I enjoy and make use of a great many of the ideas of Carl G Jung. And I cannot confidently say whether the current Jungian ideas I have issues with are ideas Jung would have espoused, or merely the interpretation of his ideas by other people. But, I wish to raise some issues I have with views expressed by a number of people I know who identify themselves as Jungians. I do because I see how things relating to the conscious existence of humans can so easily be muddled and obscured by our unresolved emotional issues hiding within our use of esoteric terminology. I think the stripping away of esoteric terminology, or terms specific to one school of thought or another, is one of the most basic tasks of anyone wanting to understand the human condition.
In the interest of setting forth some commonly used concepts about the human condition and our conscious existence, I will attempt to bring some clarity to issues many people familiar with current Jungian thought, in my view, seem to be stumbling over. I think they stumble partly because of the unnecessarily esoteric shape of the jargon the Jungian school has gravitated toward, and partly because the psychological issues of our species keeps us from seeing the human condition clearly. In any event, taking concepts out of their orthodox school clothes and dressing them up in the common language is always going to be a necessary exercise for anyone wanting more than a rote-learned sense of things.
DANCING WITH KALI
Among many Jungians there seems to be a mistaken notion that one can and should dance with the dark side of their existence. The error in this idea is that it is only dark to us because we are so terribly indisposed to dance (harmoniously interact) with it. Like the Goddess Kali, this dark aspect of us (otherwise known as the unconscious mind) is both a nurturing mother and horrifically scary source of destruction. This combination of associations has rendered our species less and less comfortable interacting with its unconscious mind in any but the most superficial of ways.
Even among Jungians this trepidation in interacting with the unconscious mind is apparent in the tendency to hold onto the symbolically encoded images of the unconscious with no interest in, and no intention of decoding that symbolism. There is a militant insistence on swallowing the symbolism of our life (including the archetypal images) whole, without any effort made to understand their real meaning for us. It is like tattooing an image of some god/goddess on our arm and expecting it to change our life. It is as if we think we can somehow get the value of those unconsciously generated statements to our cognitive mind by just hanging around them.
We get zero value from un-decoded symbols. Resistance to this psychological fact of life is itself a product of our fear of the unconscious mind. It matters not how much we mutter esoteric terms and concepts, our unconscious mind knows that we are enormously afraid of her and she will not rest until we face and resolve our fear of her. And she is a terrible goddess when we think to oppose her.
The darkness is only dark because of unresolved fear. We identify with one pole of the psyche and progressively come to fear the other. The Gods and goddesses of our religious mind are not naturally dichotomistic principles. They represent naturally complimentary aspects of our psyche. The conflicts and strategies surrounding our concepts of these psychic representations (as represented in myths) is an expression of the loss of harmony between these naturally complimentary aspects. We lose harmony between the Yin and the Yang, between the Yoni and the Lingam, between male and female principles, when we lose our harmonious connection with the unconscious mind. And our entire species has lost this connection, which is the core issue being addressed by every religion known to humankind.
THE CONFUSIUON OF DUALITY WITH DICHOTOMY
Another mistaken idea many Jungians seem to have is in thinking that dualism is a problem. It isn't. Dichotomy is a problem, not dualism. All cognitive thought is constructed upon dualisms. Concepts are born in a process of differentiation, which is essentially how duality is produced. We cannot be cognitive without duality. This overreaching in our connection with duality is further evidence of our fear of the unconscious mind. When we fear the unconscious mind, instead of loving it and working with it, we inevitably attempt to subjectively control and suppress and define it. When we do this, we then dichotomize naturally complimentary components. Yin and Yang are complimentary concepts; they are not delusional constructs because they are dualistic. What can render them delusional is un-faced, and un-resolved fear. Fear engenders subjectivity, and subjectivity manifests as a polarizing delusion.
We come to fear Yang, or Yin, and polarize these two naturally complimentary components of the same set. Yin cannot even exist without Yang, and vice versa. Yin can only survive and thrive to the extent Yang does, and vice versa. To confuse dichotomy with duality is not simply a matter of ignorance, it is an emotional reaction born of fear-driven polarization, and, it is thus also fabulously ironic. At the very moment one is trying to address the problem of dichotomistic, polarized thinking, one employs dichotomistic, polarized thinking to achieve their goal.
For example, we don't need a matriarchal society any more than we need a patriarchal society. We need a society in which both genders are working in complete harmony with each other. We don't need to cling to the feminine principle. We need to see how the feminine principle can exist in perfect harmony with the masculine principle, and vice versa.
We can march on Trump's Washington all we want, and all that will ever come from such a venture is further polarization. We need to face our own shadow, not root out everyone else's. Kali is scary because she represents our unconscious mind's efforts at overcoming our Asuras of fear. We fear our compliments, and we fear our unconscious mind's devices deployed to address and resolve our fears.
Kali would ask a feminist to face the masculine in themselves, she would not ask them to embrace the feminine. She would do this because she would know that it is the masculine that a feminist would fear and that unless and until she faced her own covert masculine self she would never genuinely be able to embrace her inner feminine self.
Kali would ask a dogmatic Christian fundamentalist to embrace the mystery of spiritual life, because she would understand that this fundamentalist is afraid of anything that might challenge their dogmatic grasp of existence, and that unless and until this fundamentalist could embrace the spiritual experience part of them, they would never have a meaningful or living connection with their dogma.
Kali would ask a shame-ridden moralist to embrace their most evil desires, because she knows that the shame of this one has caused them to unjustly condemn necessary aspects of their own humanity, and that unless and until they could love their instinctual life, they would never experience a real human moral existence.
She would ask a conscientious, empathic, highly intuitive co-dependent soul to embrace their willful, desire-driven, reason-driven self. She would do this because she knows which aspects of our humanity we are afraid of and have been pushing into the shade of our life, and that until and unless we embrace these scary, selfish-looking aspects of our self, we will never truly be altruistically loving anyone.
One does not dance with the scary aspects of kali, and one mostly just bows in complete awe of the more pleasant, nurturing motherly aspects of kali. The scary aspects of Kali often manifest as our compulsions, our obsessions, even our psychosis. Anyone want to sign up for a workshop on dancing with those aspects of their existence? Yet, those aspects of our existence is Kali acting to restore us to a fearless existence. And the only way forward into an effective worship of Kali is to decode the symbolic language that she, the unconscious mind, speaks to us in. And doing this requires us to address the shame issues that threaten our idea of ourselves and render us compulsively security conscious, conservative beings.
