the Red Book link
Carl Jung (1875–1961) is a founder of the Analytical school of psychology and has greatly influenced many fields of study, so he is obviously a very smart man. When they have societies and scholars named for you (Jungian scholar) you must be pretty intelligent. I’m responding from a Christian perspective to what I can gather from reading his Red Book (the reader’s edition, which is what I am referencing) and listening to hours of lectures about his doctrine and interviews with him and documentaries about him. (Further follow up here & here. )
I can’t assess Jung’s total influence upon the intellectual landscape so I will just give my judgment that I can draw out as admittedly limited (I’ve only studied him for a few months not years). He’s influenced people from Jordan Peterson to Terrence McKenna in his attempts to reconcile occult metaphysics and religion with a scientific approach to consciousness (a mediating position pg.331). This by the way is the spirit of the last times, to reconcile all religions and science apart from the literal incarnation of Jesus Christ (1 Jn.2:18-24, 4:1-3).
Psychoanalysts believe we are controlled by inner forces greater than us; sort of like a “loose collection of spirits”. To some extent it looks like they rip off and rename Christian truths (e.g. be authentic, be yourself or self-realize, not a hypocrite [persona], understand your sin nature, be balanced by one’s soul & spirit [male & female, anima/animus]) in order to disconnect them from the God of the bible because of their particular disdain of him and disgust at the idea of Jesus being the only way of salvation (pg.410).
Jung appears to have believed a sort of Kantian view of reality consisting of the world of the noumenal (external unexperienced realm- but not unknowable as with Kant-pg.135 nt.57) and the world of the phenomenal (experienced and categorized by us) and an innate perceptual apparatus transcendentally necessary to make sense out of experience; this includes logic, the self, and archetypes latent in our collective (or absolute pg.55) unconsciousness (which is like an inherited psyche and instincts –pg.50). Jung maintained a clinical practice while exploring the inner world of the spirit through his visions; using dream information from his patients and religious texts as evidence of his beliefs (pg.207 nt.241). He speaks of man belonging “not only to an ordered world, he also belongs in the wonder-world of his soul.” Both outer and inner worlds are infinite, he estimates. (Pg.229) Man somehow participates in this inner world through the collective unconscious which manifests itself through latent archetypes manifesting in dreams and ‘active imagination sessions’ (which process he believes is the origin of myth formation and the world's religions pg.258). Jung instructed people to receive every unknown stranger wandering in this inner world; even though science (by the ‘spirit of the time’- pg.119) would scoff at this whole idea. “This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual.” (Pg.217 + nt.15) You did not create them and they are trying to bring understanding to you from the inner world. He spoke with many figures in his Red Book visions, Philemon, Elijah, Salome, the Devil, the Anchorite, Izdubar, the spirit of the depths, the dead (pg.134) etc. who taught him mysteries of the inner consciousness. They are psychological realities and not mere subjective fantasies.(pg.56) Just as there are things and beings in the external world that do not obey you or belong to you, so also the inner spirit world contains thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you. (pg.313-4)
This active imagination that Jung exercised himself in appears to have been triggered by looking at a crystal, “which has been used to produce such visions since time immemorial.” (pg.565, 569, 571) Jung also learned to cast horoscopes and studied astrology, (pg.405 nt.273) experienced hauntings (pg.41) and believed in the precession of the equinoxes and the Platonic month. (pg.405-6, 527) Magic was an experimental science and conscious exploration of various mental states and hallucinations. (pg.23) All which presuppose some form of pantheism. The entire Red Book seems like an attempt to duplicate the prophetic experience of Old Testament seers. (1 Sam.9:9) Yet, forming a new refined religion and theology suitable for our scientific age. (pg.48, 61) Jungian scholar Edward F. Edinger said of Jung’s writings- ‘They have the quality of scripture; Jung is speaking from a consciousness that transcends all of us'. (about 22 min. here)
Magic, he learns, is part of the inner world not subject to rationality like the outer world. (pg.402-4, pg.23) This is where miracles happen like the virgin birth, which is interpreted to mean ‘the redeeming symbol appears where it is not expected and improbable’ where unconscious irrational impulses speaking to him as the spirit of the depths producing ‘ the supreme meaning’. (pg.117-8 nt.2-3, pg.120)
And not that a virgin gave birth to the incarnate Messiah. (Luke 1:26-38, 2:1-16, Mt. 1-2)
