. His, Symbols of Transformation, caught the new reductive psychology off-balance. It traced the flow of unconscious energy forward through symbolic ideas which compensated the causal method of medicine.

He saw causality as applicable only up to a certain point. Beyond its limitations, a prospective, goal-oriented viewpoint is necessary to discern the unconscious purposes of our motives. His ideas separated him from the more subjective biases of his mentor, though he later remarked that his psychological education began not with Freud but with Nietzsche.

He illustrated his efforts to reconcile a statistical, personalistic psychology with the historical facts of its nature through changes in philosophical and religious ideas. Below ego's temporal perspective, they reflected inner conditions which compensated consciousness. The objective orientation of the modern intellect is only the most recent addition to an animal psyche with its own innate demands. 

His, Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, amplified the model he advanced in 1912. Based on the laws of energy and the unconscious clash and cooperation of the opposed forces underlying its production, his adaptations of physical laws to psychology were verifiable and predictable -- but in a way logical thought was not accustomed to.

Symbolically, the facts of psychic opposition are projected in many forms: gods and devils, conflicts between the sexes, instinct and reason, the individual vs. society, progression/regression, and on through religious wars and ideological and political disputes. The compensating structure of conscious/unconscious reverberates in every human activity. These opposites reflect the dual nature of psychic energy. 

Because the unconscious puts a premium on the development of the individual as "the only real carrier of life", an increasing subjectivity accentuates certain functions to the exclusion of others. Jung outlined them in his, Psychological Types. Cultural changes reflect shifts in consciousness that can be compared historically to show trends in development.

Jung traced conditions which initially appeared as basic social structures but gradually dissolved into personal qualities. The enslavement of the masses in antiquity for the advantage of a privileged few was only one phase in a fluid process of psychological differentiation which re-emerged centuries later in the individual as a subjective function. The bias of type and attitude proved to be a new stage in the evolution of consciousness.

Just as a privileged few enslaved those subject to their tyranny, the preferred individual function grew focused enough to repress other functions. It expanded the creative abilities of individuals to contribute to cultural advancement. As consciousness sharpened its ability to focus, however, it also narrowed. The new gain in focus began to repress a more diffuse spiritual instinct. For every gain, something was forfeited.

Jung showed how instrumental to human development the unconscious force of the Christian message really was: the idea of the soul, the psychic stability of the smallest unit, the real carrier of life. It took root over centuries as a subjective function -- the not-so-conscious task of the individual in its most recent form.

"Overwhelming evidence found by an international team of scientists have shown that humans have altered the Earth to the point that the Earth has entered a new geological time period, a press release by the Australian National University (ANU) said on Friday... The exact starting date of the Anthropocene remains uncertain, although it is likely to be around the middle of the 20th century, at the start of the nuclear age and a time of accelerating population growth and rapid industrialisation."  (Read here.)

The story of the momentous shift in human consciousness taking place today continues to unfold in every facet of modern life. Whether we trace its roots to such ideas as the divine gift of earthly dominion or the psychology of in-fear-irority which drove the violent physical conflicts of our ancestors to master each other and the environment, the most consistent core, cause, and calamity of human history can be summed up in one word: vanity.

There's no doubt it was a powerful and effective compensation for an animal whose only real natural defense was the capacity to think creatively, to organize that thought and to act collectively. Without claw, fang, or physical prowess the only compensation Nature provided to balance a natural world with the new subjective experiment can also be summed up in one word: conscience.

Moral reflection is as fundamental to the spiritual imperative as the vanity which twisted our history into its present state -- the fate of every collective ideal since Daniel interpreted Nebuchadnezzar's fate. This is the same theme as Jung's dream of the turd which shattered the church: a symbol of the rejected function; what ego sees as waste and disgusting. (See also my post on the black dot.)

This wasted symbolic function, which is designed to recycle old forms into new life, is now excreted in such concrete and consuming mass that it collects on our shorelines by the tons, poisons our air and water -- even circles our planet like a swarm of biblical locusts. Reflection is painful; it's the psychological equivalent of the brute physical conditions of a natural world. Our present fate hangs on our ability to confront this strange, new psychological realm. It's the opposite of the one we fancy we've achieved:

"So, he is an evil animal, turning reason into the admiring mirror, instead of admiring reason. His nations take on the whole appearance of logic -- with courts and laws and constitutions and high principles: then the collective ego -- the instinct vanity makes blind -- takes their helm and the most elevated and noble nations make a daily business of such things as the lowest huddle of savages  would shun or kill a man for."

So wrote Philip Wylie in 1947. Many may sense the contradictions, though more often than not they appear everywhere but in ourselves. Yet, we are the parts that make up the whole:

"So, with Everyman's ego... First, the layer of familial vanities -- the false pride of his homes and parents. Next, the vanities of his school, his clubs, and lodges. Always, the vanities of his church and nation. He incorporates them. He calls them his faiths, his convictions, loyalties, friendships, codes, beliefs, and the noble appurtenances of his soul. They are logical to him and just. He is the court and the interpreter. They are his shining armor. (What  a way to meet subjective life, in armor!) They are his weapons, too -- the weapons of his righteousness..."

Thus life appeared in the mid-twentieth century. Its essence is still there, but each small pride is today becoming smaller and more diverse. The provincial fealties uniting a country half the population of today are breaking down, not just under the influence of technology in an increasingly interconnected global community but under an increasing subjectivity which signals a new stage of consciousness. Wylie saw it coming:

"The conscience is there and will always be. The reason is there. But they are not allied, in the man or his state or his church. Instead, because of temporal regard, of vanity, there always seems to be... a special condition, which appears to give leave... (backed by a myriad of private motives) to compromise some measure with principle.... Yet, one exists for the other -- or the older for the newer -- conscience for reason. To use the latter in any form limited by the ego is to set in motion, through conscience, and through instinct, the opposite danger."

That the new emphasis on objectivity and science is a compensation for an unconscious increase in subjectivity is not considered by either the sciences or the religions. Those in whom we entrust our futures, the politicians, are the nearest examples of the "greed and opportunism" (Wylie's words) with which this new subjective ego-stage replaces the collective values of the past:

"A world made to seem great by a few centuries of objective reasoning approaches, for want of equal subjective honesty, a state of uninhabitability -- not just from wars, from bombs, from deliberate plagues, or from the disastrous sequelae of wars -- but from its own psychological conditions... It is the individual of whom the mass is composed, and if he is of poor character, the group will have that quality... The individual represents the whole. To be changed, he must change himself."

This uncertain subjective realm is a symbolic one; yet we make, with everything in our power, concrete realities of it. To confront it requires introspection and a re-evaluation of everything we've been taught. My book (see also, Amazon) is just one small example of the way an individual begins to examine what we are.

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all... to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” -- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

(I owe the title of this post to Ruben Bolling, whose satirical cartoons I've long enjoyed.)

Heller's observation illustrates an inescapable truth. Though he described it in what most would see as an extreme form, the general psychic facts of the human predicament confirm that most of God's children do, indeed, revile their own natures such that their professed values will somehow turn into their opposites and yet they will still see them as ideals. How does it happen?

"Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all." It's in the nature of the beast Bolling facetiously characterized as "the only animal that can be the master of its own destiny."

Beneath the literary license Heller and Bolling used to make their points lies a more complex psychological picture than truisms or cartoons express: not only can anybody do it -- everybody does it. It doesn't require brains (see the pigeons in the cartoon): an instinctual spirit-condition which, as Jung stated, is a primary one in which consciousness must actively mediate the contradictory impulses it perceives. Whether fate or choice (or maybe both?) dictates our decisions is a paradox neither science, philosophy, nor religion will resolve.

