JUNG OR JESUS? Part Two
Compilation and commentary by Nicola Molloy
Jung claimed that where good is, there lies evil for balance --that's how it is
designed and it's the way life operates. Much of what he says in The
Essential Jung book claims that God is powerless and we must be our own god
or have no god. Jung wrote,
"Here each of us must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate
relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an
individual, from dissolving in the crowd?"
(as cited in Storr 1998 pp.391)
What may be where the problem lies with Jung turning traditional reason
upside down is his refusal to acknowledge reason as being of more value to the
primal instincts. I quote him again,
"The forlorn state of consciousness in our world is due primarily to loss of
instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind
over the past eon. The more power man had over nature, the more his
knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for
the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data - including the
objective psyche which is everything that consciousness is not. In contrast
to the subjectivism of the conscious mind the subconscious is objective,
manifesting itself mainly in the form of contrary feelings, fantasies,
emotions impulses and dreams, none of which makes oneself but which come
upon one objectively." (As cited in Storr 1998 pp.390)
However, due to the enormous scientific research done on the brain since
Jung stated his own subjective beliefs as truth, in contrast others might
also say that our conscious mind is more objective and our subconscious more
subjective, Jung believed we are all like how he perceived himself. He may
have believed (in comparison to his own conscious mind) that his own
subconscious was a source of wisdom and enlightenment, but he claimed his
ancestors had influence in this. It would've been hard for him to have been
more objective consciously because there wasn't the knowledge he could use
to draw on for this, instead he went back further in time to use the
information from less scientific people in the past, who strengthened his
belief that observation alone was enough to know truth. Never mind that the
eyes and ears can produce trickery from personal biases, which has been
found in experiments. Jung's spirits became complexes and the spirit world
became the unconscious and he believed it was the home of the ancestors, the
inner fatherland, the realm of the Gods.
Richard Semon, an associate of Jung at the hospital for mental disorders he
worked at in the early 1900s published his own theories about insanity being
hereditary. Like many others at the time Semon believed that human memory
was an organic memory transmitted from cell to cell biologically through
inheritance. DNA was not known about so this memory mystery was
misunderstood scientifically. This gave root to Jung's belief in a
collective unconscious, purely due to ignorance about how memory develops
from birth from a clean slate. Another Jungian discovery is the word
association test, which was developed by a man called Bleuler, who termed the
word "schizophrenia". He was a chief at the asylum Jung worked at. Jung
later did work on the word association tests using him and colleagues as
normal test subjects, even though Jung believed himself to be an avatar or
deity now embodied on earth. (Noll, 1997)
Jung's first book was about his cousin's multiple spirit controls in her
personality, though he denied the source of these, which was caused by him
drawing them into her to answer his own questions. He gave a devalued
clinical dissection of the so-called pathological personality of the medium,
and he named her only as S.W. He coldly claimed she had hysteria,
automatisms, distortions of identity and memory and a splitting of the
normal river of consciousness into several distinct streams giving multiple
personality. This helped launch his psychiatry career by making him sound
learned. He claimed that Helene and her spirit control, Ivenes the prophet
had mournful features, attachment to sorrow and a mysterious fate and it
lead to the historic prototype of the famous Ivenes the seeress. He
dismissed it as the actual prophetess and that Helene really wished to be a
prophetess and this archetype would represent what Helene wished to embody
in about twenty years and that she dreams herself into this higher state.
(Noll, 1997)
Never mind that this spirit control gave Jung prophetic advice which he
used, however to be all clinical he now referred to spirits as unconscious
or splinter personalities and of course the trusty complexes. Even though
his mother, grandmother, both grandfathers, great grandfather (if
indeed it was Goethe), cousin and himself all invoked spirits. They all
either really did that or all suffered from multiple personality disorder.
Either way they had trouble maintaining their own individuality without
their subconscious overpowering them. Yet Jung said that to have a
relationship with God, one had to become individualized. Furthermore he had
poltergeist activity in the house due to the many seances held there, was
this merely a manifestation of one's own subconscious asking for attention?
