C.G. JUNG – GUIDE TO THE INNER LIFE

By Rose F. Holt, Jungian Psychoanalyst

“Shadow Cornered” by C.G. Jung

”One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” 

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a lot of things—psychiatrist, theologian, historian, anthropologist—but above all else, he was an explorer. He explored first his own inner life, his interiority, through what he called his “confrontation with the unconscious,” then he helped many, many of his patients explore their own interiority. All this work was his primary field of research from which he developed a powerful theoretical construct, a “map” for those of us who dare to go on our own voyage into the interior. Today that field of endeavor is called Jungian Psychology or Analytical Psychology.

Before Jung, few people dared go beyond the collective understanding of human nature. Like the maps of old, the collective understanding was edged by mythical monsters, so there was a frightening prohibition against journeying there. The primary function of religions was to protect people from venturing into those areas where the roads ended-- areas of mystery, death, birth, sacred experience. Religious rites and sacraments served as containers for the sacred. They were prescriptions to keep people safe, confined within an area of understanding determined by others and sometimes misused in the interest of power. It was unthinkable, even dangerous, for people to venture on their own without benefit of the shelter of a given religious understanding. There were (and are) severe penalties for those who did so. Some who ventured successfully we remember as mystics, saints, or founders of new religions. They described their discoveries, but until Jung, few could adequately guide others to their own unique and individual discovery of their interiority. Interiority was assigned or assumed by faith and dogma, not discovered.

Jung opened the way for the many. He eventually understood that an early part of the journey is an exploration of one’s personal unconscious—that area of psyche to which experiences, thoughts, feelings, impressions unacceptable to conscious understanding were unwittingly banished. Initially, these unconscious contents reach consciousness through projection, i.e., some quality that rightfully belongs to the individual is assigned to some loved or hated “other.” Through careful attention to one’s feeling reactions, to thoughts, and to dream images and motifs, one can eventually withdraw the projection and begin to integrate this hitherto unacceptable quality—good or bad—into one’s own personality. Such withdrawal requires humility in accepting what was unacceptable and a sense of responsibility for either managing or developing the newly-discovered quality. No wonder, then, that many of us shirk the duty to work toward increased consciousness!

With continued work on oneself, these personal unconscious contents become more differentiated. There will be the projections onto people of the same gender, of the opposite gender, onto heroes and hags, onto saviors and demons. Once this clearing out of the personal unconscious is more or less complete, an entirely new territory begins to show itself, the collective unconscious, as Jung called it. 

Jung demonstrated that all humankind shares not just a collective consciousness but also a collective UNconsciousness. In the territory of the collective unconscious one finds the archetypal [arche = ancient and typos = imprint] images, motifs and patterns that underlie the common experience of humankind. It is a collective heritage to which everyone may lay claim. For Jung archetypes are simply the typical patterns of human behavior. Some important ones include the journey, mother, father, the hero, home, the child, birth, the savior, king, queen. Underlying all other archetypes, Jung describes the central organizing principle of the psyche and of individuality—the Self. It is the Self that gives rise to consciousness and our sense of individual existence.

An important tool in one’s journey into interiority is the dream. Like a key, the dream has no logic to its shape. Its logic is that it turns the lock. An example might be a dream in which a loved one dies. Taken at face value the dream is disturbing, even terrifying. Like a key, however, a symbolic understanding might allow the dreamer to “open” a message that something ‘alive’ in the unconscious has died, i.e., is no longer active there. Whatever energy the figure represented might now be available to the dreamer on a more conscious level and, therefore, more amenable to the will. Same dream, vastly different approaches to it, vastly different effect on the dreamer. In working with dreams we make a kind of "Pascal's Wager." We can't know with certitude what a dream means. Therefore, let's wager on a meaning that promotes growth and enhances life because we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. 

Jung demonstrated clearly that dreams carry messages from the unconscious to consciousness, and they do so in a manner finely tuned to the attitudes, needs, and desires of the dreamer. Attitude is of critical importance. The dream messenger is Janus-faced. If one dismisses the dream as unimportant or irrelevant, that is just what dreams become. However, if one takes dreams seriously and pays attention to them, dreams speak with increasing and sometimes astonishing clarity. 

