[The top of this blog is in very light but still readable print for some strange reason which I have been unable to correct. After the ad, however, the print is fine. So read on and enjoy.]
I received this invitation from Chiron
Publications to a Jungian webinar recently. It immediately jogged my memory of
the poem by William Butler Yeats, The
Second Coming, which is shown here below the webinar ad. Having spent the
last few months reading and absorbing many of the original Gnostic sources and
texts from the first through the third centuries CE, I realized that I had a
response to the overall questions of “what is happening and why”? I also
realized that Yeats, who wrote this poem after the end of World War 1, is
making particular references to the ominous consequences of a devolved
Gnosticism being reborn in our postmodern world. A historical perspective of
the effects of the original Gnostic cultural wave is valuable if not vital to
the understanding of our current world situation. It seems that there is a new,
dark, dualistic, puritanical, Gnostic current flooding the world now and that conscious
choices must be made now to stem the tide. I touch on these matters following
the Chiron Publications webinar ad and the above-noted poem. I do hope that the
presenters in the webinar, the “six blind Jungian monks,” take the time to
consider this “food for thought” offered here.
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Featuring: Thomas
Singer, Murray Stein, Warren Colman, Betty Sue Flowers, Joerg Rasche,
and Steve Buser
Live Next Wednesday
October 19, 2016;
11:30AM to 2:30PM
ET
Six Blind Jungian Monks Tackle Questions of The
Psyche, Politics and Culture of the Western World in the Era of
Brexit, Trump, Immigration and other turbulent social/political
events.
The Western world is besieged by rapid and frightening economic and social
changes that
are leaving many of its citizens feeling overwhelmed, confused and
left behind. In addition, the influx of immigrants from other
parts of the world (from Syria and other countries of the
Middle East to Europe and from Mexico and other countries of Central
America to the United States) raises vulnerabilities about basic safety, economic threat, and
the clash of cultures. In both America and
Europe, these forces are deeply unsettling to those least able to
adapt to change and most threatened by the loss of the world as they
have known it. Brexit in England and Trump in America are political
examples of how disruptive these forces can be to the status
quo. For example, "Make America Great Again" is a
perfect slogan to mobilize the yearnings and fears of many in
America. This webinar will offer a wide ranging
discussion of our contemporary psyche(s) and the
political/social/cultural/economic/ shifts that are profoundly
disruptive to all citizens. With the American Presidential
election about to take place, this is a perfect time to both dive
into what is happening right now and to step back and reflect on its
cause as well as on its destructive and perhaps less visible, its
creative potentials.
_____________________
Many questions emerge in such turbulent times and the
panel includes representatives from the United States, Great Britain,
Switzerland and Germany. some of the questions that will be explored
in this wide ranging discussion include:
·
What is happening in the psyche (s) of the Western
World?
·
'How does the US Presidential Election look from the
perspective of the UK vote in favour of Brexit?'
·
What is the difference between healthy and unhealthy
narcissism in world leader?
·
Are there limits to inclusiveness with regard to both
personal and group identities within any given nation?
·
What does it mean for America and the world that such a
revelation of shadow has been generated by this election campaign?
Can this be useful for our country's and the human world's further
individuation?
·
Does the Donald Trump phenomenon represent an American
cultural complex (s)?
·
To what extent are the political conflicts embodied in
Trump and Clinton manifestations of underlying cultural complexes in
the group psyche with their own long histories of conflict around
issues of race, gender, ethnicity, social and economic class?
·
How has the immigration of Muslim peoples into Europe
effected the psyches of different European populations?
·
With regard to gender, how are the figures of Trump and
Hillary Clinton paired and polarized in terms of our notions about
masculinity and femininity?
Presenters
Warren Colman is a Jungian analyst in London, UK. He is Consultant
Editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology and the author of a
recently published book on The Emergence of Symbolic Imagination in
which he explores the role of culture as the medium for symbolic
thought and suggests that symbols create the realities they
represent. Through this work he has become interested in how social
and economic changes impact on the symbolic life of a culture. The
advent of Brexit and the potential election of Donald Trump as US
President are illustrative of the dangers that arise when a yawning
gap arises between a culture's dominant ideology and the lived
experience of large sections of its population. Warren Colman is
particularly interested in the disappearance of truth as an arbiter
of political decision making and the emotional background to
increasing fears about immigration.