A knife broke into three places inside the cupboard door and the table
suddenly split down the middle of its own accord. (Noll, 1997)
Jung said the unconscious mind can have a prophetic function and give hints
to the conscious mind and ego about what mental organizations should or will
be on the horizon. This was his then current treatise on the current state
of psychiatric knowledge. These prophetic spirits were classified "hidden
memories" and termed "source amnesia." From 1902 Jung announced spirits were
only so called, no longer genuine, could this be denial? But if it's denial
why did he invoke them frequently? Now they were only an alternate
personality - the transcendent, heredity and the supernatural became demoted
to personality characteristics. He straddled two worlds himself, fear of
saying the truth to the world and denying that the world or even
Christianity has truth equal in value to the spirit world. He tapped the
spirit-world for data, threw it into jargon and placed it neatly into the
subconscious as human character traits. Yet he took normal good character
traits and designated them into faults and claimed they were evil e.g. being
faithful and having self-control. Instead they were repression and primal
instincts were superior. (Noll, 1997)
These "complexes", originally from multiple personality, were tagged to the
whole range of human experience but how could that all behavior be known
then, we don't even know it all 100 years later even with all the complex
brain research. When Jung was age 29 he applied scientific descriptions to
the personalities of eight mediums and claimed their characteristics
belonged to the laws of science, he wanted his colleagues to think he had
scientific terms for the complexities of human behavior. Jung became
influenced by Freud, who claimed all religion was a mass delusion, a common
neurosis or even a shared neurosis. Jung believed that psychoanalysis would
only be authentic if it offered the eternal truth of myth and that the
sexual insights of psychoanalysis could be the catalyst for cultural
redemption and rebirth, a vivifying replacement for Christianity. He
believed that sexual freedom could replace Christianity as another religion.
(Noll, 1997)
Jung wrote:
"I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for [psychoanalysis] than
alliance with an ethical fraternity. I think we must give it time to
infiltrate into people from many centres, to revivify among intellectuals a
feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into
the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those
ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making
the cult and the sacred myth what they once were-- a drunken feast of joy
where man regains the ethos and holiness of an animal. That was the beauty
and purpose of classical religion." (As cited by Noll, (1997) pp.65)
While Jung idealized us going back to an animal existence, he wanted to make
psychoanalysis into a religion, which only Initiates could gain knowledge
about. He believed that polygamy was the ideal to have as many women as
necessary to impart the feminine aspects into one's personality in order to
become whole again spiritually. He took a mistress, a patient of his, for
ten years with his wife's knowledge and he justified it with that excuse. He
claimed that you should only be faithful to yourself. (Storr, 1998) He was
comfortable with groups of women and it was said by Freud that he was
uncomfortable with becoming close to men due to a homosexual approaching him
as a teenager. His own father was an ineffectual role model for the
masculinity Jung admired.
Dr. Otto Gross, a colleague of Jung influenced him greatly, but he wasn't of
good character. Gross drove an army of women mad as their beloved for a
short time and coaxed one lover/patient to suicide and another died under
similar circumstances. He was called a genius and insane, and he also became
addicted to morphine, opium and cocaine and took psychoactive substances.
Gross gave all-night impromptu psychoanalytic sessions talking about the
necessity of promiscuity urging people to repress nothing, to anyone who
would listen. He was later committed to Jung's asylum as he went right off
the rails eventually becoming mad. Jung said (Noll, 1997) that Gross told
him that a truly healthy state for the neurotic is sexual immorality. As he
lessened his drug addiction in the asylum, he was again termed brilliant.
