For the Seeker

Because others say it much better than I, and I am not so much interested in being the reason one wakes up, but that one wakes up; I am known to use whatever means necessary. In light of this I am quoting, extensively as they say, from two books I synchronized recently in my life.  They clearly say what I have been talking about in their own way, which I find to be quite lucid. 

Let us start with the master, from "The Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy" introduction to Psychology and Alchemy, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol 12, Bollingen Series "When I say as a psychologist that God is an archetype, I mean by that the "type" in the psyche. The word "type"is, as we know, derived from "typos," "blow" or "imprint"; thus an archetype presupposes an imprinter. Psychology as the science of the soul has to confine itself to its subject and guard against overstepping its proper boundaries by metaphysical assertions or other professions of faith. Should it set up a God, even as a hypothetical cause, it would have implicitly claimed the possibility of proving God, thus exceeding its competence in an absolutely illegitimate way. Science can only be science; there are no "scientific" professions of faith and similar "contradictiones in adjecto." We simply do not know the ultimate derivation of the archetype any more than we know the origin of the psyche. The competence of psychology as an empirical science only goes so far as to establish, on the basis of comparative research, whether for instance the imprint found in the psyche can or cannot reasonably be termed a "God-image." Nothing positive or negative as thus been asserted about the possible existence of God, any more than the archetype of the "hero" proves the actual existence of a hero."

One of Carl Jung's students sums this up by saying: This fact of the existence in the psyche of an archetype that man has termed "god," and its actualization through the impact on the conscious mind, takes us to the end of our empirical and psychological statements. All that we can say, strictly speaking, is that religion is a fundamental activity of the human mind, and that there exists an archetypal image of the deity deeply and indestructibly engraved in our psyche. Psychology cannot prove or disprove the existence of God; what it can prove, however, is the existence of an archetypal image of God, the "Self." Here, then, psychology and religion both part and meet, facing each other from different sides of the frontier. All that psychology can legitimately do is to look across and accept the possibility that the "God within us"corresponds to a transcendental reality."

Before we go any further, let's remember one of my favorite quotes that I use in this blog, my boy Hermes Trismegistus. "As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul." This is a fractal. Our ego is the center of our consciousness, and the Self is the center of the unconscious. It is imperative to understand the metaphor. Do not confuse the god in our collective minds, with the thing that created the Universe. If we could somehow magically snap our fingers and make everything our unconscious is doing conscious we would think we were god. In other words, all the things our Self is doing at any given moment is all the stuff humans have attributed to god. Just because they attributed what they could not see to god, doesn't mean it was the thing that actually created the Universe doing all that work. 

God in this sense is the historical one, the active god in our lives, our own unconscious.  The guy in the sky is our own psyche, and all of our psyche's are connected. Now the thing that made the Universe itself is unknowable. No one knows anything about whatever that is. So you see we are talking about two different things when the word god is used, and no where ever am I talking about the thing that actually created existence. That thing cannot be talked about because no one knows anything about it. It's a simple logical line, if we know nothing of something it might as well not exist, or we would know something about it. 

So here, the word god is synonymous with Self, our total Self, our entire psyche, conscious and unconscious. Dreams are the way our unconscious self, speaks to our conscious self, and it does this using symbols. If you compared your conscious aspect with your unconscious aspect, the conscious aspect, the ego, is so limited and so small, that the unconscious is metaphorically speaking god. It simply takes both a bunch of studying the unconscious, and a lot of first hand experience to realize this as a fact.

These next quotes are from the book Dreams: God's Forgotten Language by John A. Sanford. This book would be an excellent book on dreams for someone who is not familiar with Carl Jung. It is not full of technical terms, and one would not need a dictionary much, that being said, one would need a lot more information beyond this book to properly understand exactly what is going on behind the veil of consciousness.

The title of the chapter is The God Within, and it is the last chapter of the book, in which he is properly summing up his thought. He is here talking about the psychological progression that humans have had about god in our recorded history of the last two thousand years or so.

"Consider polytheism as an example. The belief in many gods, goddesses, demons, and spirits was grounded upon the complexity of the psychic forces within us, which were projected outside of us in personified form. So real were these psychic realities that the Fathers of the church never denied their existence. The Fathers simply made it clear that what the pagans took to be gods were in fact demons; lesser psychic powers not meriting worship but nonetheless real.

For instance, consider the goddess Aphrodite. A man falls in love. This has the effect of releasing in him an unexpected flow of energy and passion that was not previously felt by him consciously but was in an unconscious, latent state. He is no longer the same man as he was but is transformed. Because ancient peoples knew they were not the master of this new emotion, but rather it mastered them, they quite reasonable felt themselves affected by a divine being. In the case of the Greeks they named her "Aphrodite." We now can say in view of modern psychology that it is the man's anima who infuses him with this feeling, and floods him with this new energy. But a rose by any name smells just as sweet, and has just as many thorns! Or take the idea of a demon. The ancients would see a man possessed by something that infuses him with a violent energy and destroys his ability to control himself. Anyone could see at a glance the man was possessed by a power superior to that of his ego. The ancients called this superior, possessing energy a "god,"in this case a "demon god." Today we would say the ego is possessed by an autonomous complex, a buried complexity of emotion that suddenly erupts to engulf the ego."

He ends the book with; Jung devoted his lifetime to he description of the process by which the whole person in us is realized. He calls this process individuation. Complete and complex as his description is, there remains much more to be discovered: Realizing our psychic totality is a task of a lifetime. The moments of religious insight when for an instant we know ourselves to be utterly, wonderfully whole are the rare exceptions. Furthermore, realizing our psychic totality is not something we accomplish in isolation. the life of the whole person will necessarily involve us in the lives of our fellows and in the conflicts of our time. Throughout this process of realizing the whole person within us we will be vexed by the need for a continual and painful surrender of our egocentricity. For this is not a process the ego commands, but which it serves; the conscious mind must accept, and consider, the higher authority of the Self. Our dreams are the voice of this higher authority: the God within. And if this God is identical with the final order and meaning of the universe, then our dreams express the will of the transcendent God as well."

Can you see? The ego is subservient to the unconscious; metaphorically we are subservient to god, to our Self. This author is a priest so his job depends on him believing in a transcendental god. This is not my concern though in waking people up. It doesn't matter whatsoever if there is or isn't a creator of the Universe if one cannot even find their own Self. Again: What does it matter if there is or isn't a transcendental god if one cannot even find their own Self.

Now we are going deep. This book Ego and Archetype by Edward F. Edinger is godly. It's unbelievably good. I can't say it enough. The last chapter is called The Philosophers' Stone, and in it he translates into modern language a definition given of the Philosophers' Stone by a famous alchemist, Elias Ashmole. Ashmole had compiled what would be today an enormous amount of historical alchemal information in the 1600s. Alchemy was another metaphorical system for the psyche, like all other religions. The following is the ending of the book, and to me is of the greatest importance because as a child I had both trauma and first hand experiences of the unconscious.

"This passage confirms an observation which has been gradually forming itself in my mind. It is my impression that those who go farthest in the process of individuation almost always have had some meaningful and indeed, decisive experience of the unconscious in childhood. Jung's childhood experience is an excellent example of this. What often seems to happen is that the inadequacies of the childhood environment or the child's adaptational difficulties, or both, generate a loneliness and dissatisfaction that throw him back on himself. This amounts to an influx of libido into the unconscious which is thereby activated and proceeds to produce symbols and value-images which help consolidate the child's threatened individuality. Often secret places or private activities are involved which the child feels are uniquely his and which strengthen his sense of worth in the face of an apparently hostile environment. Such experiences, although not consciously understood or even misunderstood and considered abnormal, leave a sense hat one's personal identity has a transpersonal source of support. They thus may sow the seeds of gratitude and devotion to the source of one's being which emerge in full consciousness only much later in life. 

The text says  this science can be taught only to a few. The knowledge of the archetypal psyche is indeed available only to a few. It derives from inner subjective experience which are scarcely communicable. However, the reality of the psyche is beginning to find witnesses for itself. The Philosophers' Stone is a symbol for that reality. There is a healing power in the images that cluster around this symbol. It is a potent expression of the source and totality of individual being. Whenever it appears in the process of psychotherapy it has a constructive and integrating effect. It is truly a pearl of great price.

This symbol developed over a period of fifteen centuries. It was enriched through the efforts of countless devoted men who were gripped by its numen. They worked largely alone, as individuals, without the supporting containment of an institution. They encountered dangers both from without and from within. On the one hand there were greedy princes and heresy hunters, on the other hand were the dangers of solitude and the activation of the unconscious which it brings. The history itself testifies to the power of the Lapis Philosophorum, a power capable of enlisting energies of so many talented men into its service. It is a grand symbol which has at last come within the reach of modern understanding."

Am I wrong? These men did some homework. Let's be clear though, every spiritual method, religion, philosophy, ever, had a different name of the same thing. Atman, Christ, Higher Self, Self, Soul, Spirit, the Romans called it the daimon. The Greeks used psyche. Take your pick. The alchemists used Philosophers' Stone because that kept them from getting murdered by the church. Their spiritual beliefs were hidden under the guise of actually trying to turn base metals into gold.  

If you would like to honestly know better what is going on in your own mind, I highly recommend the two books cited in this blog.