If one thinks about all this, it makes very good sense. Humankind has always and everywhere felt the need for story. Dreams are primarily story. They can be extremely important because they are deeply personal and capable of providing meaning and value to the individual. Research has shown that, deprived of dream sleep, an individual will become ill in a very short time. Almost everyone has had an impressive, unforgettable, even numinous dream. Almost everyone has had the experience of waking in a particular mood determined by a dream. The old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” particularly applies in working with dream images. It hardly needs be said that dreams have always been an important component of psychic life and development. Only we moderns, with our “not invented here, therefore not of value” attitude, have denigrated the dream.

When one has ventured deeply enough into one’s own interiority that archetypal patterns, figures, and motifs begin to appear, something happens of singular importance. One begins to experience healing—often illusive, difficult to explain or prove, but definitively a feeling of wellness. In religious terms, this feeling is characterized by the word “salvation,” or as something akin to “God’s in his/her heaven, all’s right with the world,” but viewed experientially the feeling is a psychological fact. One’s life becomes imbued with meaning and purpose, and even a seemingly mundane existence takes on great value to one gifted in this way.

Jung writes poetically about this state:

“The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden happiness. It is the state of someone who, in his/her wanderings among the mazes of his/her psychic transformation comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him/her to his/her apparent loneliness. In communing with him/herself, he/she finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner, more than that, a relationship that seems like a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests.” [From Vol. 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Para. 623, modified slightly in the interest of inclusive language.]

I think Jung is describing here the state of someone who has glimpsed that the Self is at work in his/her life and is sustained by that glimpse.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE EARTH

 

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE EARTH

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE EARTH

     The C. G. Jung Society of St. Louis released a book of the finest essays from the Society’s third writing contest, this one on the theme of “Honoring the Altar of the Earth.”  The book was available at the Jung in the Heartland Conference - “The Altar of the Earth” held at King’s House Retreat Center September 10-13, 2015.

     When Kathryn Stinson, the editor of the book, invited me to write a blurb for the back cover, I offered this: 

     Jung’s view was that one could not be reconciled with one’s own deepest nature without becoming reconciled with Nature itself.  These essays illustrate ways in which the authors, finely attuned to their own delicate and precious natures, are also finely attuned to our exquisitely-balanced Earth.  Civilization requires sufficient numbers of such individuals to save itself, and in doing so, save our small home in the great cosmos. 

     This short statement leads to critical questions.  What does it mean to become reconciled with one’s own deepest nature?  How does one effect reconciliation?  For people steeped in religion, the tenets and dogma of their tradition provide working answers.  Others, for whom religious institutions no longer hold value or provide answers, may not bother to ask, or even to know, the questions.  Yet reconciliation, though an old-fashioned notion, can be a pressing need that arises from one’s deepest nature and requires some kind of response.
     Often an individual’s first response to vague feelings of discontent and dissatisfaction is a combination of denial and repression.  He or she tries to soldier on, to pretend nothing is awry.  In extreme cases the result of so much energy invested in defenses that do not work is extreme ennui or depression.  What is behind such disturbing feelings is an inner force for fuller development that initially seems hostile because it is often foreign and upsetting to the status quo.
     At the onset of this inner urge from one’s truest and deepest nature, an individual may have threatening and difficult dreams, even nightmares.  Repressed unconscious contents presenting themselves and seeking reconciliation with waking consciousness appear as people breaking into one’s home, threatening animals, angry teachers, condemning or indifferent parental figures, or situations in which windows and doors cannot be kept shut.  Another recurring motif is the lost wallet, purse, keys, car, baggage.  Other common dreams feature dismemberment motifs and are accompanied by feelings of being torn apart by inner conflict. 
     These contents from the deep can also be life-giving and expanding.  The dreams may show the dreamer finding new wings of his/her house, discovering hidden tunnels, entering fascinating caves or ancient temples, opening ancient texts, meeting wisdom figures.
     One’s deepest nature (the “Self” in Jungian terms) seems to want to tear away parts of the individual’s self-identity yet at the same time preserve essential elements and add to them.  It is as if the “sculptor” of one’s being molds delicate material to one’s armature structure while carving away at existing casting, all at the same time.  To the individual experiencing this process, it is disconcerting, disturbing, and at times terrifying. There are also moments of joy, of numinous insight, of secret delight.  Mostly, it is a set of experiences that can hardly be communicated to anyone, a secret one cannot disclose.
     This is the painful and exhilarating process C. G. Jung calls “individuation,” a word that means “not divided.”  It is the movement of the whole person toward reconciliation of consciousness with the unknown and with the seemingly unknowable backdrop of the unconscious. Jung’s lasting gift is a rough guide through this difficult but rewarding process which apparently ends only in death. 
     The value of immersing oneself in and tending to this long-term careful process of development is that one becomes an instrument for harmony, a sort of tuning fork of nature.  If one feels horribly awry within one’s being, the first questions to answer are:  Where might I be at odds with the Self, and what thoughts, attitudes, behaviors do I need to change?  Almost miraculously, “fixing” oneself, i.e., reconciling oneself, brings harmony to an outer situation.  Perhaps just as frequently, one determines to change one’s outer situation.
      And that brings us back to my book blurb.  Are we reaching a critical mass, a sufficient number of reconciled individuals to effect the change necessary to save our small home in the cosmos?