Jung became intrigued with Gross and held round the clock analytic sessions
with him and then pronounced he'd cured him. But in fact Gross was still
insane afterwards and Jung had been more influenced by Gross than he by
Jung, with his ideas of sexual liberation, neo-paganism, sun worship and
theosophy. Gross believed our distant ancestors lived freely, instinctively
and polyagamously in small bands that were matriarchal. A man apparently
showed him archaeological evidence for this. (Noll, 1997)
After this, Jung believed that when it came to reproductive needs, humans
were still primitive and that an ancestral impulse ruled us in this area and
to remain healthy, it is best not to repress the savage beast. He believed
that the shackles of family, society, and Deity must be broken. To unleash
the ancient creative energies of the body and unconscious mind, would bring
humans to a new level of being, and to achieve this they needed to love
freely, instinctively, guiltlessly, generously and polyagamously. Gross
offered Jung forbidden fruit and after he ate, his perception of 'sin'
changed. To Jung it was a benefit to the personality to be freed from
onesidedness and going back to an Edenic instinctual being and that not
giving in to strong sexual impulses could result in illness or death. Jung
would urge this to others and he claimed that the repressive orthodoxies of
Christianity were the true enemies of life. As a psychiatrist Jung more than
once prescribed polygamy for depression and advised one patient to take a
mistress and be free -- one shouldn't forget their infant influences and
lose their soul, if having another woman could save it. Gross also gave Jung
to concepts of introversion and extroversion. But he stole this idea and
later claimed he discovered the terms. (Noll, 1997)
Jung and his mistress of ten years believed that they founded a new faith
and that what were previously termed sin and evil were necessary for
spiritual rebirth. It would seem that all one had to do was drop their jaw,
be faithful to oneself, give in to random urges, channel entities
indiscriminately who would impart truth and one would become a deity by the
power of the ancestral build-up of power from past leadership ability lying
dormant in the genes. This is a very optimistic quick fix way to
enlightenment. However it might have been the entity Philemon who Jung
channeled or else possessed him, that gave him these rather off beat ideas
about who we are as humans and what we should be. Anthony Stevens gave some
very good insights into Jung's character and writes that his own
subconscious disturbances were so severe that they brought him to the edge
of madness. He heard voices in his head, held conversations with imaginary
figures and believed his house was crowded with spirits of the dead. However
he also simultaneously believed it was just imagination and unconscious
images. Jung believed that a dream he had of killing Siegfreid (the ancient
Germanic heroic figure)suggested to him that the conscious ideals embodied
in him, that his no 1 personality had identified himself with, was no longer
appropriate and had to be sacrificed. He then turned to the no 2 personality
and gave free reign to the primal man, who existed in an abyss in the land
of the dead. Jung experienced trance-like states, in which unconscious
personalities emerged with enough clarity that enabled him to hold
conversations with them. It was like descending into the old Greek
underworld. (Stevens, 1994)
Jung also found within himself both a beautiful young woman and an old man
with a beard, with wings like a kingfisher, that he called Philemon. These
he labeled archetypes - the eternal feminine and the wise old man. He
conversed with these figures that possessed a life of their own. At times
Philemon seemed quite real, as if he was a guru who went up and down his
garden with Jung. By then Jung already lost his father figures of Freud and
Bleuler, his work peer and destroyed his heroic representative Siegfreid and
so resorted to his inner authority Philemon. He wrote down everything
Philemon said in six notebooks written in Gothic script and embellished with
illustrations. However, his female inner voice said contrary information to
Philemon and that what he was doing was not science, but art and she
possessed the power to upset him. He concluded she must be the
personification of his soul and named her the anima, or inner female.
(Stevens, 1994)
Henri Ellenberger in 1970 suggests that Jung underwent a form of creative
illness during this phase in his life, similar to that suffered by Freud at
an identical period. This normally comes after a time of intense
intellectual activity and resembles a neurosis, (which is a disorder of the
nervous system not traceable to any physical cause) or in severe cases a
psychosis (severe mental disorder in which the person's reality becomes
distorted) The subject turns deeper into himself or herself and recovery can
be spontaneous and is associated with euphoria and transformation of the
personality. The subject feels he or she has gained important truths and
believes they have a duty to share them with the world. On their recovery
both Freud and Jung published major and original works. Though Freud had a
tendency to look backward and Jung to look forward, which gave him an
adaptive concern with goals. (Stevens, 1994)
Jung, in a dream he had while studying at university, gave a possible
insight into the destiny of his soul in life. It was night and he was making
painful headway through dense fog and against a mighty wind. His hands were
cupped around a tiny light, which threatened to go out any moment. He looked
back and saw he was being followed by a gigantic black figure. He believed
that the tiny light was his consciousness and that it was the only light he
had which became the sole treasure he possessed. (Stevens, 1994)
However it is no doubt Jung was a spiritual person in that he was aware and
able to access the spiritual worlds, but to him it was a source of instant
knowledge and an increase in power of the German gods who would overpower
their avatar and make him godlike. For Jung, his interpretation of God was
the man who possessed the pinnacle of power. Know yourself, and therefore
know God, then be your own God. It was vastly different to the traditional
Christian ideal of obeying God and to repent of your sins. To Jung a sin was
wasting your own god-power. As he believed that light contains darkness as a
necessity for balance, he decided God had a darker side, otherwise why would
He have invented the serpent in the first place to tempt Adam and Eve, (whom
he believed were designed with a deliberate capacity for this) into sin.
While he pondered God in his teens he had a strange vision of a cathedral
under a blue sky. God was on his throne high above the world and then an
enormous turd falls through the sparkling new roof and shatters it, breaking
the walls of the cathedral asunder. Was this also an omen? - as nowadays
Jung's system of belief is preached in the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish
places of worship so pervasive it has seeped into traditional belief systems
and eaten away at the core. Jung believed God could be someone terrible. He
believed God was powerless and needed to vent His anger at the way His
creation turned out and that He needed to become human to transform Himself
to become mature and whole and to grow and become individualized. Jung
believed that after the Apocalypse a new divine goddess figure would emerge,
which would end the era of male dominance and destructiveness. So he
believed as we understand God he grows. He believed God and Jesus being
sinless really denied Their shadow and that nobody is without their equal
darker aspect for balance. (Berry, 2000)
Possibly what happened is Jung, having no faith except in himself, read too
many books by others on religion and philosophy all contradicting and it all
merged into a big mess in the subconscious, blending into a homogeneous whole
when it arose again to the conscious mind. A bit like the delayed memory
syndrome. Jung seems to have just picked out bits and pieces of his memories
and dreams and figured it all leads one from a clod to a god. From the
expanded mind that comes from thinking about all kinds of truths which come from
everywhere. The trouble with Jung, was it was all-good, no idea left behind.
While others may put stuff into categories of good and bad, Jung's dark was
just the unknown.
Jung likened the Egyptian myth about the god dying and being reborn to the
story of Jesus. He believed if one was willing to undergo the painful
individuation process, like the shamanic Initiations one could become a
shaman. Although others may say to lose one's individuality causes one to
become merged in universal awareness, and the drug taking era of the 1960s
may have brought this belief, Jung saw the ego going into the outer world,
as God sent His Son, becoming individualized, then integrating back into the
whole - complete. Jung also borrowed ideas from Hinduism and Buddhism,
especially ideas suited to his belief system, where one escapes suffering
from the wheel of rebirth by becoming enlightened. However he believed that
analytical psychology would lessen that aspect by facing one's own shadow
and conquering it. He traveled extensively in the east. Jung stressed that
when he said the word God, he meant the god within and added the Virgin Mary
to the Trinity for balance, and archetypal satisfaction. He believed that
she appeared to children by the collective unconscious at work. Jung said
Christ is a symbolic aspect of oneself only. (Berry, 2000)
Jung believed the psyche as a whole is divisible into aspects, which project
themselves into form when the non-physical parts appear in the
consciousness. He believed that St. Paul's vision on the road to Damascus
happened when his unconscious Christ-complex associated himself with Paul's
ego and he could only be healed from his blindness by embracing
Christianity. Jung believed in a mass collective unconscious that belonged
to a whole group of individuals at once.
I quote Jung regarding the so-called collective unconscious from his book
Psychology and the Occult,
"Its contents are not personal but collective;
that is, they do not belong to one individual alone but to a whole group of
individuals, and generally to a whole nation, or event. The whole of
mankind. These contents are products of innate forms or instincts...the
primordial images which have always been the basis of man's thinking -- the
whole treasure house of mythological motifs". (Klimo, 1987, pp.216)
I question this, because there is no proof that we are a mass mind, striving
for individuality to become our own god, as Jung portrays. Furthermore he
confided to a friend William James, that he actually believed that this
metaphysic phenomenon yields better to the embodiment of actual spirits
hypothesis than any other. (Klimo, 1987, pp217) This collective unconscious
theory, based originally on beliefs that we didn't have the capacity to form
our own memories and that we inherited them from our ancestors, sprung up
because the brain mechanism wasn't understood at the time Jung was
formulating his theories, implies we aren't created by God to become
original thinking individuals, but implies our personalities can only fit
into premolded categories. Although Jung did have complex dreams and did
stimulate his mind a lot, I feel we cannot categorize ourselves into the
perceptions he had of our evolutionary progress. He would probably have been
better off making categories from the subconscious confessions of patients
he analyzed, as Freud did and leaving conclusions open, because
understanding the mind at the turn of the 20th cent was impossible.
