Jung and his Mystics

In the end it all comes to nothing

John Dourley, John P. Dourley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317750031
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Jung's psychology describes the origin of the Gods and their religions in terms of the impact of archetypal powers on consciousness. For Jung this impact is the basis of the numinous, the experience of the divine in nature and in human nature. His psychology, while possessed of a certain claim to science, is based on depths of subjective experience which transcends psychology and science as ordinarily understood. Jung and his Mystics: In the end it all comes to nothing examines the mythic nature of Jung's psychology and thought, and demonstrates the influence of mysticism and certain religious thinkers in formulating his own work.

John P. Dourley explores the influence of Mechthild of Magdeburg and fellow mystics/Beguines, and traces the mystic impulse and its expression through Meister Eckhat and Jacob Boehme to Hegel in the nineteenth century. All of these mystics were of the apophatic school and understood the culmination of their experience to lie in an identity with divinity in a nothingness beyond all form, formal expression or immediate activity. Dourley shows how this is still of relevance in our lives today. The book concludes that Jung's understanding of mysticism could greatly alleviate the conflict between faiths, religious or political, by drawing attention to their common origin in the depths of the human.

Jung and his Mystics: In the end it all comes to nothing is aimed at scholars and senior research students in Jungian Studies, including religionists, theologians and philosophers of religion, especially those with an interest in mysticism. It will also be essential reading for those interested in the connection between religious and psychological experience.

1 The Mystics and Psychic Self-Containment

DOI: 10.4324/9781315796277-1

Jung's myth as the Mother myth

Jung’s psychology serves as an excellent resource for the interpretation of myth. It is so because myth, in whatever form, ranging from cosmogonic or theogonic statements on how the Gods and the universe were created to the interactions between specific deities and humanity, is an expression of archetypal energies. As such all myths invite their readers to experience in one’s psyche the energies they depict and personify as beyond the psyche. The introjection of the myth moves the individual to become a full participant in the drama it depicts by experiencing its truth in oneself.

Usually overlooked even by Jungians is the fact that Jungian psychology is itself a myth expressive of the foundational movements of the psyche and its extension to the world, humanity and divinity “beyond” the psyche. The dynamic of Jung’s myth describes the birth and fall of consciousness, and its return through death to its womb as a prelude to rebirth, now cast as the co-redemption of both Goddess and her child, the ego, in a cycle without end. This cycle is the primordial pulse of individual life and of the life of humanity itself. Effectively psychic life in Jung’s myth become the reenactment of the Mother myth. The defining moments in this great round lie in the emergence of consciousness from the maternal pleroma, its reimmersion through the baptism of egoic dissolution into her fontal plenitude and a resurrection toward her ongoing incarnation in a consciousness now more unified in itself and moved to embrace the totality whose eternal matrix and ground the Great Mother is. In the process the Goddess and her progeny, consciousness, engage in an all encompassing dialectic wholly contained within the total psyche neither needful nor tolerant of the influence of any agency from without. In fact within Jung’s myth it is not possible to talk of anything existing as knowable “outside the psyche”. The phrase lacks intelligibility in a Jungian context since the psyche wholly encompasses what is and what can be know.

The cycle’s first moment is the universal original sin. It is the sin of becoming conscious. It is a sin both rewarding and yet painfully paid for. It casts the newborn ego in its infantile and developing self-affirmation into a state of unconsciousness unaware of its connection to its own origin and so unaware of its connection through that origin to all that is both within and beyond itself. Though a sin, it is a needed sin, a happy fall. To be conscious and alienated from origin and surrounding is better than being wholly unborn. In its earlier condition consciousness fresh from its origin in the land of the Gods and Goddesses took them in literal projection as dwelling on mountaintops and eventually heaven. As the millennia flowed on the ego’s proclamation of independence inevitably took on a pathological hubris in the pride of its limited power and constricted but real freedom unaware of the “supremacy of the self” in all matters maturational (Jung 1969 b: 259–260).

Closer to our situation in the history of consciousness, the dialectic between ego and the unconscious, at once developmental and pathogenic, took the form of the release of reason from its captivity to religion and religious institutions in the wake of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. As necessary and, indeed, cherished as these developments were the progressive removal of consciousness, personal and collective, from its own depths deeply informs and sickens contemporary Western culture. Such diminished relation to depth is the pathological hallmark of patriarchy in either gender. The mind is torn from its ground and left to suffer isolation from the other and nature, as well as the conflict between differently archetypally bonded communities now in the form of secular faiths funded by the same possessive powers as previously empowered religious faiths and their carnage. This is not to deny that secular faith and religious faith cannot align their powers in an even deeper collective unconsciousness, as is evident in the conflicted Middle East and along the eastern shore of the Adriatic (Dourley: 2003).

This current moment of universal existential alienation is described in many terms beyond its religious designation as original sin. The current term of choice derives from Weber’s conception of disenchantment. Disenchantment in Jung’s myth describes a debilitating remove from the Goddess as source and sustenance of conscious life, and so a remove from one’s personal depth, from each other and from nature itself as grounded in her power. Jung was keenly aware of the profound disenchantment of his culture infecting himself as early as The Red Book. Early in this work he describes the creative tension in his own life as that between the spirit of the times and the spirit of the depths and so of the soul. In terms redolent of society’s current malaise he describes his possession by the spirit of the times as one of loss of soul. “I still labored misguidedly under the spirit of this time and thought differently about the human soul. I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many learned words for her. I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object” (Jung 2009: 232). In doing so Jung frankly confesses he was immersed in a darkness and alienated from the life of his soul about whom he had lectured scientifically and written so grandly (Jung 2009: 233, fn. 52).

Jung’s response to this cultural and personal malaise describes the second movement in his myth. His psychology itself takes on mythic proportion as seeking a redemptive but hard won freedom from the spirit of his time and the recovery of his soul in a soulless society. The recovery of soul was far more than individual. The recovery of his soul entailed the recovery of the soul of his culture and civilization. In the relation of the personal to the cultural Jung’s problem and its resolution became his analysis of the problem of his time and the strategy for its resolution. As Erikson would argue that Luther’s problem and its resolution was the problem and resolution of the anguish of his time so also was the resolution of Jung’s suffering and its alleviation the answer to his (Erikson 1958). The personal imagery of The Red Book emerging from his own unconscious became the mythic basis of his psychological elaboration of the powers they symbolized. For both Jung and Luther the power of the divine was engaged in their suffering toward the higher consciousness such suffering was to engender. For Luther the answer came through a revelation from beyond. Jung came to understand revelation as the compensation the unconscious offers to individual and society as the source of both becomes more real in each. This would make of Jung’s myth a revelation without making him a messiah. His personal revelation implied a relation to the divine common to all and the figures in it ones that peopled the universal psyche from which they came into his conscious life in a form appropriate to the historical situation of that life. Under his suffering of the spirit of the time Jung’s revelation came entirely from the depth of his own being. It had no origin beyond the psyche itself. In this he was among the first to realize clearly that the Gods speak entirely from within as they spoke to him in the experience that took the shape of the figures in The Red Book, later developed in a more discursive manner in his Collected Works.

From early on Jung’s psychology as myth was thus dedicated to the reconnection of the mind with its ground in the deeper psyche. The recovery of the ground of consciousness in the depths of one’s own psyche is not without suffering. The images surrounding the process are of death and dismemberment to convey the pain of a descent working a loss of mind in the interests of a wider and deeper consciousness upon return from the depth. Jung draws on a number of traditions and resources to describe the return to the inner origin in compelling variants. The return is a crucifixion and burial between archetypally based opposites as a prelude to a resurrected consciousness (Jung 1969 b: 225). It is imaged in flaying as a body moves to new life (ibid.: 228). It can be a sacred dismemberment and self-eating to be endlessly reenacted (ibid.: 227). It is visioned as a “baptism” into the abyss of the Goddess, a total immersion, even to the point of ego annihilation, in her creative nothingness (Jung 1969 e: 425). And these are but a few of the images describing the horrors of the descent into the world beyond ego as the precedent to its renewal.