"It merely required no character." -- an integral part of the subjective equation, but this is where the more complicated picture departs from the truism; such judgments are so relative to the individual, so personal, they generally land on those we don't like or can't understand for more intimate reasons than opinion or ideology: projections of subjective tendencies incompatible with conscious ideals.

"char·ac·ter

ˈkerəktər/

noun

1. the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual."

Even in its simplest form, character is defined as individual; but the psychic facts state also that we are products of human history. How we came to acquire these individual traits is a complicated evolutionary process as subjective as it is objective. Only knowledge of how the unconscious works can give us a sense of an internal opposite and how we perceive it -- if we perceive it at all.

As a concept, Jung described projection as a primary function which design is to relate consciousness in two directions, an original psychic condition. Our entire human history can be seen in terms of the conscious dissolution of projections in the development of the individual as well as the species.

This idea is far-fetched only to the ego who believes itself to be outside the laws of nature. Biology long ago described it: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." -- the individual relives the developmental stages of the species in condensed form: an analogical concept that applies to psychology in the most profound ways.

Only an inflated and disoriented ego could conceive such an outlandish notion as the Christian idea that man was "not of this world" -- a stage of development in which consciousness is still under the direct influence of mythic images and projects an internal reality onto an external one. Physics and astronomy proved its concrete impossibility; Jung, its psychic probability. Few conceived that the inner reality was of the same fundamental objective nature as the outer one.

But, many still live the unconscious ego-demands of the mythical image. I knew Christians in high school (living examples of the phylogenetic stage of symbolic medieval thought) who denounced me as a 'natural man' (I couldn't fight the statement) -- a contrast to their own 'other-worldly' spiritual desires which even then science (and an empirical psychology) had proved to be the products of its own imagination.

Science, too, is a product of human imagination. However far it may project itself, it will sooner or later come to understand that worlds are born from the forces of nature and not our contradictory notions of an anthropomorphic deity -- whether as ideas of a concrete body or a body of concrete ideas. Even as its symbolism re-appears in the scientific imagination: 'the God-Particle', 'the End of Science', the 'Theory of Everything' -- they remain the mythic image of an inflated ego which would know all the constituent parts of an objective reality yet little of its own or the whole or its effects on either.

You may read a synopsis of my book on Amazon. Also, I recommend John Ferric's website, Jung2.org. Check out his Article Library for an interesting collection of Jung-related subjects.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”  -- Genesis

This post concludes the main themes of A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious. Jung noted the above quote as a reference to the original bisexuality of the matrix of consciousness.

"Religious Images

Because it consists of a living history of our mental functioning, Jung wrote that any serious inquiry into the unconscious leads straight into the religious problem. This theme fully emerges in the second part of the book. As the poem proceeds, the intuitive side of religious ideas is explored. Job was the older anticipation of the individual who confronts the collective background to discover his or her own way; in so doing, a dialogue is entered into with the unconscious.

Job had achieved the material tasks of the first part of life. His faith, his connection to the Deity, was then tested through Jehovah's bargain with Satan. The bargain represents the interplay of opposites: the deeper unconscious process which precedes awareness. Job's sufferings comprised the circumstances which compelled him to reflect on, to make conscious, this inner exchange. According to the analogies of that time, Job's afflictions were depicted physically; today we would interpret them as projections of psychic conflicts. If we take the concrete qualities out of the figures and translate them into ideas, as we might attempt to do with our dreams, we can begin to see how they analogize psychic processes.            

When we reflect on these stories, we may grasp their symbolic meanings by relating them to our own emotional conditions. Christ, as the Son of Man, was a later anticipation of development; an ideal image of the individual which emerged from the spiritual darkness and brutality of antiquity for the purpose of further transforming our animal natures. His crucifixion is a powerful analogy of the tension of psychic opposites encountered by one who turns inward, away from the material world, and begins to discern his/her personal values apart from prevailing views.

As with Job, it is no coincidence that the myth of Christ revolved around his crucifixion at the mid-life point. Today, the spiritual changes reflected in the tasks of individuation stand, too, as a prototype of development in a new age. Just as these tasks make demands on those compelled to confront them, so they reverberate in the collective unconscious. Psychic reality is coming to bear on our times.

Alchemy

Jung’s devotion to the study of alchemy was an attempt to illustrate it as a connective stage between our historical religious outlook and the emerging scientific one. Alchemy was the intermediate form of the two views that later diverged. Like those of theology, alchemical ideas were psychic projections, though less collectively developed and therefore more expressive of natural tendencies.

As a science, alchemy paved the way to our modern conception of the world, but as a philosophy it expressed the very ideas missing in a one-sided Christianity: the problem of opposition between spirit and nature; the “evil” of the material world, of the repressed feminine and its dark urge toward a re-orientation to matter – to Mother Earth and the body and all that the patriarchal myth rejected. Alchemy connected to the inner counter-pole intended to balance and direct a distorted conscious view.

Jung's work parallels alchemical philosophy in that he sought a symbolic solution to the unconscious conflicts they represent today. The soul is a fact of emotional experience, a psychic reality. It can be seen as a natural function if we have some understanding of symbols. The symbolic view relies as much on feeling and intuition as thinking. For the intellectual standpoint, feeling is the opposed function designed to balance its orientation. The blinding of inner perception by an increasing outer-direction suggests the repression of confusion which occurs in any shift in perspective. Coming to terms with the soul means the development of emotions which would supplement the “masculine” rational viewpoint and relate it to the greater value of goals beyond its narrow focus.

********

The themes highlighted above are the core ideas of this book, and they carry something of the form of unconscious language with them. The analogies elaborating it are more circular than linear. Associations throng around the ideas to be explained as they compel attention, gradually becoming clearer with increased concentration. Images weave around and through one another to form deeper connections as they thread their opposing tendencies toward a uniform flow.

The compensating nature of the unconscious revolves around an objective organizing function which is presupposed, not only in dreams but in all natural processes. A subjective consciousness is filled out by its circular complexes of ideas; the urge to wholeness gives us a rounder and more complete picture of an inner reality which is just as objective as the outer one...."

“Everything psychic is pregnant with the future.” -- Carl Jung

"Ego and Intellect

The identification of ego with intellect contributes to this problematic conception of nature. It long slumbered in Christian theology as identification with an otherworldly God and a disdain for natural life: an image of self-rejection – one of the reasons guilt weighs so heavily in traditional religious ideas. Both are compounded through this identity, the idea of a Deity now yielding to science as it dissolves the metaphysical projections. For all our rational knowledge, we remain driven by the repressed “natural man” who serves the sensual world of material desire – just as he did many thousands of years ago. He personifies the unconscious need for a wider psychological perspective than just an intellectual one – and the internal guilt we never came to terms with because we never understood the reasons for it.

The uneven advance of self-knowledge finds no adequate ideas that would relate us to the ancient symbols and their functions, their irrational truths repressed for lack of understanding. They sink back into the unconscious where they become hostile adversaries. Due to changes in consciousness, they resurface in different guise today, though we remain possessed by their “suprapersonal” powers – paradoxically more distant now than ever. As our relation to ourselves is no longer expressed in the old images, the humbling effects of a higher authority dwindle into vague personal beliefs with no real emotional experience to support them. The result is a "puffing up of the ego-sphere” and the “brutish egotism”  to which Neumann refrerred: an exaggerated urge to individuality which has lost its relation to itself and the world.

From the scientific perspective, religious images are only fantasies. For the less developed intellect of the past, they served to influence thought’s exclusive tendencies. The objective trend today requires a new interpretation of the values they represent. The conflicts of the soul, the emotional tensions determining our deepest relations in the context of a greater whole, are projected onto fractional interests and ideologies with ever more threatening consequences.