Jean Houston, the well-known psychologist, continues Jung's theories and calls
these entities, which make themselves known to the consciousness godlings of
the depth of the psyche. However, she admits in one of her books that she
became one with the goddess Athena during a paranormal experience. Please
bear in mind this woman has had so much LSD, that she says she didn't have a
child for fear of the genetic damage that would occur. In her case it would
seem that the barrier between the conscious and subconscious has thinned to
the degree that she no longer knows who she is in relation to the entities
she channels. Sometimes these gurus who give us a new paradigm to live as
radical individualists have actually lost their individuality by allowing
some outside entity to speak through them. Even Wayne Dyer claims to have an
entity to inspire him now, an alien from our solar system. It's surprising
just how many gurus do have an entity that tells them what to say.
Certainly dreams are worth investigating and yesterday I heard a Christian
psychiatrist on the radio speaking about what our dreams meant. He'd
categorized various topics anyone could have in their dreams and fitted them
into neat categories, e.g. this means one is feeling guilty, that means one
is suffering anxiety. I was astounded at the shallowness of his
interpretations and how he thinks we are so simple that is we dream of a
fire or something it means we are worried. He didn't say sometimes it might
mean this in some case, he said what it meant and that was it. His symbols
were only emotional states. How many patients of his does he deceive by
giving pat answers to the workings of something so complex as our
subconscious. That was no better than a fortune tellers dream analysis where
one will be lucky if they dream of this or that.
Jung said that archetypes of the collective unconscious were its "gods".
This gem came right from Jung's Gnostic-Mithraic spiritual guru called
Philemon. From this entity he received instruction in "The Law". Philemon
supposedly originated from the Egypto-Hellenistic period. After he killed
off Siegfreid his no 1 personality, Jung also incorporated into his no 2
personality an elderly gentleman from the 18-century. This entity in Jung's
consciousness allowed him to perceive himself living in two time frames
simultaneously as two different people. (Noll, 1997)
Certainly Jung was a complex man, but not everyone experiences the world as
he did so this is why I question him stating his own non-Christian reality as
truth for everyone. I believe he spoke for himself, but we are
all different and Jung wasn't as rational as other pioneer thinkers. People's reality can change constantly according to their beliefs, so we can only say: this may or may not be real, but it's truth for me alone.
Jung believed that religious needs were biologically based and that our
pagan prehistoric ancestors, by being promiscuous had less neurosis and
psychosis than modern Europeans, so he believed one's life could improve if
one's religious beliefs and sexual practices resembled one's racial
ancestors. He believed polygamy unleashed the inner light that Christianity
crushed. He thought that unrestrained passions increased a person's
ancestral power to become powerful oneself and expand the consciousness.
Dreams pointed the way for the subconscious to indicate what its primal
needs were. Freud found erotic pleasure in his own dreams of mythical
figures, including the hydra snake headed creature. He became obsessed with
mythological figures in daily fantasies and dreams. (Noll, 1997) Sounds like
he opened Pandora's Box by not controlling his own curiosity about the dark
side of life.
Jung decided that changes in the libido from studying ancient religions and
cults were indicative of transformations in a developing individual. He
mixed ideas from Freud, Ernst Haekel and Johann Jacob Bachofen and made
symbolic images of the past, which would fit stages, he decided were a guide
to these libido transformations. He believed the libido was represented by
the sun and that the sun and fire were analogous and he even went so far as
to say that God was not the one of the Christians but is instead the libido
that lives within us all. He said that if one honours God, the Sun or the
fire, then one honours owns own vital force--the libido. He also said that
whoever has in himself God, the sun, is immortal like the sun. Jung was
obsessed with sun/hero myths from Hellenistic paganism and Teutonic heroes
and he called Christ a sun god, who was identical with Germanic hero-gods.