Betty Sue Flowers, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus and former director of the
Johnson Presidential Library. She has moderated executive seminars at
the Aspen Institute, consulted for NASA, CIA, and the US Navy. Her
publications include four television tie-in books in collaboration
with Bill Moyers, among them, the best-selling Joseph Campbell and
the Power of Myth. In addition to two collections of poetry, her
books include Browning and the Modern Tradition; Presence: Human
Purpose and the Field of the Future; and, as editor, Christina Rossetti:
The Complete Poems in the Penguin English Poets series.
Dr. Joerg Rasche is the co-editor of the recently published Europes' Many
Souls: Exploring Cultural Complexes and Identities. He is Jungian
analyst following his training in Berlin and Zurich where he studied
sandplay therapy with Dora Kalff. Dr. Rasche is a child
psychiatrist,working in private practice in Berlin. He served for
many years as president of the German Jungian Association (DGAP) and
was vice-president of IAAP.Currently he is president of the German
Association for Sandplay Therapy (DGST). Also a trained musician, he
has published many papers and some books on mythology, music,
sandplay therapy, and analytical psychology,Dr. Rasche has taught in
Central European countries for many years and is a training analyst
for IAAP. Dr. Rasche was honored for his work on reconciliation
between the Polish and German people by the Polish President who
presented him with the Golden Cross of Merit. He gives concerts and
lectures around the world.
Thomas Singer, M.D. is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst who has co-edited
several books on cultural complexes in various parts of the world,
including North America, Australia, Latin American and is currently
preparing a volume on Asian Cultural Complexes. In this series, he
recently co-edited Europe's Many Souls with Joerg Rasche.He has
explored the relationship between cultural complexes and politics in
several conferences during Presidential Election years at the San
Francisco Jung Institute. Other interests include his work on Ancient
Greece/Modern Psyche that has grown out of conferences in Santorini,
Greece. In addition, Dr. Singer currently serves as President of
National ARAS, the Archives for Research into Archetypal Symbolism.
Murray Stein, Ph.D. is a past president of the International Association for
Analytical Psychology (IAAP) and also of The International School of
Analytical Psychology in Zurich (ISAPZurich). He is the author of
(among others) Jung's Map of the Soul, Minding the Self, and Soul -
Retrieval and Treatment as well of numerous articles on analytical
psychology and Jungian psychoanalysis. He lives in Switzerland and is
a Training and Supervising Analyst with ISAPZurich.
Steven Buser, M.D. trained in medicine at Duke University and served 12
years as a physician in the US Air Force. He is a graduate of a
two-year Clinical Training Program at the CG Jung Institute of
Chicago and is the co-founder of the Asheville Jung Center. In
addition to a busy psychiatric private practice, he serves as
Publisher of Chiron Publications
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THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
When the Gnostic mind reigns, the
center does not hold; the God of this world, this cosmos, and nature itself, is
not to be trusted and no longer exists as unifying force. The unified universe
of Platonism and Christianity (with counterparts in Buddhism and Hinduism and many
Indigenous religions) is gone. That which was seen as a revelation or a
reflection of divine beauty and order within all nature and all matter
throughout the cosmos, no longer makes sense, and is no longer understood or
accepted. The glue of society, culture and civilization is weakened. Nothing
makes sense except to those who have lost hope in humanity and the world, have
lost their senses, their connections with nature and themselves as “parts of
nature,” instead, seeing existence as revolving around only themselves or,
conversely, are no longer able to even see themselves but can only give
credence to visions of unknown saviors; visions put forth in manipulative lies
of hope and salvation. People lose their own vision, having given up their own
minds and souls, their own ability to understand, and their own willingness to
think for themselves. They lose common identity except that defined by fear and
its unbalanced elements: hatred of and violence towards any imagined enemy, any
“other,” which have been made real through absolute loneliness, alienation and despair.
They gather then as hateful predators to insure their own survival even as they
consume what is left of their souls and the world itself as if it were meat.