Only the hard work of introspection can free the individual from the self-flattering and contradictory influences of ego. The recognition of a higher inner authority beyond will and intellect is a philosophical and religious process meant to bind us to humanity and our natural environment. For science to serve those greater purposes, its aims must be subject to a broader conception of psychic life.

Causality and Purpose

The causal thinking which orients our perception is opposed to the heavy, symbolic language of the unconscious. The one leads backward in time to a cause that produces effects, and the other leads forward to a purpose or goal without conceiving a cause. As a concept, the latter allows the thoughts, feelings, and intuitions evoked by images and symbols to shape themselves; to relate their associations to the pursuit of aims beyond conscious preconception.

Jung saw the idea of time as a primitive concept of energy, a gradient of potential, in that it flows forward in an irreversible way. This is an approximate analogy for his model of psychic energy and the reason time is capitalized in the text when referred to by the figures representing the unconscious. We can reverse it in our minds as in casual thought, but we should be aware that we are projecting subjective ideas onto the objective behavior of processes outside consciousness.

Each individual sees the world a little differently according to his/her personal interpretations: Jung's “subjective factor”. He stressed that it is “one of the necessary conditions under which all thinking takes place.” We may agree on certain general ways of thinking, but this in no way relieves them of their subjective quality. It is conscious thought which subjectivizes the ideas we associate. The historical advance from collective thinking to individual differentiation accentuates this subjective influence. The tendency toward specialization and the proliferation of “isms” attests this movement. Though still veiled by symbolic mythical influences, the undeveloped seeds of individuality are gradually emerging through the dense fog of collective history – or at least attempting to.

The opposition between causal thought and the forward movement of the unconscious, along with the projection of subjective viewpoints, create contradictions in our thinking. When looking inward, one of the most perplexing ones is the backward flow of dream-images as they draw on past experience. This paradox reflects the double meaning inherent in unconscious imagery, just as it is the basis of the causal view. The opposites are still fused together in the unconscious; it is the discriminating effect of consciousness that splits the original image and reveals only the partial aspect of its focus. Only the two forms of perceiving combined can give us a wider sense of who we are beneath our one-sided presumptions.

Past, present, and future are a single dynamic process in the unconscious. One of the functions of dreams is to express this creative flow through analogies with present circumstances. Since analogies describe how different sets of experiences conform, dreams often express immediate concerns through memory-images. They reveal the conformities of past and present events, our reactions to them, and the anticipations of tendencies which shape our futures. Jung stated: “Everything psychic is pregnant with the future.”

Next post: Religious Images, Alchemy.

“The world hangs on a thin thread; that thread is the psyche of man. How important is it to know something about it?” -- Carl Jung.

Jung analogized the difference in time-perception between consciousness and the unconscious through the idea of a million year old man. How would the time-awareness of such a being differ from our more temporal viewpoint? How do we treat him; how does he react to the changes taking place today?

In my last post, I outlined the major themes of my book as stated in the preface. In the next three, I'll offer the full text. These are the "facts of the case" for the million year old man as I understand them:

"The Human Animal

Civilization is a comparatively recent product when weighed against the immense stretch of time required for consciousness to emerge from the depths of instinctual nature. The beast tokens our animal ancestry, and the eons-long climb through the darkness of pre-history yet finds it just below the threshold of culture. As a symbol, it relates not only to our biological heritage through the body and its functions but to our sense of individuality, as it is through our bodies that we first experience ourselves as distinct and separate from others.

As humanity developed, the snake in the Garden evolved into Satan in the Old Testament, and both symbolize the opposition needed to distinguish conscious from unconscious. Each toddler repeats this contrary “no” stage in its development, and that opposition is a vital factor in the growth and consolidation of consciousness. It is a basic conflict between a “god-like” self-awareness set against a split-off instinctual heritage. The horns and tail of the Devil later became a graphic description of the animal urges repressed for their gradual conversion into the more humanizing social instincts embraced by Christian ideals.

As the newer myth took hold, the spiritual aim of building the soul, the personal relation to the Deity, sank beneath the weight of a still-developing and over-compensating collective ego, emphasizing the long, serpentine conflicts required for individual evolution. Psychologically and spiritually, ego-effects are a gauge of self-knowledge. Despite centuries of religious exhortation, they remain in much the same state now as in the past. The writer, Philip Wylie, described this idea as “the fatuous awe of the ape with the mirror.” The ape points not only to a stunted inner life but to regressive tendencies which both conceal and reveal the psychological dawn of those who would recognize and act upon their own inner opposition.

Nature and the Unconscious

This theme revolves around the image of the earth as a natural symbol of the unconscious. The earth and sun are the sources of all known life, suitable metaphors for the masculine and feminine forces which conceive it. Jung and Neumann have demonstrated that artifacts and symbols dating back to pre-patriarchal cultures intimately associate masculinity with light and consciousness, just as feminine images are associated with unconscious darkness and fertility: the earthly and the feminine, the creative matrix which bears and fosters the child of consciousness. Symbolically, masculinity refers to the heady principles of thought, the organizing of consciousness; the feminine principle dissolves separate tendencies to form emotional and physical relationships – properties of the soul.

The primitive mind long ago conceived the sun as spirit, reflecting processes which urged the coming of light to the dark, unconscious void of human origin. Earth and sun are psychological analogues for “feminine” relatedness -- the oneness of the unconscious, the body, and the individual -- and the dissecting, masculine character of consciousness. Together, they express the intermingling pairs of opposites and the penetrating form of their relationship. Male and female, spirit and matter, mind and body: all describe the two poles required for conscious orientation.     

Primitive sun-worship anticipated a Christian myth “not of this world”. Both signify the urge to distinguish conscious from unconscious, just as it is repeated in the individual. The movement away from nature toward an artificial fantasy-sphere is a projection of over-extension. Jung and Neumann suggested that the natural process of separating the two psychic systems has deepened into such a division today that we can no longer relate to our instinctual foundations – a kind of collective mid-life change in the centering and organizing processes of the psyche. Our intellectual inflation only accentuates our historical opposition to nature and the corresponding functions designed to relate us to earthly reality.

As the momentum of this drive toward conscious identity finds us alienated from ourselves, the unconscious attempts to re-orient us in the current swing by steering us back to itself, to nature and the earth, to our physical/emotional ground. The swing toward natural science describes a symbolic movement. The spiritual unfolding of our natures speaks only indirectly through its own language.

The creative spirit turns destructive when it is restricted to conscious aims and remains unconscious for too long, when a new stage is signaled. Our systematic abuse of the earth reveals an inner conflict: the oscillating poles of spirit and matter seek the undeveloped functions still in the sway of the old stage. The artificial environment we have created in the relatively short swing back to the material world exposes our Christian disdain for nature as a symbol of our animal heritage and a “god-like” ego which cannot accept its origins or its subjection to natural laws. We are literally poisoning ourselves and our children, even as exaggerated fantasies pursue grandiose notions of “conquering” space -- still driven by an inflated and unanchored ego which sees itself as “not of this world.”

Next post: Ego and Intellect, Causality and Purpose.

"It is still three minutes to midnight," the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote... announcing an update to its famous Doomsday Clock, whose estimate of the risk of global catastrophe has been ticking back and forth since 1947... The time has not changed since 2015, however, when the Bulletin's Science and Security Board last moved the minute hand, from 11:55 to 11:57. As the Bulletin's somber, sometimes scathing public letter makes clear, that is not cause for celebration." -- The Christian Science Monitor.

In my recent post on the 'Anthropocene Epoch', I tried to bring into relief a few ideas that point to the causes, effects, and purposes of the shift in values taking place today. They're not simple; they represent fundamental changes in the way we've traditionally seen ourselves and the world.

