Two quotes of C.G. Jung came up on my
Facebook screen today. I've been familiar with both of them for many
years. But it came as a reminder of the two most fundamental and far
reaching changes in my perception of things most important over the
past 30 years. Like most of my changes, which to me are of the nature
of the meaning of the Greek word 'metanoia- 'to perceive something
very differently than one once did', they came quite suddenly in the 'vision' experiences I had strongly for several years beginning
es
in mid August 1985. I was working full-time during all
this except for a couple of months before the visions started. It was only after such
ideas had been integrated into my mind that I found writers who were
able to give me ways to understand this process of inner
transformation. The one writer who helped more than any other was
Carl Jung. Since those initial changes I have benefited from many of
the things he wrote coming out of his amazingly wide range of study,
both from outside sources and what he discovered in his own depths.
As I have crossed the 70 year mark of
life and am being encouraged by my doctors to have surgery on my neck
to prevent more serious spinal cord and nerve damage, I feel
prompted by the appearance of these two Jung quotes to state afresh
the two themes that appear to me as ones fate had wired me to
become more informed about. And to live out the implications of
them as much as possible. I did not become significantly aware of
these themes and how central they are to me until I was close to
forty years old. And then quite quickly they both were calling for my
attention from the outer events of my life and from the inner
stirrings as well. The two themes have to do with the 'nature of
God' and the 'nature of love.' These are not new to anyone and the
world is full of words and ideas about them both, maybe more than
any others. But I've come to believe that our conventional ideas and
images of these two realities is far from being completed in the personal and collective development and of humankind. I think the new
perceptions I came to have and am still working with point to changes
in both that our Collective Consciousness is on the threshold of
beginning to embrace.
If one went through my blog posts it is
obvious that God and Love are central in the dreams and essays
recorded there. So in this little essay I'm not going to repeat what
I have learned or described of how my perception of these have
changed. I will simply place here the two quotes of Jung with a
simple preface to each of them. It is significant to me that on
January 6, 2014, without any initial plan on my part, I stood
for an hour and a half in the room where Jung, 60- 80 years ago,
first wrote these things.
I. The first has to do with the nature
of love. What Jung does here, written in the last years of his life
and in the last pages of his quasi autobiography, is to confess his
conviction that love is beyond any formal definition, though we must
try to find the best metaphors for it and seek to observe its
effects. And that the power of love can potentially still awaken
humanity to a higher quality of living and consciousness which is
beyond anything we have even imagined. This expresses my own estimate
of love. A strong notion I carry is what the fullness of love
would look and feel like in individual and collective human life , in
ways I can't explain, is palatable in my deepest being. Some have
felt I have romanticized love. I think I have simply taken it very
seriously and been open for its living reality to teach me something
of itself and about myself. I apologize for the Latin and Greek
phrases. But you won't miss the general picture.
“In
classical times, when such things were understood, Eros was
considered a god whose divinity transcended our human limits, and who
therefore could neither be comprehended nor represented in any way.
I
might as many before me have attempted to do, venture an approach to
this daimon, whose range of activity extends from the endless spaces
of the heavens to the dark abyss of hell; but I falter before the
task of finding the language which might adequately express the
incalculable paradoxes of love.
Eros
is a kosmogonos, a creator and father-mother of all higher
consciousness. …. In my medical experience and my life I have again
and again been faced with the mystery of love, and have never been
able to explain what it is. … No matter, no worse expresses the
whole. To speak of partial aspects is always too much or too little,
for only the whole is meaningful.
Love “bears all things”
and endures all things” (1 Cor. 13.7)
These words say all
there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the
deepest sense the victims and instruments of cosmogonic “love.”
I put the word in quotations marks to indicate that I do not
use it in its connotations of desiring, preferring, favoring wishing,
and similar feelings, but as something superior to the individual, a
unified and undivided whole. Being a part , man cannot grasp the
whole. He is at its mercy.
He may assent to it, or rebel
against i; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it.
He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it.
Love is his
light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see.
“Love
ceases not”-whether he speaks with the “tongues of angels,” or
with scientific exactitude traces the life of a cell down to its
uttermost source.
