This is a supplemental site to jungiancenter.org. If you have found this site through blogging, check out our Web site. Here you will find a full description of the Jungian Center, who we are, what we do and what we offer. 2010-09-01T22:55:14-05:00 Copyright 2004-2005 Ublog Reload 1.0.5 smehrtens smehrtens@potlatchgroup.com http://jungiancenter.org/blog/blog_comment.asp?bi=50 2010-09-01T22:55:14-05:00 2010-09-01T22:55:14-05:00 2010-09-01T22:55:14-05:00 Materialism, Scientism and Jung’s Empiricism

“What most people overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real…”
“The ‘reality of the psyche’ is my working hypothesis, and my principal activity consists in collecting factual material to describe and explain it. I have set up neither a system nor a general theory, but have merely formulated auxiliary concepts to serve me as tools, as is customary in every branch of science.”
“You seem to forget that I am first and foremost an empiricist,…”

Jung struggled throughout his life to be understood for what he was—a true scientist—and for what his empirical method told him was true—that the psyche is real. Why was this? Why such a struggle? And why is this? Why is it that many people (especially in academia and science) still regard Jung as a “mystic,” not a scientist? Why do so many still fail to understand Jung when he spoke of the psyche as real? Even at the Jungian Center, where one might expect to find people open to and interested in Jung’s ideas, I frequently find blank expressions on students’ faces when I speak about the reality of the psyche.
This blog essay considers Jung’s dilemma in trying to get people to understand how he worked and what he found in his explorations of the inner life. We will begin by examining the dominant philosophy of our culture (materialism) and the “knowledge base” of our society (scientism) and then we’ll consider Jung’s form of science (empiricism) and how it differs from scientism. Finally we will examine Jung’s concept of the psyche, its features and centrality to Jung’s psychology.

Materialism: Why Few People Regard the Psyche as Real

The etymology or origins of the word “materialism” go way back thousands of years to the Indo-European root ma. “Matter,” “material,” “money” and “mother” all come from this root, all of these words referring to that which has physical form or substance. We got our word “materialism” from Latin materia, the “-ism” coming along in the 18th century as part of the Enlightenment’s quest to escape the ideological clutches of the Church.
Dictionaries amplify the root meaning of “materialism,” defining it as:
“the belief that all action, thought and feeling can be explained by the movements and changes of matter;…”
“the tendency to care too much for the things of this world and neglect spiritual needs;…”
“the ethical doctrine that material self-interest should and does determine conduct.”
“the doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications…”
“the doctrine that consciousness and will are wholly due to the operation of material agencies…”
“a tendency to prefer material possessions and physical comfort to spiritual values; …”
“a way of life based on material interests.”
The astrophysicist Bernard Haisch defines “materialism” as “… the belief that reality consists solely of matter and energy, the things that can be measured in the laboratory or observed by a telescope. Everything else is illusion or imagination….” The underlying assumption here is that “… everything will eventually be explainable in terms of electrical currents, chemical reactions, or yet-to-be-discovered physical laws—mind and spirit are mere epiphenomena.”
I think the most overarching definition—the one most closely related to our purposes here—is the description of “materialism” as “the present-day physical model of reality that matter is all there is and all there can be.” Intangibles like ideas, love, beauty, spirit, aren’t real. This denigration of intangibles has some serious implications, which we will consider below. Before discussing them, let’s examine some of the components of materialism.
Two of the most important elements of materialism are reductionism and randomness. Reductionism is the belief that a complex system (like a living being) can be understood by reducing it to its constituent parts. You want to understand an ecosystem? Just identify all the various parts of it and study each one and presto! You’ll have it figured out. The idea that a living thing might actually be more than the sum of its parts—that it might have “emergent properties” —is never considered in the reductionist’s mind-set.
Randomness is the belief that “… natural processes follow the laws of chance.” The Universe and everything in it (including you and me!) are here because of random happenstance. There is no meaning, no purpose and no destiny in life. There is also no free will, since we all are mere creatures of chance. From this it logically follows that there is no god, no Divine intention or higher power working in the world. Materialism as our culture’s current paradigm is atheistic.
It is also committed to rationalism, putting a premium on logic, the use of reason, the dismissal of superstition, and the denigration of what cannot be proven through the use of left-brain, linear mental processes (e.g. religion). This vaunting of reason leads to concoctions that warm the hearts of economists, like Rational Economic Man. Rational Economic Man (this means you and me, in the materialists’ theory) lives by utilitarian values. That is, when you and I go to the store to buy something, or when we invest our money or decide how to spend our time, we do what works for us, we determine right from wrong based on whether the action will get us what we want. We do what is in our best self-interest. The result? An ethics of expediency (if something gets us what we want, or makes piles of money, it’s right) and the greed of consumerism.
These are some of the implications of materialism. Others include the repression of meaning and true satisfaction in life (because “He who dies with the most toys, wins!” is a spiritually deadening philosophy). By killing the spiritual side of our humanity materialism fosters a sense of meaninglessness, which leads to depression and despair. Jung remarked on this when he said:
Many hundreds of patients have passed through my hands… Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church.
Materialism also distorts perception, by making it difficult, if not impossible for most people in Western societies to value non-material experiences, like psi phenomena. One of the most frustrating aspects of teaching the “Developing Your High Sense Perception” workshop for me has been dealing with the profound disempowerment my students have endured thanks to this implication of materialism. Students stare at me in disbelief when I assure them that they can see auras, can read someone’s energy field, can access their higher (intangible) guidance. Materialism has brainwashed us to the point of deluding us about our true abilities! As a model, or paradigm, of reality, materialism colors our culture, influences our habitual way of perceiving things, forms our values and restricts our sense of what is possible.
It has also led to profound cultural pathology. We see this in our health care crisis (leading so many to focus entirely on the body and to insist on all sorts of heroic measures to stave off death); in the epidemic of drug and substance abuse (pernicious ways to block out a sense of despair or meaninglessness); in the pervasive greed of our culture of “consumeritis;” and in all the ways our environment is being degraded (in all the lamentations about the recent oil spill in the Gulf how many people have called us on our addiction to petroleum?).
Such pathologies spark criticism. The Dalai Lama, for example, reminds us that “The view that all mental processes are necessarily physical processes is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact.” Some 80 years before His Holiness wrote these words, Jung took materialism to task:
The dogma that “mental diseases are diseases of the brain” is a hangover from the materialism of the 1870’s. It has become a prejudice which hinders all progress, with nothing to justify it. Even if it were true that all mental diseases are diseases of the brain, that would still be no reason for not investigating the psychic side of the disease. But the prejudice is used to discredit at the outset all attempts in this direction and to strike them dead. Yet the proof that all mental diseases are diseases of the brain has never been furnished and never can be furnished,… for life can never be thought of as a function of matter, but only as a process existing in and for itself, to which energy and matter are subordinate… people… continue to regard the physical hypothesis as “scientific,” although it is no less fantastic [than vitalism]. But it fits in with the materialistic prejudice,… Let us hope that the time is not far off when this antiquated relic of ingrained and thoughtless materialism will be eradicated from the minds of our scientists.
Jung wrote this in 1916. Ninety years later, materialism still has a stranglehold in our Western world, in large part because it is a core element in the “knowledge base” of our culture. This “knowledge base” is scientism.

Scientism: Why Jung Got Labeled a “Mystic”

Note the word: “scientism,” not “science.” What’s the difference? “Science,” as its etymology implies, means “knowing,” or a way of discovery that is an open-ended, unbiased search for the truth. But scientism is neither open-ended nor unbiased. Rather it is a “kind of orthodoxy,” dogmatic and dismissive of experiences that don’t fit within its belief system. And its belief system is rigid, barring “genuine skepticism, [and] an honest search for better truths,…” As a “degeneration” or “perversion of genuine science,” scientism “tends to reduce all reality and experience to mathematical descriptions of physical and chemical phenomena.” Abraham Maslow, the founder of humanistic psychology, regarded scientism as “one of the most effective and prestigious neurotic defense mechanisms available” in our modern world, functioning for its practitioners as a “security system, a kind of self-cloistering, a complicated way of avoiding anxiety and upsetting problems….” As a “dogma… claiming to be the ultimate and final truth about everything,” scientism is the “consensus reality orientation” of our culture.
Materialism and reductionism are two of the components of scientism. Others include:
objectivism—the insistence on objectivity and facts stripped of all emotions (what I call the Joe Friday syndrome: “Gimme the facts, ma’am, just the facts.”) “pseudoskepticism” —the perversion of true skepticism that turns into debunking whatever does not fit into the scientistic worldview
quantification —putting great faith in number-crunching and the use of “quants” (the terrible results of which we have seen recently in the economic meltdown of 2007-8, built upon quants’ not-so-clever creations)
mechanism—regarding the machine as the model of reality (hence “spare-parts” medicine)
determinism—the idea that everything is determined, without free will
the “pathologies of cognition,” Abraham Maslow’s term for the 21 ways that scientism warps our perception
prejudices—against religion, spirituality, idealism, intuition or “noetic knowing,” and psi phenomena
“image investments”—a host of defenses against seeming to be ignorant or unable to provide answers to what’s going on
arrogance
“training into orthodoxy” —Henryk Skolimowski’s term for the years-long period of training which graduate students undergo that inculcates the beliefs of scientism and squeezes out “heresies” like belief in intangibles
If, by this point, you are beginning to wonder if scientism has the scent of some sort of religion, consider that it even has a mantra, which goes like this:
Science tells us about physical reality. It cannot tell us anything about any possible non-physical realities. Since non-physical realities cannot be investigated by science, they do not exist. End of story.
Such a mantra does not go unchallenged, even by some prominent scientists. For example, Bernard Haisch, astrophysicist, researcher and author of scores of scientific papers, recognizes that, as a model of reality, scientism “… explains away the reality of even [our] own thoughts,” and far from being the unbiased exploration of reality, it “… has abrogated its responsibility to uncover objective truth” and “… has succumbed to a dogmatism of its own.” Charles Tart notes the destructive results of scientism, as it “hinders progress in all areas of science… inhibiting new ways of thinking,…” and “…denying or invalidating the spiritual… longing and experiences…” of people. Its influence is especially pernicious because it arrogates to itself the “power and prestige” that we have given to science, as the knowledge base of our culture.
It is this grip that scientism has on our culture that has led to Jung and analytical psychology being ignored almost completely in the sylvan grooves of academe. Ninety years ago Jung challenged scientists:
It is really high time academic psychologists came down to earth and wanted to hear about the human psyche as it really is and not merely about laboratory experiments. It is insufferable that professors should forbid their students to have anything to do with analytical psychology, that they should prohibit the use of analytical concepts and accuse our psychology of taking account, in an unscientific manner, of “everyday experiences.” I know that psychology in general could derive the greatest benefit from a serious study of the dream problem once it could rid itself of the unjustified lay prejudice that dreams are caused solely by somatic stimuli…
Jung recognized that dreams arose from more than just physical causes. He came to this and his other discoveries as a true scientist, using empiricism as his method.

Empiricism: Jung as a True Scientist

“Empiricism” comes from the Greek word empeirikos, meaning “experience” or “experiment.” It is defined in dictionaries as “the use of methods based on experiment and observation.” Real scientists (i.e. not practitioners of scientism) regard empiricism as “genuine science,” “an open-ended, error-correcting, personal-growth system of great power.” It is a method posited on the belief that “direct inner experience… trumps logic and proof.”
Time and again in his essays, letters and interviews Jung called himself an empiricist:
“… I am first and foremost an empiricist.”
“… I was particularly satisfied with the fact that you clearly understood that I am not a mystic but an empiricist.”
“… I am not a philosopher, I’m an empiricist.”
And his methodology backed up his claim. Doing science—true science—begins with observation. It asks “What’s going on?” and proceeds to observe with an open mind. Data collection from direct personal observation and experience leads to the formulation of a hypothesis. Then the empiricist communicates his/her findings, sharing data so others can provide further insights, feedback and reports on their experiences with similar data. This leads to refinement of the hypothesis, further data collection, more sharing of results, and more refinement, until the collaborating group comes to conclude that the tentative hypothesis is likely to be valid. The whole process is inductive, i.e. it proceeds from the facts to a conclusion—the opposite of deduction, where one starts with a belief and then seeks out facts that support it.
Jung described how he worked in several passages in his letters:
“The empiricist does not think from above downwards from metaphysical premises, but comes from below upwards from the phenomenal world,…” (This is the way of induction).
“… the empiricist… in order to do justice to his task, can appeal to nothing except the given realities.” (He focuses on facts, not theories).
“… our empirical psychology is based entirely on the experience of individual cases,…” (Rather than try to fit people into some arbitrary theory, Jung began by taking each patient as an individual, with a unique set of experiences).
“One should not misconstrue the findings of empiricism as philosophical premises, for they are not obtained by deduction but from clinical and factual material.” (Jung got the material for his psychological system from his own experiences and those of his patients).
“The point of view I have adopted is that of modern empirical psychology and the scientific method… Psychology cannot establish any metaphysical “truths,” nor does it try to. It is concerned solely with the phenomenology of the psyche…. For modern psychology, ideas are entities, like animals and plants. The scientific method consists in the description of nature.”
And part of nature, Jung argued, is intangible. Here is where Jung parted company with materialism and scientism: Intangibles—like ideas, dreams, the psyche—are real. They exist. We deny their existence at our—and our society’s—peril.