I've quoted Jung, Neumann, and Wylie extensively in my attempts to accent the importance of tackling this transition with a mindset that inspects itself: one of the first steps in dissolving the unconscious projections that find our rational, outer-directed thinking increasingly unsustainable. Their ideas are well known; but here I'll relate some of what I understand of them through the preface of my book:

"Beneath our scientific preoccupations, we remain in the stage of psychological awareness reflected in our religious heritage. Behind the curtain of moral judgment lurk the split figures of good and evil: a model of how we relate to our unconscious natures. Jung has described how those ideas reflect the positive and negative poles necessary to produce psychic energy: the sliding scale along which consciousness fluctuates in its on-going efforts to define itself. Just as it forms the path of collective history, so in the growth of the individual... the repression of the unconscious required for ego to strengthen and develop now creates circumstances which signal the need for a new relation to it -- to balance conscious direction; to relate it, make it relative to the counter-pole of inner development."

The inner counter-pole is a function of relation, not just in the religious sense of self-reflection and introspection, but for the individual to impact the world with creative reflections the group does not possess. This, as Jung has shown, is vital to understanding the unconscious demands that set the stage for changes in consciousness. Here, as stated in the preface, is a brief synopsis of the major themes in my book:

"The Human Animal

Civilization is a comparatively recent product when weighed against the immense stretch of time required for consciousness to emerge from the depths of instinctual nature. The beast tokens our animal ancestry, and the eons-long climb through the darkness of pre-history yet finds it just below the threshold of culture. As a symbol, it relates not only to our biological heritage through the body and its functions but to our sense of individuality, as it is through our bodies that we first experience ourselves as distinct and separate from others....

Nature and the Unconscious

This theme revolves around the image of the earth as a natural symbol of the unconscious. The earth and sun are the sources of all known life, suitable metaphors for the masculine and feminine forces which conceive it. Jung and Neumann have demonstrated that artifacts and symbols dating back to pre-patriarchal cultures intimately associate masculinity with light and consciousness, just as feminine images are associated with unconscious darkness and fertility: the earthly and the feminine, the creative matrix which bears and fosters the child of consciousness. Symbolically, masculinity refers to the heady principles of thought, the organizing of consciousness; the feminine principle dissolves separate tendencies to form emotional and physical relationships – properties of the soul...

Ego and Intellect

The identification of ego with intellect contributes to this problematic conception of nature. It long slumbered in Christian theology as identification with an otherworldly God and a disdain for natural life: an image of self-rejection – one of the reasons guilt weighs so heavily in traditional religious ideas. Both are compounded through this identity, the idea of a Deity now yielding to science as it dissolves the metaphysical projections. For all our rational knowledge, we remain driven by the repressed “natural man” who serves the sensual world of material desire – just as he did many thousands of years ago. He personifies the unconscious need for a wider psychological perspective than just an intellectual one – and the internal guilt we never came to terms with because we never understood the reasons for it...

Causality and Purpose

The causal thinking which orients our perception is opposed to the heavy, symbolic language of the unconscious. The one leads backward in time to a cause that produces effects, and the other leads forward to a purpose or goal without conceiving a cause. As a concept, the latter allows the thoughts, feelings, and intuitions evoked by images and symbols to shape themselves; to relate their associations to the pursuit of aims beyond conscious preconception...

Religious Images

Because it consists of a living history of our mental functioning, Jung wrote that any serious inquiry into the unconscious leads straight into the religious problem. This theme fully emerges in the second part of the book. As the poem proceeds, the intuitive side of religious ideas is explored. Job was the older anticipation of the individual who confronts the collective background to discover his or her own way; in so doing, a dialogue is entered into with the unconscious...

Alchemy

Jung’s devotion to the study of alchemy was an attempt to illustrate it as a connective stage between our historical religious outlook and the emerging scientific one. Alchemy was the intermediate form of the two views that later diverged. Like those of theology, alchemical ideas were psychic projections, though less collectively developed and therefore more expressive of natural tendencies..."

Visit Amazon for a general description of my book. See, also, this post for an example of the poetry.

(Note: the themes described under the headings contain only the first paragraph of elaboration.)

"A major shift in perspective accompanies today’s fast-paced super-highways of information. Jung's and Neumann's comparative studies of consciousness revealed patterns -- evolutionary swings in its focus throughout history. They saw such shifts as reflections of unconscious organizing and centering functions. Their purpose is to re-orient us at certain critical stages to the more diffuse aims of spiritual and psychological development. Until recently, those aims were the province of religion and philosophy. That has changed. The beginning of the new stage is marked by a revolutionary discovery in the trend toward objective inquiry: the old metaphysical images proved to be the symbolic language of an unconscious psyche." -- A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious.

As much of my effort concerns what I see as the increasing relevance of Jung's work, this quote from the preface of my book is a continuation of my last post on the cultural changes taking place today. While it's important to reflect on their origins and effects, this often reinforces the causal thought that only drags us further into the rut of conscious reasoning responsible for an increasing unconscious opposition -- the more threatening the more we depend on it. Though few took note at the time, Erich Neumann wrote in 1954:

“Typical and symptomatic of this transitional phenomenon is the state of affairs in America, though the same holds good for practically the whole Western hemisphere... The grotesque fact that murderers, brigands, thieves, forgers, tyrants, and swindlers, in a guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time. Their unscrupulousness and double-dealing are recognized -- and admired. Their ruthless energy they obtain at best from some stray archetypal content that has got them in its power. The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because in its one-track primitivity, it suffers none of the differentiations which make men human.”

A scant generation later, the dire conditions of WWII the New Science was to save us from finds us in the wake of effects which threaten in different ways than the old ideological perspectives of good vs. evil. That view is gradually giving way to a new stage of psychological awareness. The conscious world of today is more diverse and complex than ideological absloutes can sustain. Neumann:

“Not only power, money, and lust, but religion, art, and politics as exclusive determinants in the form of parties, sects, movements, and “isms” of every description take possession of the masses and destroy the individual.”

What "takes possession of the masses" is an expression of human need, though in unconscious forms so undefined and inarticulate that good and evil no longer express life as we once conceived it. The understanding of symbols, however -- because they're also individual and express personal needs -- is relative to subjective interpretation (as if no one ever knew what religious thought was for). I stated in the preface to my book:

"Our ideas of religion are changing, and there is no return to the old ways. Deep in the throes of unseen psychic forces, consciousness is being pushed in a new direction. The possibilities for further development hidden in the older ideas require a re-interpretation of the peculiar language of the depth from which they spring and the symbols it produces."

Not only are they changing in the West, but in the Middle East and Asia, too. It's no puzzle that Neumann's observations on the greed and opportunism which for centuries defined the unconscious opposite beneath Christian ideals have finally become apparent to the rest of the world.

Beyond politics -- the subjective clash of "isms" reflecting the opposed nature of unconscious regulating processes -- what are the unseen forces pushing conflict in the Middle East? Radical extremism is a new awareness, not of its religious history, but of the West and its exaggerated moral superiority; the underside of its professed principles: negative projections which bind opposed yet inter-penetrating ideas of progression and regression into mutual conflicts. But, the unconscious intent is to destroy such attitudes as repress its creative aims. When projected, they're lived concretely.

The purposes revealed in the current forms of ideological idolatry can't be seen through the lens of ego, reason, and belief. Listen to the "rational" solutions today's leaders offer: they lead only deeper into conflict. The reasoning hasn't changed -- only the consequences.

Conscious focus on objectivity cannot reason itself out of its subjective prison without a sense of purpose beyond temporal desire. Whether some see progress only through a single aspect of their personalities or are completely consumed by spiritual regression makes little difference. The fact is: all will be drawn into the conflicts for their own material investments in them: the nature of a global commercialism. History attests its primitive collective nature.