For their God whom they had worshipped and held as sacred has become the Devil
himself; they have been thrown into the world unawares and then out of the
Garden to survive as dumb animals, but animals who are unnatural and do not
belong in this landscape of earth, much less in their own physical bodies. In
their state of darkness, ignorance and sleep, they are unable to see any
goodness, any divinity within themselves, within nature or within their world,
seeing only the dark images of their own thoughts and imaginations. And they
see their lives only in and within the power of the great beast, the Demiurge,
their Creator, rather than in any loving, merciful, universal Father.
When we can no longer see the beauty of
nature or find ourselves in nature, when we can no longer trust nature and
ourselves as the reflection, order and goodness of the “Divine,” that is, a
principle of essence or ground of being, we lose hope, understanding and
direction. For, from the perspective of the first Gnostic cultural wave in the
first to the third centuries CE, the whole universe was created in error by
Error, and we ourselves cannot escape imprisonment in such a world of ignorance
and evil. Yet, as social beings, there is an innate need, or at least tendency,
to find “divine essence” within ourselves and others. The ignorance that comes
to possess human minds and souls devolves into the form of anti-social actions,
to the point of “evil” itself. But, at that moment, does the Truth then finally
arise within us? Within humanity itself? Are we suddenly somehow “made aware”
and able to “see the light” of understanding? Do we become aware of the great
goodness and love that exists within and among us? Or, do we fail as a species,
never fulfilling the potential of our “spiritual destiny,” destined to fade
away or otherwise destroy ourselves?
I see that this as a choice we must
make. Though it may seem to be the other way around, being in the world is far more challenging than avoiding the world; the via positiva is far more difficult than
the via negativa, the kataphatic far
more harsh than the apophatic. This a choice which requires that we sacrifice
such pleasures as avoidance of the world’s helter-skelter and learn to find
peace and quiet in the very midst of frenetic, distracting existence. It
requires that we come together, cease our endless judgment and division, and be
willing to trust others and ourselves. It is our purpose to create a “center to
hold” if human life is to be able to continue in love, goodness, reason, and
heartfulness.
Gnosis
has devolved into dark division and separateness; the “elect” judge and condemn
those who do not “know the secrets of God” but are simply of kind and good
heart. Living is not a mental exercise, no matter how erudite or impressive.
Rather, it is an act of love and faith in that love of all that lives. If we
cannot act lovingly towards others, ourselves, and the planet itself, we are
doomed. If the split way of seeing continues, we will continue to split
ourselves, to disconnect and destroy ourselves. The Gnostic vision of cosmic
duality must by choice and understanding be replaced with an evolved Platonic
vision and version of existence in which we are able to experience and
recognize a “center that holds,” a center that exists throughout the cosmos and
that is one of love and awareness of others as ourselves, in which we treat
each other as we would like to be treated.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Gnosticism, so far presented here, has
historical substance and reality, however, Gnosticism is also an archetype, a
set of aspects ever-present, manifesting anew as powerful cultural and epic
waves in the currents of history, often as seemingly necessary and worthy
purging social movements but resulting in chaos and the destruction of order,
including any sense of “center.” Yeats, well-versed in Gnosticism, Hermeticism
and Theosophy, in The Second Coming, recognizes
the “widening gyre” of the cosmic spheres meant to both define and contain the
differing cosmic elements, as becoming unbalanced and unable to “hold its
center.” We “falconers” who had once been able to merge and find ourselves
within the “falcon” and act as part of and in accordance with nature, have lost
this ability as we have accepted the Gnostic tenets of the essential “error” of
our being, nature, and all creation, in which we reject the material world,
including our own flesh, as anathema to our “true divine being.” In the Gnostic
view, we are prisoners of ignorance and evil in this universe of matter: there
is no virtue, no trust, no innocence, no “conviction,” no consciousness (for we
have been created by a lesser god of pride and ignorance, who is compelled to
imprison us in his world and maintain darkness so that the other-worldly light
within us may not be revealed to us). And those minions, called Archons, of
this mind come to dominate and to infect and enthuse humans to the point of
“passionate intensity” in the creation of a world of even greater loss and
depravity. Yeats recognizes this “Spiritus Mundi,” this Spirit (God) of the
World as Evil personified, perhaps as the Antichrist, as Ialdabaoth, the Creator
of the cosmos, the Demiurge, in the form of the Sphinx (with human head and
lion’s body) arising from the desert, the realm of the dead and the remote
past. These images are Gnostic ones. Has the “rough beast” been born into the
world?