The Psyche, Its Features and Role in Jung’s Thought

“Psyche” means “soul” in Greek. In some places in his writing Jung uses the two terms interchangeably. For example in his essay “Psychology and Alchemy,” he writes:
…with Western man the value of the self sinks to zero. Hence the universal depreciation of the soul in the West. Whoever speaks of the reality of the soul or psyche is accused of “psychologism.”
From our discussion of materialism and scientism, we can understand why Jung was so often accused of “psychologism.”
Elsewhere Jung describes the psyche as “peculiar.” Autonomous and unconscious, it is mostly unknown to us, and beyond our ability to fully grasp. While it is linked to both the organic and inorganic worlds, it is independent of physical data to some extent, and it has the curious ability to relativize both time and space (i.e. it plays a role in psi phenomena). As “… a complex whole actuated not only by instinctual processes and personal relationships but by the spiritual needs and suprapersonal currents of the time,…” the psyche in its “creative capacity,” opposes entropy (the principle in thermodynamics that postulates increasing disorder in a system over time). Because of the action of the psyche, living systems are “negentropic,” i.e. they are able to maintain a state of order or equilibrium while they are alive.
Maintaining equilibrium is another feature of Jung’s image of the psyche. He notes repeatedly that “… the psyche is a self-regulating system, just as the body is,…” As a quality of matter, the psyche is dependent on the body’s nervous system. It has a structure and is accessible to the scientist through empirical methods.
What role does the psyche play in Jung’s thought? Before addressing this question, we might well recall what we discussed above. “Psychiatry” and “psychology” both come from the root word “psyche.” This suggests that, in any form of psychiatric or psychological activity, the psyche would be the central focus. But in actuality, due to the pernicious influence of materialism and scientism, the vast majority of psychiatric training programs, college departments of psychology, and state boards of mental health licensure act as if “psyche” has no place in their work! The psyche being an intangible, they ignore or dismiss it. They are so locked into the materialist ethos that they can’t recognize the core element in their profession.
Jung, of course, is different. He recognized the psyche as one of the three central elements of his system:
… the structure of opposites and their symbolism, the anima archetype, and … the unavoidable encounter with the reality of the psyche… these three main points play an essential role in my psychology,…
Elsewhere Jung called the psyche “… reality par excellence,” the “auctor rerum… the ground and substrate” of reality, “…the greatest of all cosmic wonders and the sine qua non of the world as an object.”
Jung went further than these encomiums in his regard for the psyche. He regarded it as “the world’s pivot:… the one great condition for the existence of the world,” and the factor upon which the future of the world depends:
… nowadays particularly, the world hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.” “We are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger…
When asked about our prospects, Jung put the psyche front and center:
… the careful consideration of psychic factors is of importance in restoring not merely the individual’s balance, but society’s as well. Otherwise the destructive tendencies easily gain the upper hand. In the same way that the atom-bomb is an unparalleled means of physical mass destruction, so the misguided development of the soul must lead to psychic mass destruction.
Jung was not sanguine about the future of the world, as I have noted in earlier blog essays. He continued his remarks above with this warning:
The present situation is so sinister that one cannot suppress the suspicion that the Creator is planning another deluge that will finally exterminate the existing race of men.
If we want to rise to the challenge facing us in these critical times, Jung would ask us to turn within, to our souls, to the psychic reality that is at the root of our being. Stand up to the foolishness of materialism and the life-killing stupidity of scientism! These features of our contemporary world are the most fearsome weapon of mass destruction we face now, all the more threatening because they are unrecognized as such.
How do you come to learn for yourself that the psyche is real? Trust your own experience, work with your dreams, pay attention to your inner life, and turn a deaf ear to the scientistic materialists! (This will require some independence of thought, as our society is deeply permeated with scientism). Listen to Jung and follow his example of relying on your own inner wisdom, and you too will come to know what Jung knew: that the psyche is real.

Bibliography

Griffin, David (1996), “A Postmodern Science,” Revisioning Science, ed. Susan Mehrtens. Waterbury VT: The Potlatch Press.
Haisch, Bernard (2006), The God Theory. San Francisco: Weiser Books.
Harman, Willis (1988), Global Mind Change. Indianapolis: Knowledge Systems.
Hergenhahn, B.R. (1994), An Introduction to Theories of Personality. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Jung, C.G. (1960), ”The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” CW 8. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1959), “Aion,” Collected Works, 9ii. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1970), “Civilization in Transition,” CW 10. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1969), “Psychology and Religion: West and East,” CW 11. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1953), “Psychology and Alchemy,” CW 12. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1976), ”The Symbolic Life,” CW 18. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1973), Letters, ed. Gerhard Adler & Aniela Jaffé. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1977), C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, ed. William McGuire & R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lewis, Michael (2010), The Big Short. New York: W.W. Norton.
Lewis, Charlton & Charles Short (1969), A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Markopolos, Harry (2010), No One Would Listen. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Moelaert, John (1974), “The Epidemic in Our Midst,” Earthkeeping: Readings in Human Ecology, eds. Charles Juzek & Susan Mehrtens. Pacific Grove CA: The Boxwood Press.
Sharf, Richard (1996), Theories of Psychotherapy and Counseling: Concepts and Cases. New York: Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.
Skolimowski, Henryk (1996), “The Methodology of Participation,” Revisioning Science, ed. Susan Mehrtens. Waterbury VT: The Potlatch Press.
Solomon, Deborah (2010), “Math Is Hard: Questions for Harry Markopolos,” The New York Times Magazine (February 28, 2010), 14.
Tart, Charles (2009), The End of Materialism. Oakland CA: New Harbinger Publications.






]]> smehrtens smehrtens@potlatchgroup.com http://jungiancenter.org/blog/blog_comment.asp?bi=49 2010-08-01T10:06:38-05:00 2010-08-01T10:06:38-05:00 2010-08-01T10:06:38-05:00 C.G. Jung, 1938
“For a long time I have advocated schools for the adult…”
C.G. Jung, 1960

A series of dreams in July 2005 led to the creation of the Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences. Dozens of dreams since then have supported it, added to its curriculum and widened its scope. I have always intuitively felt that Jung would approve of this endeavor but it is only recently, in reading Jung’s works to prepare a course on Jungian parenting that I came across his explicit statements—like those quoted above—in support of the Center’s type of educational organization.
In this essay we will consider Jung’s thoughts and preferences about how education should be conducted, and the distinction between “instruction” and “education.” Then we will examine what Jung regarded as the two halves of life and their different concerns, followed by discussions of the tasks, components and goals of adult education in a Jungian framework, and what the consequences or results of such an education might be. Lastly, we’ll discuss some of the ways the Jungian Center serves the adult learner and his/her needs.

“Instruction,” “Education” and Jung’s Thoughts on the Proper Form of Education

It is common in American society to use “instruction” and “education” interchangeably to refer to what goes on in those buildings we identify as “schools.” But in etymology, practice and their image of the learner, the two terms could not be more different. “Instruction” comes from the Latin verb instruere, meaning “to pile on.” When we “instruct” students we “pile on” them the facts, figures, techniques, and information that we feel they need to have to cope with the demands of modern life. This is essentially a one-way, teacher- or subject-centered process. It is, to some degree at least, unavoidable, since no one is born able to do sums, parse sentences, read, write, or find France on a map.
Jung recognized the necessity of instruction when he wrote that “youth… must find outside” those things it needs to acquire in order to function and flourish in contemporary society. While he admitted that modern life demanded some technical training (a trend that has intensified in a major way in the 50 years since his death), he preferred a school system oriented more to the historical and humanistic subjects, rather than the “scientific worldview, with its statistical truths….” In general, he was quite critical of most forms of education, because teachers lacked self-knowledge, the children sensed this and the result was that they came away from their studies lacking “a sense of authority, robbed of their individual nature and halted in the development of their personality.” So, while Jung knew instruction had its place, he also knew it must not be the sole form of learning, and this is especially true for the adult learner. For adults—persons at or after mid-life—a much more suitable form of learning is education.
Our English word “education” derives from the Latin exducere, meaning “to draw forth.” When we “educate” we draw out of the student what is within. This is a student-centered, dialectical process, requiring one-on-one dialog and interaction between student and teacher. It is student motivated and self-directed and reflects the shift in focus that Jung felt was a key feature of mid-life—a shift away from a preoccupation with outer reality toward a focus on one’s inner life. Jung described it in these words: “What youth found and must find outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself.” As a process of recognizing and then drawing forth that which is within, education can do this; instruction cannot. So when we speak of “adult education” we are speaking about education, rather than instruction.

The Two Halves of Life and Their Different Concerns

As we noted above, Jung felt that people in the first half of life were concerned with externals: training for work and parenthood, making a living, raising a family, acquiring the material wherewithal that would support a decent life. Jung termed all these things of the “biological sphere.”
By contrast, Jung felt people in mid-life (c. age 40, usually timed when transiting Uranus comes to oppose one’s natal Uranus) and beyond were to shift their focus away from the biological to the “cultural sphere.” This shift came with a host of different concerns from earlier life: the biological instincts were subordinated to cultural goals; mental and emotional energies had to be expended to making a successful mid-life transition (a transition that is not always an easy passage); and the adult had to navigate a reorientation from regarding life as a series of ascents to recognizing the reality of descending and diminishing energies and capacities.
Jung recognized that a variety of questions commonly characterized the mid-life passage. These include such queries as:
“Where am I standing today?”
“Have my dreams come true?”
“Have I fulfilled my expectations of a happy and successful life as I imagined them 20 years ago?”
“Have I been … intelligent, reliable and enduring enough to seize my opportunities or to make the right choice at the crossroads and produce the proper answer to the problems which fate or fortune put before me?”
“What is the chance that I shall fail again in fulfilling that which I obviously have been unable to accomplish in the first 40 years?”
Some people who spend their first 4 decades striving for material success find mid-life full of confusion, disillusionment or loss of meaning. They wonder “Is this all there is?” “With all that I’ve got, why don’t I feel satisfied?” “Why does my life feel so flat, blah, empty?” “Where’s the ‘juice,’ the excitement I used to feel?” “What’s it all mean?” Helping adult learners deal with questions like these is one of the tasks of adult education.

The Tasks of Adult Education

Providing venues within which adults can grapple with the common questions that arise at mid-life is just one of the tasks of adult education. Others include encouragement: Adults need to be encouraged to look within, so as to discover their true self and the Self (Jung’s term for the Divine within). By looking within, the adult learner can see all that he or she is meant to be and what he or she is living from and living for. Adults also need to be encouraged to fantasize, since fantasy and imagination hold the germs of new goals and can open up new possibilities. Adults need encouragement, also, to play with these new possibilities and a variety of forms of creativity that they may, in earlier life, have regarded as “frivolous” or “fun, but not a way to make money.”
Support is another task of adult education. In Jung’s schema, adult education should support people in developing “new eyes which see them [i.e. new goals] and a new heart which desires them [new goals].” Adults need support to gain “an ever-deepening self-knowledge,” and to live their unique life, independent of (and sometimes in direct contradiction to) a host of scripts and rules laid down by parents, teachers and other authority figures back in childhood.
Adult education has other tasks: To foster life renewal, to provide “spiritual nutrition” and “spiritual guidance,” and to provide companionship and a sense of belonging to a community of like-minded individuals in the face of the isolation that is an inevitable consequence of a person’s developing his/her personality.

Components of Adult Education

Jung felt that adult education had to be individualized, indirect and self-directed. That is, it should avoid the collective form found in conventional public elementary, secondary and college settings. It should be “indirect” in that it would set out the range of learning opportunities but rest on the motivation of the adult learner to pick and choose what he or she feels drawn toward. And it was to be self-directed, self-paced and centered on the learner, rather than the teacher or the subject.
Student-centeredness is part of another component of adult education: participatory methodology. I have taken this term from Henryk Skolimowski, who used it in the context of scientific experimentation, to refer to a more subjective, personal involvement with the object of one’s research, à la scientists like Barbara McClintock, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her research on corn genes that she conducted by having “a feeling for the organism.” Like Skolimowski, Jung would challenge the objectivist viewpoint of modern science in his insistence that analysts, and teachers, recognize their basic identity with the client or student. We are all “in the soup together,” jointly learning, sharing and growing.
Independent thinking is another component of adult education. Unlike children, adults can and must think for themselves. By mid-life, Jung felt adults should have developed inner loci of control and authority, and should have acquired a capacity for critical thinking and the ability to discern what is appropriate for themselves. Jung was adamant that an adult learner must listen to his or her own nature. This is possible due to another key component of adult education: attention to the inner life.
Adult learning, in a Jungian model, must include the unconscious. Jung was explicit about this. How was this to be done? Jung felt one of the best methods was through the study of one’s dreams. Jung was convinced that people can be taught to work with their dreams, that one need not become a professional, certified Jungian analyst to be able to figure out the meaning of dreams. Our dream classes at the Jungian Center bear this out: our students learn the language of the soul, learn how to decipher their dreams. You too can come to know the truth about yourself through study of your dreams.

Goals of Adult Education

Why undertake adult education? Some people get into it out of desperation, when their mid-life passage has become so fraught with confusion and disorientation that the need for greater self-awareness cannot be gainsaid. Others have an easier time making the transition into mid-life. For them the goal might be to educate the personality so as to produce “a well-rounded psychic whole that is capable of resistance and abounding in energy.”
Jung recognized that adult education could also satisfy the “eternal child within” all of us, that part of us “that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention and education…”. If properly crafted and presented, adult education also allows the inner child to play, re-create, relax and let go, perhaps in ways the adult has never felt able to do before in his or her life.
A fourth goal for adult learning is to create that self-knowledge that permits a person to “walk his talk” and move into his authentic being, with true authority. Such a process produces a “fuller consciousness.”
A final goal is spiritual. Jung described this goal as “conveying the archetype of the God-image, or its emanations and effects to the conscious mind,” thus helping to root the adult learner in a larger spiritual matrix. This process brings a greater sense of meaning, purpose and direction to life.

Consequences of Adult Education in the Jungian Framework

What results when adults undertake Jungian-oriented education? As noted above, one result is self-knowledge: awareness of one’s shadow side, persona, animus/anima, and the Self, along with the recognition of one’s creative inner daimon, and an understanding of what has purchase on one’s soul.
Another consequence is the ability to live authentically. Actions align with rhetoric, and the individual radiates a genuineness that others find compelling, attractive and inspiring.
As the adult learner wises up to his/her inner “tapes” and scripts and sets aside those that are inappropriate, he or she moves more deeply into his/her authority. True authority flows from an inner awareness of the ego-Self relation and from the alignment of the ego will with the intentions of the Self.
All the above are positive results. There is another, mentioned earlier, which is not so positive: isolation. Jung recognized that only a “leading minority” are likely to achieve self-knowledge. Lots of adults take classes; few undertake the soul journey that leads to deep transformation. Given the materialism and unconsciousness of modern culture (especially in the United States)—two features of modern reality that have only gotten worse in the 5 decades since Jung died—few people will understand or appreciate those who take up Jung’s path of adult education. Those who do take this path face the fate of being isolated, acutely aware of the gulf that separates them from family, friends and associates. As was noted in an earlier essay on this blog site, this is one reason why educational organizations like the Jungian Center are so essential: so the “awake” few have a place to go to find others who understand and share their interests, focus, awareness and concerns.

How the Jungian Center Serves the Adult Learner

Providing social opportunities through classes, workshops, and the Psychology Club is just one way the Jungian Center serves adult learners. Another way is through the variety of classes that encourage and require introspection, e.g. Introduction to Dream Work, Jungian Dream Theory, Shadow Work, Meeting Your Inner Partner, Finding Your Mission in Life, The Path of Individuation, Developing Your Intuition, Developing Spiritual Literacy, and The Creation of Consciousness.
The Center also supports personal growth through independent studies, in a one-on-one format with a faculty member, tailored to individual interests and needs. Such independent studies can be taken on-site or via our Distance Learning option, which brings most of our courses to the far-off adult learner in an individualized format.
Finally, the Center is responsive to our students who have suggested many of the courses now being taught. Their needs and interests are now driving the curriculum, as we strive to measure up to Jung’s vision of a school of Self-directed study.