He said the Sun was a symbol of the visible God. Sun worship was the
original religion of the Aryans. He believed the pagan gods resided in the
subconscious of many educated Germans. (Noll, 1997)
During Jung's time multitudes of groups in Germany, Austria and especially
Switzerland where cults and heretical sects were active, believed in pagan
gods. There was an urge to return to the Edenic Aryan past, where primordial
soul was satisfied. Jung’s dreams were of Dionysis, (the god of wine) the
great mother goddess and sun heroes like Siegfreid. The Aryanist, popular in
bohemian circles, believed the universe was created from primordial fiery
chaos splitting into masculine and feminine forces creating eternal tension
between them and once joined back they would release the Creative Force or
primal energy of the Sun. So to release the creative potential of an entire
race, eugenics would be necessary to make prototype Aryans producing super
progeny. This was Hitler's goal. (Noll, 1997)
Jung repeatedly induced trance states in him to get visionary
experiences for a mystic Initiation into pagan mystery cults of the
Hellenistic world. He had one experience where his head changed into a lion
and he became a god, the lion headed god of the mystery cult of Mithraism (
1-4 cent CE) Jung claimed he became a god known as Aion, an Iranian eternal
being whose name means the infinitely long duration. Jung said at a lecture
where he described his deification,
"In this deification mystery you make yourself into a vessel, are a vessel
of creation in which the opposites reconcile." (As cited in Noll, 1997)
Before his supposed deification he encountered another man from his
subconscious called "Elijah", who sat on a rocky ridge, later climbing up a
mounded Druidic alter. During this encounter another entity, a woman called
Salome appeared to Jung and started worshipping him. He asked he why she
worshipped him and she replied, "You are Christ" and insisted on this. Then
he saw a snake approach him and encircle him in her coils, which reached up
to his heart. He realized that he assumed the attitude of the crucifixion.
He sweated profusely as the snake pressed him. Salome then rose and she
could see. Jung then felt his face had taken on the face of a lion or tiger.
Jung believed if one descended through the murky depths of the ancestral
unconscious the gods awaited them. In a disassociated altered state of
consciousness he descended into what he referred to as the Land of the Dead
or his unconscious and returned a god. Jung's supposed deification happened
in 1913 and this experience gave him the certainty of immortality. However
fitting his career in mental health Elijah, like Philemon became another
wise old prophet archetype- a factor of intelligence and knowledge, the
snake associated with hero myths, and Salone the anima or inner female
aspect. But he added that , "it is better to leave these experiences as they
are, namely as events, experiences." (Noll, 1997, pp.122) So to fellow
cultists he was a god and to his work peers they can be conveniently called
therapeutic techniques to understand one's mind. From then on he based his
psychotherapy practices on the beliefs of the ancient mystery cult of the
Hellenistic period.
Three years after his so-called deification, in 1916 Jung was driven to the
brink of insanity and suicide, as he went into his highly disassociative
trance induction enabling him to go into the realm of godlings and talk to
his entities like kingfisher winged Philemon, the main entity who controlled
him. The other women who inhabited his body, that he called his anima (as
she spoke in a female voice) had many long conversations with him. In the
evenings he'd be asking his anima questions and replying to himself in a
falsetto voice, believing she was one of the gods of matriarchal prehistory.
(Noll, 1997)
Jung couldn't yield to a personal God. His former colleagues diagnosed him
with colossal narcissism, because of his god complex and that he couldn't
tolerate the existence of another god besides his inner version. He even
couldn't say the word God without swearing. In 1916 he became paranoid after
the first world war having quick fits of anger, rage, paranoia and he became
emotionally loud. He kept a loaded pistol next to his bed and vowed to blow
his brains out if he felt he eventually lost his sanity. He'd had to
suppress revealing his own self-deification in public until 1925, so he'd
bottled up his godlike power for 12 years before he released it. (Noll,
1997) I guess this would be hard to foist on people during WW1 because
people may start asking for miracles, or they'd have been distracted by more
pressing concerns.
