The Darkening Spirit

Jung, spirituality, religion

David Tacey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135933920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The twenty-first century could well be Jung's century, just as the twentieth century was Freud's. Jung predicted the demise of secular humanism and claimed we would search for alternatives to science, atheism and reason. We would experience a new and even unfashionable appetite for the sacred. Educated people, however, would not return to unreconstructed religions, because these do not express the life of the spirit as discerned by modern consciousness. The sacred has developed a darker hue, and worshipping symbols of light and goodness no longer satisfies the longings of the soul. The new sacred cannot be contained by the formulas of the past, but nor can we live without a sense of the sacred. We stand in a difficult place: between traditional religions we have outgrown and a pervasive materialism we can no longer embrace.

These changes in our culture have come sooner than Jung might have imagined. In his time Jung struck many as eccentric or unscientific. But his works speak to our time since we have experienced the full gamut of Jungian transformations: the unsettlement of Judeo-Christian culture, the rise of the feminine, the onslaught of the dark side, the critique of modernism and positivism, and the recognition that the Western ego is neither the pinnacle of evolution nor the lord of creation. A new life is needed beyond the ego, but we do not yet know what it will look like. The outbreak of strong religion and terrorism are signs of the times, but these are expressions of a distorted and repressed spirit, and not, one hopes, genuine pointers to the future.

What the future holds is uncertain, but Jung's prophetic vision helps to prepare us for what is to come, and this will be of great interest to analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts, as well as to theologians, futurists, sociologists, and the general reader.

Chapter 1

The degraded spirit in secular society

---

Our unconscious hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed.

Jung¹

When spirit is ignored

In these times it is easy to forget our responsibilities to spirit. Spirit is a powerful force that seeks to transform our lives so they might be reconnected to the sacred. Spirit seeks to rebind the temporal to the eternal, and in doing so our lives are turned around so we are no longer enslaved to the ego and its narrow goals. Spirit is the instigator of our rebirth, insofar as we are made to realise the illusory nature of the ego and become new persons with profound aspirations. In religious cultures, this process is facilitated by rituals, liturgies, prayers and instructions. The spirit needs all the help it can get to enable the transformative process to take root in the personality. It relies on religions and cosmologies to bolster its claims against those of the world, which tend to move in the opposite direction. For the world, ‘spirit’ is a mere phantom or illusion and only the ego and its ambitions are real.

When the worldly impulses drown out those of the spirit, we live in dark and dangerous times. The ego does not perceive this darkness because it is too limited to understand the deeper impulses of life. In fact the ego prides itself on having driven out the ‘superstitions’ of the past and overcome the ‘morbid’ ideas of religions and philosophies. It declares itself to be ‘free’ and ‘modern’, that is, without religious belief, and is dedicated to the process of ‘enlightenment’. This too often means it becomes enslaved to reason, science and technology. To the spirit, the ego's enlightenment is a form of endarkenment, since the things that are important are not seen but rendered invisible. The ‘best minds’ of modernity declare religion and cosmology to be dead or irrelevant. Gradually, however, a darkness settles over society and the bright hope of modernity is diminished. The makers of modernity have overlooked an important fact: the spiritual forces do not go away because we stop believing in them.

Spiritual forces turn dark and malign when they are no longer recognised. They cannot be got rid of because they are part of our reality, and are the ‘eternal’ in us, the forces that bind us to creation. If they are not allowed expression, they bring about violence and disease. Spirit can be suppressed by the ego but cannot be banished. It has a special relationship to death, and if that cannot be realised in a life-enhancing way, the ‘eternal’ in us forces itself on us in suffering and death. We have no real choice in the matter: we either sacrifice some of our egotism for eternal values, or we are sacrificed to eternity in a destructive way.

In traditional cultures this process was mythologised in terms of a personal deity. The deity was ‘pleased’ if we acknowledged him or her, and kept a special place for the eternal in our hearts, but the deity was ‘wrathful’ and ‘angry’ if we neglected to serve him or her, upon which he or she would seek retribution. This mythology seems like nonsense to us today, now that we no longer believe in gods, but we have to translate the ancient narrative into modern terms, so we might understand what this means to modern persons. It is a tragedy that the ‘enlightenment’ of the mind has not included the ability to translate mythology into psychology. Today we need midrash, that is, the ability to read the ancient stories in ways that are meaningful to modern times. The gods are sacred forces that are as alive today as ever. When the ego rules, we are living in a fool's paradise, and it is only a matter of time before its constructs are undone and we have to reconsider everything.