Man can try to name love, showering upon it
all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in
endless self-deceptions.
If he posses a grain of wisdom, he
will know, ignotum per ignotius-that is by the name of God.
That
is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his
dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose
between truth and error.”
(Carl Jung – Memories, Dreams and
Reflections p. 354 )
II.
The Second theme that underscores the not consciously planned goal pursued by my
life has to do with the nature of God. We should know as obviously
true that no human thought or words can capture a full meaning of
what our consciousness bearing species has always called God. For,
similar to love, God is a whole of which we are only a part; a part
can never grasp the whole. But we are an important part, for we bear
the capacity of an ever widening consciousness through which to
better know God. As humans we are the one thing in the universe, we
yet know of , that can create any 'knowing of God.' If not for us(or
conscious ones like us somewhere in the universe) God would not,
could not be 'known' at all and in a most real sense not exist. It is
a general fact that humans had from most ancient times carried the
intuition that they might come to 'know God.' To know God fully
would to be fully conscious which is impossible but it is reasonable
that we could 'know' God more fully than what God has been known
before, simply because we are potentially more conscious here and
there than were our ancestors. As you listen to Jung speak of God
from a very deep place within himself you hear him describe a reality
that is far more present and real than any orthodox image has
allowed. He sounds much like the N.T. description of God being that
in which, 'we live, move and have our very being.'
The
most troubling aspect of God that I came up against, and I think
that any human could come up against, is that God is not morally
perfect, not perfectly good. This for sure is the big kicker which
seems to be the last idea any believer in God wants to even
consider much less to claim. When the subject is raised most any
orthodoxy leaves the room in an emotional disgust. The perfection of
God is that last bastion that any orthodoxy or prejudice is willing
to surrender for fear of losing God. It is the greatest taboo of
all. Some would say that such an estimate of God's nature is to
render God not God anymore, but I would say that is not true. It is
even quite the opposite.
This is not the place for me to go into any
defense of this significant change in my perception but in a way I'm
convinced; that one day in the life of any human taken with full
seriousness and without anything to defend would teach this to all of
us. Or a perusal of a few Old Testament stories, heard objectively
with nothing to defend but the truth would send us away with some
need to 'tell on' Yahweh for his immature and obnoxious ways at
times. But because of the metaphors of God developed over time
immemorial our resistance to such a notion is the very last aspect
of an ultimate God that we would ascent to. It has been no different
for me. And like the other rediscoveries I've made on my journey,
this was through a direct raising of consciousness, not by academic
discussions or reading Jung or anyone else.
There
are many posts in my blog that work through this alarming aspect of
God along with suggested readings of some of the finest minds of the
human family. These quotations about God from Jung's mature work
remind me that Jung experienced, as many others have, that what is actually God is far
nearer and real than most dare to imagine and that God can be as
terrifying and amoral as God can be a radiant expression of all that
is good, light, faithful and loving. God is not a simplex of
perfection to be defended but a complex to be discovered, as it is
in reality, in the center of human life and consciousness.
Far from
lessening my conviction of God's reality, crossing this threshold of
perception brings God to greater constant reality and to my surprise
leads to a strong and tender empathy for God. For it has made me
aware that God suffers precisely the same kind of ways that I and
my fellow humans do. For, after all, we are made in God's image. One
N.T. Writer speaks of the Sacred as being one who knows suffering
and disappointments (I would add imperfections) as well as us humans,
thus making it possible for us to actually identify with each other.
And it is from such suffering, and the raised consciousness it gives
birth to, that both God and the creature human move to higher levels
of consciousness, bringing to my mind a grander hope for a bright
future for humanity and for the our planet than I ever could have
had with my previous conventional perceptions. Here are some words for
your consideration about the nature of God from C.G. Jung.
Jung 1. “To
this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross
my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my
subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my
life for better or worse.”
“For the collective unconscious
we could use the word God. But I prefer not to use big words, I am
quite satisfied with humble scientific language because it has the
great advantage of bringing that whole experience into our immediate
vicinity.