Bibliography

Brewi, Janice & Anne Brennan (1988), Celebrate Mid-Life: Jungian Archetypes and Mid-Life Spirituality. New York: Crossroad Press.
Hollis, James (1993), The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife. Toronto: Inner City Books
________ (1996), Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places. Toronto: Inner City Books
Jung, C.G. (1977), C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, ed. William McGuire & R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1966), “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,” CW 7. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1960), ”The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” CW 8. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1970), “Civilization in Transition,” CW 10. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1953), “Psychology and Alchemy,” CW 12. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1954), “The Practice of Psychotherapy,” CW 16, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1954), “The Development of Personality,” CW 17. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1976), ”The Symbolic Life,” CW 18. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Keller, Evelyn Fox (1983), A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W.H. Freeman.
Prétat, Jane (1994), Coming to Age: The Croning Years and Late-Life Transformation. Toronto: Inner City Books
Qualls-Corbet, Nancy (1988), The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine. Toronto: Inner City Books
Sharp, Daryl (1988), The Survival Papers: Anatomy of the Midlife Crisis. Toronto: Inner City Books
________ (1989), Dear Gladys: The Survival Papers, Book 2. Toronto: Inner City Books
________ (1992), Getting to Know You: The Inside Out of Relationship. Toronto: Inner City Books
Skolimowski, Henryk (1996), “The Methodology of Participation,” Revisioning Science:Essays Toward a New Knowledge Base for Our Culture, ed. S. Mehrtens. Waterbury VT: The Potlatch Press.
Stein, Murray (1983), In Midlife: A Jungian Perspective. Dallas TX: Spring Publications.]]> smehrtens smehrtens@potlatchgroup.com http://jungiancenter.org/blog/blog_comment.asp?bi=48 2010-07-03T09:20:39-05:00 2010-07-03T09:20:39-05:00 2010-07-03T09:20:39-05:00
Earlier essays on this blog site described some of the components of individuation and defined it as
… a developmental process which begins in the adult individual, usually after the age of thirty-five, and if successful leads to the discovery of the Self and its replacing of the ego as the personality center. Individuation is the discovery of and the extended dialogue with the objective psyche of which the Self is the comprehensive expression.
Perhaps because it seems similar to “individualism,” or perhaps because American society is so biased toward that philosophy of “each for himself,” many people assume that individuation implies a preoccupation with oneself, selfishness and social isolation. But this is not true at all. Far from fostering selfishness and self-absorption, individuation promotes a greater sense of social concern and responsibility in the person who has taken the spiritual journey. This essay seeks to clarify Jung’s attitudes in this regard, beginning with his warnings about the dangers of immersion in the “mass psychology” of groups.

Jung on the Dangers of Groups

In the essay “Jung’s Timeliness and Thoughts on Our Current Reality,” we noted Jung’s concern about how easily individuals could become identified with groups and thus loose their individuality, as well as their personal moral stance. Over and over Jung decried the tendency for the psyche of the group—the collective psyche—to overwhelm or submerge the individual’s psyche, especially if the group is large. Jung felt that the larger the group, the more readily the individual would get lost in it, and the lower the level of morality that would manifest. So Jung concluded that
…every man is, in a certain sense, unconsciously a worse man when he is in society than when acting alone; for he is carried by society and to that extent relieved of his individual responsibility.
Jung felt that, even when a large group was composed of “wholly admirable persons,” it would still have the “morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal.” Clearly, Jung had little use for large groups!
Not just large groups were at issue: Jung also recognized that the person undertaking the path of individuation would have to “differentiate” him/herself from smaller groups—the family, circles of friends, ethnic and other collectives. This is because individuation requires giving up persona stuff—the host of social expectations and inauthentic roles that the individual has acquired unconsciously over time.
Does this mean that Jung expected individuated people to live in some sort of social isolation? Not at all.

Jung on the Consequences of Individuation

Jung recognized that human beings are social creatures and society is a “necessary condition” for us. Each of us is part of the whole web of life and the process of individuating makes one aware of this wholeness and the unity of all. The process also makes us aware of the unconscious, which—in Jung’s concept of the “collective unconscious”—is common to all humankind. The individuated person is “at-one-ment” with him/herself and also with humanity. Working toward individuation leads us to a deeper sense of connection with others and fosters a desire to serve others.
But because the process of individuating entails being “born out” of identity with family, tribe, ethnic group etc., the individuated person does not fall back into his or her original social network. Time and again as I work with students at the Jungian Center I hear them note how they have found themselves creating new friendships and new social networks. Their old friends seem not to have similar interests or outlook. “As within, so without:” having changed inwardly, individuating people discover that outer life also changes, including their social contacts and friendships.

The “Leading Minority” and the Need for Community

“Leading minority” was Jung’s term for those awake, those persons who had undertaken to look within and become conscious of the unconscious. Both then and now, there aren’t a lot of people who have done this. Western society, and especially American society with its strong ESTJ bias, is not inclined toward introspection or introversion. People stepping out of the mainstream to discover the unconscious and develop their individual uniqueness are few and far between, and they often wind up feeling “different” or isolated, until they link up with like-minded individuals.
Toni Wolff, Jung’s “friend and collaborator” saw this need to link up with other individuating people and got Jung to agree to the formation of the Psychology Club of Zurich. Funded with a gift of 360,000 Swiss francs from Edith Rockefeller McCormack in 1916, the Club provided Jung with the opportunity to do a “silent experiment” in group psychology. Jung also saw it as the antidote to the “onesidedness” of the analytic process.
Jung noted that “Human personality is certainly not individual only, it is also collective,…” and we need contact with others. Years later, as Jung Institutes were created in various cities around the world, there has been the “spontaneous phenomenon” of similar clubs being formed by analysands and others interested in Jung and his ideas.
One such club recently formed at The Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences. The shared experience of Jung and his deep effect on individuals committed to their growth has brought people together to share fun, fellowship (and food!), as well as stimulating intellectual exchange of Jung-related ideas. Such clubs become for their members what Edward Edinger called an ecclesia spiritualis, a spiritual gathering of those “called out” from the crowd.
If you are reading this essay in some place far from Vermont, and you need the fellowship of others on the path of individuation, here are some ways you might go about finding others who share your interests:
1. Google “Jung Institutes” and you will bring up over 1 million sites related to Jung, some of which will put you on to a locale near you. There are Jung Institutes (i.e. formal organizations of certified Jungian analysts who train therapists to be analysts) in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Santa Fe and Toronto. Many, if not all of these institutes run programs for the public where you can make contacts and develop social networks.
In addition to these Institutes, there are dozens of less formal groups (i.e. not set up to train future analysts)—Jung Societies or Friends of Jung. A cursory scroll through the Google site revealed such groups in Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Claremont CA, Cleveland, Colorado Springs, Eugene OR, Fairfield County CT, Houston, Montana, New Orleans, Port Townsend WA, San Antonio, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Seattle, St. Louis, St. Paul and Waco TX.
2. If you don’t live near any of these cities/states, you might find like-minded people interested in Jung through “new age” bookstores, natural food markets, alternative healing centers and their bulletin boards.
The old adage “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” applies here: when you are ready and aware of your need for the fellowship of others also on the path, such people will appear in your life. Just set the intention to find them, and you will.

Bibliography

Edinger, Edward (2009a), “Individual & Society,” in George Elder & Dianne Cordic, An American Jungian: In Honor of Edward F. Edinger. Toronto: Inner City Books.
________ (2009b), “Jung Distilled,” in George Elder & Dianne Cordic, An American Jungian: In Honor of Edward F. Edinger. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Jung Carl (1960), “The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease,” Collected Works, 3. Princeton University Press.
________ (1956) “Symbols of Transformation,” Collected Works, 5, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1966), “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,” CW 7. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1959), ”The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious,” CW 9i. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1970), “Civilization in Transition,” CW 10. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1969), “Psychology and Religion: West and East,” CW 11. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1954), “The Practice of Psychotherapy,” CW 16, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1976), ”The Symbolic Life,” CW 18. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Keirsey, David & Marilyn Bates (1984), Please Understand Me. Del Mar CA: Prometheus Nemesis Books.
Shamdasani, Sonu, “Introduction,” in Carl Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009.
Three Initiates (1912), The Kybalion. Chicago: Yogi Publication Society.






]]> smehrtens smehrtens@potlatchgroup.com http://jungiancenter.org/blog/blog_comment.asp?bi=47 2010-05-28T09:47:10-05:00 2010-05-28T09:47:10-05:00 2010-05-28T09:47:10-05:00 A Jungian Approach to Choosing

Those readers of this blog who are on the mailing list of The Jungian Center were informed of the voiceover dream I had on September 22, 2009. The voice said:
October 2010 will be an especially important month, when key choices are made that lay down energy patterns the consequences of which we will reap in the next 2 years.
Given my 26+ year track record with such dreams, I always take them seriously. So very shortly I found myself researching what Jung might have said about choice and choosing. Did he leave us any advice about how to make good choices? And what might constitute a “good” choice, to Jung?
My research revealed that Jung never wrote an essay directly on this topic. There are only references scattered throughout his voluminous writing on the subject. But these references allow us to answer the questions above. Before doing so, let’s address the title: What was “Buridan’s ass” and how does it relate to choosing?

Buridan’s Ass

Jung was very learned and well-read and, as such, was familiar with the paradox in philosophy that goes back well into antiquity, to the time of Aristotle, which was discussed centuries later by the 14th century French philosopher, Jean Buridan. Buridan satirized this paradox, in which a man (in Aristotle) or an ass (in later versions) is positioned exactly between two necessities, food and drink (in Aristotle), two bales of hay (in later versions). Buridan felt that if one got stuck pondering the possible outcomes, one could starve. That is, one’s will could so delay making a choice that, in the extreme, one could die before the choice was made. Jung mentions Buridan’s ass three times in his writings, in contexts that give us insights into his views on choosing.

Jung on Choosing

As Jung saw the paradox of Buridan’s ass, the problem was due either to the ass not being hungry so he didn’t take the problem seriously, or to the creature’s externalizing the task. When we externalize a decision we look to the object to make the choice. Jung recognized that good choices—choices that are aligned with our true being—require us to look within, to the depths of our nature and then, to ask ourselves what we feel drawn toward. We must ask ourselves “What is the natural urge of life, at this moment, for me?”
While for most of us the situation of Buridan’s ass may seem extreme, Jung’s identification of the core issue is right on the mark: When people (especially those who are strong Perceivers) have trouble coming to closure, they do just what Jung described. They look to others or turn over the decision-making to others. Or they leave the decision up to life, Fate, Destiny. Jung regarded this tactic as abdicating responsibility for one’s own life and forfeit the opportunity to learn, grow and live more authentically. So one key component of good choices, for Jung, is looking within and being aware of what we are naturally drawn toward.
Jung also recognized that our sense of “free will”—being able to choose freely—is, to a degree, an illusion. The possible range of choices we face when making a decision is dependent upon (and limited by) the amount of libido (psychic energy) disposable by the ego. The Self is really in charge of our lives, a fact most of us usually forget or prefer to ignore. The ego does not like to face its inferiority. It wants to think it is running the show.
The reality of the ego’s dependence on the Self is usually brought home to us only after years of inner work in which the ego experiences the “defeat” that comes with its experience of the Self. This repeated fixatio experience is never pleasant, but eventually it fosters the ego relinquishing its desire for control.
Free choice Jung defined as a “subjective feeling of freedom,” which is not totally free. Our will comes up constantly against the limits of the outside world and also comes into “conflict with the facts of the self.” As the Self acts on the ego it circumscribes our will.
Then there are the inevitable times in life when we experience what Jung calls “conflicts of duty.” These are those situations where we face a choice between two evils or two unpalatable options. In such times Jung saw 3 possible courses of action:
We might look to some outside authority, thus externalizing our locus of authority, something Jung never encouraged.
We might look to an “act of God,” in the form of a fait accompli, which Jung felt most people regard as the will of God. An example here is that of a woman unable to decide whether to have a child, so she stops using birth control, thinking that if she gets pregnant it will be the will of God.
Neither of these did Jung see as desirable. Rather he suggested that we view such situations as opportunities to discover the power inherent in “holding the tension of opposites” and wait for the resolution of the conflict in the form of the emergence of the “transcendent function.” This is not something the ego figures out; it is done by the Self. So this waiting and holding at various (difficult) times of life provide us with opportunities to experience the Self.
Such times also provide the opportunity for us to recognize our “two-ness,” i.e. how we contain both good and evil, different, often opposite impulses or inclinations, as Saint Paul lamented in his letter to the church in Rome. If we can hold the tension of the “two-ness” Jung felt we would achieve a new attitude.
Jung reminds us that the major problems in life—those times when we face major decisions—are never things we solve. Solutions are the purview of the ego. The ego is way out of its depths here. Such problems are only outgrown. When we wait, holding the tension of opposites, the Self provides a resolution, with the appearance of the reconciling third thing, and this results in a whole new attitude, new perspective, new outlook—in short, in our growth.
Jung also provides us with insights on the subject of choosing in his concept of psychological types. In an earlier essay we discussed the types. For our purposes here two components of type theory are relevant: Intuition and Perception. The MBTI and SLIP, the two major “tests” of type, seek to identify a person’s innate preferences. Those with a strong preference for Intuition (N) are oriented more to the future than to the past, see future possibilities and potentials, and take in information irrationally, without the involvement of the linear, left-brain rational mind. Those with a strong preference for P tend to resist closure, to be disorganized and to prefer to continue to glean perceptions and information.
The person strong in both Intuition and Perceiving tends to have the hardest time with choosing because neither intuition or perceiving provides a base for making a choice. Intuition is irrational; perception does not determine either values (Feeling) or logical facts (Thinking)—the two bases on which we make choices. Type specialists will assure us that no one is an “NP” as a type, that there is always either T or F related here. But in my experience, even when the T/F preference is present, the person with strong inclinations toward N and P can be very indecisive.
Finally Jung offers us insights about choosing in his discussion of archetypes, in particular the archetype of the puer. The word is Latin for “child,” and so is an archetype we all have experienced in our youth. But some people never develop the opposite archetype, the senex, sufficiently to balance the qualities of the puer. Such people live what Jung called “the provisional life” —a life without commitment, a life always containing the opportunity to make an escape, a fantasy life, the life of the child.
Pueri seek to keep their options open. They live spontaneously, relishing fun and excitement. As such they make stimulating friends, but very poor marriage material (although this doesn’t stop some women—especially Kores and Mother types —from finding them irresistibly alluring). Unless the puer grows up, i.e. integrates the senex that lies in the unconscious, he will never become either fond of, or good at choosing.

