by Ruth Snowden
Jung claimed that all his thoughts ultimately revolved around God and that he felt it would be very wrong to ignore the importance of this. Although he considered the religious aspects of his work to be vitally important, he never wanted to dictate to other people what they should believe, or indeed appear to be superior in any way. He regarded himself as simply a tool of God – a ‘spoon in his kitchen’ – trying to guide people in their individuation process. At the same time he always retained a small but fierce element of personal pride. God, he explained, needs man in order to illuminate his creation. This attitude, which Jung retained all his life, went right back to the game he played as a small boy sitting on his stone and asking himself, ‘Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?’
The problem of evil
Astrological ideas suggested to Jung that the Age of Pisces had coincided with the birth of Christ and the subsequent growth of Christianity. Jung emphasized that for him the Christian insistence that God the Father and Jesus were sinless beings represented an unbalanced attitude – a total denial of the shadow. Jung predicted an eventual inevitable swing to counteract this trend. He saw this beginning with the nineteenth-century teachings of thinkers such as Marx and Darwin, whose rationalist, materialist stance came into conflict with Christianity. But Jung felt that modern man had gained scientific insight at the cost of losing his soul – he is no longer in contact with the numinous.
A lack of understanding of what goes on in the unconscious is dangerous because it means that we are afraid to confront the shadow and therefore do not develop the capacity to deal with evil. Jung asserts that none of us is without our darker aspects. It is important in religious matters, as in human relationships, to see and acknowledge our imperfections because, ‘where love stops, power begins, and violence and terror’. Chilling words, which express projection of the shadow.
Jung’s attitude to the problem of evil is probably the most important way in which his thinking differs from traditional Christian theology. He struggled during his teens with a great spiritual crisis that led him to the idea that God must have a darker side to his nature, otherwise he would never have created the serpent in order to tempt Adam and Eve towards sin. In other words, God must have made the first people with a deliberate capacity for sin.
Jung’s teenage vision of God shattering the whole of his cathedral with an enormous turd was followed by an indescribable sense of relief – he realized that what really mattered for him was to follow the will of the living, active God, rather than blindly following handed-down traditions and Biblical texts. From this experience also came the ‘dim understanding that God could be something terrible’. For Jung, in fact, God was both ‘the annihilating fire and an indescribable grace’. Once again, we find the idea of balanced opposites that is so important in Jung’s thinking.
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Insight
In some religions the dual nature of God is accepted for example, the Hindu Kali, who is both a nurturing mother and a dark destroyer.
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Jung struggled with these ideas all his life and in 1951, when he was 76 and recuperating from a grave illness from which he thought he would never recover, he published an interesting little book called Aion. This book put forward controversial answers to the questions that had troubled him for many years about the dark side of God’s nature. He felt that the book seemed to write itself and he had little control over it, but it enabled him to express ideas that he had long kept secret. The book explores the archetype of the God-image, exploring the ways in which it has evolved over the years, and showing how it is reflected in symbolic imagery in dreams, myths and art. Its main theme is the change in psychic consciousness that is occurring as we leave the Age of Pisces and enter the Age of Aquarius. Pisces – the fish that lives in water – is a symbol that can represent the psyche. Aquarius, on the other hand, is the carrier of the water and so lives outside it. The new aeon cycle therefore represents a change from being controlled to being the controller. This means that the psyche will no longer be controlled by religious communities, but will instead be carried by spiritually conscious individuals.
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Insight
Again, Jung was well ahead of his time here – he would no doubt have been very interested in the huge upsurge in interest in individual spirituality that is happening today.
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Needless to say, Jung’s message in Aion has still been largely ignored. Shortly after its publication, Jung published another highly controversial book called Answer to Job. This book had been foreshadowed by a long dream in which he found himself kneeling before God, but could not bring himself to put his forehead totally to the floor – there was about a millimetre to spare. This tiny vestige of defiance represented man’s mental reservations even in the face of divine decrees. Such reservations are what gives man his freedom and allows him to challenge the creator.
The story of Job
Answer to Job was published in 1952, towards the end of Jung’s life. As with Aion, Jung needed a lot of courage to write the book and he realized that it would unleash a fresh storm of criticism. In Answer to Job, Jung uses his own interpretation of the Old Testament story of Job to explore his idea of the shadow aspect of God. The story tells of how the devil bets God that Job, an honest and upright man, will turn against him if he is tormented enough. God takes the devil up on this and sends Job all kinds of nasty trials and tribulations. Jung’s fundamental question is this: if God is all-good, and all-encompassing, then where does evil come from, and how does God permit it to exist? Jung suggests that the Old Testament God who torments Job is unpleasant and frightening and yet demands love from Job. For Jung, this is a demonstration of God’s shadow side. Job eventually survives his ordeals by seeking God’s help against God, and so the story expresses God’s dual nature as both tormentor and redeemer. Jung argues from this that good and evil are two halves of a great paradoxical whole. All that we call good is always balanced by an equally substantial evil. Evil cannot be argued to have come from man, because ‘The Evil One’ existed before man as one of the ‘Sons of God’ (Satan was originally one of God’s angels).