Rose F. Holt
Jungian Psychoanalyst
August 11, 2015

On the Energies that Move Us

 For those of us who pay attention to the energies that move us from within, changes or shifts in those energies are critically important.  I remember my mother laughingly saying, "I can do nothing until the spirit moves me."

In my own life I have suffered through or enjoyed energy shifts as they occurred.  They included changes in important relationships, a passionate interest giving way to another, or at times the unavailability of any energy that ushered in a depressive period.  

For decades I thought I was the one doing the shifting, making the changes, accepting or rejecting challenges, suffering the ennui while inexplicably believing I was responsible for it.   Only after months of Jungian psychoanalysis did I begin to realize these energy shifts did not originate in my will; they were largely autonomous and carried me along with them.  Learning that I was not in control of them was both liberating and frightening.  If not I, then who assigned me my passions and, seemingly ripped them away or shifted them so irrationally?  For a time, I blamed others.  I blamed the fates.  I blamed death.  

Step by step, I learned that resistance was futile.  The shifts, though both liberating and painful, were like small rivers yielding their volume and force to something larger.  I learned to "go with the flow," generally liking the outcomes or at least adapting to them.

I learned, with Jung, that the energies that flow through us can be both divine and demonic, and must be dealt with that way.  They are autonomous.  I also learned I could wrestle some of them to the ground only to have them emerge in a different guise.  I learned I could cooperate with others and be exhilarated in doing so.  Each defeat and each victory convinced be anew just how autonomous the energies are.

Through these experiences I eventually came to realize I had dramatically revised my god-image.  The god of my childhood, sort of a super-Santa who kept track of my every transgression, gave way to a more mature understanding.  My revised god-image is that of an incarnating bipolar god whose energies are channeled through me and whose standing in my world are affected and only partially determined by me.  But the small part assigned to or accepted by me gives my life dignity and meaning.  It's not an exaggeration to say I have had to humanize autonomus energies.  The mystery is that they appear to desire being brought into the world but need help from the human realm.  

It appears that demonic energies also desire incarnation into the world.  The tip weight seems to be the human will hanging in the balance.  Even a small benevolent willful energy can effect significant change.

 

 

INVISIBLE REALITY

      Jung writes, “What is real is that which has real effects.”  In our rigid three-dimensional conscious constructs, we tend to define reality as that which is concrete and tangible, excluding anything of a spiritual nature.  Yet, the spiritual has real effects.  Even a cursory self-reflection will confirm the validity of Jung’s statement.  The spiritual is real.

     When I was growing up, it was the custom in our small Catholic community to pray the rosary as part of a funeral wake.  The effect on my young self was extreme boredom mixed with wonderment that adults behaved this way.  However, in thinking about this ritual as an adult, I can see the real effects of rote recitation and meditation on the mysteries of the rosary—the joyful, the sorrowful, and the glorious.  What human life hasn’t been touched by joy, sorrow, and glory?  What resonances are set up in the depths of the souls of the living?  What evokes the sacredness of life like those intoned prayers, drawing mourners into an unconscious unity of spirit?  Who knows what the effects were on those people around me?  On me?  On the departed soul?  Surely it had at least as much impact as an invisible wind rustling through trees.

     The psychological impact of formal prayer is that it tends to align consciousness with semi-conscious, established patterns that have served humankind well for a very long time.  For a consciousness mired in some less-than-healthy unconscious pattern, prayer can be a way of getting  “unstuck.”  The mysteries of the rosary are built on New Testament stories which recount the life story of one of the most developed personalities in human history, someone fully individuated, i.e., who completely realized both the human and the spiritual dimensions of existence.  

