Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung (3/5)
A Commonplace Commentary
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PAGES 154 - 291
Page 154
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and non-sense, not between right and wrong. The numinosum is dangerous because it lures men to extremes, so that a modest truth is regarded as the truth and a minor mistake is equated with fatal error.
Remarks
This strikes me as Nietzschean. It's also interesting because Jung doesn't speak directly about the dangers of the numinosum often, at least from what I've read. However, I have experienced this exact problem with the numinosum. Jehovah's Witnesses even refer to their belief system as "The Truth." Because of that, I experience minor pain every time I say "the truth" in conversation.
The first sentence of this quote intuitively makes sense to me. I know it to be true, but I struggle to say how and why.
By setting up the sense/good, nonsense/bad dichotomy, Jung implies that people commonly make a mistake by conflating the conscious states of sense with good and anything not sensical with bad. I see people operating with this mental model frequently.
For example, we have a lot of people who are concerned with optimizing their life and productivity. This is a worthwhile endeavor in multiple senses, but people easily fall into this sense = good, nonsense = bad conflation. Sense, in this case, is being productive and limiting waste. Nonsense is unproductivity and waste. The problem is, if one optimizes for productivity and limits waste, one will inevitably disregard some unproductive and wasteful things, which are only unproductive and wasteful upon an incomplete assessment. Something that comes to mind is, "Some people spend so much time working, they forget to make money," or, similarly, Dolly Parton said, "Don't get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life." Many unproductive, wasteful, and nonsensical things benefit those who engage with them.
Another example is science versus religion. Not long ago, there was once a time when religion was rationally practiced and respected. Essentially, this is no longer the case. In the post-modern mind, science = sense, and religion = nonsense. For others, notably zealous and fundamental minds, the roles are reversed. Whether reversed or not, one becomes mostly good and the other mostly bad. If one disregards the nonsensical, a baby is lost with the bathwater. I take Eliphas Levi's side: "to know is to believe, no longer. To believe is not to know as yet." In this sense, science (to know) and religion (to believe) become linked in a mutually beneficial relationship, like yin and yang, that complement each other. Therefore, faith becomes the science of the unknown (nonsense), and science becomes faith in the known (sense). To label one good and the other bad is a grave mistake.
One will also experience this pendulum of sense and nonsense throughout the day. One may think, "I have to take the trash out. It's beginning to stink, and Bob will be here soon." Then five minutes later, say, "Ooga booga looga, who's the cutest little boy in town? You are, you are, oh, you're so precious," to their puppy dog. One thought is sensical, and the other a bit more nonsensical. But the value of entertaining each is obvious. If one refuses to play and talk with their pets because it's nonsensical, they're missing out on something meaningful and probably the most insufferable person at the party.
Let's consider the second sentence of this quote: "The numinosum is dangerous because it lures men to extremes, so that a modest truth is regarded as the truth and a minor mistake is equated with fatal error."
The numinosum is the thing that generates numinous experiences. According to Jung, numinous experiences would be profound, often deeply emotional encounters with what can be considered the divine or mysterious aspects of existence. Numen has its roots in Latin and comes from the Latin word "nuere," which means "to nod." In the ancient Roman context, nuere was used to refer to a nodding gesture that the gods would use to command or will something. The numen in ancient Rome was associated with the feeling of a divine force. Jung's use of the term is similar and clings to the aspect of divine force, as he doesn't use the term to denote some specific entity's energy like the Romans may have.
The quote also pertains to Freud, where Jung believes he made a mistake, namely, in Freud's focusing so much of his psychology around the sexual drive or, more accurately, Eros.
Through his experiences with Freud, Jung became convinced that Freud hoped to elevate his psychology to a kind of dogma centered on the power of Eros. Freud was concerned about "a black tide of mud" washing away his theories. Jung saw that in Freud's mind, a battle between the "light and darkness" was ongoing. This is where the numinosum becomes a danger. Since Freud had such a numinous connection to Eros, discovered truth within it (in time, that truth becoming "the truth"), and a balancing erotic principle impossible to comprehend, he was dramatically drawn to the far end of the Eros spectrum. Jung thinks something similar happened to Nietzsche because he deified the power principle.
My experience with religion is one where the numenosum compelled an entire community to extremism, and it is not an uncommon experience.
It's increasingly common because people conflate science/sense = good, religion/nonsense = bad, or vice versa. When someone or a group adds a value judgment to sense or nonsense, and numinous experience supports that judgment or sets the mind oscillating with even more frequency and intensity, the equation is set for a potentially explosive and damaging situation. The emergence of cults, particularly religious and political, is a crucial indicator of how widely these mental models or memes spread. From a mimetic standpoint, these black-and-white and numinous memes are the most likely to become virulent. As a society, we are responsible for raising consciousness about this to protect ourselves against it.
There is an antidote to this luring of the numenosum to extremes. It's found within the essence of the numinous and spattered around psychological experience as a whole. It's the tension of the opposites, psychological plurality, yin and yang, the balancing principle, etc. My favorite topics are dichotomous relationships, love and hate, sense and nonsense, consciousness and unconsciousness, dark and light, and knowledge and the unknown. These things are inextricably linked and sit on the ends of a dipolar spectrum. It's only possible to have both together, and neither one nor the other is entirely attainable. One has arrived at an extreme when one begins believing that the light will beat out the dark, sense will finally destroy nonsense, or that the "black tide of mud" will overwhelm truth. The Extremist believes the dichotomous relationship can be overcome. The antidote to this form of extremism is the permanent establishment of the dipolar-spectrum relationship as natural law.
The solution to my own religious extremism was not to flip the equation around—glorify nonsense instead of sense, turn to Atheistic Satanism, and deny an afterlife. Instead, the solution has proven to be a reintegration of the balancing principle. I honor both sense and nonsense. I take the trash out, and I baby-talk to dogs.
Page 177
As a result of my experiment, I learned how helpful it can be, from the therapeutic point of view, to find the particular images which lie behind emotions.
Remarks
Jung uses the word "Bilder" in the German version of MDR, which is translated to "images" in my version. Bilder can have multiple meanings in German, ranging from all types of creative artwork (sculpture, graphics, painting, etc.) to symbols or individuals. So, one can safely assume that the translator chose "images" for the broader Jungian understanding of the word. This understanding includes some artworks and all products of the imaginal function.
When Jung says, "translate the emotions into images," what do you think this looks like? Have you read the Red Book? Have you tried the things Jung talks about doing? Automatic writing? What about stacking rocks and playing in the sand like a child? These are all acts of translation in this domain, and its products may not be decipherable, even by you.
The images Jung speaks of could be described as the psychic content associated with one's emotions. Psychic contents are like the experience of viewing an image instead of the image itself. Our perception will be colored by the context in which the viewing takes place. The things an image reminds us of, the emotional state we view it in, the smells and sounds occurring at the same time, all of these things become part of what an image is for us.
In this sense, we can approach an emotion like a sculptor and peer into its contents, along with the psychological energy that comes forth from our conscious comprehension of it. One's emotions also have a history, which can come into consciousness from these images.
These images have a particular power that, when cut off or unconscious, can control us. They become part of the shadow. They can cause mental illness or be projected and become a reality. Therefore, one must integrate these images into consciousness as soon as they're willing. To deny the responsibility they will call for is to cause oneself and others harm.
Let the images do something with you before you try to do something with them.
Page 178
For as long as we do not understand their meaning, such fantasies are a diabolical mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous.
I had to take the chance, had to try to gain power over them, for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me.
Remarks
Potential explorers within the subconscious must still be cautious. One may not be driven to schizophrenia, but there can be other kinds of severe consequences. Surely, many of us have met people who seem taken down these diabolically sublime and ridiculous paths and who are, to varying degrees, unaware of their extent.
Those on such a path could have confronted one such diabolical image and chose to bury it, striving not to become identified with or assimilated with it. Because of this choice, it began to take them on its diabolical path.
It's only through understanding the "diabolical" that one becomes free from the psychic energy it contains and may be able to use it elsewhere. Once one reaches this stage, the diabolical image becomes something that one is grateful for having gone through.
Page 181
This identity and my heroic idealism had to be abandoned for there are higher things than the ego’s will, and to these one must bow.
Remarks
This is Jung's summary of the meaning of an important dream he had: the dream of Jung and the brown-skinned savage murdering Siegfried, the Germanic folk hero.
I was with an unknown, brown-skinned man, a savage, in a lonely, rocky mountain landscape. It was before dawn. The eastern sky was already bright, and the stars fading. Then I heard Siegfried's horn sounding over the mountains and I knew that we had to kill him. We were armed with rifles and lay in wait for him on a narrow path over the rocks.
Then Siegfried appeared high up on the crest of the mountain in the first ray of the rising sun. On a chariot made of the bones of the dead he drove at furious speed down the precipitous slope. When he turned a corner, we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck dead.
Filled with disgust and remorse for having destroyed something so great and beautiful, I turned to flee, impelled by the fear that the murder might be discovered. But a tremendous downfall of rain began, and I knew that it would wipe out all traces of the deed. I had escaped the danger of discovery; life could go on, but an unbearable feeling of guilt remained.
The dream became a fulcrum point where Jung began to realize that the ego should be limited because the heroic idealism of the ego is a powerful generator of shadow contents. Once the ego's superiority is abandoned, the plurality of the psyche may flourish. Jung was a monotheist who could not refrain from spreading polytheism.
The shadow projection of Jordan Peterson could be one example of someone failing to kill the ego's superiority when brought to its task by some such image as Jung's dream. To neglect the task of killing Siegfried when holding the gun with a clear shot is to allow oneself to be subject to the powerful things one must eliminate.
To become subject to and bow to these "higher things" are two very different circumstances.
To bow is to serve, to commune with.
To be subject to is to be under the control of, to be ruled subconsciously.
To identify with one's heroic idealism is to remain an internal conqueror who systematically identifies and banishes aspects of the psyche to the shadow. Things relegated to the shadow do not perish. They become more powerful but also more subtle—their power shifts from a mythopoetic image to libidinous chaos in one's thought center.
The ego rids itself of "sublime and ridiculous images" only to allow those images to become a part of its projected reality.
Page 191
The intellect, of course, would like to arrogate to itself some scientific, physical knowledge of the affair, or preferably to write the whole thing off as a violation of the rules. But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes.
Page 201
Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.
Page 209
Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious.
Remarks
I thought I had caught Jung contradicting himself. How could a process contain such contents that the subconscious holds? If it's a process, then what is the collective subconscious? Is it only some grand mechanistic process to be played out by us all?
The unconscious is a state of thought, I thought. What's the difference between a state and a process? Something can be in a state of process, becoming, or change. Therefore, the unconscious is a connecting link through which the stuff of the unconscious has to travel to get from one state to another.
The unconscious can be proposed as the known-unknown and unknown-known, between the known-known and the unknown-unknown. The known-known is conscious awareness, and the unknown-unknown is something entirely other; the spirit world, for instance. This mixed state of the known-unknown and unknown-known is a state or process between the unified states of the known-known and the unknown-unknown.
The mixed state is agitated and energetic, seeking resolution into a (seemingly) unified state. The unknown-known is in a state of stepping down to the unknown-unknown and the known-unknown is in a state of stepping up into the known-known. This is a gross oversimplification, but useful.
Page 236
The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all we ought to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of grace.
Page 255
What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects, say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation, put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence.
Remarks
Sounds like something a scientist would say, I object. Instead, Man, I, in an invisible act of creation, put the stamp of perfection of the world by giving it conscious experience.
Page 291
My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end.
Remarks
Beginnings and endings are human inventions. Jung also seems to have lived in a way that resisted a continuum-centric existence and sat with a deep recognition of eternal recurrence.
He could be thinking of those two great uncertainties: How did we come to this life, and what comes afterward? These two questions, bookending our conscious experience, give rise to many of the existential anxieties and depressions we've collectively experienced.
To examine these questions without the dogmatic coloring of a rigid belief system is to disband much of its power to provide answers beyond the knowable. One must then come to them on their own. To brave these uncertainties as they are is to see life as a story with no end and no beginning. To successfully bear these uncertainties, one must find a meaning in life satisfying enough to one's mind.
We are lucky to have some insights into what could be, but in our rationalist and post-rationalist world, the certainty humanity once had is not so attainable. On one hand, this is a great robbery of the rational system. On the other, it gives us power and autonomy. Like eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, to gain knowledge is power, but maintaining the knowledge is rife with "weeping" (depression) and "gnashing of teeth" (anxiety).