Many people influenced Jung. Neitzsche introduced Jung into the ancient cult
of Dionysis with the mysteries of blood and sexuality and underground
Initiation as mentioned. His peer Otto Gross encouraged Jung to become
polygamous to release his inner power. Madame Blavatsky, the Russian mystic
and founder of the Theosophical Soc. popular with some radical thinkers of
that time, claimed to have been an Initiate of the goddess Isis in 1875, so
in esoteric circles it was an accepted reality that this could happen. Also
Albrecht Dietrich influenced Jung on the ancient Gnostic god Abraxas.
Dietrich identifies the Mithraism mysteries of Iran as having the mystical
union of man in god, god in man and the erotic union of humans with a god.
So the original sources of Jung's teachings were mainly his own psychic
experiences, those of other thinkers in history or ancient philosophers. He
didn't arrive at his system of psychology from the research of clinical case
studies, but he tried to fit his client’s dreams into his preordained
archetype system. Mystery cults from the ancient times had their goal the
direct contact with a transcendental realm of gods, sometimes through the
underworld. The candidate passed through a reincorporating stage in the
boundary between the sacred and profane worlds. They revived with a new
identity. (Noll, 1997)
Summary:
Were they possessed -- is it a normal part of evolution to go through these
rebirths, or was it all just the imagination at work? You decide. In the
occult revivals of the 19th and 20th century pagan mysteries persisted and
live on in the work of Jung. If he hadn't studied widely on Gnosticism,
mythology, ancient gods and paganism we may not have his work categorized
under the term psychology because strictly speaking his work isn't
scientifically provable. Because understanding the mind then was new,
instead of doing scientific research Jung just interpreted dreams as
mythology and put entities that mediums channeled into roles of personality
aspects, of which any type can fit anyone. Which brings me to the
question -- is it truth? If we all followed Jung the world would be full of
too many chiefs and not enough Indians if we all pursued a goal of self-
deification.
I think this sort of thinking is too vague to be classed intellectual, but
it suits people who are finding their way through the fog of abstract
thinking and have yet to develop their own unique philosophy and need a
model of someone who was a prolific writer and appears to be learned. For
me, I don't believe his philosophy was true as he portrayed it, but he has
had a lot of ideas. These could possibly be researched further to know if he
was partially true as far as universal archetypes go, though many people
believe in the 12 zodiac constellations as a kind of order in the universe.
Considering we have 6 billion possibilities of truth according to everyone's
different experiences, I think it's premature to base the meaning of life
upon Jung's ideas, especially as he was verging off the edge of normal
thinking and not really searching for higher qualities like righteousness,
love, honestly, compassion, self control etc. However, he at least gave us
an idea of one man's capacities and how one will end up if they really do
walk in the Land of the Dead and return. Using him as a case study in human
capability, it is interesting that he may have contacted the Land of the
Dead and found ancient beings still there. Are the ancient godlings still
around? Where would they have gone if indeed they went underground. Many
new age books encourage people to believe in mythology. Perhaps the belief
itself draws them back to our reality. He needed more than one woman at once
to feel balanced, so he brought in another one and still remained married
for ten years. But it was meant to be, he believed. I think Jung was
exceeding limited in his ability to relate to others as his equal. He would
probably needed to have had to learn to yield to others as women can more
easily, if he really wanted balance in his personality to tone down his
enjoyment of power. Give and take, me and thee is true balance.
Bibliography:
Berry, R. (2000) A Beginner's Guide. Jung. Oxon, U.K.: Bookpoint Ltd.
Campbell, J. (1976) The Portable Jung. N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books.
Klimo, J. (1987) Channeling. L.A., U.S.A. The Aquarian Press.
Noll, R. (1995) The Jung Cult. London, U.K. Fontana Press.
Noll, R. (1997) The Aryan Christ. London, U.K. Macmillan.
Stevens, A. (1994) Jung: A Very Short Introduction. N.Y., U.S.A: Oxford
University Press.
Storr, A. (1998) The Essential Jung: Selected Writings. London, U.K. Fontana
Press.
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JUNG OR JESUS? Part One
JUNG REPLACES JESUS IN CATHOLIC SPIRITUALITY by Paul Likoudis