Return from this immersion in the depth becomes in Jung’s myth the third and resolving moment. It is the substance of incarnation and redemption. The psychic hallmarks that characterize it most adequately are an enhanced personal integration of the energies that create the individual coupled with an extended universal compassion. The cycle of birth from, return to, and fuller conscious expression of the origin is the basis of the mother myth and the mother myth is the myth informing Jung’s psychology. In effect processes of what Jung calls “individuation” are the reenactment in individual life of this myth of birth, death and rebirth. The mother myth thus described may indeed be the primal cosmogonic and theogonic myth. By making the myth the basis of the individual’s true reality, Jung’s psychology works to reconnect the individual with the origin of the universe as the ground of one’s personal being from which the Gods and Goddesses arise as needed to consciousness in person and history. The universal dialectic between consciousness and its origin seeking consciousness in it engages every individual and, through the individual, the species. From participation in this commerce there is no place to hide. The dialectic commences with the original sin of consciousness and will continue as long as the origin of consciousness seeks ever-greater self-consciousness in it in a cycle without end.

To the extent that this dialectic becomes conscious in historical humanity, the sense of the Goddess and her sympathies becomes increasingly real in existential consciousness. Such consciousness bears an intensified compassion for all that lies within and beyond the individual born anew from the Great Mother as the creative nothingness from which the individual and the all proceed. In the above treatment the moments of the myth were distinguished and dealt with as scenes in a play. This presentation may be overly intellectual in dissecting the myth. The myth itself and its moments are susceptible of great variation but on closer inspection appear in the significant myths both extant and practiced or now living only in memory.

Nor can the great moments in the myth be reduced to once-and-for-all historical events though they may be so depicted, in particular by communities who live under their spell and in various ways depend on their literal and historical interpretation for communal coherency, assurance and even survival. There was no historical Garden of Eden nor fall therefrom. There was no universal redemption of humanity in an individual’s return from death in a unique historical event. Nor will there be a final gathering of the saved within history in a New spotless Jerusalem. Nor can these events be confined to any historical autobiography though their depictions in collective religious imagery, and especially in a literal and rational age, may force them to be so. Jesus’ return to mother earth in death and resurrection from her are but one instance of taking a myth personally, literally and historically. Death and resurrection undergone by an historical individual is in this instance a striking variation on a much told tale, still in possession of large swaths of the collective imagination reducing it to historical biography and so missing its myth and transformative power. In the Jungian myth these religious depictions of birth, death and rebirth are not of past events. They owe their origin to passionate energies operative in the creations of the mythic whose intent is to lead those they touch into the same intensities from which they came. The object of symbolic story and its ritual enactment is to lead the individual into living contact with inner powers they depict. One whose experience has yet to include that of personal death and resurrection would be incapable of understanding its biblical meaning.

These archetypally based energies are the real authors of and actors in the stories of heroic enactment in days of yore and the guarantors of the indelible imprint they have left on the present. Their referent is not to history and its religious luminaries and communities but to the deeper movements of the psyche itself working now, always, everywhere, and in everyone. By elevating it to a psychic reality Jung gives a universal meaning to the Vincentian Canon. It now reads that religious humanity in the very diversity of its communities lives under the suasion of that which is believed “always, everywhere and by everyone.” In this sense Jung can proclaim the universal truth of the Christian myth and liturgy and be entirely free from the slightest taint of Christian religious imperialism. When he writes, “That is to say that what happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere” (Jung 1969 c: 89) he is not writing as an aggressive Christian apologist on behalf of the supremacy of institutional Christianity, he is writing that the archetypal power of the image is one of the self from which it derives its lasting import and universal meaning as one among many expressions of the self. Jung could have said the same thing about the lives of Abraham, Moses or Mohammed.

And yet to admit that both the origin and referent of the great religions, and their “revealed” accounts of deities, in their dealing with humanity express spe-cific variants of the foundational movements of the universal human psyche remains regrettably beyond the epistemic and faith boundaries of many. The popular religious imagination would dismiss such suggestion with the accusation that such a position is reductionism in the form of psychologism. It would become the basis of the vapid accusation that Jung “psychologizes” religion. Such a position reduces an objective revelation by an objective God to the status of a symbol whose origin is wholly internal to the human and serves to track the movements of the major energies of the psyche. In contrast for Jung only the symbolic as expressive of its living archetypal base enables revelation to endure. Taken literally such symbolism is rightfully dismissed as magic and infantile. Thus Jung found himself strangely forced to defend himself from charges of reductionism by pointing out to religious critics that his archetypal theory points to the founda-tional power and perdurability of their faith located in the archetypes themselves. As such his psychology hardly corrodes faith by revealing its profoundly human origin or, more precisely, it origin in the profundity of the human (Jung 1967 a: 49, 50; Dourley 1994: 20, 21). Yet sophisticated intellectual and theological reflection on the origin and substance of the diverse religions continues into the present to evidence a hankering, however disguised, for the supernatural status and so objectivity of one’s preferred divinity and its engagement with humanity. A psychological analysis of another religion is quite acceptable as long as it does not touch one’s own. Jung’s response to such religious protectionism was simply, “Yet, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” (Jung 1969 d: 109).