Part of the supreme meaning is to recognize that Christ is what we should all become. (pg.137, pg.197, pg.202) The divine child is an archetype of the potential future of the development of the personality as opposites unite inside us (integrating our shadow so it doesn’t unconsciously influence us) through the synthesis of the unconscious and conscious mind during the individuating process (a balance pg.226). This is the real meaning (Gnostic- pg.508 nt.81) of Christianity; not the simple minded traditional and literal belief in the gospel. We have evolved past that immature mind. (pg.136-7) Do “everything of your own will; then you will be free and beyond Christianity”. (pg.139) The supreme meaning is the coming of God in image form (pg.120) which is what symbol is- the union of rational and irrational. (pg.57) Which appears to be the practical application of inner meaning and guidance arising from the randomness within but what manifests itself in symbols. The manifesting of these archetypes are stronger than our own voice. (pg.63, 324) God appears to us in a certain state of the soul. (pg.481)
You must give yourself to the unconscious facts to learn them. (pg.197) Salvation is the application of the meaning of events you create within yourself; mastering the world and asserting your soul. (pg.152) Beauty is what arises from the libido or the unrestrained psychic energy in man. Desire is not in things but in the soul. (pg.129) Let the divine creative power become a personal consciousness in you out of the collective unconscious. (pg.201 nt.226, pg.55) Don’t follow heroes and redeemers be one. (pg.203) Jesus failed in this respect (pg.409-410), Jung estimates, for his teachings kept men depending upon others like sheep. Destroy your world and be born anew, like a bird breaking out of its shell to fly to God. But the ongoing process of salvation is to let the true unique self unsheathe from its shell and individuate (pg.512 nt.85). To cease living from others instead of from self. Do everything of your own will, then you will be free and beyond Christianity. (pg.139) Parents sometimes stultify their children by trying to live their own desires through them. (pg.134 nt.56) People flee the true reality of their self, even pretending to love others as a virtue when it is just a guise, or cloke to cover their own inner failings. (pg.475-8) Don’t be blind to your true self, self-realize, individuate. (pg.134) Exist from your own energy like the lion or the sun, not a chameleon who changes their outward appearance (persona) to fit in.(pg.275) Be free within. (pg.392) Bear your burdens and not others, redeem yourself and relieve mankind of your burdens. (pg.478, 482) By people self-realizing, society will be saved from pathologies arising in herd mentality and collectivism. (pg.200 nt.221 ) Global warfare is a product of repressed religion and psychological experience after the enlightenment. (pg.56 Ideas which could be gathered from scripture a few thousand years ago; such as James 4:1-5.)
If we could just let loose of the spirit of the times (which is sort of like peer pressure) and let the spirit of the depths lead us into the collective unconscious we can experience these personifications and interact with them and receive their instructions. (pg.75, pg.145) Don’t fear madness (pg.197 nt.211) govern it. (pg.150 nt.89) Insanity would be replacing external reality with that of the inner world of the collective. (pg.58) Overcome your fear of the unconscious facts by giving yourself to them and letting yourself go to them. Dreams are a way the unconscious communicates; the language of images and the speech of the soul. (pg.132-3) You must learn the meanings. Although dreams are inferior expressions of the unconscious contents the wakened trance and spontaneous fantasy method was preferred. (pg.53) This is a dramatized form of thinking that anyone can do with practice.
In this process you will discover your shadow, a demonic and barbaric nature in everyone. (pg.199 + nt.221, pg.317 i.e. sin) Secretly you love evil and hate the fact that you do. (pg.312) You also discover your anima (feminine soul) & animus (masculine soul), which all humans have. (pg.227-8) The anima and animus in each person must be integrated to bring them into balance. Men accept the feminine within them as women accept the masculine in them. We integrate or humanize the self by making ourselves aware and conscious of our egotistical aims (pg.461-67)- that is we give an account of our motives and try to form an objective a picture as possible of our own being. (pg.479 nt.32) This involves also the difficult task of differentiating the personal and collective psyche. If the collective was mistaken for the personal then insanity occurred and extreme mental states of superiority or godlikeness occurred. (pg.50-51)
In Jung’s case the anima was objectified and he posed questions for her and as he dialogued she would bridge the gap between the conscious and unconscious mind. (pg.82 Functioning like the Holy Ghost in Christianity.) The self would be distinguished from ‘I’ in that the self is the totality of my psyche including the unconscious, whereas the ‘I’ (ego) is that which I am immediately conscious of. The self is an archetype of order and symbolically represented indistinguishably from God (pg.59, pg.481 nt.34) because the self is how we connect to the God.