Why does this matter?

Making good choices is a serious issue now. We as a society are living in a time when we face critical choices. I think my dream of last September was meant to get us to realize this fact. We have to choose on so many fronts, e.g.
how to be responsible with our resources (on both the individual and collective levels)
how to handle the problems in our economy
how best to protect the environment
how best to respond to the reality of terrorism and other challenges we face
how much, or if, to participate in the public discussion of contemporary issues
how best to teach our children sound values
how to choose among the candidates in the coming mid-term elections
We need to be good choosers, so as to make choices that are wise, born from our individual truth, consonant with the guidance of the Self. Jung offers us a wealth of advice on how to do this. He reminds us that
“Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakes.
We need to be awake, and aware of who we are, what we value, what the Self is asking of us, and Jung’s perspective is an invaluable aid in good choosing.

Bibliography

Bolen, Jean Shinoda (1984), Goddesses in Everywoman. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Edinger, Edward (1996), The Aion Lectures: Exploring the Self in C.G. Jung’s Aion. Toronto: Inner City Press.
Giannini, John (2004), Compass of the Soul: Archetypal Guides to a Fuller Life. Gainesville FL: Center for the Application of Psychological Type.
Carl Jung (1961), “Freud and Psychoanalysis,” Collected Works, 4. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1966), “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,” CW 7. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1959), “Aion,” Collected Works, 9ii. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1970), “Civilization in Transition,” CW 10. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1969), “Psychology and Religion: West and East,” CW 11. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1963), “Mysterium Coniunctionis,” CW 14. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1954), “The Practice of Psychotherapy,” CW 16, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1973), Letters, ed. Gerhard Adler & Aniela Jaffé. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Keirsey, David & Marilyn Bates (1984), Please Understand Me. Del Mar CA: Prometheus Nemesis Books.
Kroeger, Otto & Janet Thuesen (1988), Type Talk. New York: Dell.
Myers, Isabel Briggs with Peter Myers (1980), Gifts Differing. Palo Alto CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Sharp, Daryl (1998), Jungian Psychology Unplugged: My Life as an Elephant. Toronto: Inner City Press.
Wikipedia, “Buridan’s Ass;” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan’s¬_ass
Woodman, Marion (1985), The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation. Toronto: Inner City Press.


]]> smehrtens smehrtens@potlatchgroup.com http://jungiancenter.org/blog/blog_comment.asp?bi=46 2010-05-01T01:32:45-05:00 2010-05-01T01:32:45-05:00 2010-05-01T01:32:45-05:00 An Examination of America’s Potential Future in Light of Its Astrological Chart



In previous essays I have made references to possible forms of the future for America and American society. Those essays make it clear that I am not a fan of our current culture, government or society, nor am I very optimistic about the future. In part, this stems from a series of dreams I had back in 2007 and 2008 which suggest some of the challenges we are likely to face in the coming years. In part, my attitude stems from my reading of Native American sources about the actions of the United States government over the last 400 years, and Native predictions about the karmic consequences of those actions. And in part, my attitude stems from my reading of Jung, and his conviction that our collective future will see some sort of “impending world catastrophe.” As people have read the previous essays posted to The Jungian Center’s blog, they have asked me for specifics: what’s coming down? What are we, as a society, looking at in the next few years? And when might we expect the challenging times to arrive?
There are several ways one might address these questions: One way is with the use of Intuitive Imagery, which I have used with several friends who are adept in it. Another way is by consulting the variety of mantic arts, the results of which, on the collective level, often are hard to decipher or interpret. A third way is by watching one’s dream guidance, and beyond just watching, actively seeking the guidance of the psyche through an interactive dream practice. I have done all of these. There is also another source of information, which Jung used on occasion to better understand his patients, and also to study the relationship of married couples. This source is astrology.
Many Americans, nearly all academics, and some of you readers of this blog might at this point start rolling your eyes. Astrology? Astrology!***??? Yes, I know. Years ago I too had a very low opinion of this ancient branch of knowledge—until I was forcibly, shockingly disabused of my prejudice in this regard. It happened like this:
I was a very logical, rational Cartesian college professor, locked into the world of theory and abstraction like only an Eastern Ivy League intellectual can be, when, in November 1983, my world began to come unraveled. It began with the first of what I have come to call my “voice-over dreams.” No action, no figures, just a voice that said: “Friends will die. Relatives will die. You will give up everything and your life will be transformed.” I was married at the time and I woke up and told my husband, thinking that he must have heard this loud voice. But no, he had heard nothing. I then dismissed the whole experience, given my academic prejudices, but my husband remembered what I had told him. Five days later I learned that my friend Hazel Crafts had dropped dead. When I told Ed, he reminded me of the words I had heard. But I dismissed it as “just a coincidence.” Over the next six months, however, I lost another friend, two aunts and an uncle and everything in my life began to fall away. I came to feel like I was losing my toehold on reality and various friends tried to help, some sending me to ministers, others to counselors, others to psychiatrists and psychologists. So it was, in the Spring of 1984, that I thought my student Miranda was taking me to another therapist of some kind when I went with her to a home in downtown Bar Harbor. It was only on the sidewalk going into the house, just minutes before my appointment, that she told me the person I was about to meet was not a therapist but an astrologer. I recall freezing on the spot, turning to Miranda in shocked disbelief, and yelling at her that that sort of stuff was bunk, nonsense, that she should know better, that astrologers were full of—Well, you get the idea: I was not open to astrology at all! Miranda then said that if I didn’t go in she was still going to have to pay for the session and all the work the astrologer had done to prepare for it. That made me feel guilty: here was one of my students being willing to ante up her own limited funds to help me out. So I hung my head and went into the house. The session lasted the better part of 5 hours—5 hours during which I was transformed. First I sat there, arms folded across my chest in stern disbelief and disdain. Then I began to hear things that rang true—about my nature, my personality, and, even more intriguing, about what I was experiencing at the time. But it was when the astrologer began to tell me when all of it would be over, when life would get better, that I really sat up, took notice and then, lacking any other inner resources with which to explain what I had just experienced, I accused the woman of being a psychic. “No,” she replied, “anyone could do this, if he or she were prepared to study and learn how to interpret the symbols.” Astrology was just a powerful symbol system, open to anyone willing to invest the time and energy to learn. I could do just what she did. Presented with such an intellectual challenge, some part of me took the bait, and I became a student of Frances Sakoian on the spot. Over time, as I faced similar experiences, I came to realize that the Universe was taking each of my prejudices, each of my paradigms about how reality is, and “popping” them, forcing me to give up my old beliefs.
I recount my personal story here for those of you who, like me 30 years ago, have dismissed astrology without even examining it. A very powerful symbol system, developed in every one of the major cultures of the world, time-tested for thousands of years, astrology has validity. It should not be dismissed out of hand. And it can provide some insights into the questions that I am getting from students at The Jungian Center and readers of this blog. At the same time I realize some readers of this essay may be practicing astrologers, well versed in the technicalities of chart analysis and interpretation. As I try to write about America’s future through its chart, transits and progressions for both those who know nothing about charts and those at the opposite extreme, professional practitioners of astrology, I will add notes throughout the text for the pros interested in the specific astrological data on which I am basing my sense of our collective future. I suggest those familiar with astrology consult the appendix to this essay for more discussion of particular technical points.

America’s Natal Chart: Personality, Values and Collective Concerns

One of the tenets of astrological practice is that, before we look at transits and progressions (i.e. what is going on with the client at the time) we must look at the natal chart, to get a sense of who the client is, his/her interests, level of awareness and life purpose. So before we tackle the subject of what the current planetary configurations suggest about America’s future, we must examine America’s identity, as seen in its chart.
A natal chart is drawn for a date, place and time of birth. The debate begins: When could America be said to begin, as a country? Some insist the nation began only in 1787, with the Constitutional Convention that created the United States, others with George Washington’s inauguration as President on April 30, 1789. Most astrologers date our beginning to the signing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4th, 1776, the date when we formally broke our tie to Great Britain. But while this date and place are most commonly agreed upon in the astrological community, it is not without debate too: What time was the Declaration signed? No primary source gives us an exact time. Various astrologers have ventured times, some using the technique known as “rectification” to argue for a 4:45 PM time.
Why does this matter? Having an accurate time allows the astrologer to identify the “rising sign” and the house placements of the planets for that date and place. Absent a reliable birth time, we can create only a “solar chart,” which would lack some specifics that are useful in fleshing out a transit reading. In what follows, I am going to rely mostly on what is incontrovertible, assuming July 4th, 1776 is the “birthday” of America. I will indicate in footnotes those rare times when I am using data based on the hypothesized birth time.
America’s Personality. From its astrological chart, we can see many of the qualities that have made America great: its enterprising spirit, its ability to act with surety and confidence, its fertile imagination and ability to make practical use of creative inspiration. With strong engineering and mechanical skills, America is gifted with the ability to undertake ambitious projects, to coordinate large teams of people, to develop strategies and manage collective resources and power. Thanks to its Promethean Mercury, America’s mentality is future-oriented, inventive, ingenious and expansive in its goals. It is also very humanitarian, willing to help others, altruistic and generous of spirit. The Extraverted nature of America makes for a society that is gregarious and sociable, oriented more to outer reality rather than to its inner life.
Earlier essays noted some of the less desirable qualities in the American temperament. Analysis of America’s natal chart reveals others. For example, the negative side of America’s personality may go back to its origins as a nation of immigrants, leading to a certain feeling of inferiority or insecurity about status. To compensate for this feeling, America is inclined toward boasting and self-aggrandizement, reflecting a gnawing inner feeling of “not making the grade.” Its thinking influenced by deep-seated emotional patterns (of which it is unconscious), America feels the need to prove itself over and over, and it has an exaggerated sense of its own importance.
Most prominent, in America’s personality, is its puer nature. America is immature, childish in many ways, e.g. in its tendency to jump into things without proper preparation; its expectation of a big break coming any time now, producing a lack of realism; its tendency to scapegoat or need to have some external enemy on which to project its failings; its irrational gullibility; and its tendency to bite off more than it can chew. The puer also tends to be superficial, living on the surface, in an attempt to avoid facing the dark places within. Most problematic, with the puer nature, is its strong reluctance to face or deal with bad news, unpleasant facts or negative issues. Denial looms large in our collective makeup, and, as I noted in the essay on America’s shadow, denial is not that river in Egypt: it is a very dangerous trait in our collective life and one that could intensify our misery by blocking any realistic engagement with the challenges we currently face.
America’s Values. Jung made many trips to the United States and he liked this country, although he recognized its preoccupation with what he called the “yellow god,” i.e. gold/money. Material wealth and “success” defined in material terms are two of America’s most characteristic values. Others include progress (defined as continual improvement in physical conditions, particularly in terms of making life easier and more comfortable through the application of sophisticated technologies that save labor and time); freedom (defined as the untrammeled opportunity to do what one wants, when one wants, how one wants, with minimal interference or limitations); creativity (especially the pragmatic kind that solves practical problems and makes piles of money, e.g. blockbuster films, “killer aps” for the iPhone etc.); self-improvement (in the sense of the archetypal “Horatio Alger” self-made man); and platitudinous values like the flag (i.e. patriotism), Mom and apple pie.
More problematic values include its litigiousness, its vaunting of independence into exemptionalism (unwillingness to cooperate with other nations or to honor the decisions of courts outside the United States), its strong concern for self-protection, and its religiosity. This last is problematic because American religiosity is deeply imbued with cosmic vanity, that ideological stance that regards one’s own position as privileged. The cosmic vanity of America’s Christian fundamentalists is no different than the cosmic vanity of the Islamic jihadist. The anachronistic ideology of the medieval Crusaders lives on in the contemporary clash of these two groups.
America’s Collective Concerns. Modern critics of American culture identify our current concerns as “need, greed and speed.” We are addicted to faster, faster, more and more, never feeling like we have enough. As for “need,” American society seems unable to distinguish between “need” and “want.” Our “wants” are endless; our needs modest, but the materialism of our culture, coupled with the consumerism that is driven by the incessant marketing and advertising all around us, makes most Americans feel they need to buy this “new new thing” and that latest gadget. Perhaps once upon a time in our collective life we lived content with “Yankee frugality,” but that long ago was replaced with the discontent of “consumeritis,” the societal disease built on “planned obsolescence” and “keeping up with the Joneses.”
None of our consuming habits makes us feel more secure, and especially in these times of terrorism, security is another widespread collective concern. In an earlier blog essay I spoke of the true source of security—our individual knowledge, understanding and awareness of the Self within and its guidance. The vast majority of Americans knows nothing of this. Most Americans externalize their locus of security —savings, a pension, a job, a spouse, a set of marketable job skills—all of these vulnerable to loss. So fear haunts the collective mind of America.
Another concern is standing up for what we believe in. Americans have strong emotional convictions, and are willing to crusade for “truth, justice and the American way.” This is fine until it produces political paralysis, as we see now in Washington, with neither party willing to temper its ideology to make needed changes in important policies. It is also a detriment when “the American way” becomes the American Exceptionalism that was the subject of an earlier essay: chauvinistic, self-satisfied, terribly inflated—and therefore headed for a fall.
What is the nature of this “fall,” and when is it likely to happen? These questions shift us from America’s natal chart to an analysis of the aspects that the transiting planets are making. By “transiting” I am referring to the planets that are constantly moving through the heavens. The position of the 10 planets in 1776 is not the same as their position now, in 2010 (and especially around August 1st). The angles (“aspects” in astrological jargon) the planets’ current positions make now to the planets’ positions in 1776 provide us with insights into what might happen to the United States in the next few years. These transits also give us clues as to timing—when we might expect various events to occur.

