Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung (1/5)
A Commonplace Commentary
Sometimes, projects pick us. The following five-part series is one such project. What began as the first book in my keeping of a commonplace journal evolved into a review of my personal thoughts on C. G. Jung's life and works. It's taken me over a year to compile and review, and it has served as a catalyst for my post-Jungian thought and reflection on the experiences I've accumulated in my life.
If you're unfamiliar with commonplace journals and interested in deepening the experience of digesting a text, check out this video.
It's the video that initiated this journey into Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
The material presented in this series can be read in any particular order. Once I have all five parts posted, I suggest reading them in reverse for a unique taste of Jung's thought. Use it as reference material or pick out the longer sections for essays on Jung's autobiography; choose your own adventure.
PAGES 0 - 88
Page 3
...the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole. I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem.
Remarks
One cannot wholly view their container.
Page 3
Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science.
Page 5
Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared. But my encounters with the “other” reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engrained upon my memory.
Remarks
Is this not an introverts general experience? For people who feel most at home in their interior retain deep impressions of what goes on in there.
Page 20
The question then arose: “Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?”
Remarks:
Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and there he was, the startled Zhuang Zhou in the flesh. He did not know if Zhou had been dreaming he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Surely, Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities!
Zhuangzi 2:49
Jung was aware of Taoism later in life but was entirely unaware as a child laying upon the stone. These ideas then, from whence do they come?
"...a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." One thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty.""
Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil, Prejudices of Philosophers, 17
Nietzsche doesn't provide an answer, instead a negation, the egoic "I" is NOT the source of thought. Ones will is not a prerequisite to thought, thought is thrust upon us whether we will it or not. What force causes men across disparate time and space to follow the same trains of thought? Is it a personal disposition, related, perhaps, to one's typology, nature, or natural gifts? Or, could it come forth from the non-personal, transpersonal, spirt, or psyche herself?
Page 63
Other people all seemed to have totally different concerns. I felt completely alone with my certainties. More than ever I wanted someone to talk with, but nowhere did I find a point of contact; on the contrary, I sensed in others an estrangement, a distrust, an apprehension which robbed me of speech. That, too depressed me. I did not know what to make of it. Why has no one had experiences similar to mine? I wondered. Why is there nothing about it in scholarly books? Am I the only one who has had such experiences? Why should I be the only one? It never occurred to me that I might be crazy, for the light and darkness of God seemed to me facts that could be understood even though they oppressed my feelings.
Remarks
I resonate with all feelings of estrangement. However, Jung's religious estrangement gets to a particular core estrangement in my being. Even nowadays I can tell there’s few people who concern themselves about such things as I do.
Growing up, however, in a fundamentalist religion amplifies the grief experienced in estranging religious experience. This is particularly an issue of our time (modernity and post-modernity), a time when direct experience with/of God is seen as abnormal, satanic, and/or mentally ill unless sanctioned and in agreement with the dogma. Fundamentalist religion generally wants their followers to become disinclined and disinterested in direct experience with the divine as a manipulation tactic. Direct experience with the divine is inherently anti-dogmatic and challenges top-down structures.
To found a religion based on teaching others how to connect to the divine is to not form a religion at all. Instead, it teaches others how to found their own religions.
This experience of divine estrangement is one of many foundational moments for those fated for a mystical path. In the experience of estrangement or the noticing of others disinclination to speak of similar connections to the divine, one realizes they have a secret. A sacred secret which discussion with the uninitiated would spoil. Therefore, one begins seeking the words and people with and through which to share their experience and conclusions.
Page 66
...the more I read and the more familiar I became with city life, the stronger grew my impression that what I was now getting to know as reality belonged to an order of things different from the view of the world I had grown up with in the country...
Remarks
I understand this deeply.
Having grown up hunting and familiar with the tooth and claw reality of nature I can tell that my perspective is something other than the urban population. My view of nature is very different. Some view nature as this lovely healing thing (which it is) but it’s also a death-filled dark forest where no one will hear you scream as a mountain lion bleeds you out within its jaws.
I recall the first time I saw a freshly dead mountain lion. Fish and Game had it killed because it moved into a residential area and began killing residents pets and they feared it would move to people. The animal stretched the full length of a pickup truck bed, it’s paws wonderfully majestic but, outweighing the majesty of it was its horrifying size and stature. A fear of the animal began bubbling into existence from some place deeply ancestral. Someone without a defense would be incapable of resisting attack, it was a living, breathing, death machine.
Deer, even, seem docile and, more often than not, run away from people but I’ve seen them attack our dogs before which left a lasting impression. Their speed was more so than our German Shorthair hunting dogs in their prime. A gentle and docile deer therefore allows us to live when it runs away for they have the ability to chase and trample us down.
The most majestic animal I’ve ever seen is the wild Bull Elk. My Pacific North-West high school was less than a mile from an Elk preserve where we could frequently see them. Some people ignorantly fed them and eventually the establishment closed because of some Elk getting caught in the fencing and others being poached. I saw these Elk frequently. They seemed like horses, big, majestic, terrifyingly attractive, yet docile and contained. They did not threaten.
In the wild, however, there’s been only one Bull Elk I’ve been within 60 feet of.
It was dusk and my father and I were archery hunting for such a Bull Elk. We were about to call it a night when suddenly and silently the Elk clamored our into the clearing we had been watching for many dull hours. My father and I were dumb-struck, this is the first time in my life and many years, if ever, for my father this had happened, even though we had hunted this area and herd for as long as I had been alive.
Inside of our makeshift blind under the boughs of a tree with some broken limbs placed to conceal ourselves even better, we looked at each other expecting the other to take the shot but neither of us did before the animal silently retreated back into the trees. My heart was pounding, for even getting so close to to that reclusive and powerful animal took so much effort and preparation.
Perhaps, those days are what has given me #patience beyond average capabilities. I've sat for hours doing nothing but silently and scentlessly watching, listening and waiting, often for nothing to happen. It was clear in those days that it is us and our civilization which trespassed on the natural world and its inhabitants. In Jung’s words our world is “an order of things different.” Country life nowadays is often more city in nature, but some of us still retain something of the wild in ourselves and origins.
Page 67
...like animals they herded, paired and fought, but did not see that they dwelt in a unified cosmos, in God’s world, in an eternity where everything is already born and everything has already died.
Remarks
This brings to mind my other experience growing up near nature. The #deep-time awareness of my insignificance and magical nature of that world “other” than the human. I remember the clouds and starts. Clouds crashing into the mountains and shaped by the stratospheric winds. The stars shining mysteriously outside my window at night. And the coyotes howling as I fell asleep on the edge of town.
It felt like I lived on the brink of two worlds. The contrast of these two worlds is most evident when getting back into the truck after staking out a hunting spot for a few hours, the technology contrasted so heavily with the primal act of looking for prey in the woods. The two worlds were also strangely never mentioned by anyone. You could hear of it occasionally in the mentions of “God’s country” or in the vague statements and sentiments of the hippies. “God’s country” always struck me as vague a frequently meaning nothing more than “people don’t live here.” The hippies are easily discounted; they’re from a bygone sentimentality which isn’t rooted in reality, and they believe weird things so they shouldn’t be paid any mind. Therefore, hearing the dynamics of these two worlds stated in a way which is intelligible and agreeable is something new to me.
Page 68
For that reason the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.
Remarks
He’s talking about the meaning of life here; and like, girl, same.
Page 75
…nicer people, with natural emotions...
Remarks
Speaking about the worldly folk in contrast to the religious community. This I’ve certainly felt, but why? How could it be that the “less virtuous” people were the more people-like people? Shouldn’t it be the case that those most closely connected to a higher power would be the most authentically themselves and pleasant to be around?
“Worldly” people having the the most natural emotions makes sense: because the new personality which is given of God via Holy Spirit isn’t human centered, it’s something other than humanity and therefore supernatural. “Nicer people” however, is counter-intuitive for traditional reasoning. If the religious community is focused on being godly and God is love , then the godly should be the most loving. This is clearly not the case.
I would attribute this to a lack of understanding in application of scripture because. On the face of things with an elementary reading of the Bible God being love is not mentioned enough to outweigh all the other qualities God has (jealously, anger, infinitude, lack of prescience, omniscience, etc.) and people allow themselves to dabble in these vices because God does too.
Additionally, believing literally, that Jesus has died so that our sins may be forgiven gives people a subconscious (and sometimes conscious) allowance to sin and do ill towards their brethren. A subtle yet pernicious effect of #fundamentalist Christian faith.
Page 88
I know, too that this little light was my #consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest.
Remarks
This is the interpretation of a dream Jung had in which he was trying to keep a light from being extinguished by other forces. This highlights the importance of consciousness, in many ways it is all we truly posses. The importance of our consciousness only rivalled by the unknowability of its nature.
Page 88
The past is terribly real and present, and it catches everyone who cannot save his skin with a satisfactory answer.
Remarks
Jung isn’t clear on what question this unsatisfactory answer is responding to. It seems he’s talking about an answer to the meaning of life but it could also be the answer to the past, why the past happened the way it did, for example. But soon, if you dig into the past hard enough, the question of the meaning of life will rear its inexhaustible head.