The soul must be controlled for it seeks power and pleasure for their own sake. (pg.140 pg.500-3) The soul is tripartite interconnecting the Above and Below with the within (the ego or ‘I’), the human the animal and the divine. (pg.46, pg.577) Thus self-realization is a process of assimilating the personal unconsciousness, differentiating the persona, and overcoming of the state of godlikeness, then the integration of the anima for men and the animus for women. (pg.81)
Gods are the persistent images in our minds (universally and historically) representing dominant inner forces that appear to the individual psyche out of the inherited collective unconscious. Man is a gateway for the procession of the Gods to pass. (pg.535) They are not a product of the single personal mind, but they are psychological realities outside the personal psyche (pg.55-6) God is the symbol of the libido. (pg.120 nt.7) Regarding the self, Jung wrote “It might as well be called ‘God in us.’ The beginnings of our whole psychic life seem to be inextricably rooted to this point, and all our highest and deepest purposes seem to be striving toward it.” (pg.83) It is the goal of life since it is the most complete expression of individuality. To serve the self is a divine service and a service to mankind. (pg.482) The soul corresponds to God as the eye does to the sun; God is born in the soul of man. We reach the God through the self. (pg.480-1)
Our virtues and vices (pg.140) can keep us disconnected with the self through which we experience “the God”. Jung described a powerful, euphoric, intoxicating force unleased within his soul that he called the God. It was so real to him that even though he could “cite a theory that would sufficiently explain my experience” and “furnish this theory myself and be satisfied in intellectual terms” he could not dispossess himself of this encounter with this force once dormant. (pg.323) This was an unexpected experience, that he states “has seized me beyond all measure and steadily goes on working in me.” “I recognize the God by the unshakeableness of the experience.” He did not particularly want to believe in “the God” but the experience was a real thing. His experience was so tenacious that he states “if it is a deception, then deception is my God.” (pg.479-481, 324) “Sometimes you no longer recognize yourself. You want to overcome it, but it overcomes you... you are its tool... your thoughts obey it.”(pg.324) Jung criticized contemporary psychiatry for not distinguishing religious experience or divine madness as he experienced, from psychopathy. (pg.74) “The divine appears to me as irrational craziness.” (pg.325)
The self becomes subsumed in this experience of the God and we must wrestle the self free from it. “Since the God is an unfathomable powerful movement that sweeps away the self into the boundless, into dissolution.” (pg.481) “Hence we must strive to free the self from the God, so that we can live.” (pg.482, Making allusion to Jacob and the angel from Gen.32:24-32) He wants the experience of the God and cannot deny it, but also must not let the self be dissolved in the God. Individuation and self-realization is the goal of life as it is the micro expression of the macrocosm. Symbolically this “salvation of the soul” from the God is represented by eating the sacrifice, the image of the God’s formation. Man must employ evil in him to overcome this God force he has activated and awakened. (pg.323)
This is the marriage or union of the Above and the Below (pg.407) the underworld and the upperworld (pg.406), uniting the two conflicting powers of my soul. (pg.405) “Fullness and emptiness, generation and destruction, are what distinguish God and the devil.” (pg.517) Christ separated the evil into the underworld and kept evil apart from himself. Christ sinned psychologically in not living his animal side of himself. (pg.335 nt.174) Christ even descended into the underworld to become his antichrist before ascending to heaven. (pg.167) This was necessary in the eternal cycle based on the precession of the equinoxes. But now is the next Platonic month, the new age of Aquarius where these opposites are united. (pg.405-6) We add to the Christian gospel a new stage of development. (pg.406 nt.276)
The devil or evil seeks to influence you, if you do not assimilate it into yourself it will emerge and influence you without you knowing it. (pg.433) Evil is ambition, greed for fame, lust for action, never content, always anxious, seeking divisiveness and disunity, impatience and hasty desire of the personal life. (pg.422-3, 432) Beneath, at the foundation of reality of subconscious thought lies madness and chaos, irrational randomness. We formulate words which are magical to establish stability, (pg.348) to escape boundless ambiguity and ward off the demonic and non-differentiated and dissolution. (pg.250-1)
The individuation process mirrors the never ending creation cycle. (pg.535 nt.123) It is a bit difficult for me to decipher with precision from the Red Book but it looks to me something like the Pleroma (Greek for fulness) is the totality of everything dissolved into nothingness and which permeates everywhere (pg.516). It is out of which everything emerges and into which everything dissolves... forever. And the supreme God (force) which causes this all is Abraxas the Gnostic God (pg.517). Abraxas sounds like ‘cause’ or in his terms “effectiveness”, “force, duration, change.” (pg.517-8) Abraxas caused God and the devil to arise from the Pleroma (fulness) of nothingness; thus they are created beings/forces. (pg.516) Almost as if one were trying to make sense of this in Christian theological terms, the Pleroma corresponds to the mind of God and Abraxas to his will. Except this is an ongoing process of nothingness of mind emerging into somethingness of will and evolving into consciousness in us through the individuating process and then lapsing back into dissolution in nothingness. (pg.512) The game of pantheism is, to the extent that God is creator he must be non-personal, and to the extent that he is personal he must be part of the creation. Those are the rules, and they are known from intuition not reason; so don’t try to figure it out, just experience it within.