We live in a period of time where the most profound rethinking about existence has to be carried out, but we are resisting this process as much as possible. Something needs to happen, but it cannot happen, because we are not allowing ourselves to see the problem. The ego's grip on our world is so strong that we are unable to release ourselves from its tyranny. A more religious age would say that we are held by the power of Satan or the devil; and fundamentalists do say that. But they are speaking a language we no longer understand; they do not understand it either but are possessed by its mythological suggestiveness. We need new ways of talking about the relationship between the sacred and humanity. Jung's psychology is an important attempt to correct the thinking of the ego and recall us to the spiritual tasks and responsibilities of our lives.

The activation of the inner sun

Jung found in his clinical practice that the unconscious is alive with spirit. Spirit is often distorted, malformed and diseased in its unconscious state, but it is present. Jung compared the activity of the religious impulse to the workings of the instincts. When an outlet is closed off to an instinct, another channel will be sought and he felt the same could be said of spirit:

The archetype behind a religious idea has, like every instinct, its specific energy, which it does not lose even if the conscious mind ignores it. Just as it can be assumed with the greatest probability that every man possesses all the average human functions and qualities, so we may expect the presence of normal religious factors, the archetypes, and this expectation does not prove fallacious. Any one who succeeds in putting off the mantle of faith can do so only because another lies close to hand. No one can escape the prejudice of being human.²

Secularism has the paradoxical effect of making us not less but more spiritual, insofar as we are impelled from within to seek meaning. We can outgrow a particular local form of the religious impulse, but as we do we find ourselves looking around for something to replace it. The secular mind imagined that religion was synonymous with its outdated forms, but because religion expresses an eternal living reality, the squashing of its old forms results in the proliferation of new expressions. The trappings of religion can be stripped away and its dogmas discredited, but no amount of secular conditioning can alienate us from the soul. After the stripping away and the deconstruction, we are left with the soul's cry for ‘more’, since we are homo religiosus and cannot deny this fact. We cannot escape the ‘prejudice of being human’, as Jung put it, and will always require a spiritual orientation or a substitute formation.

Jung saw through our secular mask and the religious resistances of his patients. He claimed, to the incomprehension of the scientific community, that the religious impulse had not disappeared but had simply changed its location. Instead of being found in churches or temples, the spirit is found in psychological experience as people wrestle with the forces inside them. The collapse of tradition had caused religion to be privatised, internalised, and in a peculiar way, re-energised. A hundred years after Jung put forward his thesis of the continued subterranean existence of religious life in Western humanity,³ we are becoming aware of this as a problem to be solved as well as a possibility to be explored. With a certain degree of bitterness, since his theory was disparaged for so long, Jungians can say that the old master was right on this important point and his research has been vindicated, at least posthumously.

Our society alienates us so radically from religious forms and practices that the psyche gives rise to compensatory yearnings for the sacred. ‘If anything of importance is devalued in our conscious life, and perishes – so runs the law – there arises a compensation in the unconscious.’⁴ By this act of compensation, the longings of the spirit are intensified and what would otherwise remain silent is pushed to the forefront, affecting our thoughts and behaviour. There is a popular Zen saying that helps us understand our situation:

There are two suns, one in the sky and one inside the heart. When the sun in the sky becomes weak and the world darkens, the sun inside us blazes more strongly.

When the God ‘out there’ in the heavens, or worshipped in institutions, grows weaker through lack of belief and conviction, the God ‘in here’ becomes stronger. Jung said ‘when all visible lights are extinguished one finds the light of the self’.⁵ When religion declines, the inner world lights up with spirit because there is ‘a life-producing sun in the depths of the unconscious’.⁶ This life-producing sun is what drives many of us to seek ultimate meaning. What this means in historical terms is that religion is weaker institutionally but stronger psychologically.

Religion was a cultural construct instituted by tradition, but in today's world it becomes an existential need, driven by desire. Hence so much spiritual activity seems personal, to the point of being idiosyncratic.⁷ People collect and explore their own sets of symbols, many of which are borrowed from the same religious systems that they repudiate. They ransack traditions in the hope of finding resources for their personal quest. This produces a curious social situation and cultural patterning, where the world is divided against itself: interest in spirituality rises at the same rate as religion declines. Contradictory things can be said about the contemporary world, such as that the intensity of our relationship with the sacred is decreasing formally and increasing informally.