Jung’s idea is that God actually goes through an individuation process of his own, gradually becoming more mature and whole. He traces the course of this development through the Bible until we reach the point where God really wants to transform himself through becoming human. Eventually, by being incarnated as Jesus, God fully experiences what he had made Job suffer.
Jung was fascinated by the weird apocalyptic visions in the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible. He suggests that they represent a final confrontation with the shadow, where God gives vent to his anger at the way his creation has turned out. Jung suggests that after the apocalypse a new divine Goddess figure will emerge, representing a balancing energy after an era of male dominance and destructiveness. What Jung really seems to be suggesting is the idea that as people’s understanding of God evolves, so God himself (or herself?) also evolves.
The notion that God could have a negative shadow side has perturbed a lot of Christians, and many critics have been extremely hostile. But in his answers to furious theologians, Jung emphasized that he was speaking about the God-image – the idea or representation that man makes of God – rather than God himself, who is mysterious and unfathomable. The problem arose, he said, because people fail to see that the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are actually moral judgements, and have nothing to do with the incomprehensible nature of ‘Being’, which is God himself. The basic idea behind Answer to Job is really that we all need to transform the negativity in ourselves before we can hope to transform the outer world. The paradoxical God image forces us to confront our own shadow. This is what we are trying to do in the search for the Self. The Self represents a deeper, wiser aspect of our being that knows our life’s purpose and our true path.
The journey towards the Self
Ju
ng saw Christ as providing people with an archetypal image of the Self that they can aspire to. Other religions have their own figures, such as Buddha, who also represent spiritual perfection and wholeness. Just as God sent his son Christ into the world, so each of us sends our ego into the outer world. The goal of the individuation process is the eventual re-integration of the ego, whereupon it ceases to occupy centre stage in our consciousness. This is a lengthy and very painful process, which Jung compares with the difficult initiation tests often undergone by members of shamanic tribes. Such tests are often designed to bring initiates to the brink of death, after which they emerge with new spiritual awareness. The shaman can then become a healer and spiritual teacher.
Jung identifies this archetypal death and rebirth process occurring in different forms in many cultures and religious traditions, for example in:
the death and resurrection of Jesus
the alchemical process where a base metal is broken down and eventually transmuted into the elixir vitae
shamanic initiation rituals
ancient Egyptian myths, where again the god dies and is reborn.
Interestingly, in the Egyptian tradition rebirth was originally only a possibility for the Pharaoh, who was a god-like being, but eventually it was available to others who followed the correct burial rites. Jung’s vision was that eventually a kind of psychic rebirth would be available for everyone who was willing to undergo the individuation process.
Naturally Jung’s unorthodox views about religion opened him to criticism from theologians, who resented his trespassing on their territory. He disagreed totally with fundamentalist points of view, where people held that their own particular brand of belief represented absolute truth. Jung tended more towards the Gnostic view that it was knowledge that counted, rather than faith. He cautioned that whenever dogma takes over human minds, they lose sight of whatever spiritual insights they had in the first place.
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Insight
Fundamentalist viewpoints adhere strictly to the ancient doctrines and texts of their chosen religion. The huge danger here of course is when groups of people then decide that they are right and everyone else is wrong. Unfortunately, examples of this limited kind of thinking still abound today.
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For Jung, the divine manifests within each individual in a different way, and through exploring personal symbols in dreams and fantasies he helped his patients to come to their own understanding. This intensely personal experience of the divine is what Jung described as the ‘numinosum’. The experience feels as if it comes from outside the individual and cannot be brought on by an effort of will. Experience of the numinosum is the key to healing and it always carries a feeling of awakening and being connected to something beyond oneself. It may be connected with an ordinary, everyday experience; usually it is related in some way to the person’s area of greatest weakness and it always manifests for the purpose of healing. Sometimes it appears in a very unorthodox, even frightening form, for example a person may develop a fascination with death, or with some sort of erotic symbol. This can make it difficult to recognize the numinosum when it appears. Whenever it does appear, it is experienced as a powerful compelling force that is somehow endowed with great significance to the individual. Because the numinosum is connected to our woundedness and weakness, it is very important in analysis to explore and try to understand the shadow – knowledge of the shadow may lead us to the numinosum and vice versa.