In Philemon's sermons to the dead he explains that the Pleroma contains absolute potentiality which is everything and nothing combined, (pg.510) and cancelling each other out. (pg.513) Differentiation is creation. (pg.511) Diversity arises from this individuating principle. (pg.512 nt.85)
The gods (forces in the collective unconscious) emerge in us similarly as the Pleroma is in us. (pg.510) Differentiation is part of our nature as it is with the Pleroma. (pg.511, 513) We must go through the differentiation process ourselves. If we don’t we fall into non-differentiation and dissolve into nothingness, i.e. the death of the creature. (pg.511-12, Which obviously happens regardless.) We must individuate the good and evil within us as they are part of the Pleroma. (pg.513) Opposites or polarities being unified in our nature like God and Satan becoming one. (pg.418) This is the most important new god (pg.41) symbolized by a frog which lives in water but emerges upon the land. (pg.521, 577-9)
With the outer world, as peaks of waves arise upon the water’s surface so human consciousness emerges from the Pleroma through the biological evolutionary process. Likewise with the inner world, our personal consciousness emerges from the collective unconscious; also do the gods manifest within our soul. Opposite forces collide forcing our wave to arise to the surface from below.
But by differentiating we individuate ourselves from the collective unconsciousness and keep our soul from reemerging and absorbing back into non-existence or the collective unconsciousness. The better we self-realize the more pronounced is our wave upon the sea, or our star in the sea of night sky. We should seek absolute individuality. (pg.578) (This glorifying of the individual self is a tenant of occult spirituality as expounded by Aleister Crowley for example.) You become the force or Abraxas in your world, God the creator of your world; you must fulfill the work of life. (pg.580-82) In which case there are innumerable “gods”. (pg.525-7,578-9)
That was a summary of the points I consider most relevant to the epistemological nature of Jung’s thought. For, there is not much point pursuing someone’s doctrines for truth if it cannot account for the idea of truth. What is truth? Usually people hope to unify the real objective nature of external facts with some objective nature of internal facts. That is to avoid contradiction between the inner world of mind and the outer world of matter (logic and science). This is what philosophers always try to do, account for mind and matter. In so doing they discover that facts of the internal and external world must conform to laws of logic which must not themselves be subject to change. If literally everything changes, learning is not possible, a fact would change and cannot maintain existence. If literally everything changes, acquiring that one fact would not be possible; therefore the statement itself stands as evidence against such a supposition. It is self-evidently wrong.
What are termed laws of logic and which are considered laws of logic are debated by logicians, theologians and philosophers. But debate itself presupposes laws of thought and usually at least the traditional three.
“For no very good reason, three of these principles have been singled out by tradition under the name of 'Laws of Thought'. They are as follows: (1) The law of identity: 'Whatever is, is.' (2) The law of contradiction: 'Nothing can both be and not be.' (3) The law of excluded middle: 'Everything must either be or not be.' These three laws are samples of self-evident logical principles, but are not really more fundamental or more self-evident than various other similar principles: for instance. the one we considered just now, which states that what follows from a true premiss is true. The name 'laws of thought' is also misleading, for what is important is not the fact that we think in accordance with these laws, but the fact that things behave in accordance with them; in other words, the fact that when we think in accordance with them we think truly.”- (The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell pg.113) In other words ‘laws of thought are also laws of reality’.