“You all know what the collective unconscious is,
you have certain dreams that carry the hallmark of the collective
unconscious; instead of dreaming of Aunt This or Uncle That, you
dream of a lion, and then the analyst will tell you that this is a
mythological motif, and you will understand that it is the collective
unconscious.
“This God
is no longer miles of abstract space away from you in an
extra-mundane sphere. This divinity is not a concept in a theological
textbook, or in the Bible; it is an immediate thing, it happens in
your dreams at night, it causes you to have pains in the stomach,
diarrhea, constipation, a whole host of neuroses.
“If you
try to formulate it, to think what the unconscious is after all, you
wind up by concluding that it is what the prophets were concerned
with; it sounds exactly like some things in the Old Testament. There
God sends plagues upon people, he burns their bones in the night, he
injures their kidneys, he causes all sorts of troubles. Then you come
naturally to the dilemma: Is that really God? Is God a
neurosis?
“Now that is a shocking dilemma, I admit, but when
you think consistently and logically, you come to the conclusion that
God is a most shocking problem. And that is the truth, God has
shocked people out of their wits. Think what he did to old Hosea. He
was a respectable man and he had to marry a prostitute. Probably he
suffered from a strange kind of mother complex.”
Jung 2. “The
absence of human morality in Yahweh is a stumbling block which cannot
be overlooked, as little as the fact that Nature, i.e., God’s
creation, does not give us enough reason to believe it to be
purposive or reasonable in the human sense. We miss reason and moral
values, that is, two main characteristics of a mature human mind. It
is therefore obvious that the Yahwistic image or conception of the
deity is less than that of certain human specimens: the image of a
personified brutal force and of an unethical and non-spiritual mind,
yet inconsistent enough to exhibit traits of kindness and generosity
besides a violent power-drive. It is the picture of a sort of
nature-demon and at the same time of a primitive chieftain
aggrandized to a colossal size, just the sort of conception one could
expect of a more or less barbarous society–'cum grano salis."
“This
image owes its existence certainly not to an invention or
intellectual formulation, but rather to a spontaneous manifestation,
i.e., to religious experience of men like Samuel and Job and thus it
retains its validity to this day. People still ask: Is it possible
that God allows such things? Even the Christian God may be asked: Why
do you let your only son suffer for the imperfection of your
creation?
“This most shocking defectuosity of the God-image
ought to be explained or understood. The nearest analogy to it is our
experience of the unconscious: it is a psyche whose nature can only
be described by paradoxes: it is personal as well as impersonal,
moral and amoral, just and unjust, ethical and unethical, of cunning
intelligence and at the same time blind, immensely strong and
extremely weak, etc. This is the psychic foundation which produces
the raw material for our conceptual structures. The unconscious piece
of Nature our mind cannot comprehend. It can only sketch models of a
possible and partial understanding.”
jung3“It is only
through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but
we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God
or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the
unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts
for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established,
with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the
unconscious an archetype of wholeness. Strictly speaking, the
God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with
this special content of it, namely the archetype of the Self.”
“God
is reality itself.”
“God is a psychic fact of immediate
experience, otherwise there would never have been any talk of God.
The fact is valid in itself, requiring no non-psychological proof and
inaccessible to any form of non-psychological criticism. It can be
the most immediate and hence the most real of experiences, which can
be neither ridiculed nor disproved.”
“All modern people
feel alone in the world of the psyche because they assume that there
is nothing there that they have not made up. This is the very best
demonstration of our God-almighty-ness, which simply comes from the
fact that we think we have invented everything physical – that
nothing would be done if we did not do it; for that is our basic idea
and it is an extraordinary assumption. Then one is all alone in one’s
psyche, exactly like the Creator before the creation. But through a
certain training, something suddenly happens which one has not
created, something objective, and then one is no longer alone. That
is the object of certain initiations, to train people to experience
something which is not their intention, something strange, something
objective with which they cannot identify.
“This experience
of the objective fact is all-important, because it denotes the
presence of something which is not I, yet is still physical. Such an
experience can reach a climax where it becomes an experience of
God.”
http://thesethingsinside.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/carl-jung-says-god-is-reality-itself/
Jim
Hibbett