I quoted Philip Wylie in my last post: "It is the individual of whom the mass is composed, and if he is of poor character, the group will have that quality... The individual represents the whole. To be changed, he must change himself."

For a literary example of how one begins the psychological process of coming to terms with the unconscious, visit Amazon.

"This is a world not of sciences, but of religions... And it is a peculiarity of most religions -- indeed, a general condition of faith itself -- that those who believe in one eschew all others, regard their God or their gods as the true divinity, and their system of conduct as alone irreproachable. Thus the heart of religions... consists of a superior intellectual posture, an absolute intolerance." -- Philip Wylie, An Essay on Morals, 1947.

A funny thing happened as I wrote this. In my previous two posts about Wylie's thoughts on Jung's work, I wrote that his book was published in 1954. I've since emended it, but I wondered how it happened -- the central theme of the book: ego. My identification with the ideas transposed the copyright date into the year I was born.

It's a little thing, but little things constitute big things. Jung wrote about the subjective viewpoint: "The difference in the case of a single apperception may, of course, be very delicate, but in the total psychic economy it makes itself felt in the highest degree, particularly in the effect it has on the ego." Such subtleties may be reserved for the psychologist, though most educated people have an idea of the effects ego has on the practice of religion. Wylie:

"Through its mechanism, such passion as man has for the truth, his earnest wish to be right, and his desire to excel among his fellow men lie open to perpetual exploitation while his laziness, his irresponsibleness, and his will to conform shape him for the most accessible religion or for that religion most convenient to the nature of his personality, whatever it may be. Fear is, moreover, the father and mother of every religion and of all the gods -- their offspring, intellectual stupidity."

We have a different historical perspective today. The Church has lost its grip on collective life, and Wylie foresaw what the atomic age would bring:

"For half a century, and until the present crisis, the articulate intellect of the West has been satisfied that the Grail will be found by the scientific method. This "method," according to the commonest tenet, has already demonstrated that man is a chemical mechanism and thereby has shown that he has chemical needs (i.e., that man is "economic man"); it now merely remains for the physical truths of the universe to be exposed for the judgment and action of a creature that is basically reasonable, dependable and good. World happiness will ensue."

Though Wylie never expressly referred to the development of intellect and of science as the historical emergence of the individual -- the subjective factor -- he aptly described it:

"These assumptions represent a new Faith... but their subscribers... have found no means to associate insight with their own credulity. They have masterminded as much of the world as they could get their hands on. They are... the authors of the long, tedious cult of Realism. They have shown that religion is silly... the church an abomination. But... their disillusionments have been so numerous, so shattering, that their very behavior suggests they never had in mind a Principle but only a host of Sentiments mixed with a body of different little dogmas.

"When, as in Russia, religion has yielded to "realism," neither liberality nor humanitarianism has blossomed but only instinct regimented, internal ruthlessness, and an aggressive greed. Where the church has held sway, confusion has increased... Social discipline but turns... into professional regiments and tenders the keys of human zeal to opportunists... God's disciplines give the keys to a Vatican or, in a "free country" to the vanity of every private Presbyterian."

So Communism has given way to the new "individual", the regimentation of society no longer forced but craftily manipulated and sold back to us through a needy and regressive conformity. The greed and opportunism exploiting Marx's ideal of an "economic man" hides now beneath the guise of freedom and democracy.

"There is no Reason today in a whole world implemented by reason... A world wherein the best brains are no longer capable of turning back to the old gods. A world of physicists unmoved by Christian charity. A world four-fifths inhabited by the blindest bigots, born into credulity, worshiping snakes and ghosts and holy virgins. A world which has at last unlocked the secret of objects, whose strength is as the strength of suns because of the pure part of a few minds. A world of muscle, carnivorous, with a very little brain. A new dinosaur -- man, destroying, huge -- who dimly blinks at the shape of extinction, sees the coming of hunger in a planet his own strength has scourged. A stupid character who has sought violence as the means of his arrogant perfection and hypocritically to protect himself; who now sits in the gloom of an unradiant mind, waiting for radiation to consume his tissues. The one animal who ever feared himself -- as well he might!"

The unconscious god of fear is a religious one. The most basic facts of the psyche tell the story not of religion but of a religious attitude toward life.

"The latest large event -- the engineering of a large-scale atomic chain-reaction, because it involves not just the opinions but the bodies of our species, too -- has waked up every archetype, every instinct, in the billion-year-old breast of humanity. It is hoped by multitudes that the psychological shock will have even more benefit... in better times... from all the fragments of atoms men can harness. It may, if a man at last appreciates he is an animal and takes charge of himself instead of tendering the charge to religion..." -- Philip Wylie, An Essay On Morals, 1954.

As the once culturally binding religious and patriotic identifications of the last generation have steadily dissolved into more personalized forms of instinct-ego-possession, so have centuries of human conflict continued to shape a natural world to its one-sided reality. The relentless pursuit of conscious aims unmoved by motive or consequence, as Wylie inferred, now harbors an unspeakable destruction.

The further splintering of nationalistic and ideological interests today has only magnified the threats portended by WWII; though the psychological shock has been numbed by new diversions. Science may have realer benefits for humanity, as Mr. Wylie noted: "If we, who have proceeded to this magnificent truth by applying integrity to objects... now apply it equally to subjectivity and develop the science of our inner selves -- the morality -- that matches the outer knowledges.

"The reasoner, that is, must become reasonable concerning himself, lest the findings he has made by reason destroy his very body through a seeming of incomprehensibility and of irrationality which drives his reason mad. Panic -- national schizophrenia -- universal paranoia -- whole societies in manic ecstasy and depressive melancholia -- such has been the historical panorama of mankind..."

Though Hitler's Germany was the most tangible threat imaginable in the last century, the threats today are so diverse, diffused and intertwined, so subjective and integral to ideas of life today that catastrophe can no longer be measured solely by objective events.

The unseen danger lurking behind the current fix is the subversion of nature by a partially developed consciousness too technologically sophisticated and too unconsciously destructive to sustain it. It's as if Hitler presaged the coming of a new ego-stage -- now the common vision of a whole host of littler authorities but in no less fantastic guise.

"It is a common fallacy to believe that instinct is itself wicked, bestial, or witless... Moreover, the fashion for twenty or thirty thousand years had been to ascribe all good to the gods, and, for some centuries more, to ascribe gods to conscious logic -- a trick by which the intellectuals have grossly inflated their egos. Reason, the sophisticates say, is "good" -- all else irrational, and if not sinful, at least, non-good. Thus is instinct indicted."

Not only has Jung empirically described our deeply-rooted hostility to nature as a subjective condition become concrete through a profound lack of psychological understanding -- the archetypal images behind it projected into forms so diffuse as to be altogether lost today -- the illusion of this psychologically primitive ego-quality drives us as surely as it did in biblical times; only now in a vastly more complicated and temporal world where the only gods are human.

"Instinct is timeless; seen as enduring energy it is not evil... For, out of the conflict of its opposed forces it has developed awareness for a billion years... until it flowers in man as consciousness of Time itself -- past and future -- and consciousness of Mind itself. To seize from this immense evolution of subjectivity one function -- the newest and least developed, Reason -- to make it the platform of ego and to consign all else to limbo is as illogical as to pretend that an eye or a kidney is a person and that the meaning of the whole being is expressed by vision or excretion. Reason is by such means made a "faith" and practiced as another religion.

"Many... have become convinced as if of good and evil in this way and define any broader theorem by their own, unconscious opposites. They call all such ideas "mysticisms" -- perennial epithet of the baffled! Instinct seen whole creates infinitely more than it destroys; seen in pieces, it confuses.

