Jung Again
Afternotes |II| II ⋅ On a Narrow and Indistinct Path
Context:
This is a delayed second Afternotes to Psychadelics and the Gift of Subjectivity (the reading of which is unnecessary but helpful). Afternotes is a typically quote-heavy series where I wander off in different directions from the main narrative of the newsletter and explore.
“He who looks outside dreams, he who looks inside awakens”.
I want to revisit this oft-quoted line from Jung because it begs a crucial question: what is it precisely that one “looks inside” at that “awakens” one?
Outside of vague references to “knowing oneself”, and/or “the Numinous”, answers are not so easy to detail. But since I concluded my notes on psychedelics by positing that the ways in which it enhances subjectivity and encourages a “look inside” may, in the long run, be its primary contribution to a redemptive turn - then it follows we have little choice but to venture into this “inimical jungle” to seek answers.
In other words, if I’m interested in “awakening” what am I looking for within and how might I helpfully understand the experience?
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Jung is not an easy cookie to crack. He was a deeply unsystemic thinker and refused to venture into the realms of theology and philosophy, all the while tackling themes and making proclamations on things that are deeply both of those things.
Why this avoidance? First, his background was in the natural sciences and he craved the respectability that came with “scientific” work, while he was indifferent (at best) to the world of abstractions. Second, he was highly scornful of much of philosophy and theology, seeing it as a form of sickness.
If you have to ask the meaning of life you are already sick, for objectively speaking, it has no meaning. No one asks the meaning of a dog's life.
Oops, that’s Freud. Here’s Jung:
Heidegger's modus philosophandi is neurotic through and through and is ultimately rooted in his psychic crankiness. His kindred spirits, close or distant, are sitting in lunatic asylums, some as patients and some as psychiatrists on a philosophical rampage. For all its mistakes the nineteenth century deserves better than to have Heidegger counted as its ultimate representative.
...for all its critical analysis philosophy has not yet managed to root out its psychopaths. What do we have psychiatric diagnosis for? That grizzler Kierkegaard also belongs in this galère. Philosophy has still to learn that it is made by human beings and depends to an alarming degree on their psychic constitution. In the critical philosophy of the future there will be a chapter on "The Psychopathology of Philosophy." Hegel is fit to burst with presumption and vanity, Nietzsche drips with outraged sexuality, and so on. There is no thinking qua thinking, at times it is a pisspot of unconscious devils, just like any other function that lays claim to hegemony. Often what is thought is less important than who thinks it. But this is assiduously overlooked. Neurosis addles the brains of every philosopher because he is at odds with himself. His philosophy is then nothing but a systemized struggle with his own uncertainty.
All of this reminds me of the Wilde quote, “The intellect is not something to be taken seriously. It is something to be played with, that is all.”
And that is very much in line with Jung’s overall disposition. It’s about experience.
But experience of what?
Of the Psyche.
But what is the Psyche?
The Psyche, according to Jung, is the ground of experience. All knowledge is filtered through it, such that “we can distinguish no form of being that is not psychic in the first place. All other realities are derived from and indirectly revealed by it…”
And again:
…I can say of nothing that it is "only psychic," for everything in my immediate experience is psychic in the first place. I live in a "perceptual world" but not in a self-subsistent one. The latter is real enough but we have only indirect information about it.
But of course the psyche disguises as it were the psyches role in perception. Unlike, say, a video game, there is no life meter on our “screen” to remind us of the existence of the intermediary. Thus perception is easily mistaken for direct unmediated experience of the world “as it is.”
That’s one of the prime benefits of psychedelics: it reveals finally in an unmistakable experiential way this intermediary, so that it is no longer humming silently in the background. The curtain is thrown down, the charade revealed and at last one is faced with “the vehicle of perception” directly and the illusion of direct sensation is, if integrated, shattered.
In other words, the psyche is confronted at last with itself, which can provide a seed for the “awakening” of which Jung speaks:
Nothing is submerged forever—that is the terrifying discovery everyone makes who has opened that portal ~ the exploration of the unconscious. But the primal fear is so great that the world is grateful to Freud for having proved "scientifically" (what a bastard of a science!) that one has seen nothing behind it. Now it is not merely my "credo" but the greatest and most incisive experience of my life that this door, a highly inconspicuous side-door on an unsuspicious-looking and easily overlooked footpath—narrow and indistinct because only a few have set foot on it—leads to the secret of transformation and renewal.
Indeed, for Jung this experience was the only real one. Psychic experience of the “outside’ is just a dream, in Jung’s terminology it is a realm outside the “epistemological curtain” that requires faith to take seriously.