Our goal is simple here, show that given Jung’s doctrines the possibility of truth is not. Given his pantheistic view of reality, truth would be swallowed up along with his personal fascinations of mind into absolute and irretrievable randomness. In Jung’s teaching the irrational randomness of the whole is the foundation of thought and consciousness. Force moved upon nothingness and matter emerged in an endless evolutionary cycle. This is no principle guaranteeing that conscious thought is uniform or random. It is no buttress against irrationality penetrating and invading the hopeless mind. Jung’s gods are forces that control the mind and not forces the mind controls. The free thought and will of Jung’s man is simply swept away with the tide of inner conscious forces and then drowned. The body is never recovered.
The problem of induction raised by David Hume (and discussed in Russell’s book linked above pg.129) in the 1700’s is not addressed. What is the basis of uniformity in nature and thus the scientific procedure for Jung the man of science? Force moved upon nothingness and matter emerged in an endless evolutionary cycle. This would contribute to uncertainty of any scientific laws. For they all emerge accidentally from nothing and submerge back into nothing at the behest of Abraxas. This can hardly be the foundation of uniformity. If cause and effect are internal habits of thought as Hume would suggest then it would make (to quote Russell again) “all expectation as to the future irrational, even the expectation that we shall continue to feel expectations.” (History of Western Philosophy, pg.641)
Jung also based his teachings upon inner dialogues with his own heart. (Jer.17:9-10) But this assumes that none of these ‘thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you’ are malevolent evil spirits deceiving you or you just don't care (-then ‘deception is my God’). It presupposes the inner unconscious structure of his mind is like everyone else's so that the mapping of his inner world will be the mapping of all peoples uniformly. It assumes dreams convey true information and not nonsense many times. That these archetypes and inner meanings aren’t evolving and changing meaning randomly or that they will hold the same meaning in the future. Or that we will even continue the expectation of such. Perhaps it is a more modest claim that instead of archetypes being inherited in the collective unconscious mind, our minds are created similarly in similar circumstances and we experience common blessings and we think analogically by design. (Psa.19:1-3, 33:15, Rom.1:19-20) So, men universally think of the sun as ‘enlightening’, rain as ‘times of refreshing’, darkness as ‘fear and uncertainty’. And then we translate these into spiritual analogies. But maybe there is some transfer of consciousness genetically and this is a field of research.
But for Jung, what ‘is’ does not indicate what should be morally. What ‘is’ does not indicate what will be scientifically. And what ‘is’ cannot even be known in his case logically. The Christian God he so despised is the only hope he has for knowledge at all.
Afterword
Jungian psychology appears to be a more sophisticated fantasy religion (pg.128 nt.35, pg.48) than Scientology, but no less fiction. Speaking of synchronicities (or meaningful coincidences- pg.91 Red Book), I just randomly watched this clip of South Park on Scientology and 2 or 3 minutes later someone texted me out of the blue ‘have you ever watched South Park’. Other synchronicities I encountered reading the Red Book were, once I read the name Loki (pg.344 nt.186) and immediately following I heard my older son call his friend by his video game name Loki while they were playing. Also, one day while beginning the Red Book I was outside sitting in the sun reading page 4 about ‘the god’ wanting Jung to think sinful thoughts like Adam and Eve with the serpent, when and a black snake (racer) crawled up from behind me and touched my foot. Later at someone else’s house sitting out in the sun reading of Jung’s god Abraxas (pg.41), ‘the union of the Christian God and Satan’ another black racer crawled out from some plants in front of me and I scared it off (i wasn’t interested to see if it touched my foot). I finished reading and then reviewing portions of the Red Book today and oddly as I was coming in and out of the front door I noticed I had inadvertently trapped a small grey rat snake, coiled up and pinned hanging in the top center of the door. So, I opened the door and scared it off into the bushes. (Here he is; he was a feisty little guy!)
It was unusual. But over the years I've called ‘synchronicities’ ‘providences’ before I ever heard the word synchronicities used this way. I learned to not interpret them too quickly to mean one thing over another and just think over them prayerfully recognizing God’s hand. I received instruction in a former friend as I observed him interpreting ‘synchronicities’ as signs of God’s particular approval (his word was ‘confirmations’) of whatsoever he happened to be thinking or doing. He was and probably still is completely ignorant that anyone had formed a teaching on this subject before we were born, thinking himself to be the sole recipient of such wonders and confirmations of his singular blessedness. There is a madness of ego associated with such patterns of thinking. We should humbly recognize God’s providential hand that "all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?” Dan.4:35
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