Commentators on Yeats’s poem note that
this was the world he had witnessed during the First World War and was now
observing—and experiencing—as the devastation of the civilization he had known.
Perhaps what is occurring in the world now is simply an extension of that
process, made here and now through the immediacy and strange intimacy of the
internet. Perhaps it is quite similar to the “Gnostic revolution” that occurred
twenty centuries ago and brought down the “pagan” Platonic and Christian
“universal orders” held in place by “divine powers.” But then, Gnostic duality (with
its Manichean-Iranian version deriving from the dual and independently “good”
and “evil” gods of Zoroastrianism, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, and the Syrian
version of Valentinus, deriving from Greek philosophy itself, perhaps
Egyptianized) has remained quite alive throughout history to our current time.
Sts. Paul and Augustine carried it into Roman Catholicism and Calvin and Luther
into Protestantism. Existentialism and Marxism hold much of Gnostic archetypes,
if not actual beliefs. And now it surely appears that “things fall apart” and
“the center cannot hold.”
I would be remiss if I did not
elaborate a bit more on “original Gnostic tradition,” since this is, as I see
it, the archetypal and metaphysical force that has come into play in a most
powerful way in our world. In his Preface
to The Gnostic Religion, Hans Jonas
summarizes the “Gnostic epic,” so to speak, as follows:
Almost all the action would be in the
heights, in the divine or angelic or daimonic realm, a drama of pre-cosmic
persons… And yet that transcendental drama before all time, depicted in the
actions and passions of manlike figures, would be of intense human appeal:
divinity tempted, unrest stirring among the blessed Aeons, God’s erring Wisdom,
the Sophia, falling prey to her folly, wandering in the void and darkness of
her own making, endlessly searching, lamenting suffering, repenting, laboring her
passion into matter, her yearning into soul; a blind and arrogant Creator
believing himself the Most High and lording it over the creation, the product,
like himself, of fault and ignorance; the Soul, trapped and lost in the
labyrinth of the world, seeking to escape and frightened back by the
gatekeepers of the cosmic prison, the terrible archons; a Savior from the Light
beyond venturing into the nether world, illumining the darkness, opening a
path, healing the divine breach. (xiii)
Let us briefly compare what might be
called “classical Greek Platonism” and “classical Gnosticism,” as presented by
Jonas:
Plotinus maintains the unity of all
being in the universe, with no essential separation of the human and the
non-human realm. Man is in his essence kindred to the whole cosmos … [and he is
endowed with] the best in him, namely reason… He actualizes his kinship with
the cosmic powers, that is, … he increases the original generic community of
his being and that of the total cosmos [when he utilizes reason].