America’s Future

After making some general remarks, I will consider our future under several headings: politics; economics, finance and ecology; and social or cultural circumstances.
General Overview
Generally, some expert astrologers recognize that the United States is likely to experience “severe lessons” because part of its destiny is to “gain realizations that are of a fundamental nature.” Given all the difficult aspects in the transits at this time, I can’t help but think many of the “severe lessons” are, or soon will be upon us.
Speaking of destiny calls to mind the issue of karma. Just as individuals get back what they put out so do countries. With all the aspects involving the Nodes of the Moon now, I can’t help but think the U.S.’s karma is now coming due. As I noted in an earlier blog essay “The Law of Cause and Effect and America’s Future,” the United States has terrible karma to clear. The coming months and years might be when this is meant to happen, given all the signs of it in the transits.
Hit by both transits and progressions the Nodal axis is timing a series of fated encounters that are meant to have a major impact on America’s growth and development. With transiting Nodal axis contacting Jupiter, this could relate to religion or our culture. Since the Islamic jihadists criticize both our religion and our culture, their actions might relate to this aspect. As the transiting Sun comes to conjunct natal Rahu and oppose natal Ketu in the coming months, the U.S. could experience some important, meaningful encounter linked to its destiny or purpose. Natal Jupiter and Venus are opposed by the transiting Nodal axis, suggesting this might involve a relationship or dispute with another country over religious differences. Again, the Islamic jihadists come to mind.
The challenge of confronting karma won’t go away soon: transiting Saturn is moving into a square of the Nodal axis which won’t become exact until the Fall of 2013. So it is likely we will be facing consequences of our collective past actions for years to come. We aren’t going to like this. It won’t be a pleasant experience. With all the transits and progressions involving Mars, and the 7 transits and 4 progressions involving Pluto, the next few years are going to see the eruption of primitive, infantile passions, the surfacing of deep rage and long-pent-up frustrations, and the triggering of public unrest. In such a climate of burning, instinctual drives, neither logic nor intuition will produce much in the way of answers. As a society we have to realize we are in a calcinatio time, an important stage of development that sets off complexes in the individual and is likely to show up in the collective in waves of mass demonstrations, protests and perhaps even rebellion. This is a “wipe out” time that wants to sweep away what has become anachronistic so new things can emerge. There will likely be changes in basic patterns of living, working, and governing. The progressions of Jupiter produce sublimatio energy now, providing us with opportunities to see what’s going on from a higher perspective.
The 4 transits of Saturn speak to a desire to break free of life structures that have become calcified and rigid. In an individual, these aspects often mark a time in life when there’s a major shift. On the collective level, this might show up as earthquakes, especially when the 9 transits involving Uranus are also considered. If so, the times in 2010 when an earthquake would be most likely are: March 22-29, April 18-25, May 15-23, June 12-19, July 9-14, August 5-13, September 2-9, September 29-October 6, November 22-30, and December 20-25th.
The afflictions involving Mercury suggest the coming year will not be very easy in terms of communications. Mercury under stress can time intervals when appointments are missed, problems arise in meetings, and errors in contracts create hassles. Computer systems and global communications systems may be disrupted or malfunction now. Information the United States gets might be incorrect, distorted or incomplete. (Are the bankers telling us the whole story? Are the generals on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan giving the President the full picture?). Some people may be reluctant to express their feelings honestly at this time, a dangerous situation if they are in positions of power or keepers of key information. In other contexts important communications may get garbled due to emotional issues or prejudices that block our getting or taking in all the facts. Given our long history of prejudice toward the Middle East, it is not hard to imagine that we would be prone to mis-hearing or misinterpreting the intelligence we get from that part of the world, and with the 9/11 trials coming up, there might be challenges and delays with Mercury afflicted. In 2010, miscommunications are especially likely from April 19 to May 12, August 21 to September 12 and December 11 to 30th, when transiting Mercury will be retrograde. Travel plans go awry, luggage gets lost, phones malfunction and both email and snail mail have glitches in these 3-week intervals.
Communications difficulties may be compounded given the unconscious stuff that is likely to emerge this year. In earlier essays I have noted how unconscious most Americans are. Jung reminds us that the overall level of any large collective is based not on the highest but on the lowest common denominator. This means our collective consciousness is very low. The transits of Neptune and Pluto making hard aspects to the Moon, Jupiter and Venus might show up in our collective life as distortions in our collective judgment, the surfacing of painful memories (e.g. the events of 9/11/01), and uncontrolled impulses being brought into the open. It will be particularly important in the next several years to have very cool, calm, collected leaders in positions of power.
Even if unconscious forces play a minor role (which I don’t think they will, given the karmic nature of our time), we are likely to see troublesome mental attitudes in our country. Impulsive, headstrong attitudes may arise as the transiting Sun comes to oppose Pluto. Self-deception—willful avoidance of facing reality—is likely with transiting Neptune inconjunct natal Neptune. Impractical ideas and intellectual conceit, as well as fixed attitudes and mental vacillation will pose problems to our effective hearing and handling of information. The next several years are likely to be a sustained interval of emotional and mental confusion.
All this will impact our relationships with other countries. We are likely to witness unforeseen difficulties in dealings with our friends, or with groups and organizations (like the United Nations and other non-governmental organizations). With progressed Mars in a square of the U.S. Sun, a relationship could break up. With transiting Pluto opposing Venus in the U.S. chart, changes in relationships are likely, perhaps due to the United States trying to reform or remake other nations. Conversely, we may see other nations or figures try to do this to the U.S. (I am reminded here of Osama bin Laden’s demands after 9/11 to the United States; clearly he and his ilk would like to remake us!).
Given the high level of indebtedness we now have with other countries, it is good that the stars at this time bespeak a growing interest in foreign cultures. Maybe we will even begin to support widespread foreign language learning in our elementary schools.
Such educational reform would require energy, perhaps more energy than our society will be able to summon, given the signs of laziness, self-indulgence, self-pity, confusion, anxiety and hopelessness indicated by an array of aspects. Arguments, anger and back-biting are also likely to continue; we see all these now in the polarized environment of the U.S. Congress. There are some “hot” issues that may surface that will grab the public’s attention; whether we will have sufficient sense to deal with these issues rationally is doubtful. We may lack the willingness, as a society, to cope with practical affairs. People may retreat to their homes and eschew involvement in public life. (Another, less palatable interpretation of these transits is that we might have to remain in our homes, quarantined in the face of pandemics, or insulated from biological or radiological threats).
Eccentric or unreliable people might be in key positions (like the fellow in the consular office of the embassy in Yemen who misspelled Abdulmutallab’s name, thus leaving him off the “No Fly” list), and they could create problems for the U.S. We will need leaders who resist the tendency (due to the U.S.’s “J” nature) to jump to conclusions without sufficient information. Calm deliberation will be the order of the day, but is likely to be in short supply. We will need a balanced, rational outlook in the years ahead, an outlook using caution, diplomacy and good judgment. We will need to cooperate with other countries and play fair, and work to find honest solutions to problems. We also need to recognize that there are large-scale forces afoot that affect all of humanity, and this is no time for idleness, hopelessness or unconsciousness. With transiting Pluto squaring Neptune, we as a society must recognize, understand and work with the unconscious, but given the infantile nature of the American psyche, I think it is unlikely we will do so.
More likely is that the U.S. will be its own worst enemy in the years ahead, stumbling into political, economic, ecological, and social changes beyond its control. Life will feel like a big test. Old wounds may reappear, bringing up social discontent and sparking a death-and-rebirth time. The hardships and frustrations we are likely to see are meant to encourage conscious change, serious reforms to make a world that works for everyone. No longer will we be able to carry on with old ways, old forms, old beliefs, old attitudes.
Aspects of Our Political Future
We are already seeing the stars reflected in some aspects of our political life, e.g. the polarization and battles between Republicans and Democrats, with few politicians taking the high road of statesmanship or thinking of the long-term well-being of the country. Such in-fighting and political posturing is alienating the electorate and sparking protests, as we see in movements like the rise of the Tea Party. Conflicts with government authorities, and more broadly, conflicts with authority figures of all types, are likely to continue and probably will get worse. Power struggles are going to be a theme beyond government: we will see them in the world of business, as well as in the military. But we aren’t likely to see the full picture, because another theme of the politics of the years ahead is secrecy. Secret or covert action could be carried on behind the scenes, some of it to avoid opposition or disapproval from the public or Congress. Even now, of course, we surely know we are not privy to all the “black ops” and other forms of covert activity that are going on ostensibly for the good of the country.
More problematic than secrecy will be the theme of domination: the United States may try to dominate other countries (nothing new there, of course) or it may get a taste of this treatment from others, with the double Sun-Pluto/Pluto-Sun opposition. Power struggles are likely to take place on both the domestic and the international scenes. The latter will spark problems in our foreign relations (we see intimations of this already in our dealings with Pakistan). If the U.S. tries to reform or remake other countries without cleaning up its own house (and huge debt level) there could be a backlash or dangers. The progressed Chiron return could produce crises that are beyond America’s control. Things could get out of hand, particularly with the transits involving Mars, suggesting impulsive and aggressive behavior, war, revolution or natural disaster.
The transits suggest that the mood of the American public will be out of harmony with our political leadership. The people may have little sympathy for government officials, particularly if public scandals come to light, or if grandiose, unrealistic projects have little to show for all the money and rhetoric they sparked. Lawsuits, rash physical confrontations, possibly even large-scale rebellion may mark the coming years. Certainly it will be a challenging time for politicians, as more and more citizens begin to ask pointed questions, reflecting their growing discontent and feelings of disillusionment.
The United States experiences a Saturn return in October 2011. Such transits are always challenging times, marking intervals of crises and calling for a fundamental reorientation. Next year will be a time of breakdown and disintegration (will the States stay united? Will the country split apart?). If the union holds, the country is likely to experience a fragile self-confidence, which may be very hard to endure, given its triumphalism and vaunting sense of exceptionalism.
The next few years politically will be a time for the U.S. to develop practicality and face reality. We are no longer the masters of our own house, given that we are so deeply in debt to other nations. We can no longer dictate to others, given how dependent we are on foreign resources (especially oil). We have to give up our intellectual and moral conceit and recognize that uncontrolled selfish impulses will be our undoing. We are facing a breakdown time, a time when, if we choose, we can turn breakdown into breakthrough. We only have a few years to make this shift in attitude: transiting Pluto will come to oppose the U.S. Sun exactly early in 2016. This is when the stars suggest we will have to make some great sacrifice, especially around power. We may have to submit at that time to another nation more powerful than we (China perhaps?). We will undergo a change of a total, irrevocable nature. Since Pluto transits are so powerful, and Pluto moves so slowly, astrologers often give its transits a wide orb: we might be feeling the intimations of this challenging transit even now.
Aspects of Our Economic and Ecological Future
Without a doubt we have been seeing intimations of the future in our economic conditions these last two years. We can expect more of the same hardship and problems related to corporate finances, insurances, taxes and public monies in the years ahead, along with lawsuits and legal difficulties, wasteful spending, and neglect of necessary maintenance of our local and national infrastructure. While we will hear of more and more Americans losing their jobs, the media will also present us with news of obscene levels of luxurious living and selfishness on the part of moguls and CEOs whose greed knows no bounds. In the face of such a disconnect between the people and the plutocrats, discontent may boil up into riots, looting and widespread thievery.
The last two years have presented us with the scenario for the future in terms of our nation’s finances. All the talk of things getting better have been the result of the temporary conjunction of Jupiter and Neptune. Jupiter is now moving off Neptune, and it is likely that by mid-summer 2010, when Jupiter will be conjunct Uranus, the rose-colored glasses will be off and people will return to reality. Aspect after aspect warns of conflicts and problems related to corporate finances, taxes, insurance, and monies we have borrowed from others. Past financial extravagance will cause the U.S. embarrassment, and we may see difficulties in dealings with our creditors. It is well known that both Russia and China would like to see a single global currency. It may well be that the coming years see such pressure on the U.S. dollar that these two countries get their wish, as some of the aspects refer to coercion in financial affairs and a “sustained interval of financial tension.” The progressed Chiron return may spark a severe depression as the stock market goes into a swoon much more severe than what we saw in recent years. This is a time for both personal and national belt-tightening, but all we hear out of Washington are calls for more programs, costing more money. In this, as in so many other areas of reality, the U.S. is in denial. The slowdown we are now experiencing will turn into a major depression likely to last for years—all meant to induce us, as a society, to develop new values, new attitudes toward the material world and money, and to work toward a new economic paradigm, predicated on justice and equity for all.
The business world faces many uncertainties now and this will continue in the years ahead. We can expect the unexpected in our collective commercial life. Caution will be needed, as well as a good deal of courage on the part of entrepreneurs hoping to do well in the business landscape of the next few years. We are likely going to hear about more deceptive and unethical business practices, and yet more examples of greed and selfishness that create legal and PR difficulties, as well as financial losses. There are likely to be problems with work efficiency and hassles in business caused by communications glitches. Perhaps this will be due to the sunspot activity that scientists predict for 2011 or it may take the form of computer hackers spreading viruses or developing ways to break into and take over control of servers and other large computer-based communications systems. The coming years will not be an easy time for PR and marketing firms, or businesses involved in transportation, import/export or finance.
We are likely to see more food-borne illnesses, workplace dangers from chemicals, explosives, fires or employees so enraged by mistreatment that they go on shooting rampages at their workplace (or former workplace). The emotional and psychological problems of workers kept on after massive layoffs will also be an issue facing many businesses. Occupational hazards from toxic chemicals, water pollution, or leaking gases will also be in the news. We may see tainted medications, as quality standards fall due to greedy suppliers of raw materials. (This is something we have seen already with the Chinese who substituted cheaper substances for more costly gylcerine). Tainted meds will be a serious problem as more people fall sick: Since economic and financial stresses tend to weaken immune systems, more people are likely to fall prey to infections. The H1N1 swine flu epidemic is not going to be the last widespread disease in our collective future.
The environment will continue to generate debate, even as the reality of global warming becomes more and more evident. From mining to melting glaciers, we will witness myriad examples of Mother Nature trying to get our attention, while we still have time to turn the global environmental crisis around. Given the scope and severity of our economic and financial dilemmas, I would be very pleasantly surprised if the environment gets the attention it deserves.
Our Social and Cultural Situation in the Years Ahead
Given the puer nature of the American national soul, we are likely to see more people spending more time indulging in social activities that divert their attention from the challenges we will be facing as a society. The puer does not like to face negativity or deal with the “hard stuff” of life: he would rather play. Juvenal recognized this in his famous remark about how the Imperial subverters of the old Republic were able to co-opt the people with “panem et circenses,” bread and circuses. The modern form of bread is Social Security, disability and unemployment payments, food stamps and WIC, while the modern version of circuses is sports: NASCAR, the Super Bowl, the World Series etc. While the social structures of our culture fall apart, the American people are likely to pull an ostrich act and go hide their heads in their TVs, Wiis, iPods and iPads. Those still willing to engage socially with others may encounter problems—insincere gestures made to avoid unpleasantness, self-centered attitudes that alienate others, profound restlessness, impulsive actions, over-use of alcohol or abuse of drugs. Escapism will not be appropriate in the years ahead, although many, if not most Americans, are likely to fall into it. The future will call for Americans to become responsible for themselves and not look to government—local, state or national—to bail them out.
On the cultural scene, we are likely to see difficult problems arise over religious beliefs. With transiting Pluto opposing Jupiter, the United States may become the victim of autocratic promotion of religious beliefs (think al Qaeda). We might experience coercion in the name of religion. The transits and progressions of Pluto to America’s chart call for the death of old cosmologies and religions so as to allow the rise of new visions and spiritualities more attuned to the coming Age of Aquarius. Transiting Neptune coming to conjunct the Moon fosters attunement to spiritual energies as it wipes out the old ways. We are likely to see more people become involved in personal expressions of the spiritual impulse within. Multiple transits and progressions support the predictions of Native peoples that the coming years will see a global spiritual awakening.
Such a global movement will likely be supported by a growing interest in the cultural traditions of foreign countries and a willingness on the part of Americans to travel to foreign lands to experience these traditions first-hand. This is nothing new: Americans have had a wanderlust for many generations. But foreign travel for Americans in the future may come with family separations, lack of prudent discrimination, poor taste and dangers from mobs or crowds. If the U.S. government continues to be tone-deaf to the mood of the American people, we may even see mob violence and riots in this country.
The aspects involving Saturn and Pluto to the U.S. chart are asking us to work with our collective shadow (beginning, of course, with our own individual shadows). We must, as a culture, face our shadow. It is staring us in the face: Its name is “Taliban.” The events of the last decade have served to “constellate” our collective shadow and now we must face it—not lambaste it, not excoriate it, not point the finger and call it an “axis of evil.” All that is just more projection. We must give up all the exceptionalist rhetoric and face the truth that we, as a nation, are not perfect, not superior to other countries, not above needing to work on ourselves. We are now in an important time in the history of our national life, a time meant to spark emotional and spiritual development. We need to give up our materialism, greed, selfishness, consumeritis and self-indulgence, and come to recognize the potentials that lie in our immediate future.