As a cosmogony Jung’s myth links the individual to the universe and as a the-ogony accounts for the origin of the divinities in the impact of the archetypal and its numinosity on consciousness. He could hardly be more explicit on this point than in his reference to “my demonstration of the psychic origin of religious phenomena” (Jung 1968 c: 9). In the context of his wider work he is here affirming that the archetypal psyche creates the experience which creates the Gods as well as personal and communal faith in them. This experience of the divinities and their interaction with the human are the substance of all religious conviction, scriptures, dogma and ritual reenactment, the most dramatic “empirical” expression of the archetypal foundation of human consciousness. Sketched in its broadest sense Jung’s cosmogony and theogony coalesce in affirming that the Goddess creates consciousness in order to become conscious in her child. She births the various religions to provide a diversity of access to herself. The stories of their Gods, the substance of their beliefs and their ritual initiations and constant reen-actment serve primarily and forcefully to identify and access her deeper movements in the human psyche. She is the presiding divinity, the one true Goddess and source of all the others. Only in human consciousness can her lesser and defined offspring, human and divine, work toward an ever demanded yet ever evasive conscious fullness adequate to her and to her at once unbounded but con-flicted potential to be united and realized in consciousness. A later chapter will fully address Jung’s late work, Answer to Job, in which he makes clear that the relation of the ego to God is its relation to the archetypal unconscious, that the ego had to emerge from its source at the insistence of the self as the only locus in which the polarities inherent in the source could be perceived and resolved, and that such resolution is the meaning of individual life and the life of the species. Jung’s myth thus stated has many implications in many fields.

The implication for cultural diagnosis and healing

Severance of the mind from its generative roots is more than simply a widespread wallowing in a passive social malaise of superficiality and meaninglessness. Such severance is the precondition of collective possession. It is dangerous and currently threatens the species. For the emergence of a rational milieu has by no means disabled the archetypal energies that create the Gods and their communities. On the contrary, the mind stripped of conscious interaction with the powers that create the Gods and equivalents in other forms of faith is peculiarly susceptible to being possessed by the very powers whose existence reason denies, diminishes or forgets. Individually those possessed not only of but also by faith are most visible in all form of fanaticism whose only distinction lies in the underlying archetype. More lethal than individual fanaticisms is their collective equivalent, the transformation of religious faith into political faith and the loss of life such transformation works so widely today. Political faith is the insidious concretion of the same archetypal power that formerly created religious faiths and the enmity and bloodshed that so marked their history. Such religiously inspired mayhem became a major impetus in the emergence of the Enlightenment. If religion and its wars in the wake of the Reformation could not keep the peace then reason might. And to some extent it did. The Enlightenment, especially in its Kantian and Humean streams, demonstrated the weakness if not total inefficacy of traditional arguments for the existence of God and reduced metaphysical speculation about the nature of the divine to a skeleton creed evocative of a universal rational assent that God existed, rewarded good and punished evil. It separated church and state. Explicit theocracy is no longer an option in the societies living in the legacy of the Enlightenment. Enlightened reason’s critique of institutional religion and its theological support did contribute to a more responsible religious sense if such a sense was to be maintained at all beyond an affirmation of faith both beyond reason and divested of experience.

Yet ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• preface
• 1 The mystics and psychic self-containment
• 2 The unspeakable ecstasy: Mechthild and other divine mistresses
• 3 I pray to God to rid me of God: Jung, Eckhart and the nothing
• 4 Jung on Boehme: The co-redemption of the divine and human
• 5 Hegel and Jung: A requiem for a lonely God
• 6 The Answer to Job: The humanity of the divine as the divinity of the human
• 7 Conclusion: So what?
• References
• Index