Gnosticism, on the contrary, removes
man, in virtue of his essential belonging to another realm, from all sameness
with the world, which now is nothing but bare “world,” and confronts him with
its totality as the absolutely different. Apart from his accessory outer layers
contributed by the world, man by his inner nature is acosmic; to such a one,
all the world is indifferently alien. Where there is ultimate otherness of
origin, there can be kinship neither with the whole nor with any part of the
universe. (263)
I quote Jonas on Gnosticism’s
historical and culture influence and effect in the first few centuries CE and
ask the reader to compare the Gnostic archetype and historical reality as it
affected that world to its seeming affect in our current one:
The gnostic movement—such we must call
it—was a widespread phenomenon in the critical centuries indicated, feeding
like Christianity on the impulses of a widely prevalent human situation, and
therefore erupting in many places, many forms, and many languages. First among
the features … is the radically dualistic mood which underlies the gnostic
attitude as a whole and unifies its widely diversified, more or less systematic
expressions. It is on this primary human foundation of a passionately felt
experience of self and world, that the formulated dualistic doctrines rest. The
dualism is between man and the world, and concurrently between the world and
God. … In this three-term configuration—man, world, God—man and God belong
together in contraposition to the world, but are, in spite of this essential
belonging-together, in fact separated precisely by the world. To the Gnostic,
this fact is the subject of revealed knowledge, and it determines gnostic
eschatology: we may see in it the
projection of his basic experience, which
thus created for itself its own revelatory truth [my emphasis]. Primary
would then be the feeling of an absolute rift between man and that in which he
finds himself lodged—the world. It is this feeling which explicates itself in
the forms of objective doctrine. In its theological aspect this doctrine states
that the Divine is alien to the world and has neither part nor concern in the
physical universe; that the true god, strictly transmundane, is not revealed or
even indicated by the world, and is therefore the Unknown, the totally Other,
unknowable in terms of any worldly analogies. Correspondingly, in its
cosmological aspect it states that the world is the creation not of God but of
some inferior principle whose law it executes; and, in it anthropological
aspect, that man’s inner self, the pneuma
(“spirit” in contrast to “soul” or psyche)
is not part of the world, of nature’s creation and domain… . (326-327)
… whoever has created the world, man
does not owe him allegiance, nor respect to his work. His work, though
incomprehensibly encompassing man, does not offer the stars by which he can set
his course, and neither does his proclaimed wish and will. Since not the true
God can be the creator of that to which selfhood feels so utterly a stranger,
nature merely manifests its lowly demiurge: as a power deep beneath the Supreme
God, upon which even man can look down from the height of his god-kindred
spirit, this perversion of the Divine has retained of it only the power to act,
but to act blindly, without knowledge and benevolence. Thus did the demiurge
create the world out of ignorance and passion. (327)
The world, then, is the product, and
even the embodiment, of the negative of knowledge.
What it reveals is unenlightened and therefore malignant force, proceeding from
the spirit of self-assertive power, from the will to rule and coerce. The
mindlessness of this will is the spirit of the world, which bears no relation
to understanding and love. … Power
thus becomes the chief aspect of the cosmos, and its inner essence is
ignorance. To this, the positive complement is that the essence of man is
knowledge—knowledge of self and of God: this determines his situation as that
of the potentially knowing in the midst of the unknowing, of light in the midst
of darkness, and this relation is at the bottom of his being alien, without
companionship in the dark vastness of the universe. (327-328)
What sticks in my mind is our
“situation as that of the potentially knowing in the midst of the unknowing, of
light in the midst of darkness.” As I previously noted, this is precisely the
choice that must be made by those who “possess knowledge,” specifically,
“knowledge of God.” Jonas notes the presence of “understanding and love” as, in
my estimation, our proper and true ground of being. I do not wish to present
Gnosticism as inherently wrong-minded or “evil”; it is a creation of dualistic
perspectives with their own mythology and cosmology that took root in the minds
of many at a juncture in history. It is nihilistic, anarchic, and even
anti-social in scope and practice. I would submit that my criticism of
Gnosticism may be more of a criticism of a most diminished human condition. Historically,
those who “possess gnosis” of the
transcendent, believe that they possess such knowledge or are the “elect of God,”
have tended to see themselves as “superior” to others, and conveying this
“superiority” to their impressionable and “passionate” followers. Even if they did
not impose their beliefs upon others, their belief in their exclusivity was
socially and culturally separative and divisive. They often chose to no longer
operate within the common law and only recognized their own. Society broke
down: the center could not hold. This is not to say that they did not possess
true knowledge or even transcendent gnosis; they very well may. But, in the
world of human beings, such gnosis “goes to the head but not the heart,”
feeding their sense of separateness—and paranoia. When fear for survival takes
over, there is no gnosis, no matter how right or how true; there is only
catastrophe.
There are a number of other “Gnostic
sources” I have consulted, including Forerunners
and Rivals of Christianity from 330 BC to 330 AD by Francis Legge, Pagans and Christians: Religion and the
Religious Life from the Second to the Fourth Century by Robin Lane Fox, The Other Bible edited by Willis
Barnstone, The Confessions of St.
Augustine (which is quite Manichean) translated and edited by Albert Cook
Outler, and others. So far, Jonas seems to have the deepest understanding and
the most thorough research. As a philosopher himself, he is familiar with both
ancient and modern philosophers as well as both “pagan” classical Greek and
early Christian apologists who understood Gnostic teachings well in order to be
able to provide persuasive arguments against them. These apologists and critics
of Gnosticism include Plotinus, Augustine, Irenaeus, Origen, and Tertullian.
Jonas realizes that Gnosticism is informed by Christianity and Classical Greek
thought and vice-versa. The threads of each are interwoven and Jonas is quite
careful when separating them in order to reveal how Gnosticism is much the
opposite of the other two, which are quite similar in many ways. Finding the
“right” quotes from Jonas in order to display the various essential Gnostic
teachings and their applications has been a most difficult process, for
Gnosticism has many different threads. This one, by Jonas pertaining “gnostic
dualism” and the consequent view of the psyche, also in light of the fact that
Jung himself claimed to be “gnostic,” provides food for thought:
Gnostic dualism … regards the “soul”
itself, the spiritual organ of man’s belonging to the world, as no less than
his body an effluence of the cosmic powers and therefore as an instrument of
their dominion over his true but submerged self. As the “terrestrial
envelopment of the pneuma,” the “soul” is the exponent of the world within
man—the world is in the soul. A
profound distrust, therefore, of one’s own inwardness, the suspicion of demonic
trickery, the fear of being betrayed into bondage inspire gnostic psychology.
The alienating forces are located in man himself as composed of flesh, soul,
and spirit. The contempt of the cosmos radically understood includes the contempt of the psyche [my emphasis].
Therefore what is of the psyche is incapable of being elevated to the condition
of virtue. It is either to be left to itself, to the play of its forces and
appetite, or to be reduced by mortification, or sometimes even extinguished in ecstatic
experience. [This] indicates that the negative attitude to the world, or the
negative quality of the world itself, though it does not give room to virtue in
the Greek sense, still leaves open the choice between several modes of conduct
in which the negativity is turned into a principle of praxis. (269)
The praxis may therefore be that of the
libertine, the ascetic or puritan, of the loss of self in fantasy or altered
reality (which is not so different than the first two).
I introduced “Gnosticism” as a major,
if not the major, influence of change that has occurred in civilization in our
present time. I believe it affects the whole
world at this point. In Gnostic cosmology (of the Valentinian-Syrian
school), the realm of Light is attacked by the powers of Darkness, which have each
so far existed separately and independently of each other. Light sacrifices a
part of itself, seemingly losing the battle to Darkness, believing that the
devouring (and consequent absorption) of Light by Darkness will bring imbalance
and disorganization to the Dark, thus halting its invasion of Heaven, the
Pleroma. This is how the Light-Dark polarity works out in the West. In the
East, the Daoists of two thousand years ago were able to maintain “Heaven” and
“Earth,” “Light” and “Dark” separately but equally and in relationship to each
other, each in its proper place and, in that respect, keeping the other in its
place. But now it seems there is no longer any safety from the loss of the “center
that holds all together.” I believe the “Gnostic” archetype and historical
image is an effective and perhaps true representation of a force now both loose
and loosed upon the world. It is insane, without any center at all, and it
spreads itself like an infection of fear, loss of self, and extreme,
passionate, and violent quest for this lost self. We who claim and believe
ourselves to know point righteous
fingers at “those others” who are “ignorant, irresponsible, inferior.” Each
individual believes himself or herself to be “right.” We may have reached a
crisis of individuality in which the pursuit of the “rights of the individual” destroy
the cohesiveness of the whole. Or separate, warring groups of people destroy
the cohesiveness of the whole.
To me, as noted earlier here, it seems
that the answer begins with each of us choosing to be with others rather than against them. To do that we must be able to
recognize ourselves as the other. This is most difficult for those with the
Gnostic temperament of distrust of the world-as-ignorance. The world we see is
the world we have created through our beliefs. If we loved one another, the
world would be a loving place. If we forgave one another, the world would be
forgiving; we would have another chance. This requires profound sacrifice from
each of us who may actually “possess gnosis,”
but also possess an inherent fear for our own survival and see ourselves as
quite separate from the person next to us or from the group of others who seem
so different from us. It has to start somewhere. What comes to my mind are the
Irish women, Catholic and Protestant, who chose to stand in between the Irish
men, Catholic and Protestant, who were all ready to start firing at each other towards
the end of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Our lives may not be so
immediate or dramatic as that, but it does become a matter of “turning the
other cheek” (which is a “Lighting of the Dark”) in a world of intolerance,
fear, and blame. How do we change what
people think, much less how they
think? By changing what we think, how we think—of ourselves, others, the world,
and life itself. Kindness, love, forgiveness, understanding, appreciation,
trust have to start with ourselves. We bring a calmness and then a peace; a
sanity and a sense of safety and acceptance. I think this is how the world
changes. This is how we bring about “Heaven on Earth.”
I have thus far avoided using Jungian
terms since this essay is meant also for the general public. Of course I am
speaking of individuation and how to get there. The process of individuation
itself can make us too separative in our individuality. Daryl Sharp, paraphrasing
Jung, in The Jung Lexicon, writes:
The aim is not to overcome one’s
personal psychology, to become perfect, but to become familiar with it. …
Individuation involves an increasing awareness of one’s unique psychological
reality, including personal strengths and limitations, and at the same time a deeper appreciation of humanity in general
[my emphasis]. (68)
Jung’s own thoughts regarding the pitfalls in the process of
individuation, as noted in his Collected
Works, also come to the fore:
As the individual is not just a single,
separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective
relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more
intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation [my emphasis]. (“Definitions,” CW6, par. 758)
Individuation does not shut one out
from the world, but gathers the world to itself. (“On the Nature of the
Psyche,” CW8, par. 432)
Individuation has two principal
aspects: in the first place it is an internal and subjective process of
integration, and in the second it is an equally indispensable process of
objective relationship. Neither can exist
without the other … [my emphasis]. (“The Psychology of the Transference,”
CW16, par. 448)
Sharp interprets the split that can occur in the process of
individuation, according to Jung, and Jung more specifically presents the consequences
if there is not adequate “production of values” to the collective world in
which one lives:
Individuation and a life lived by
collective values are nevertheless two divergent destinies. In Jung’s view they
are related to one another by guilt. Whoever embarks on the personal path
becomes to some extent estranged from collective values, but does not thereby
lose those aspects of the psyche which are inherently collective. To atone for
this “desertion,” the individual is
obliged to create something of worth for the benefit of society [my
emphasis]. (68)
Individuation cuts one off from
personal conformity and hence from collectivity. That is the guilt which the
individuant leaves behind him for the world, that is the guilt he must endeavor
to redeem. He must offer a ransom in place of himself, that is, he must bring
forth values which are an equivalent substitute for his absence in the
collective personal sphere. Without this production of values, final
individuation is immoral and—more than
that—suicidal [my emphasis]….
The individuant has no a priori claim to any kind of esteem. He
has to be content with whatever esteem flows to him from outside by virtue of
the values he creates. Not only has society a right, it also has a duty to
condemn the individuant if he fails to create equivalent values. (“Adaptation,
Individuation, Collectivity,” CW18, pars. 1095f)
What I refer to as “devolved Gnosticism” is a description of
the “negative values” that derive from it and draw one into oneself and out of
the world and being in and connected with the world, with others. Jung
recognizes this as well and says, to paraphrase, that there must be a
“balancing out,” as it were, between that which one takes from the world and
that which one gives back to the world, the collective. He pointedly notes,
“Without this production of values, final individuation is immoral and—more
than that—suicidal.” It seems that there has been much taken and not enough
production of values in service and contribution to the world, that the
movement inward of those modern-day Gnostics has metaphysically and literally
“sucked the world dry,” that the negative, hopeless mind-set of too many people
of influence has become a self-fulfilling prophecy spreading throughout the
world. And so, those of us who may and can, must now make the choice to change
the way we think, the way we see, and what
we think and what we see. It is up to
us to “turn the tide.”