"The instinctual conditions of men -- obsessions, I ought to say -- have become plain in the atomic light. The military men look in such and such directions and thus see such and such landscapes on the future. The scientists observe another set. The churchmen bear testimony to a third. The average citizen has his head jerked this way and that from one forbidding prospect to another... he makes a logical intelligent summation of his opinion -- according to his previous pattern. He sets himself, that is to say, against whatever he secretly fears the most. But that he was already set, he knows no more than soldier, physicist, or priest..."

Times have changed somewhat since 1954 -- but not for the better, I think. Commercial media, in its infancy then, has burgeoned into such an all-embracing ideology in itself, it defies any moral standard (the new ego-stage) -- more willfully, purposefully and methodically than any religion history has ever seen. Add the legislation of political corruption, a world-consuming regression to materialism and a mistrust of anything beyond the senses (because, unreal), and you may see the true character of the modern mass-man and the destruction created by the projection of inner images.

"If he sees the world as I see it -- a world of men... acting in national concerts, and privately, by instinct -- a world of men who rationalize what they do so that it will seem holy, or noble... or a personal evidence of "righteousness" -- a world of men who possess sudden and enormous physical strength but hardly more sense than apes -- and if this spectacle afflicts the days and hours of the reader with as much misgiving and anxiety as I have suffered from it, and if he finds in himself no extricability of his spirit from the general predicament, he will spend much time and effort and a great deal of thought in a search for a solution or resolution of his subjective quandary."  -- Philip Wylie, An Essay on Morals, 1954

I recently wrote a post on Philip Wylie's ideas about education. For those who are interested, I'd like to share his review of the nature of awareness according to Jung's psychology:

"Awareness is the instinct of the Instincts -- their awareness of themselves and of the material world.

"It has evolved.

"Its nature is animal, as is man's. He has merely abused the definition of "animal" to aggrandize notions of his soul and intellect.

"Man not only acts out his instincts, like all beasts, but puts them in the form of legends and identifies with the legends, so that he says, not, "Instinct compelled me," but, "Thor bade me,"  "Jehovah forbade me,"... and so on.

"As man evolved, so did his legendry, from the most primitive worship of the sun to the most abstract theology of this day.

"A particular form of awareness took place when, using time to settle a conflict of his instincts, man noticed the time-user: himself.

"The pride he invests in that notice -- his arrogant effort to fool and flatter himself -- is his ego. It is a temporal phenomenon which seeks to gratify the immediate wishes for pleasure and to put off or to conceal past and future pain as much as present pain. It is vanity. Individuals pool pride to make the egos of their every group, organization, state, society, and current historical age.

"The egoist not only refuses to recognize instincts because they are "animal" in nature and invents gods to hide that fact, but in godlessness he also owns an arrogance which he attributes to the "superiority" of his logic or the sciences. Every egoist, religious or atheistic, has therefore lost touch with his instincts; they operate without his consciousness, or with his consciousness impaired by religious descriptions of instinct which, being guessed at and arranged in part to abet vanity, do not coincide with truth... he is forced to rationalize his behavior -- to give intellectual, or institutional, or emotional "reasons" in explanation of blindly instinctual activity.

"Instinct operates according to its own thermodynamics and laws of motion. Its energy is never lost but only transmuted. Its inertia is such that it may keep a group of men moving in one way for generations, until a new fact or another instinctual force collides with it. For every fraction of instinct in conscious use, there is an equal and opposite amount in the unconscious mind. Thus the use of an instinctual principle by the ego sets up its opposite liability...

"The instincts in the unconscious mind, and all that the conscious mind is aware of, together with the material repressed by the individual, form the subjective equivalent of all our objective knowledge and identifications -- and more... since this psychic nexus contains not only the entire past of consciousness but the basis, the... rudiments, of future development.

"As the individual understands these ideas, he... experiences a continually new and expanding orientation of himself with other minds and the objective world. He does not merely predicate, but inwardly perceives the balance of instinctual urges.

"His best means to this... is his conscience -- that organ of instinct which gives him the elective opportunity to deal with every subjective fact as honestly as he deals with objectivity in science.

"And he will find that his personality is able to identify instincts by various methods of perception: logic, the values which provide him with feelings, and intuition. That is, he may weigh up the idea that arises from an instinctual urge, or the feeling, or a series of insights, which have used the combined functions of his brain.

"Because articulate man has... long translated instinct as legend, it... takes the form of archetypes -- images which represent fragments of the life-urge... heroes, demons, and gods. They appear also in dreams... Symbols, too, which appear in fantasies, in dreams, in primitive art are archetypal and represent the same effort to... describe instinct to the consciousness; symbols are deeply germane to the species because they began before there was any terminology fit for the discussion of such prodigious impulses, such conflicts... as early man experienced. Trees, snakes, rivers, crosses, are such primeval metaphors... the plots of the legends are archetypal: the modern businessman dreams stories that were told around campfires half a million years ago with the ancient purpose of reminding his ego of a particular instinctual pattern...

"Instinct alone has been acting through the evolving life of our planet for a billion years -- without verbalization. Words are clumsy to describe it..."

Time (and instinct) have confirmed Mr. Wylie's intuitions sixty-so years ago. Words may clumsily describe it, but the images of ideological conflict today are vivid.

Though we generally think of mid-life as an individual process, as a universal function, it applies to cultural changes as well. The similarities are notable, and Jung's, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, highlights the parallels.

Regarding the conversion of opposites at mid-life, Jung wrote: "Just as before... disorders arose because... opposing fantasies were unconscious, so now other disorders arise through the repression of former idols." The shift in focus over the last generation is undeniable; but increases in consciousness also depend on unconscious conditions:

"It is of course a fundamental mistake to imagine that when we see the non-value in a value or the non-truth in a truth, the value or the truth ceases to exist. It has only become relative. Everything human is relative, because everything rests on an inner polarity; for everything is a phenomenon of energy. Energy necessarily depends on a pre-existing polarity, without which there could be no energy... Therefore the tendency to deny all previous values in favour of their opposites is just as much of an exaggeration as the earlier one-sidedness.

"The point is not conversion into the opposite but conservation of previous values together with recognition of their opposites. Naturally this means conflict and self-division. It is understandable enough that one should shrink from it, philosophically as well as morally; hence the alternative sought, more often than conversion... is a convulsive stiffening of the previous attitude.... the symptoms, the rigidity, the narrow-mindedness... are unpleasant, not to say harmful; for their method of espousing a truth or any other value is so inflexible and violent that their umannerliness repels more than the truth attracts, so that the result is the opposite of the intended good. The fundamental cause of their rigidity is fear of the problem of opposites..."

Though religious fanaticism is an age-old euphemism for the fear of change, its cultural significance has declined since Jung's time. The swing toward natural science continues to gain momentum since the so-called Age of Reason in the seventeenth century. But, as Jung noted, any conversion has its consequences. The rejection of religious values inherent in the shift toward science, however, is governed by the same general fear of inner opposition as the old extreme...

The brutality of the French Revolution which followed that lofty precursor of western rationalism continued unabated into the twentieth century. Jung wrote during WWI (remember? the War to end all Wars?): "...the rational attitude of culture necessarily runs into its opposite, namely the irrational devastation of culture." A brief footnote in his 1943 revision reads: "As present events show, the confirmation did not have to wait very long.

"...one or other basic instinct, or complex of ideas, will invariably concentrate upon itself the greatest sum of psychic energy and thus force the ego into its service. As a rule the ego is drawn into this focus of energy so powerfully that it identifies with it and thinks it desires and needs nothing further. In this way a craze develops, a monomania or possession, an acute one-sidedness which most seriously imperils the psychic equilibrium."