Hinduism
Jung felt it was necessary for him as a psychologist to explore comparative religion in as much depth as possible, so he also made in-depth studies of some of the Eastern religions. In the Hindu faith there are lots of gods and goddesses, who all originate from an original creative force called Brahma. Each god or goddess symbolically represents a different divine aspect – such as Vishnu, the creator, Shiva the destroyer, or Krishna the god of love. Unlike in the Christian tradition, the shadow side of the divine is openly portrayed. In 1937, Jung visited India and found himself mainly interested in the question of the psychological nature of evil. (For more about his visit to India see Chapter 10.)
Jung also became interested in Yoga, which is a Hindu system of philosophy using physical exercises, breathing and meditation as a means to attaining ultimate reunion with the divine.
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Insight
Many people think of yoga as just a bendy kind of physical exercise, but there is actually a lot more to it than that. Yoga also involves a lot of mental discipline, breathing and meditation techniques and other spiritual practices.
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He found the physical postures helpful for calming the mind and he was fascinated by the symbolic process of spiritual transformation described in the Yogic texts. Once again he found a description of the archetypal process of separation and eventual rebalancing of opposites, just as he had seen it in alchemical texts. Jung saw the physical and meditative processes of Yoga as a useful means of relaxing the ego’s grip over the unconscious, so that the individuation process could get underway. But he cautioned Western people not to go too deeply into the more obscure practices of Yoga, warning that Western minds are not usually properly prepared and that psychosis could result.
Although he was impressed by the Hindu religion and Yoga, Jung could not accept the ultimate goal, which is a bliss state involving the total absorption of the Self into the divine. He argued that such a state would be logically impossible, because if there is no Self, then there is no consciousness, so who can be experiencing the bliss state? In any case, he was not at all happy with an ultimate goal that seemed to represent a total escape from reality. This seemed to him to be pointless and he believed instead that each of us is in the world for a special purpose, which is known to the Self and which it is our task to discover. The goal of Jungian analysis was to help people towards wholeness and to function more fully in the real world. For this reason, Jung did not wish to be freed from other human beings, himself, or from nature, because all these appeared to him to be ‘the greatest of miracles’. To withdraw before he had achieved all that he was able to do in the world felt to him like amputating part of his psyche. He further cautioned that whatever we deliberately leave behind and forget has a habit of returning to us with added force.
Buddhism
The goal of Buddhism is to attain an inner state of enlightenment, once again detaching oneself from the physical world and the endless chatter of the psyche. In Zen Buddhism, the student studies riddles called koans, for example: ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ Of course, there is no logical answer – the purpose of the koan is to demonstrate the futility of trying to achieve enlightenment through logical thinking. Jung saw parallels here with psychological therapy, where the aim is to alter conscious awareness and so achieve a higher spiritual state.
Jung was particularly interested in The Tibetan Book of the Dead – a sort of travel guide for the departed soul. This tied up with other texts that he had discovered, for example in ancient Egyptian mythology, where there is also a Book of the Dead. He had explored similar themes when he wrote the Septem Sermones (1916) and once again he was struck by the archetypal nature of the teachings that he found cropping up in different cultures. In other Buddhist teachings, he found more vivid archetypal imagery, such as the ‘jewel in the crown of the lotus’, which he saw as another mandala-like symbolic image of the Self.
Buddhism appealed to Jung because:
it is up to each person to follow their own path to enlightenment – there is little emphasis upon dogma and faith
the answer to spiritual growth is seen as lying within – there is no external deity as such
the spiritual teachings and meditations are helpful for training the mind towards concentration.
Nevertheless, he also found that there were drawbacks. In Buddhism, suffering is seen as an illusion from which one can ultimately escape through attaining enlightenment. Jung disagreed, saying that suffering
is real and unavoidable. We can only overcome suffering by living through it, and analytical psychology can help us to do that. Also, withdrawal from life is in itself a form of repression – a denial of the shadow – and as such would tend eventually to produce an opposite swing. Finally, in Buddhism there is an endless cycle of reincarnation, where the individual is born and dies and is born again. The only escape from this dismal trap is through enlightenment. Jung says that this is no good for the Western mind, which needs to feel that it progresses towards a goal and has a purpose to its existence.
After travelling extensively in the East, Jung was eventually drawn back to study Western teachings. He realized that the study of Eastern religions had been important to him, but that it was only a part of the path that would bring him to his goal. He compared the Eastern way of thinking with that of the West and concluded that: