The missing half

I’ve been ruminating for months and months about what psychology really is. It’s treated like a science - most psychologists (including Jung!) want it to be a science. The reason Freud is still discussed in psychology classes, even though he was clearly full of shit, is because Freud shared this desire. Even Jung had some tendencies in this direction but, as a thoroughgoing empiricist, he knew when to give up this lifesaver and actually swim in the water. In fact, I think this was his whole point: his theory is based on reality... however, that reality includes spirituality! By refusing a priori to even look at the possibility that psychology has a spiritual aspect, these people are denying what is actually true, which is why they can never find out how to create deep, fundamental change in people.

What I’ve been struggling with is: how much of psychology is spiritual? This morning, as I was waking up, I realized that of course psychology is spiritual, because everything is spiritual! Psychology, even Jungian psychology, isn’t spirituality, but when you go deep enough it is. But this isn’t something unique to psychology alone. For example, go far enough into physics and again, you come to spirituality.

The thing is... everything is spiritual at its deepest place. Art, ecology, politics, farming, wood-working, cooking, everything. This is, in fact, our disease, the fact that we’ve forgotten this. Jung wrote about the “infrared” and “ultraviolet” ends of the archetypes; that is, our instincts and the spiritual archetypes that both live within us. The thing is, the entire world, all of reality and every part of it, has an infrared and an ultraviolet end. It’s just more obvious in psychology.

Until recently religion served to regulate the psyche. When religion lost its place of importance, we needed psychology to fill that gap. And the reason that modern psychology fails us over and over is that spirituality is a uniquely large and fundamental part, at every level, of the process of psychological healing, which is really actually spiritual healing. Instead, it’s techniques fail to create fundamental change in us but rather merely clean up the most shallow parts of our wounds (stick bandaids on them one might say). But what's not unique about psychology is the fact that it has a fundamental spiritual component. And how can that not be the case, since reality itself is spiritual, or ultraviolet, as well as infrared.

The illnesses of our time are caused by the lack of awareness of this spiritual side of reality. In fact, the illness of our time is at root this lack; everything else - the wars, the social and racial unrest, the looming nuclear destruction and actual ecological devastation - are just symptoms of this fundamental disease. The fact that we have forgotten this whole half of reality is the cause of everything wrong, not only in our individual lives but in the world at large. Just as our lives would fall apart if we failed to grasp the physical side, so it is falling apart because we have forgotten the spiritual side. Our world is reflecting this illness back on us. And as nothing in our individual lives will truly improve until we grasp this, so too will nothing fundamentally improve in the world until we come to understand both its halves.

The perversion of love

This is kind of off topic but unfortunately very much on topic in light of current events. Trump's (still) in the White House and Republicans are doing their damndest to pass a health care bill that will basically lead to the deaths of many poorer people in this country, a kind of social Darwinism not seen since the era of the robber barons... Or maybe it does have something to do with the topic of the four functions. Why don't you decide?



White people (or men, or people of any other dominant group) simply don't get group dynamics unless it's brought up by a person of a dominated group.  It may be perfectly clear to everyone else, including people who don't belong to either group. When you're in a dominating group there's some sort defense mechanism that tries to prevent you from seeing reality. The same doesn't happen to a dominated group; they have no reason to distort reality, they haven't done anything wrong, i.e. anything in violation of the laws of basic human dignity. So, members of the dominating group refuse to even see it... unless it's an attempt to balance the inequities that inevitably result from such relations. In that case, they take the “best defense is an offense” tactic and try to use sleight of hand to turn the accusation on their victims. This is because people's identity is actually very deeply tied with their group identity (this is the similarity between American and Japanese cultures that leads both to attack the loners).

There is a difference between white and black peoples because in this culture white people are on top... and they want to stay there. The masculine way is to look at the law itself, completely without any reference to the relationship. The reality is that to truly understand the situation, we must admit to the truth of the unequal relationship which is baked into the system, upon which the system is dependent to maintain itself. This is because the true motivator is the drive for power; because love is not there, because there is no consciousness in the feeling side, it comes up in its unconscious form, the desire for power.

The desire for power is love perverted. It's an attempt to get the good feelings of love without sacrificing anything of yourself. We want love but the only way to get it is to allow a part of yourself to die. This is why I've had to live a life of failure. Any part of life can be can be a time we got it right, but especially when your Self is pushing you away from the things of this world. This is why spiritual people down the ages have spoken about giving up this world in order to gain the other one, the eternal one, the real one. But the truth is, both worlds are real; the real is something beyond them, that unites them but also transcends them. Each must be accorded its respect and treated with all the dignity due them. Only then does one achieve the goal.


- "Object Anyway?", More Perfect

Listen to this podcast; it's awesome. Actually, you should listen to the entire series. It was created by the gifted and passionate folks over at RadioLab (and if you haven't listened to them, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR????)

The thin thread

As I was watching a video about Jung this particular section hit me hard. Trump is America's screaming Id in human form. Now more than ever we need to do everything in our power to prevent catastrophe in our own time.

When you observe the world you see people, you see houses, you see the sky, you see tangible objects. But when you observe yourself within you see moving images, a world of images, generally known as fantasies. Yet these fantasies are fact. It is a fact that a man has such and such fantasy, and it is such a tangible fact that when a man has a certain fantasy another man may lose his life. Or a bridge is built. These houses were all fantasies. Everything you do here, all of it was fantasy to begin with, and fantasy has a proper reality that is not to be forgotten. Fantasy is not nothing! It is of course not a tangible object but it is a fact nevertheless. It is, say, a form of energy, despite the fact we can’t measure it. It is a manifestation of something. And that is a reality that is just a reality as, for instance, the peace treaty of Versailles or something like that. It is no more… you can’t show it, but it has been a fact! And so psychical events are facts, are realities, and when you observe the stream of images within you observe an aspect of the world, the world within.

… The man who is going by the external world, by the influences of the external world - say, society or sense perceptions - thinks that he is more valid because this is valid, this is real, and the man who goes by the subjective factor is is not valid because the subjective factor is “nothing.” No, that man is just as well based because he bases himself upon the world from within, and so he is quite right even if he says “Oh, it’s nothing but my fantasy.” Of course that is the introvert, the introvert is always afraid of the external world. He will tell you when you ask him… he will be apologetic about it. “Of course, yes I know, it’s only my fantasy.” And he has always a resentment, against the world in general. Particularly America is extroverted like hell. The introvert has no place. Because he doesn’t know that he beholds the world from within. And that gives him dignity, and that gives him certainty because (nowadays particularly) the world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man. Assume that certain fellows in Moscow lose their nerve, or their common sense, and the whole world is in fire and flames!

Nowadays we are not threatened by elemental catastrophes. There’s no such thing as an H-bomb [in nature]. That is all man’s doing. We are the great danger, psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche? So you see it is demonstrated to us in our days, what power the psyche is, how important it is to know something about it, but we know nothing about it.

From: "The World Within: C.G. Jung In His Own Words" (go to 10:00)