The Potentials in Our Future

So far this essay has had a negative tone. We are living in challenging times and such times often seem negative. But we must recognize that we are choosing to put labels like “negative” on what is not necessarily negative at all. It seems to be part of basic human nature that we get motivated to change more from what is unpleasant, what is not working, than when everything is going well. We are now in a time—and facing a much more difficult couple of decades—when things will not go smoothly, when our karmic “chickens” come home to roost, when we will have to grow up, as a society. It will be much easier to do so if we change our attitude, and focus on the positives—the purposes and intentions of all the challenges we face.
Why all the disruptions, depressions, discontent? We are meant to wake up now, to use our collective painful experiences as awakeners, as goads to our creative imagination, to stimulate our ingenuity and resourcefulness. When we confront an old way that no longer works, it is meant to help us discover some new way that is more aligned with what really matters in life. For example, when budgets are tight and high-tech gifts are beyond the family’s means, parents and children might turn to the simpler pleasures of storytelling, board games and other forms of entertainment that foster literacy, inter-generational interaction and family solidarity. Economic hard times can be the incentive for us to create a new economic model (capitalism being so destructive to both the Earth and human beings), with new values and a new attitude toward money and the material world. As the most materialistic of all cultures (as well as the most wasteful and consumptive), the United States has to move away from materialism and come to believe the truth in the bumper sticker: “The best things in life aren’t things.”
The events in our national life are providing us with myriad opportunities to move in new directions and create the solidarity that “rugged individualism” has thwarted in our collective history. For example, if petroleum becomes a resource in very limited supply (a likely prospect over the next decade) it will give us the opportunity to develop car pools or local shared transportation systems, and thus to get to know and rely much more on our neighbors. If the national government disappears (another likely prospect in the next several decades), we have the opportunity to develop regional associations and a strong system of local communities. If we are forced to evacuate our homes and move to other places (either through natural disasters, like earthquakes, or through terrorism), we have the opportunity to jettison most of our “stuff” and come to recognize what’s really important in life. These are unsettled times—just the sort of times that inspire creative artists—so we can expect an outpouring of insightful creative expression in the coming years, by both plastic and performing artists. We need to be open to such creativity and celebrate the changes it can help bring about.
We are standing at the precipice of a breakthrough time in our national life. As always, it comes with a breakdown period beforehand. We must remember the point: that old ways, old systems, old verities, things we have taken for granted are leaving so that we can move in new directions and create a more viable reality, a reality attuned to the demands of our souls and the wisdom of Nature. We can do this, we can get through this challenging interval, but only if we understand the bigger picture—that what we are facing is purposive, meaningful, important and ultimately for our benefit.

Appendix for Those Familiar with Astrology
(and others who want further information)

The material above was drawn only from what is incontrovertible in the U.S. chart and its near-term transits. Nothing was drawn from the debatable components—house systems, Western vs. Vedic, Tropical vs. Sidereal, possible birth times. In what follows I consider information from some of the debatable sources.
First, I want to note that I am using a 10 degree orb here—an orb much wider than the 6 degree orb I use when handling individual charts. Then I suggest the experienced astrologer turn to the chart included with this essay which presents the version I think best represents the United States in terms of rising sign, house placements and choice of system. What criteria did I use to make these choices? Let’s consider this question.
My choice of rising sign comes from Liz Greene’s The Outer Planets and Their Cycles. Greene was not original here: she got her chart from Dane Rudhyar’s The Astrology of America’s Destiny. A footnote in Greene’s book noted the work of Barry Lynes, who “rectified” America’s chart by culling through 200 years of its history, to determine a more accurate time for the “birth” of the country as 4:45PM, rather than Rudhyar’s 5PM. Using 4:45PM gives us an Ascendant of 7 degrees Sagittarius in the Tropical system.
Why the Tropical system? Those who have had chart readings with me know that I prefer the Sidereal system. In this case, however, I think the Tropical more accurately reflects the low level of consciousness, the manifold puer qualities and the ESTJ nature of the American temperament. As Liz Greene notes, Sagittarius as a rising sign suits the United States so well, with its lust for freedom, dislike of constraints or limits, its love of wealth, its wanderlust and pioneering spirit and its cowboy (puer) mentality. The Sidereal system would put the ASC in Scorpio, and that does not suit the American nature at all. Saturn in Libra in the 10th house in the Tropical system also well reflects the American tendency to “set itself up as the arbiter of rights, the fair judge and leader and guide.” —a role it loves to play in the world, a very different role than one would expect with the Sidereal Saturn in Virgo.
While I can see the Sun in Gemini in the Sidereal system (more puer), I can also see the Cancerian nature of the Tropical Sun, with its strong protective and defensive instincts, its concern for material security, its fear of ridicule, its isolationism, its risk-taking with other peoples’ money, its strong patriotism (think “American exceptionalism”), its dislike of mental or physical discomfort, its powerful imagination and its aversion to being told how to do things.
As for the house system—Placidus (Western) or Vedic—I went with the Placidus because it posits Venus, Mars and Jupiter in the 7th house, a placement that I think reflects the projective tendencies of America much better than the 8th house placement these planets have in the Vedic system. In both systems the Sun is in the 8th house, so the basic nature of the country—focused on corporate and business finance, other peoples’ money, progress, regeneration, secrecy and superficiality (in its reluctance to face the dark places in the national psyche)—is the same regardless of which house system is used.
Now I want to turn to a more general examination of the U.S. chart (Tropical, Placidus, Sagittarius rising) and the transits that are underway now or will be coming up in the next 15-18 months. See the chart included in this blog essay. The astonishing number of Grand Crosses is immediately evident: 14 involve planets in the 1st, 4th/I.C., 7th and 10th/M.C. houses, the 4 most significant houses in a chart. However these multiple hard aspects manifest, the United States surely will have to sit up and take notice.
Another two, more transient crosses develop a few days later, as transiting Mercury comes to oppose the U.S. Moon in square to the Ascendant/Descendant, and to ASC opposing natal Uranus. These crosses are in the 9th, 3rd, 12th/ASC, and 6th/7th/DSC houses. Communications will surely be an issue, perhaps communications fraught with intense emotionality, frustration or anger (since the Moon is involved and afflicted). We are also likely to witness finger-pointing and blaming, as the “powers that be” project out their stuff, and, as a nation, the U.S. tries to weasel out of its dilemma by looking to others (7th house). That the 12th house is involved suggests that the coming crisis/crises will have, as one of its purposes, to make the United States more conscious of its unconscious. Whether the nation will be willing to look within remains questionable. I have my doubts, given its immature puer nature.
Note also the transiting Sun hitting Rahu in the 8th, a position that lies on the midpoint between the natal Mars-Neptune square. This seems likely to highlight 8th house issues, e.g. corporate finances and monies the United States derives from other countries. As I noted earlier, with the involvement of Rahu, I find myself thinking of karma coming due around our profligate ways and materialistic values.
Another Grand Cross will form as Venus and Mars transit through the 10th and into the 11th house and come to oppose U.S Chiron while squaring the natal Mercury-Pluto opposition. Chiron is the wounded healer, a sensitive spot in any chart, and hit here by hard aspects, I can imagine that the U.S. will feel some sort of pain in this time. All the 10th house activity suggests that whatever comes down will not be hidden: the 10th is not a house where things get hidden and so the United States’ crisis, karmic moment, financial humiliation or global comeuppance will be out there for all to see. Whether this will provoke some sensible response on the part of Americans, whether all these cosmic energies will be put to some positive purpose, the astrologer can never predict: “The stars only impel, they do not compel.”

Bibliography

Bacevich, Andrew (2008), The Limits of Power. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Cole, Helene (2010), “Astrological Insights,” Astrological Insights Archive: The US and Canada: Sister Nations. URL: spiritlink.com/insights-US-Canada.html
Deloria, Vine (1988), Custer Died for Your Sins. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Edinger, Edward (1995), Melville’s Moby Dick: An American Nekyia. Toronto: Inner City Press.
Farmer, John (2009), The Ground Truth. New York: Riverhead Books.
Friedman, Thomas (2010), “Never Heard That Before,” The New York Times (January 31, 2010), WK 10.
Greene, Liz (1983), The Outer Planets & Their Cycles: The Astrology of the Collective. Reno NV: CRCS Publications.
Howell, Craig Robert (2010), The Astrology of the United States. URL: www.mykwanyin.com/usastro.html
Jung, Carl (1966), “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,” CW 7. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1970), “Civilization in Transition,” CW 10. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1973), Letters, ed. Gerhard Adler & Aniela Jaffé. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Juvenal (1958), The Satires of Juvenal, trans Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mails, Thomas E. (1997), The Hopi Survival Kit. New York: Penguin Compass.
Mander, Jerry (1991), In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations. San Francisco: The Sierra Club.
Mipham, Sakyong (2003), Turning the Mind Into an Ally. New York: Riverhead Books.
Nichols, Roger (2003), American Indians in U.S. History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Pehrson, John & Susan Mehrtens (1997), Intuitive Imagery: A Resource at Work. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Prophet, Elizabeth Clare (1991), The Astrology of the Four Horsemen. Gardiner MT: Summit University Press.
Rich, Frank (2010), “The State of the Union Is Comatose,” The New York Times (January 31, 2010), WK 10.
Sakoian, Frances & Louis Acker (1972), That Inconjunct-Quincunx: The Not So Minor Aspect. Lakemont GA: Copple House Books Inc.
________ (1973), The Astrologer’s Handbook. New York: Harper & Row.
________ (1976), The Astrology of Human Relationships. New York: Harper & Row.
________ (1977), Predictive Astrology. New York: Harper & Row.
________ (1978), Those Inconjunct Quincunx Transits (no further bibliographic data given)
________ & Betty Caulfield (1980), Astrological Patterns: The Key to Self-Discovery. New York: Harper & Row.
Smale, Alison (2010), “Leaders in Davos Admit Drop in Trust and Uncertainty Ahead,” The New York Times (January 31, 2010), 6.
Solté, David (1994), Scorpionic America. San Diego: David Solté.
Stevenson, Richard (2010), “The Muddled Selling of the President,” The New York Times (January 31, 2010), WK1,4.
Vogel, Virgil (1972), This Country Was Ours. New York: Harper & Row.
Volcker, Paul (2010), “How to Reform Our Financial System,” The New York Times (January 31, 2010), WK 11.
Waldman, Carl (2000), Atlas of the North American Indian, rev. ed. New York: Checkmark Books.
Washburn, Wilcomb (1975), The Assault on Indian Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) of 1887. New York: J.B. Lippincott.
Waters, Frank, Book of the Hopi. New York: Penguin, 1963.
Woodward, Harry & Steve Buchholz (1987), After-Shock: Helping People Through Corporate Change. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

]]> smehrtens smehrtens@potlatchgroup.com http://jungiancenter.org/blog/blog_comment.asp?bi=45 2010-04-01T08:36:06-05:00 2010-04-01T08:36:06-05:00 2010-04-01T08:36:06-05:00
In the previous essay I noted how Jung anticipated a new development in the evolution of religion. Some of his followers call this the “new dispensation.” Just what this means, and the role the individual will play in it, is the subject of this essay.
We must begin with some definitions, since “dispensation” is not a household word for most readers of this blog. Nor would Jung’s definitions of “God” be familiar to most readers. After defining terms, we will consider the role of the individual in the emerging spiritual landscape, and we’ll conclude by setting the subject in the broader context of the evolution of Western civilization.