The shift from metaphysics to an "objective" science is the new monomania. Technology, media, and the atrophy of a collective value-system contribute to a paper-meche individualism while denying the subjective factor; contradictory unconscious tendencies whose energy exceeds intent appear only as conscious exaggerations. Ego-values subvert common goals and dissolve group-identities into anonymous aggregates -- for those ambitious enough to exploit them. They're beginnings of a new reality, but to understand what it points to requires a dual perspective  of unconscious functioning:

"The passion, the piling up of energy in these monomanias, is what the ancients called a "god,"... A man thinks he wills and chooses, and does not notice that he is already possessed, that his interest has become the master, arrogating all power to itself. Such interests are indeed gods of a kind which, once recognized by the many, gradually form a "church" and gather a herd of believers about them. This we then call an "organization." It is followed by a disorganizing reaction which aims to drive out the devil..." The conversion into the opposite "... that always threatens when a movement attains to undisputed power offers no solution of the problem, for it is just as blind in its disorganization as it was in its organization."

The decline of the Church means evolution, and it moves forward of its own accord. Only self-examination dissolves the projections of unconscious gods onto the ideologies that shroud the real personality. The seeds of their solutions begin with those who find meaning in their self-division; and our "bipolar" natures also provide symbolic solutions beyond conscious ingenuity. To think we would "cure" this condition only adds to the conflicts. Jung wrote of today's misunderstanding of the psyche:

"No matter how beautiful and perfect man may believe his reason to be, he can always be certain that it is only one of the possible mental functions, and only covers that one side of the phenomenal world which corresponds to it. But the irrational, that which is not agreeable to reason, rings it about on all sides. And the irrational is likewise a psychological function..."

This is surely the reason we were cursed with the "disease" of spiritual conflict: to explore the meaning and purpose of development; not just as individuals but as contributors to our evolution. Will we seek solutions to the excess energy of unconscious functioning through yet more technology?

The threat of extinction -- the greatest power science owns -- may force us to come to terms with it sooner rather than later. The development of unspeakable instruments of destruction implies reason and intent. This must be apparent to a psychology devoted to discovering how our minds work; that's its business -- isn't it? Or maybe the business is part of the problem.

Austrian ethologist (animal behaviorist, different from the human ego-version), Konrad Lorenz, was of a class of empiricists whose integrity stood out in the field of observational science. His book, On Aggression, was a model in his discipline. His dedication to understanding nature equaled his love of animals, and his book was a tribute to both.

One study he recounted was an experiment by Wallace Craig on the effects of loneliness in the blonde ring dove. He separated a male in a cage to see which objects might elicit courtship activities when deprived of a female:

After several days he was ready to "court a white dove which he had previously ignored. A few days later he was bowing and cooing to a stuffed pigeon, later still to a rolled-up cloth, and finally, after weeks of solitary confinement, he directed his courtship to the empty corner of his boxed cage where the convergence of the straight lines offered at least an optical fixation point."

Lorenz explained that the inner threshold of release sinks in proportion to the lack of external stimuli. Instinct regulates specific energies according to natural imperatives. Lacking the specific object of its intent, the energy is expended on the closest available analogy to it.

Many have difficulty admitting that humans are subject to the same instincts as the rest of the animal kingdom, though anyone seeking company in a bar can relate to the dove in the cage. It seems "the girls all look prettier at closing time." But, whether we're talking about birds, bars, babies, or bibles, similar functions are at work. That's just the body, though, right? God gave it to us (only once-removed from His image) not only to tempt us but to: "Be fruitful and multiply... and subdue the earth..." However haughtily science may deride religious belief, it still operates on that very assumption.

Conversely, we've long been dangerously over-populated, and an unconscious science has also devised quick and terrible remedies for it when nature deems it no longer sustainable. Aims differ according to higher needs, and biological impulses contain the seeds of psychic functions on higher levels.

Lorenz quoted from the witch's kitchen scene in Faust where Mephistopheles proffers the potion which will enable Faust to fall in love: "With this drink in your body, soon you'll greet/A Helena in every girl you meet." -- an example of the mythic complexities of the sexual instinct in a conscious animal.

Jung showed that the gulf between the natural intent of an unconscious function and its conscious fulfillment is compensated by longing -- libido, his term for psychic energy, from the Latin, lust or desire. He showed in his, Symbols of Transformation, how the energy originally arising from the sexual instinct is converted into higher cultural aims through symbolic ritual.

But, he also argued that rational concepts can't replace living experience: the value of symbol and ritual. He compared it with the knowledge of a disease as opposed to having it. History shows, too, that even the most ardent believers experience the doubt and conflict which fill the divide between a function's natural intent and conscious ideas about it -- a process of discovery none deny except they be trapped in the past.

Like the dove's courtship to the rolled-up cloth, an instinctual need must be acted out in some form. If consciousness deviates too far from it, its energy is expended in compensating activities: exaggerations, compulsions, obsessions, "isms", and all the rest of the litany of modern psychic conflict.

Compare Wallace Craig's observations with the changes reflected in today's shift from theology to science to technology to media diversion. Like the dove in the cage, Jung showed that the religious function can't be deprived of its energy even where there's no conscious outlet. It re-appears in substitute forms which resemble the original intent but don't satisfy it.

Even when we profess spiritual beliefs, however sincerely, we have difficulty recognizing that we also identify with them; and in the identity, we worship the belief through its object. An unconscious opposition then creates unintended consequences designed to re-direct it -- like the unconscious effects of the creation/destruction problem on science and religion.

It's difficult enough to reconcile any ideal with a psychic reality, however truly believed in -- how much more so when one has forfeited the spiritual reflection intended to inform it? Inner responsibility is compensated by an extraverted group-think as contradictory as it is unconscious.

The dizzying complexity of information today is indigestible without the feeling-values needed to orient and organize it. Science and technology feed commercial innovation, and a deceptive media markets it to keep us from reflecting on what we're doing; if we can be induced to identify with things, we'll need more and more of them to fill the psychic void. We sit staring at "the empty corner... "

Jung demonstrated that the only faculty that makes sense or meaning of the world is the reflective instinct; that it's religious and philosophical nature is a reality and will not be altered: an individual function that no group possesses but is possessed by through identification.

Unconscious conflicts, however, produce symptoms. They appear in relief in the individual, but also reflect cultural undercurrents. To a rational, scientific psychology which has rejected the study of religion as psychic experience, symptoms mean "disease". A simple animal analogy can't tell us how doves feel, but we could learn a lot more about stuffed pigeons with a little knowledge and reflection.

Read more on the symbolic aspects of instinct.

Philip Wylie was a preacher's son; mainly, a fiction writer in the 40's and 50's. His keen intellect tackled the controversies of his day through the characters in his novels. He was self-educated in that he had no degree, though he'd studied physics and psychology at Cal State and Princeton, "beyond the point at which doctorates are given." He was a critical thinker in pursuit of subjective truth. 

I stumbled onto An Essay on Morals in high school. It was dedicated to C. G. Jung's psychology, the conceptual underpinnings of Mr. Wylie's philosophy. His social critique became a guiding thread in my own search for a subjective truth. These are some of his ideas:

"What shall we do?" he asked, concerned for the deepening psychic split he saw reflected in the conflict between science and religion. He described its resolution as an inner search: "The answer for the individual is clear. Through the use of his conscience, and with insight into natural law, he can extend his awareness as far as he will.

"To be conscious of the instincts and conscious in the instinctual sense is his chief function. Learning psychological law and meditating it in the intellect is of little avail. It must be applied by the man to every thought and notion, dream, fantasy, memory and motive. The illumination that ensues takes the form of inward experience, of heightened consciousness, of the fulfillment of the newly educated mind through performance."

He explored the possibilities of a society oriented to understanding its nature in the interest of collective consciousness and not just for the benefit of a few: "I think... education could profit if it were to embark upon the serious, subjective instruction of wisdom in the order man has learned it. Anthropology provides the proper schedule for subjective study by the child."

