posted January 30, 2009 03:23 AM         

~ C.G. Jung

Confrontation With The Unconscious

An incessant stream of fantasies had been released, and I did my best not to lose my head but find some way to understand these strange things. I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible... One thunderstorm followed another... Others have been shattered by them -- Nietzsche, and Holderlin, and many others. But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies. When I endured these assaults of the unconscious I had an unswerving conviction that I was obeying a higher will, and that feeling continued to uphold me until I had mastered the task.

I was frequently so wrought up that I had to do certain yoga exercises in order to hold my emotions in check. But since it was my purpose to know what was going on within myself, I would do these exercises only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious. As soon as I had the feeling that I was myself again, I abandoned this restraint upon the emotions and allowed the images and inner voices to speak afresh. The Indian, on the other hand, does yoga exercises in order to obliterate completely the multitude of psychic contents and images.

...First I formulated the things as I had observed them, usually in "high-flown language," for that corresponds to the style of the archetypes. Archetypes speak the language of high rhetoric, even of bombast... I had no choice but to write everything down in the style selected by the unconscious itself. Sometimes it was as if I were hearing it with my ears, sometimes feeling it with my mouth, as if my tongue were formulating words; now and then I heard myself whispering aloud. Below the threshold of consciousness everything was seething with life.

From the beginning I had conceived my voluntary confrontation with the unconscious as a scientific experiment which I myself was conducting and in whose outcome I was vitally interested. Today I might equally well say that it was an experiment which was being conducted on me...

In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me "underground", I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them, as it were. I felt not only violent resistance to this, but a distinct fear. For I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies -- and as a psychiatrist I realized only too well what that meant. After prolonged hesitation, however, I saw that there was no other way out. 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.

...Soon after this fantasy another figure rose out of the unconscious. He developed out of the Elijah figure. I called him Philemon. Philemon was a pagan and brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration...

Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon repressented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies, I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air... It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought...

Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru... And the fact was that he conveyed to me many an illuminating idea.

It is of course ironical that I, a psychiatrist, should at almost every step of my experiment have run into the same psychic material which is the stuff of psychosis and is found in the insane. This is the fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mental patient. But it is also the mythopoetic imagination which has vanished from our rational age. Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded, so that it even appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adventure to entrust oneself to the uncertain path that leads into the depths of the unconscious. It is considered the path of error, of equivocation and misunderstanding. I am reminded of Goethe's words: "Now let me dare to open wide the gate/Past which men's steps have ever flinching trod." The second part of Faust, too, was more than a literary exercise. It is a link in the Aurea Catena* which has existed from the beginning of philosophical alchemy and Gnosticism down to Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Unpopular, ambiguous, and dangerous, it is a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world.

...I dedicated myself to the service of the psyche. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. My delivering myself over to it, as it were, was the only way by which I could endure my existence and live it as fully as possible.

Today I can say that I never lost touch with my initial experiences. All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago.** Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images.

...My experience and experiments with the unconscious had brought my intellectual activity to a standstill. After the completion of The Psychology of the Unconscious I found myself utterly incapable of reading a scientific book. This went on for three years.... nor would I have been able to talk about what really preoccupied me. The material brought to light from the unconscious had, almost literally, struck me dumb. I could neither understand it nor give it form. At the university I was in an exposed position... It would be unfair to continue teaching young students when my own intellectual situation was nothing but a mass of doubts.

I therefore felt that I was confronted with the choice of either continuing my academic career, whose road lay smooth before me, or following the laws of my inner personality, of a higher reason, and forging ahead with this curious task of mine, this experiment in confrontation with the unconscious. But until it was completed I could not appear before the public.

Consciously, deliberately, then, I abandoned my academic career. For I felt that something great was happening to me, and I put my trust in the thing which I felt to be more important sub specie aeternitatis. I knew that it would fill my life, and for the sake of that goal I was ready to take any kind of risk.

What, after all, did it matter whether or not I became a professor? Of course it bothered me to have to give this up; in many respects I regretted that I could not confine myself to generally understandable material. I even had moments when I stormed against destiny. But emotions of this kind are transitory, and do not count. The other thing, on the contrary, is important, and if we pay heed to what the inner personality desires and says, the sting vanishes. That is something I have experienced again and again, not only when I gave up my academic career...

The consequence of my resolve, and my involvement with things which neither I nor anyone else could understand, was an extreme loneliness. I was going about laden with thoughts of which I could speak to no one: they would only have been misunderstood. I felt the gulf between the external world and the interior world of images in its most painful form. I could not yet see that interaction of both worlds which I now understand. I saw only an irreconcilable contradiction between "inner" and "outer".

However, it was clear to me from the start that I could find contact with the outer world and with people only if I succeeded in showing -- and this would demand the most intensive effort -- that the contents of psychic experience are real, and real not only as my personal experiences, but as collective experiences which others also have. Later I tried to demonstrate this in my scientific work, and I did all in my power to convey to my intimates a new way of seeing things. I knew that if I did not succeed, I would be condemned to absolute isolation.

...It has taken me virtually forty-five years to distill within the vessel of my scientific work the things I experienced and wrote down at that time. As a young man my goal had been to accomplish something in my science. But then, I hit upon this stream of lava, and the heat of its fires reshaped my life. That was the primal stuff which compelled me to work upon it, and my works are a more or less successful endeavor to incorporate this incandescent matter into the contemporary picture of the world.

The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life -- in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime's work.

~ Carl Gustav Jung
"Memories, Dreams, Reflections"

*Aurea Catena -- 'The Golden (or Homeric) Chain in alchemy is the series of great wise men,
beginning with Hermes Trismegistus, which links earth with heaven.' - editor's note

**Jung was born in 1875, so this "beginning" of his development occured in his mid-to-late thirties.
(He is in his early eighties, at the time of this writing.)

posted January 30, 2009 03:56 AM         

That's very interesting - thank you for the post. I tried to read that book when I was a lot younger but only got as far as a few chapters. I rarely read a book cover to cover anymore.

Funnily enuf, I have the same experience. I have a someone called Ipschod(Well, that's the closest spelling I can get). Same kinda thing but he is Sumerian/Mesopotamian. I don't tell anyone. I figure most people will either think I'm nuts or full of BS or just fantasising.

posted January 30, 2009 05:15 PM         

katatonic,

Good question. I might look it up.

Jung did have his Sun exactly Square Neptune, in his natal chart.

Maybe he just grew into it?

Chryseis,

Thanks.

I try to keep an open mind.
Or, I should say, a balanced mind.
I think it is good to encounter these things, --
to trust ourselves enough to encounter them, --
but we ought always to retain some doubts,
and remain open to undiscovered possibilities;
to new ways of interpreting these encounters,
and according a proper place to the information received.

Too often, I think, people treat these things uncritically.
If an entity or a projection appears to us,
we may immediately fall under its charismatic spell,
and become eager to promote its agenda as prophecy.
When, really, the deeper intention behind the information
is to provide a means of stimulating the mind and heart;
and often the images and insights are not "absolutely" true;
they are landmarks to arrive at, and then to go beyond.

I dont think it is possible to receive or communicate pure insight.
Always, there is some distortion in the message,
according to the personal orientation of the spirits involved.

posted February 01, 2009 11:35 PM         

quote:

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Thank you HSC, I appreciate your thinking.

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You're welcome, thanks.

quote:

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Explanations and retell almost seem a waste of time - kind of like when you show a majestic sand castle you've just built and in the first few seconds all the edges and foundations fall away with the water running in. But thank you for the offer - most things seem like everything and nothing at the same time, and I would get sick of myself in the telling.

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You sound complacent. Are you a Taurus?

Maybe you are supposed to get sick of yourself?

Empty yourself so you can be filled, sort of thing.

What was it you said to Kat on my other thread.. about how this is our lives? Maybe what I am suggesting is not mere rehashing, but, sharing your experience, not just for the benefit of others, but, most importantly, in the faith, or hope, that something new might be revealed through the interaction. When any two people come together there is a chemical reaction....

There's more I could say, but you gather the gist of what I'm suggesting.

I know its only one possible way of looking at it. Perhaps I am just being pushy and feel rejected, lol. Perhaps there is a very good reason for keeping these special experiences to yourself, and not exposing them to the scrutiny of ruthless and detached Scorpio-Aquarius people like me, lol. They are sacred to you, and you dont want to see them profaned by swine like me.
I understand that. I consider all sorts of things. I never know what to think.

Maybe you just don't like to type.

Love to you,
Stephen

posted February 01, 2009 11:41 PM         

I subscribe to the theory that the stars neither compel, nor incline, but, merely correspond. With some sense, you could say that they impel, for this supposes that the stars are also within us; that the constellations reflect, with pristine clarity and exactness, the inner processes of the individual, according to his temporal and terrestrial relation to them; that the stars we see are rather a veil, and the "actual" stars are constellated in the spirit, related to us directly through the medium of soul (as opposed to the medium of space/time, which simultaneously veils and refllects it). Following this line of calculation, it begins to appear that the dialectic between "providence", or "destiny", and "free will", is effectively transcended; not in the sense that it has ceased to confront us as a problem, but, that we have been thrown back upon the immediacy of our present experience, and the existential dilemma of choice. It is not that we are exactly free, but, that we are "compelled" to behave as though we were free, and to consciously unravel the scrolls of our destinies one inch at a time. Destiny, despite the fact that its nature is hermetic and unconscious, yet, corresponds to us, and to our ultimate developments, more intimately than our own jugular veins. You may say that it is our "deeper will", or "the will behind our will". Every apparent deviation from this deeper will by the errant, or prodigal, will of the ego, is really a necessary over-compensation, in the gradual restoration of balance between the two wills. In the final analysis, even the ego is salutary.

Imagine two rivers branching off from the same source and reuniting in the same ocean... One of the rivers delves, undettered, straight down the mountainside, while the other is detoured by the surrounding matter, and makes its way only gradually downward. What divides them, regarded from an objective distance, is merely a strip of earth, disconnected from the mainland. Really, it is just a glorified island in the larger stream, stretched until it appears to divide two riviers, which, in actuality, are one; since this apparent boundary is only a free-standing wall, around which the waters easily mingle and move. The unbroken current is that subtle yet powerful energy, which, through the constant and steady operation of the law of gravity, carries both streams in a singular direction. Though the geography of the land appears to divert them from their proper course, they still follow the shortest routes possible, and unite at the same goal. The source is the unconscious... the branching of the rivers is the apparent deviation of the egoistic will from the source, resulting in the illusion of two wills - one sacred, the other profane... but the higher will, proceeding from the source in the form of both streams, and working through the ego, rather than at cross-purposes with it, is distinguished by its transcendance of this dichotomy. The personal act of will, whether tending toward or away from the ultimate goal (of "Individuation", "Self-hood", or "Realization of The Atman"), is, in all its movements, directed by that deeper will, and mitigated only temporarily by the viscissitudes delineated by impinging matter. The "elevation" of the unconscious source in relation to "the ocean" of Atman, as it were, catalyzes the "gravity" of the higher will, drawing the "waters" of insight downward into consciousness at a rate proportionate to itself (i.e. to the degree of elevation). "Elevation" is precisely that condition, characterized by distance and resistance, which we commonly know as our experience of space/time, and which paradoxically retards and promotes our transition toward enlightenment. Because of this elevation, the waters may encounter opposition (in the form of matter), and may even appear to reverse direction, flowing upwards for a time, while yet obeying that stronger pull downward into the heart of illumination. Such a river is the ego, but there is nothing to distinguish it from the free-falling water seen in waterfalls, save for the geography which surrounds it.

posted February 02, 2009 07:34 AM         

As to your other post, you are like a cool hand to a fevered brow, I swear! You had me laughing with relief - you have such a depth of insight. I was also nearly in tears as well.

I'm not Taurus but Virgo - yeah, so material reality is probably still coming into play.

I think I just don't want to stretch anyone's open mindedness; explanations can be so tedious. By the end of it I would have the same feel as trying to give someone directions with a whole hamburger stuffed in my mouth.

posted February 02, 2009 07:08 PM         

quote:

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By the end of it I would have the same feel as trying to give someone directions with a whole hamburger stuffed in my mouth.

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LOL

I understand.

Anyway, I think maybe I just wanted an excuse to talk to you.

posted February 02, 2009 10:33 PM         

It all kind of reminds me of quantum mechanics, where the observer affects the observed. We don't see reality other than the reality that is brain made. So how can we know if we have free will because the us making the judgement is part of the equation?

posted February 03, 2009 06:58 PM         

But the very fact that we are without objectivity -- proves the subordination (i.e. the subjectivity) of the will.

posted February 03, 2009 07:01 PM         

I'm not flattering you, really.

You just stirred something, that's all.

Maybe its nothing. We'll see.

posted February 03, 2009 09:18 PM         

If you set a 5 year old in a fenced in yard, he may think he's free because it's a big yard full of many toys to play with, but the decision as to what he may play with has already been made, no matter what he chooses.