Some Definitions
Dispensation
“Dispensation” comes from the Latin verb dispensare, “to manage, distribute, allot, arrange, dispense.” Given our materialistic ethos most Americans would immediately think of the dispensing of resources, stuff, food or money. But our focus here is more on intangibles. What intangible is being dispensed? Jungians would say the stuff of the psyche. “Dispensation” defined in psychic terms is “the specific arrangement or system by which our perception of the world is ordered.”
This system is not something a group of people decide to create: It is the work of the objective psyche or Collective Unconscious, and it evolves over time. Thousands of years ago the psyches of the ancestors of Western people operated within a participation mystique with Nature. In time, this changed, as the ancient Hebrews took up monotheism, and their perception became ordered around the worship of Jahweh, the God of the Torah. The fact that we now speak of an “Old Testament” and a New bespeaks the later evolution of another form of ordering, what Jung’s followers call the “Christian dispensation,” centered around the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
Jung felt that the key difference between the Judaic and Christian religions was the “transformation of the God-image” that occurred over hundreds of years from the time of Job (c. 600-400 B.C.) to the time of Christ. As he anticipated the shift from the Age of the Fishes (Pisces) to the Age of the Water-Bearer (Aquarius), Jung recognized the outlines of a new form of religious expression.
Jung’s follower, analyst Lawrence Jaffe, coined a term for this new form: the “psychological dispensation.” The first dispensation was the Judaic, the second, the Christian. What Jaffe and other Jungians now see is the emergence of a new religion of consciousness, a “religion of experience” that will reconcile the first and second dispensations.
This “psychological dispensation” is a form of religious expression in which
experience supplants faith: Jung articulated this key feature of the new dispensation in the interview he had with John Freeman of the BBC late in his life. Freeman asked Jung if he believed in God. Jung paused and then said, “… I know. I don’t need to believe, I know.” This was not the only time Jung spoke about his knowing the Divine. In an earlier interview Jung said “I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take his existence on belief—I know that he exists.”
In the psychological dispensation, the role of the individual becomes central, as Jungian analyst Edward Edinger noted, when he said that by becoming “…aware of the transpersonal center of the psyche, the Self,” and by living “… out of that awareness, [the individual] can be said to be the incarnation of the God-image.” This quote begs further definition. What is meant by “God”? by “God-image”? by “Self”?
Jung’s Definitions of God
Since “God” is a word most Western people have heard often, the reader of this blog essay is likely to assume he/she knows what Jung meant. Not so! First, note the plural in the sub-heading: Jung used many terms to define the Divine in his voluminous writings.
Second, ever the empiricist, Jung was not about to indulge in vagueness with his terms. He recognized that “god,” as a concept, is unknowable, “because no one can get outside his/her own psyche.” Jung reminds us that “… everything men assert about God is twaddle, for no man can know God.” Jung makes a distinction, therefore, between “God,” the unknowable, and the “God-image,” that sense or image we have in our minds. Jung said: “… I speak of the God-image and not of God because it is quite beyond me to say anything about God at all.” And Jung was quite critical of theologians who did claim to speak of God and describe God, without making any distinction between the unknowable and the mental image.
Third, Jung’s “God” was not absolute, but “relative to man.” Regarding the Divine as absolute would place God “outside all connection to mankind.” Jung recognized that “Such a God would be of no consequence at all.” And God was of great consequence in Jung’s psychology, as seen in the 498+ citations listed in the Index to his Collected Works alone (not considering his Letters, or the other books, essays and articles he wrote).
Jung spoke much of God, but his uses of the term vary greatly. Here are some statements likely to resonate:
“God is Reality itself.”
God is “… a factor unknown in itself.”
God is “… an inner experience, not discussable as such but impressive.”
“God is a universal experience which is obfuscated only by silly rationalism and an equally silly theology.”
“… God is ev to pan.” (in all things)
“God is an immediate experience of a very primordial nature, one of the most natural products of our mental life,…”
“… I do know of a power of a very personal nature and an irresistible influence. I call it ‘God’.”
“I only know Him as a personal, subjective experience…”
God is “… the principle of order…”
“… God is a mystery, and everything we say about Him is said and believed by human beings… when I speak of God I always mean the image man has made of him…”
But consider these quotes from Jung that might either shock or puzzle the typical Western person:
God is “… an apt name given to all overpowering emotions in my own psychic system, subduing my conscious will and usurping control over myself. This 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.”
God is “… the power of fate in … positive as well as negative aspect,…”
“After thinking this over I have come to the conclusion that being ‘made in the likeness’ applies not only to man but also to the Creator: he resembles man or is his likeness, which is to say that he is just as unconscious as man or even more unconscious,…”
“… it would be an arbitrary limitation of the concept of God to assume that He is only good and so deprive evil of real being. If God is only good, everything is good….”
“… I know of the existence of God-images in general and in particular. I know it is a matter of a universal experience and … I know that I have such experience also, which I call God. It is the experience of my will over against another and very often stronger will, crossing my path often with seemingly disastrous results, putting strange ideas into my head and maneuvering my fate… outside my knowledge and intention…”
And Jung recognized just how strange some of the above might sound to the typical Western person, when he wrote: “… it is strange and painful to us to admit a paradoxical or a contradictory God-image.” We are not used to defining the Divine as a force that upsets our life, that “maneuvers our fate” or that includes evil. Even more surprising is Jung’s idea that God might be even more unconscious than humans. Which brings us to the third type of definition Jung used for “God:”
psychological usages:
“My God-image corresponds to an autonomous archetypal pattern. Therefore I can experience God as if he were an object, but I need not assume that it is the only image.”
“’God’ therefore is in the first place a mental image equipped with instinctual ‘numinosity,’ i.e. an emotional value bestowing the characteristic autonomy of the affect on the image.”
“For me ‘God’ is on the one hand a mystery that cannot be unveiled, and to which I must attribute only one quality: that it exists in the form of a particular psychic event which I feel to be numinous and cannot trace back to any sufficient cause lying within my field of experience. On the other hand ‘God’ is a verbal image, a predicate or mythologem founded on archetypal premises which underlie the structure of the psyche as images of the instincts (‘instinctual patterns’)… these images possess a certain autonomy which enables them to break through, sometimes against the rational expectations of consciousness (thus accounting in part for their numinosity). ‘God’ in this sense is a biological, instinctual and elemental ‘model,’… which, despite its numinosity, is and must be exposed to intellectual and moral criticism…”
“… ‘God’ within the frame of psychology is an autonomous complex, a dynamic image, and that is all psychology is ever able to state. It cannot know more about God.”
On a personal level, Jung used another term for God: the Self. This is a major term in the new dispensation and must be defined.
Definitions of the Self
“… the self is a redoubtable reality….”
the Self is “… an empirical concept [that] designates the whole range of psychic phenomena in man… it encompasses both the experienceable and the inexperienceable (or the not yet experienced)…”
the Self is “… a transcendental concept…[that] thus characterizes an entity that can be described only in part.”
“The self is not only the center, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the center of this totality,…”
“I call this unknowable the ‘self’…”
“The self is … a borderline concept, not by any means filled out with the known psychic processes.”
The Self is the “archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche;… a transpersonal power that transcends the ego.”
The Self “… might equally be called the ‘God within us’.”
As that form of the Divine that lives within each of us, the Self was a key component of Jung’s thought and is a key feature of the emerging “psychological dispensation.” It reflects Jung’s stress on the individual, as the sole carrier of consciousness. Where Yahweh was the focus of the first, Judaic, dispensation, and Jesus was the focus of the second, Christian, version, the individual person will be the focus of the third dispensation. To the role of the individual we now turn.

The Role of the Individual in the New Dispensation

In several previous essays I noted how Jung had no use for mass movements or “mass man.” He disliked large groups and felt no lasting change ever occurred in collectives. In Answer to Job, the book in which Jung developed most clearly his sense of the future form of religion, he noted
There is only one remedy for the leveling effect of all collective measures, and that is to emphasize and increase the value of the individual. A fundamental change of attitude (metanoia) is required, a real recognition of the whole man. This can only be the business of the individual and it must begin with the individual in order to be real.
In one of his last books, The Undiscovered Self, written for laymen, Jung pleaded with people to recognize the vital role each of us is meant to play now, in these critical times:
So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man… does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales?
As the “sole and natural carrier of life,” the individual—not groups, organizations, congregations, clergy or a priestly class—bears the full weight of responsibility in the new dispensation. This means we must look within, not without. We must value our inner guidance, our intuition, and cherish our imagination and creativity, two human qualities so expressive of our divine nature. We must also do our inner work, to get in touch with and integrate our shadow side, our contrasexual side (animus or anima), to hold the tension of opposites that confront us all through life.
The new dispensation recognizes that individual people “are to become incarnating vessels of the Holy Spirit on an ongoing basis.” The role Jesus played in the second dispensation, individuals are to take up in the third. When Jesus spoke of the “living water” that he could give to people he was looking ahead to the coming eon when each of us will be the “bearer” or container of that “living water” that symbolizes the Holy Spirit. “Water bearer” is the symbol for the zodiacal sign of Aquarius. The individual is at the center of the metanoia that is now underway, as we move slowly out of the Age of Pisces into the Age of Aquarius.

The New Dispensation in the Evolution of Western Civilization

“Slowly” is not used loosely here: world eons change over many centuries. Jung looked back in Western history and identified a 12th century monk, Joachim of Flora, as one of the first Western writers to spot the change which was just beginning. Joachim wrote of the 3 “ages” of Western history: the “Age of the Father,” the term he used for the first, Judaic, dispensation; the “Age of the Son,” his term for the Christian dispensation, centered around Jesus Christ as the Son of God; and he foresaw an “Age of the Holy Spirit,” when divinity would no longer be lodged “out there,” in some figure outside human beings.
Jung recognized the instability that characterized the 12th century, with its numerous heresies. Joachim’s ideas were anathematized by the Church, which, then as now, had no use for individual people claiming they could know or “be a carrier” of God. How could such people be controlled or kept under the thumb of church leaders, if they felt they could have direct and personal knowledge of the Divine?
Jung wants us to understand that the first two dispensations are loosing their “juice,” their vibrancy, their hold on the Western consciousness. Goethe saw this. Nietzsche recognized it, and tried to sound the alarm in his famous statement that “God is dead.” The God of the earlier dispensations—that version of the Divine that is “out there,” external to human beings, accessible only through the mediation of some religious hierarchy—is changing, as Western consciousness evolves.
Jung’s followers believe that the form of spiritual expression consistent with the evolution of Western consciousness will partner the individual person with God, with individuals becoming friends of God —a God recognized in all its completeness (containing both good and evil). Gripped by the numen in encounters with the Self, the individual will recognize what Jesus meant when he spoke of the “treasure buried in the field.” In the new dispensation, consciousness will be the new value and goal. And the purpose of living will be to create more and more consciousness.
Creating more consciousness is not easy. People will have to expend “arduous, conscious effort” to do it. Doing so will force confrontation with the deus absconditus, the hidden god, the shadow side of the Divine. The God-image mentioned above will need to widen, to include the breadth of Jung’s many definitions listed earlier. For some people reluctant to look on the dark side or to go into their depths, this new dispensation will be most unpalatable.
But Jung and his followers see many benefits. For the individual these include, a tremendous expansion of compassion, empathy and creativity (born from recognizing one’s shadow, redeeming one’s suffering, and touching into the ultimate creative impulse), as well as an unshakeable sense of security (through constant awareness of the Self and its guidance).
For the collective, widespread adherence to the new dispensation promises the redemption of matter (for people will recognize that all of physical reality is pervaded with the Divine); the spontaneous formation of communities of like-minded people (something we are seeing even now, in the growth and popularity of organizations like the Jungian Center); the healing of societal malaise (as more people find the true source of meaning and healing); and the evolution of the Collective Unconscious into a more ethical and creative psychological force.
Jung pointed out the vital necessity for a new religious myth that would undergird Western culture. He recognized that we are living in a time that has lost its central myth, which Edward Edinger called “a truly apocalyptic condition.” Our civilization has become rudderless, without the means to steer Western societies in meaningful ways, without solid bases for decision-making. In earlier essays we discussed the archetype of the apocalypse and how current global conditions are leading us closer and closer to confronting our collective shadow. The emergence of the “psychological dispensation” is one positive sign on the horizon that could avert global disaster. But for it to do so requires individuals to find that “treasure in the field”—the treasure that lies within each of us.

Bibliography

Edinger, Edward (1996), The Aion Lectures: Exploring the Self in C.G. Jung’s Aion. Toronto: Inner City Press.
________ (1984), The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man. Toronto: Inner City Press.
Elder, George & Dianne Cordic (2009), An American Jungian: In Honor of Edward F. Edinger. Toronto: Inner City Press.
Jaffe, Lawrence (1999), Celebrating Soul: Preparing for the New Religion. Toronto: Inner City Press.
________ (1990), Liberating the Heart: Spirituality and Jungian Psychology. Toronto: Inner City Press.
Jung, Carl (1956) “Symbols of Transformation,” Collected Works, 5, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1971), “Psychological Types,” Collected Works, 6. Princeton: Princeton University Press
________ (1966), “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,” CW 7. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1959), “Aion,” Collected Works, 9ii. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1970), “Civilization in Transition,” CW 10. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1969), “Psychology and Religion: West and East,” CW 11. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1953), “Psychology and Alchemy,” CW 12. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1954), “The Practice of Psychotherapy,” CW 16, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1975), Letters, 2 vol., ed. Gerhard Adler. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Leff, Gordon (1973), “Heresy in the Middle Ages,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, II. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons.
Lewis, Charlton & Charles Short (1969), A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sharp, Daryl (1991), Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Toronto: Inner City Books



]]> smehrtens smehrtens@potlatchgroup.com http://jungiancenter.org/blog/blog_comment.asp?bi=44 2010-03-03T10:26:41-05:00 2010-03-03T10:26:41-05:00 2010-03-03T10:26:41-05:00
“Phoberon to empesein eis cheiras theou zontos.”
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
Hebrews 10:31
“… the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.”
[italics in the original] Jung, Collected Works, 14, ¶778


The first of the above quotes was cited in the previous blog essay and in a note in that essay I indicated that the following essay would provide further discussion of the “Hebrews” quote. In that essay I noted how fear can be used to keep people under control and how those in power would have us believe that internalizing a locus of security through personal experience of the Divine is something to be feared.
Jung had much to say on this point. Most explicitly he made it clear in his statement quoted above that confronting the Divine is never a pleasant experience for the ego. This is because of pride: the ego “does not like to think consciousness might lose its ascendancy.” The ego fancies it is in control and is forced to face its smallness and limitations when the Self appears.
More broadly, Jung addressed this issue in his discussions of the numen, the numinous, the numinosum and numinosity. In this essay we will define these terms, provide some features and qualities of the numinous, then consider the experience of the numinous and how it has been experienced by some noteworthy historical figures. We will then examine Jung’s experience of it, and Jung’s assessment of our current predicament, now that Western civilization has lost many of its numinosities.

Some Definitions

Numen is a Latin word, deriving from the verb nuere, meaning “to nod.” Its original meaning was “a nod.” You might well wonder how it comes to have anything to do with the Divine, the Self and Jung’s concerns. It came to mean “divine will or divine power of the gods” from the Greek and Roman practice of going to a temple to consult the will of the gods, at times when a person confronted a serious decision. In the temple the supplicant would stand before a statue of the god, state his problem, ask the god for guidance and then watch the statue. If it seemed to nod, the person knew the god approved the tack he planned to take. Over time numen came to be synonymous with “deity,” “Godhead,” divinity or “divine majesty.”
The other 3 words mentioned above—numinous, numinosum and numinosity—Jung used frequently and all of them derive from numen. “Numinous” was an invented word, coined in 1917 by a German professor of theology, Rudolf Otto, in his book Das Heilige (translated in 1923 as The Idea of the Holy). Why the invention? Otto felt the need for a specialized word to describe the concept of “holy” without the “moral factor” or rationality that we usually attach to “holy.” He sought to describe “… this ‘extra’ in the meaning of ‘holy’ above and beyond the meaning of goodness.” To create his neologism Otto started with numen and then looked for analogies. He found one in “omen,” the adjectival form of which is “ominous.” The adjective form of numen thus would be “numinous.” Otto used “numinous” to describe categories of value within the sense of “holy,” and also to refer to a state of mind.
Modern English dictionaries define “numinous” several ways. It can mean “spiritual, holy, divine” and also “ethereal, nebulous, intangible.” In Otto’s and Jung’s usage, “spiritual,” “holy,” “divine” and “intangible” capture most accurately the qualities they mean.
Numinosum is a word Jung used repeatedly. He may have borrowed it from Otto; perhaps the original German text had this Latinized version of “numinous.” I have not found it in the English translation. In his essay “Psychology and Religion” Jung provides a definition of numinosum:
“… a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will…. The numinosum—whatever its cause may be—is an experience of the subject independent of his will…. The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness….”
In Jung’s thinking the numinosum is both a quality inherent to an object or an experience that comes over a person, often inadvertently.