These are things mature, intelligent beings ponder when they envision their children's futures. When did you last hear a politician or preacher express such ideas? Very different notions of profit drive today's leaders.

"The great advantage of the deep, inner realization that man is an animal lies in the fact that it reveals the amount of work and effort he must expend to accomplish his good purposes -- to use his virtues creatively and his destructive impulses for the destruction of that which impedes his consciousness, beginning with his ego. The very acceptance of our animal nature and origin and state is, in itself, the biggest blow to the ego. We have imagined that, as super-beasts, as animals with souls, or animals made superior with reason, there ought to be for us a quick and handy way to personal perfection and the achievement of Heaven on Earth. But if we know we are animals, we see how we must evolve, and that the more conscious we make ourselves, the sooner shall we evolve."

He saw exposing the myth of racial purity as basic to a modern education in a global community: "... national and racial prejudice is founded upon ignorance and fear... he is afraid of other races because he is afraid of himself.

"...to protect himself from the knowledge of his constant panic, he develops an arrogance of race... and nations. This, he passes on to his son, generation after generation...  its attending facts ought to be taught to the ten year old, and not just in college to a few candidates for philosophical doctorates.

"Next on the public curriculum should come that significant finding about man which next occurred in history: the discovery of the unconscious mind... The home and the schools of an animal that knows its universal kinship with beasts will be ready to receive the ideas. Sex symbols, totems, tabus... all the hidden, ageless patterns and data of sex should be taught so they are incorporated in the common mind and the common behavior.

"Society by then would be sufficiently conscious... productive of responsible individuals, and sufficiently understanding of its own instincts, to govern itself on a world basis and maintain at the same time, peace and liberty. Half of the ill -- the psychosomatics -- would heal. Prisons and asylums would empty. Common knowledge of psychology would supplant the shortage of psychiatrists. These gentlemen bemoan the incidence of neurosis and madness today. The idea that their science could become the property of home and school would irritate and maybe amuse them: they are haughtily learned." (Whether they bemoan it as much as exploit it today is another question.)

Is it just another ideal in our search for meaning? Maybe, but it may also be more realistic than any we've conceived; one which would incorporate our highest achievements through education. The subjective complement to objective knowledge, our psychic history, however, is still buried deep in an unconscious religious heritage, far below scientific inquiry, now to peer back at us through fractured ideological and political interests. Only the conflicts and prejudices of the past remain; that we never absorbed its wisdom is plain. 

Wylie saw Jung's model as a way to heal the schizophrenic effects of ideological differences though attention to our own natures; that we study ourselves as ardently as we study objects. Self-study indicates that we value who we are. That subjective "truth" is, in a scientific age, still defined largely by ideology and ego reflects an undeveloped soul (Russian philosopher, Gurdjieff, described it in the corporate businessman of the 1950's as a "small, deformed thing"). Why would we give attention to something we don't value?

As Wylie suggested, the recovery of the soul begins in the confrontation with ego. A recent shift in values was all that was needed to strip the bright veil of Christian ego-worship and expose its underside. The new spiritual authority is now the naked god of technological materialism. Sadly, for the modern scientific world: "... meditating it in the intellect is of little avail."

How can we be educated in a world where competing ideological interests seek only to capitalize on our lack of development? How do we recover the subject in a world of objects?

Don't read here if you're not concerned about the future.

In Christianity, the mystery of coming to consciousness is represented as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden. Jung described the serpent as a symbol of nature's transformation in a twilight half-human which gradually came into opposition to itself. It didn't happen suddenly.

Myths contain an ambiguous wealth of unconscious information which can't be explained discursively. The psyche is a diffuse organ of perception whose wider perspective is supplemented by the focus and detail of consciousness. Beyond rational science lies an irrational pre-history of sensory, emotional, and intuitive functions that point back to a remote past -- but, also to the future: the psyche is is a mysterious continuum in which past, present, and future co-exist outside our conscious conception of time. 

In its most urgent sense, the function of life is adaption to immediate reality, though the value of memory-images confirms that an orientation to the past is indispensable for it. But, time-awareness implies possibilities as well. As myths also portend collective tendencies, dreams sketch out possibilities for individual development; it's how the unconscious deity of wholeness reflects our fate -- pardon the subjectivity.

Jung demonstrated how the snake symbolizes instinctual wisdom: the winding by-paths of earth-bound existence, the frightening hidden nature of an animal reality which strikes suddenly from unseen places, the forked tongue of a dual nature which deceives as it yet speaks the truth. As we evolved, so did the image -- into a part-human figure as did older animal deities which described the dawn of humanity.

Over the many centuries of evolution depicted in the Old Testament, the serpent reappeared as Satan, much as the Sphinx symbolized the humanization process in Egyptian mythology. It seems crazy to me today that as a youth I was instructed to believe literally in such a mythical figure as had the tail, horns, and hooves of an animal yet to realize its full human potential; though, I see it in myself and the world, still.

For many, it's difficult to identify anything real in it. To the rationalist and the atheist, it's merely silly. To the politician and the preacher, it's more a tool for manipulation. But, even the true believer is coming to doubt its significance in an age of literal material truth. A major shift in consciousness finds it mostly in the museum of outdated fantasy -- diffused back into the unconscious -- waiting to be re-defined. But, historical analogy is essential for a sense of the symbolic blueprint of unconscious functioning.

In the biblical context, snake and devil condense into one idea the opposition required to accept or reject; to choose amid a world of possibilities in a human prototype slowly awakening from a dreaming instinctual awareness. Expulsion from the garden signified that fateful split from unconscious nature, its secret relations eloquently and poetically portrayed as the drama between god and man.

The last collective image describing the dark side of our natures is that figure of the Devil. Whose mind doesn't respond to the leering mythical half-beast's evil grin, the long arrow-headed cat's tail, the beastly horns, the cloven hooves? These attributes demand to be reassembled in a new way to form any meaning in the strange guise they present. He's now the scattered and undefined anxiety of fear, chaos, confusion, and projected hostility in the new dawn of an uncertain technological future.

The horns of this fading fantasy figure equate with the forked tongue, and both point to a dual nature: the fork in the head, a form of awareness, though a primitive one; the tongue, an ancient reminder of an opposed consciousness which would question even a god (a property the snake possessed, too, in the ancient trinity of animal, man and deity) -- and at the same time, the earthly opposite of the Word of humanity's highest aspirations.

Someone once told me of a dream he had of this very picture of the devil, its tail twitching like a cat's tail as it grinned eerily in its sphinx-like repose. It's this cat-like, feminine quality of repressed emotion which the unconscious seized upon to inform him of his dissociation. The arrow-head on the tail was the piercing depth his unconscious nature intended to point out his rational misconceptions of himself.

The Devil's unconsciousness is symboled by his dark nature, though his defining color is red. Erich Neumann described redness as instinctual excitation; and the sensuality of material desire now bids our loftiest scientific minds to uncover all its depth -- in concrete form. The beast would become human -- but it needs the assistance of other psychic functions. Goethe expressed something of the sort in the witch's kitchen when Faust was in need of a magic potion to make him fall in love: "It's true the Devil taught her how to do it. And yet the Devil cannot brew it."

His hooves describe the instinctual foundations of herd-like collective instincts which can easily overpower the freedom of the individual. Jehovah's commands, however, forbade the eating of herd animals with split hooves, reinforcing the idea of dissociation, but also the need for union which the myth of the garden decreed was the central theme of an individual spiritual life.

These ideas lie in the images as symbolic pointers to our division and the need for a spiritual reconciliation. The depth psychology which unearthed this new way of looking at our histories has only recently been established. The science of it is not yet recognized. 

For an example of how this associative process works below the surface of consciousness, continue reading or visit Amazon.