Carl Gustav Jung
If, for whatever reason, you no longer find meaning in the religion you were raised in, or if you were raised in no religion at all, but are haunted by a gnawing sense of something missing in your life, what do you do? Do you just pick up some belief at random? Do you conclude, perhaps somewhat hastily, that life has no meaning at all?
If you’re lucky, if you’re open to it, life sends you pointers.
In 1970, life sent me first Colin Wilson’s book, them a book by Carl Jung titled Modern Man In Search of a Soul. I picked up Colin’s book not knowing why, but Jung’s title spoke to me. I’m always picking up books, but this was particularly good listening. (I think we were in London at the time.)
The thing to remember about Jung is that he wrote not as a philosopher, nor as a student of history, nor as a cultured European surveying life – though he was all of those – but as a physician, a psychiatrist, reporting on what he had observed in a lifetime’s medical practice. That is, rather than beginning with a theory and searching for evidence for it. he formed his theories on observed facts. He wrote that he had analyzed many thousands of dreams before he began to formulate his conclusions.
Much later, I would learn (in Psychology and Religion) that Jung’s thought and experience had brought him to five basic conclusions on the religious side of the psyche:
- A spiritual element is an organic part of the human psyche.
- Such elements are regularly expressed in symbols.
- These symbols reveal a path of psychological development which can be traced backwards toward a past cause and forward toward a future goal.
- This goal is expressed by images of completion in a whole Self which is unique for each individual, formed by integration of the ego and unconscious.
- This whole is characterized by all the qualities of numinousness, unconditional authority, and value which also belonged to the image of God.
Of course I didn’t know any of this in 1970. Nonetheless, something guiding me knew that this was the influence I needed. Here was a man who brought intellectual rigor and clear-eyed perception to the question of religion and spirituality and our situation in life.
I needed that. Everything within me said that (for me at least), Catholicism, Christianity, was not enough. I don’t mean that it isn’t true, exactly, more like, it isn’t true enough. Or probably a better way of putting it is to say that Christianity as I saw it being interpreted wasn’t enough. There was truth there; I could feel it. But the way it was being interpreted was dumbed-down, to the point that intelligent people mostly gave it lip service at best. I knew the atheists weren’t right, but Christianity as I was seeing it wasn’t either. So what were the facts? What were the religious facts?
It isn’t like Jung could give me the answers. But he could, and he did, give me some of the questions. Like Colin Wilson, he shone light on areas of life that were darkness to me. In a word, he reassured me that my instincts weren’t wrong, even if I couldn’t yet say what was right.
A few relevant quotations from Memories, Dreams, Reflections,, to give you a faint sense of what he offered, and offers still.
“The idea of rebirth is inseparable from that of karma. The crucial question is whether a man’s karma is personal or not. If it is, then the preordained destiny with which a man enters life represents an achievement of previous lives, and the personal continuity therefore exists. If, however, this is not so, and an impersonal karma is seized upon in the act of birth, then that karma is incarnated again without there being any personal continuity….
“I know no answer to the question of whether the karma which I live is the outcome of my past lives, or whether it is not rather the achievement of my ancestors, whose heritage comes together in me. Am I a combination of the lives of those ancestors and do I embody those lives again is to mark have I lived before in the past as a specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life and I am now able to seek a solution? I do not know. Buddha left the question, and I like to listen that he himself did not know with certainty.
“… When I die, my deeds will follow along with me — that is how I imagine it I will bring with me what I have done. In the meantime it is important to ensure that I do not stand at the end with empty hands.” (pp 317-8).
&&&
“Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about the daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the short-sightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upwards from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.” ( pp 326).
&&&
“Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence. We stand perplexed and stupefied before the phenomenon of Nazism and Bolshevism because we know nothing about men, or at any rate have only a lopsided and distorted picture of him. If we had self-knowledge, that would not be the case…. [W]e have no imagination for evil, but evil has us in its grip. Some do not want to know this, and others are identified with evil. That is the psychological situation in the world today: some call themselves Christian and imagine that they can trample so-called evil underfoot by merely willing to; others have succumbed to it and no longer see the good. Evil today has become a visible great power. One half of humanity battens and grows strong on a doctrine fabricated by human Grassi is a nation; the other half seconds from the lack of a myth commensurate with the situation. The Christian nations have come to a sorry pass; their Christianity slumbers and has neglected to develop its myth further in the course of the centuries.” (pp 330-331).
And finally, as quoted in Jung’s Contribution to Our Time, by Eleanor Bertine, p 57:
“One of the toughest roots of all evil is unconsciousness, and I could wish that the saying of Jesus, ‘Man, if thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed, but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed, and a transgressor of the law,’ were still in the Gospels, even though it has only one authentic source. It might well be the motto for a new morality.”
Need I add that this is but a teaser? There’s enough in Jung to last you at least the rest of your life. It seems to be a matter of seek and you will find, ask and the way will be opened.