Qualities and Features of the Numinous

Otto and Jung provide a wealth of explicit qualities people are likely to feel when in the presence of the holy. First, it must be noted that the numinosum is a paradox, containing both positive and negative, both of which we may experience simultaneously in any encounter with the Divine.
Some of the positive qualities of the numinosum include: sublimity, awe, excitement, bliss, rapture, exaltation, entrancement, fascination, attraction, allure and what Otto called an “impelling motive power.” Not so pleasant are other qualities like: overwhelment, fear, trembling, weirdness, eeriness, humility (an acute sense of unworthiness), urgency, stupor (blank wonder), bewilderment, horror, mental agitation, repulsion, and haunting, daunting, monstrous feelings that “overbrim the heart.” Otto speaks at length of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the fascinating mystery that makes us tremble (in awe). Because it “grips or stirs the mind,” such an experience is not one we forget.
But, while it is memorable, the numinous is not easily put into words. “Ineffable” is another of its features. The numinous “eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.” Being bigger and beyond oneself, it induces speechlessness. Being a mystery, it bewilders the rational mind. Being divine, it links us to the “ground of the soul.” Being “unevolvable,” it is not to be derived from any other feeling.
More frequently found in Jung’s works is “numinosity.” He used this term to refer to a quality inherent in archetypes, in complexes, in “curiosities which the logical mind cannot explain.” Found in Western alchemy, and in cultural symbols, numinosity is that quality that gives religious ideas their “thrilling power.” Much as with archetypes, we can’t grasp the meaning of the word without personal experience. True understanding here comes from a lived encounter.
This is very consistent with Jung’s empiricism: what is real is what one experiences. Rudolf Otto’s study of the concept of holiness appealed to Jung because Otto took it out of the realm of theory and brought it into the realm of feelings, sensory experience and personal events in individual lives. Otto gave Jung both the vocabulary to discuss this aspect of psychology and confirmation of Jung’s own personal experience when he had encountered the Divine. What was this experience? What might we expect to experience when we contact the numinous?

The Experience of the Numinous

A wide variety of historical figures have tried to put into words their experience of the numinous. In the 1st century A.D. St. Paul spoke of it as “… the peace which passes all understanding.” The author of Hebrews found it fear-inducing, as noted in the quote opening this essay. In the 14th century Meister Eckhart described it as the “primal bottom” grounding the soul. Two centuries later Martin Luther referred to the numinous as the deus absconditus et incomprehensibilis, the hidden and incomprehensible god. In the 18th century Friedrich Schleiermacher suggested the numinous was the “intuition and feeling of the infinite.” The 19th century cultural historian John Ruskin described the “instinctive awe, mixed with delight; an indefinable thrill…” that he got in the presence of the numinous. A later contemporary of Ruskin, the American psychologist William James, studied the varieties of religious experience and referred to the numinous as “a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of … something there.” Jung was another person who experienced the numinous in life. What did it mean for him?

Jung’s Experiences

In his analytic work, Jung witnessed every day the power and impact the numinous had in the lives of patients wrestling with their complexes, encountering archetypes and confronting the unconscious. Coming from the collective unconscious, the numinous is uncontrollable and “outside conscious volition.” Often linked to synchronicity, the feeling of numinosity would grow in patients as the number of synchronous events became more numerous.
Jung saw in his own life, and in the lives of his patients and colleagues, just how powerful an impact the numinous can have. It can feed the “hunger of the soul” and provide feelings of liberation and relief. As much as it is ineffable, the numinous is also ineluctable: it cannot be ignored. When people tried to ignore its dictates, Jung saw how things started to go badly, eventually leading to physical symptoms as the Self tried to get the individual’s attention.
Jung felt that the numinous controlled our fate and could work a major transformation in us, e.g. in conversion experiences, in situations that produce emotional shocks, or, more pleasantly, in moments of illumination. Common to all these experiences is “affectivity:” powerful feelings are always involved in any encounter with the numinous.

A Richer Translation of Hebrews 10:31

Jung understood that “to have fallen into the hands of the living God”—that is, to be confronted with the Divine—would produce an affect, a feeling response. Most translations of the Greek of Hebrews 10:31 use the word “fearful,” as the response brought up when a person confronts the Self. But the original Greek captures more of the rich quality of the numinosum. Let’s examine the verse word-by-word.
Phoberon comes from the verb phobein, “to put to flight; to strike with fear; to terrify, frighten, alarm; to be seized with fear; to stand in awe of.” So phoberon is what causes a person to flee or feel fear.
Empesein is an infinitive in one of Greek’s past tenses, with the meaning of “to have fallen upon/chanced upon/fallen into…”, suggesting inadvertence, or an unintentional event or act.
Theou zontos is the periphrastic genitive, literally translated as “of the living god,” or what Jung means when he speaks of the self.
So Hebrews 10:31, as a verse, is a description of the personal experience of contact with the Self. A fuller translation, more nuanced and attuned to Jung’s understanding of the role of the numinous in the process of individuation would be: “When one has fallen into the hands of the Self (the living god within), it causes one to stand in ‘holy dread,’ with awe, fear and trembling.”
Jung felt that organized religions, with their rituals and dogmas, provide a “defense” against this experience. But those on the path of individuation cannot avoid it.

Our Current Predicament

Nor should we try to. Jung was clear about this and in his writings he repeatedly lamented the loss of numinosity in the modern world. Facing the decay and dissolution of society, Western culture has lost its raison d’être, which depends on numinosity.
Jung recognized that most people in the Western world today are closed to the irrational, reluctant to engage mystery or to allow themselves to be overpowered by numinous feelings. “Caught in the toils of egohood,” most people are mistrustful of anything they can’t see, touch, count or quantify. They are disoriented and dissociated because they have lost their moral and spiritual traditions.
Most people in our world live now without true spiritual leadership because religious leaders are more interested in protecting their institutions than in understanding the shift that has occurred in the psyche of Western people. Unable to understand the character of mystical experiences, people these days deny mysticism’s numinous nature. Those still “contained” in religion are leery of the numinous because numinous experiences often give rise to doubt. Too busy, too hurried, too harried to take the time to understand the meaning of numina, people refuse to take the time to come to terms with them.
Those on the path of individuation take the time. They have to: numinous dreams, synchronicities, and life experiences confront them frequently, calling up that “holy dread,” reminding the ego of its modest place compared to the Self.
A “new dispensation” is aborning in the closing years of the age of Pisces. Jung recognized this and he felt that those who had worked on themselves, those who had taken up the task of crucifying the ego and giving over control of their lives to the Self—such people would become carriers of Spirit, open to the experience of the numinous. An examination of Jung’s sense of this new dispensation, and the central role individuated persons will play in it, is the subject of the next essay.

Bibliography

Edinger, Edward (1996), The Aion Lecture: Exploring the Self in C.G. Jung’s Aion. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Elder, George & Dianne Cordic (2009), An American Jungian In Honor of Edward F. Edinger. Toronto: Inner City Books.
James, William (1961), The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Collier Books.
Jung, Carl (1956) “Symbols of Transformation,” Collected Works, 5, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1966), “Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,” CW 7. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1960), ”The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” CW 8. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1970), “Civilization in Transition,” CW 10. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1969), “Psychology and Religion: West and East,” CW 11. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1953), “Psychology and Alchemy,” CW 12. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1967), “Alchemical Studies,” CW 13. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1963), “Mysterium Coniunctionis,” CW 14. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1954), “The Practice of Psychotherapy,” CW 16, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
________ (1976), ”The Symbolic Life,” CW 18. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lewis, Charlton & Charles Short (1969), A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Liddell, H.G. & Scott (1978), An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon. New York: Oxford University Press.
Otto, Rudolf (1958), The Idea of the Holy. New York: Oxford University Press.

]]> Jungian info@jungiancenter.org http://jungiancenter.org/blog/blog_comment.asp?bi=43 2010-03-01T13:14:09-05:00 2010-03-01T13:14:09-05:00 2010-03-01T13:14:09-05:00
A one-day experiential workshop that helps students identify those items, ideas and pieces of information that can support them in times of emotional and spiritual crisis. An invaluable adjunct to the spiritual journey and helpful for anyone who works with the unconscious or is in analysis. Led by Sue Mehrtens

The New Dispensation. March 25,April 1, 8 and 15, 2-4PM; $60; 55 Clover Lane, Waterbury.

Carl Jung recognized that a new form of spiritual expression was arising in anticipation of the Age of Aquarius—a form rooted in the psychologically conscious individual. Jung felt that such new spiritual developments grew out of older religions (the old “dispensations”), and this course draws on the wisdom contained in the New Testament and the life of Jesus to describe the form of this “new dispensation.” Led by Sue Mehrtens

Visioneering. March 21, April 11, May 2 and 23; 2-5PM; $75; 55 Clover Lane, Waterbury.

This workshop applies Bernoulli’s principle (the basis for all forms of aerodynamics) to the realm of personal life, to jump-start dreams and hopes we have for the future. Participants learn what vision is, the power it has, and how to use it in very practical, grounded ways, to bring about changes in their own lives. With over 30 exercises, and a modicum of readings, this 12-hour workshop runs over 3 months, to allow members the time to develop a vision, apply the principles and use the exercises to realize a dream. Led by Sue Mehrtens

Making Good Choices Workshop. April 7,14,21,28; 7-9PM; $60; 55 Clover Lane, Waterbury.

We are living in a time when the choices we make will have far more crucial and long-term consequences than at any time in the past. This course explores a variety of questions related to making good choices, e.g. “What does it mean to “choose”?” “What goes into making good choices?” “What assumptions underlie the choices we make?” and “What is going on now, in the larger context of our lives, that might impact our choosing?” Led by Sue Mehrtens

Creation of Consciousness. April 22, 29, May 6 and 13; 7-9PM; $60; 55 Clover Lane, Waterbury.

This advanced course offers an in-depth examination of 4 key documents that explore the basis of what Jung called the “new dispensation”--the Biblical book of Job, Jung’s “Answer to Job,” William Blake’s illustrations of the book of Job, and Edward Edinger’s The Creation of Consciousness—toward explicating Jung’s image of God and fostering an understanding of how we, as individuals, are meant to be carriers of the numinosum and co-creators with the Divine. Ideally students will have taken the Introduction to Jung and Esoteric Christianity courses prior to taking this course, but this is not required. Led by Sue Mehrtens.

The Divine Feminine. April 24; 12-5PM; $30; Best Western Motel, Waterbury.

How can we imagine Wisdom? Learn how to embody in the manifest world the inspirations that come from this exciting experiential workshop that opens your spiritual senses . Led by Kathy Warner, teacher and author; for further information, call Kathy at (802) 426-3987.


Micheline Bogey, a California-based Qigong teacher and Shamanic healer, will be visiting Vermont in May and will offer a two-day weekend workshop called MEDICAL QIGONG, May 1-2, 9AM-5PM, at 55 Clover Lane, Waterbury VT; $75/day; $140, 2 days. Info, call Margery (802) 633-4368.

Learn how to deal mindfully with stress, keep the body relaxed and the internal energy strong with the practice of ³Five Elements Medical Qigong.² Medical Qigong is a holistic system of self-healing exercises and meditation that includes meditation, breathing techniques, self-massage and gentle movements. In this workshop we will learn breathing techniques to stimulate the Qi in different parts of the body. We will practice the Inner Nourishing Qigong, Brain Cleansing Qigong and the 6 healing sounds to strengthen our body and mind. We will circulate the microcosmic orbit and its flow in the Qi channels. We will then learn and practice the ³Five Elements Qigong form,² which is a specific form working with the acupuncture meridians and the 5 elements in Traditional Chinese Medicine. We will also attend to specific healing needs of the students. At the end of each day the students will participate in a group healing.

Micheline has over 25 years of experience in teaching Qigong and healing arts. This is a workshop you won¹t want to miss!


Art & Soul Workshop. Saturday, May 1; 9:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. $55 includes lunch; Morrisville Studio.

Inside the psyche of each and every person is an ember of creativity. Using movement and various creative techniques, we will help you to fan that ember into a flame of creative expression. Learn to nurture your soul through the expression of joy, creativity, self-love and acceptance. Facilitated by Lisa Buell, business/life coach and JourneyDance ™ Facilitator, and Sara Waskuch, teacher, writer and creative coach. Call Sara 888-3802 to register and for directions.
The Life Mission Institute Open House. April 25th; 1-5PM; free; Best Western Motel, Waterbury. We’ll be introducing the work of the Life Mission Institute and the LMI team in this afternoon opportunity where you can meet exciting people, enjoy refreshments and have a chance to socialize with like-minded people.

Finding Your Mission in Life. May 5,12,19,26; 7-9PM; $120; 55 Clover Lane, Waterbury.

Every person alive has a unique soul mission, a special way he or she is meant to make a difference in the world. When we discover our purpose we open our lives to greater joy, meaning and wonder. Melding the work of Carl Jung and Edgar Cayce, students participant in a variety of exercises and processes to help them identify their purposes for living. They also meet the Life Mission Institute team and choose one member of the team from whom they get a free reading. Also included in the cost of the course is a personal interview designed to foster the student’s integration of the reading, course materials and insights. Led by Sue Mehrtens and the Life Mission Institute team.

Developing Your Intuition. (weekend format) June 19 & 20, 9-5PM, lunches included; $75; 55 Clover Lane, Waterbury.

The tumultuous times we live in are making it obvious that many of our old ways of thinking, living and working don’t function very well any more, and change is happening faster than ever before. How might we cope? By using the whole of our brains—right as well as left sides, the intuitive as well as the rational mind. Because the intuitive mind operates outside linear time, it is particularly powerful in dealing with the future, allowing us to anticipate what is to come, to make realistic plans, and to stay safe from harm. This workshop opens with a brief introduction to the various forms intuition takes, followed by a short assessment of personal intuitive styles. Participants learn a variety of ways to access their intuition by working with personally relevant issues, coming away from the workshop with concrete information immediately applicable to their lives. They should bring to the workshop several questions about which they would like greater clarity or insight. Led by Sue Mehrtens.



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