A secret life holds sway

In ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’, Jung put forward a memorable interpretation of our spiritual condition:

Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols. Symbols are spirit from above, and under those conditions the spirit is above too …Our unconscious, on the other hand, hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed …The ‘heart glows’, and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.⁸

As with Freud, Jung often symbolised the unconscious as a body of water, but today our unconscious is no longer ordinary ‘water’, containing common drives and ambitions. The unconscious, which would normally be a natural element of the psyche, is no longer natural. It is turbo-charged, living water, or ‘spirit that has become nature’. The things of the world have been infected with the eerie glow of the sacred. As the poet Theodore Roethke put it: ‘All natural shapes [are] blazing [with] unnatural light’.⁹ Spirit has contaminated nature and there is a ghostly disturbance in the world that refuses to allow us to rest. Spirit is normally symbolised by fire, but in our time the metaphysical ‘fire’ has dissolved into psychological ‘water’:

When our natural inheritance has been dissipated, then the spirit too, as Heraclitus says, has descended from its fiery heights. But when the spirit becomes heavy it turns to water … This water is no figure of speech, but a living symbol of the dark psyche.¹⁰

Although Jung tried to assume the stance of a scientist, such statements read as mythological imaginings or poetic metaphors of the life of the spirit. He tries to explain himself: ‘Psychologically, water means spirit that has become unconscious’,¹¹ but the force of his argument is in the poetry, not in the reasoning he adds to it. Whenever we talk about the fate of the spirit we are automatically in the realm of mythology, whether we like it or not. Spirit and soul exist in a ‘poetic’ realm and can only be accessed by literary figures of speech, not by science or reason.

Jung's thesis is that ‘spirit has become nature’ and that is why our psyche is disturbed. The two poles of our archetypal experience, spirit and nature, have been collapsed into one flat world and this is a fraught and untenable situation. It is not that Jung is promoting dualism above the idea of a unitary reality, but he is saying the necessary polarity between spirit and nature has been subverted. Just as electricity requires the tension between polarities to function properly, so our minds work best when spirit and nature are held in dynamic tension. When we live between spirit and matter, heaven and earth, we live correctly. But when spirit collapses, our instincts and higher desires become entangled and confused, and we are unable to tell them apart. Asacred impulse, for instance, the desire to unite with God or the gods, can no longer be distinguished from the desires of the flesh, or even from criminal desires such as incest or child sexual abuse. The desires of the spirit fall into the body, contaminating it with longings that can never be realised at the physical level. The sacred becomes profaned by this downward movement, and the body thrashes around trying to realise desires that belong to the realm of the spirit.

Jung believes that this is why alcoholism and drug addiction, for instance, have become such huge problems, because we look in vain to drugs to deliver a transcendence that normal life can no longer provide. We have killed off the gods, and with them, our ability to transcend our egoic condition. We no longer know what is a natural desire and what is a false or deluded attempt to realise a spiritual need. This means that the possibility of our wholeness has been denied. Movement between and across the polarities of spirit and nature is vital if life is to proceed. To achieve balance and integration, we need spirit and matter to be related but different energies, each with its goals. We do not achieve unity by collapsing one half of the archetypal field into the other. The world becomes flat and dull when spirit is prevented from expressing its vertical, soaring longing. Since it is an archetypal force that cannot be quelled, spirit continues to struggle toward realisation but in ways that create havoc. It has to make itself felt, and it will do this negatively if it cannot achieve a positive outcome.

Blocked pathways and the problem of language

In discussing the situation of the West ‘after’ religion, Jung uses two kinds of language. He employs a mythopoetic language that describes gods, fires and the collapse of spirit, which we have just considered. Then, in a more scientific mode, he tries to discuss the same situation in an analytical and psychodynamic way. In ‘The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man’, he uses the image of the human spirit as a river that has been blocked in its normal flow:

So long as all goes well and our psychic energies find an outlet in adequate and well-regulated ways, we are disturbed by nothing from within. No uncertainty or doubt besets us, and we cannot be divided against ourselves. But no sooner are one or two channels of psychic activity blocked up than phenomena of obstruction appear. The stream tries to flow back against the current, the inner man wants something different from the outer man, and we are at war with ourselves. Only then, in this situation of distress, do we discover the psyche as something which thwarts our will, which is strange and even hostile to us, and which is incompatible with our conscious standpoint.¹²

All ages have psychic problems and complexes, but they are found ‘on the outside’ in cultures that possess rituals and living religions.¹³ Only in spiritually illiterate times such as ours, when we forget the purpose and meaning of life, when we collapse the metaphorical systems of spirit, do proble...