But look inside and there, according to Jung, is a whole world of direct unmediated experience, and therefore of the only true knowledge. He never explains why or how inner experience is unmediated - it does not necessarily logically follow - but it is the conviction of which he was most certain and that like a line traces through all of his writings, work and life. And indeed if one talks to anyone who has had a psychedelic or a Numinous (or indeed rock bottom) experience invariably they will tell you of its unmistakably hyper-real character. In comparison, everything else indeed feels like a dream.
So Jung here is leaning into his intuition, his experience - logic or (the lack of) empirical evidence be damned.
However, in his defense there is a fair history of folks finding that this kind of stance - defiance (or indifference) towards anything that contradicts one’s direct experience - is synonymous with maturity, with the kind of shift we’ve been speaking of. Here's Carl Whitaker:
“If you study the few grownup people in the world who have managed to make an existential shift to the present, you will find that the most dramatic aspect about them is their personhood—that is, their presence…
…the change of language that comes with [it] has to do with the disappearance of the conditional quality, the disappearance of the mythological “I wish it could be,” “I think it should have been” — all the shoulds, woulds, coulds, ought to’s, ought not to’s. It has some of the quality of the manic patient who will name 250 things in the office. It’s as if he’s not thinking; he’s just seeing and putting into words…. There is no programming in the computer to see whether it agrees with past conclusions, conceptual frameworks, parental orders, cultural demands, and so forth.”
Here’s another Carl, this one a Rogers, with a direct hit:
“...neither Freud nor research neither the revelations of God nor man can take precedence over my own direct experience.”
And that is exactly what Jung did, despite the fact that it led to him being forsaken by most everyone he knew. Which led to a descent into madness, from which he was lucky to emerge - perhaps only his cleverness in using writing as a kind of exorcism saved him.
After which, he largely flourished. He came back from the dead and made the experiential understanding and explaining of that his life’s goal. And because of it, we’re talking about him now, and today he's the most search queried psychologist in all of history, dwarfing every other figure past and present.
Strange world indeed.
There’s one more thing I want to say about Jung’s epistemology, and that is concerning its attractiveness. There is something appealing about the idea of staying within the threshold of one’s actual experience in thought and conversation. How many interpersonal fights are due - at least explicitly - to differences of experience? Very little - most are about what Jung categorizes as beliefs, as things outside the purview of knowledge. And how much neurosis is the same?
Jung feared concepts because he believed that that they replace the “descriptive concept of the self by an empty abstraction, and therefore the archetype is increasingly detached from its dynamic background and gradually turned into a purely intellectual formula.”
This, as it turned out, was not a baseless fear. The way he is taught today—when he is taught—is exactly the latter. There is nothing dynamic whatsoever about it.
And yet he fought all his life against this kind of thinking and speaking in every sphere, and particularly - and perhaps most notably - the religious. And yet even there he encountered yet more resistance to his delineation of beliefs and “knowledge”:
What good is it to anyone when a theologian "confesses" that he has "met the living Lord"? The wretched layman can only turn green with envy that such an experience never happened to him. In my practice I often had to give elementary school lessons in the history of religion in order to eliminate, for a start, the disgust and nausea people felt for religious matters who had dealt all their lives only with confession-mongers and preachers. The man of today wants to understand and not be preached at. The need for understanding and discussion is as great as it is unconscious (at least in most cases)… It is of burning interest for them to hear something understandable about religion, so much so that often I am hard put to it to draw a distinction between myself and a director of conscience.
What matters most is not understanding—this will always be elusive—but experience, and of that which is most direct and intuitively certain. The “psychopathology” of abstract systems of concepts he left to others, who in turn have long since abandoned him.
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But we still have not addressed what exactly one is looking at “inside”. If we turn to Jung, he will direct us to the unconscious, the personal kind and the collective.
But while there's been plenty of interest written in the empirical and theoretical literature about the “personal” unconscious since Freud and Jung’s time - I have never in my life read a single compelling thing about the collective unconscious.
So I'm going to step forward and make an attempt. It might be an abject failure, but my whole purpose with this afternotes series is to explore, to venture into things without necessarily knowing the effort will be fruitful beforehand (though it's been bouncing around my head for several months, a hopeful sign).
So to that end we're going to venture into the realm of the long-dead “rich description” era of sociology, blow some dust off a long forgotten best selling book, and see if we can make some unconventional connections and remake this long banalized idea into something we can move forward with, that can generate something with some heat and life.
Until then (next week?) friends,
Thomas