     For another example of invisible effects, consider gazing on a full moon.  Even thinking about the image of a full moon right now conjures up emotion, memory, awe, and mystery.  I rarely look at a full moon without wondering about peoples over millennia who saw this same sight, who relied on it to mark the passage of time, to know when to move or to harvest crops; who began to associate it with the cycle of a woman’s life and the mysterious absence of the cycle with an impending birth, to predict the movements of the tides, even eventually to know when to celebrate the Paschal Mystery itself.   What knowledge the spirit of the moon has imparted to humanity over the ages!  What knowledge does the physical world hold, awaiting a consciousness sufficiently capacious to apprehend it?

     If you haven’t seen the movie, “Moonstruck,” I urge you to watch it.  It will awaken some spiritual awareness without ever touching on anything religious or dogmatic.  I would argue that we are all a bit moonstruck and it would do us well to recognize and celebrate it.

     Whenever anything intangible and haunting is evoked in us, whether it be in seeing the flag, in hearing a moving poem, in playing and replaying a song in our minds, in being visited by the memory of a deceased loved one, or in a thousand other ways in which a current experience ties us back to an old memory trace, we experience the movement of an invisible spirit. 

     A favorite poem of mine is “elegy” by W.S. Merwyn:

who would i tell it to

That simple sentence, sans capitalization or punctuation, always evokes such depth of emotion in me that I know it brings me into solidarity with every other human being who has grieved in ways beyond language or explanation.  Why is it that the Gerard Manley Hopkins’ opening line, “Margaret, are you grieving over goldengrove unleaving,” pops into my mind frequently and at odd times?  I can only conclude that there is some unseen but very real force at work in my being.  It is a force of some power, and it is arresting.

     Of course, in our romance-besotted modern life, no one among us would deny the effects of love or its life-changing, life-enhancing power.  Yet, few of us would identify love as a spirit, but in the truest sense of the word, it is spiritual.  And in the sense that Jung defines “real,” it is real.  “What I did for Love” is more than a lovely song; it is a testament to the power of love.  

     Jung was interested in the psychology of the human person and in the ways reality, seen and unseen, can call forth richness of experience and wholeness of personality.  Whether we approach the spiritual through a formal religion or through a religious, reverent attitude toward the people and the world within and around us matters little.  What is important, from a psychological point of view, is that we not neglect all of experience.  

     To live in a reality that consists only of things, one that must be explained by cause and effect is to live in a carved-out, desiccated existence.  To live in a world of things is to see and understand people and ourselves only as objects to be manipulated and managed.  To live in a strict cause-and-effect universe is to miss perhaps the largest parts of existence, the parts that respond to mythic patterns, the forces that, rather than pushing us from the past, are pulling us into the future. 

     It is a basic tenet of Analytical (Jungian) Psychology that we as conscious moderns have a responsibility to understand the spiritual forces that move us as best we can, learn to cooperate with those that are benevolent, and resist those that are not.  External authority, while important for civil living, can also lead us very much in undesirable directions if it is not reconciled with the individual spirits that inhabit all of us.     

     A careful reflection about spiritual forces leads me to conclude that there are a myriad of invisible agencies that have very real effects and that are shaping our lives, our relationships, and our actions in unknown and sometimes undesirable ways.  What our individual and collective futures become is, in no small part, of our own choosing and attitude toward the real.

 

A BRIEF LOOK INTO C.G. JUNG'S AION

Rose F. Holt, M.A., Jungian Analyst

April 22, 2022

On April 22, 2022, I gave an updated lecture on Jung's tome, AION, via Zoom, for the C. G. Jung Society of St. Louis jungstlouis.org.  The occasion was a benefit for the Society's Scholarship Fund.  The lecture will be followed by two on-line study groups to discuss the work further.  

Here is the text of my lecture.  Accompanying slides are below. 

AION TALK - APRIL 22, 2022  [SLIDE 1]

GOALS [Slide 2]

I’ve set some goals for our time together and they all center around the issue of religion and religious traditions in the development of personality.  Because “religion” is such a laden word, I will use a less-charged definition of the word in this discussion, Jung’s definition.  God is also a word with many meanings.  In my talk, please know I mean god-image, the ways humankind visualizes, defines, and understands its gods.  And, of course our image changes over time.  The god-images from antiquity have been updated.  The god-image of my childhood is hardly applicable to my life today. 

JUNG [Slide 3]

Many of you know a great deal about C.G. Jung.  Briefly he was a Swiss psychiatrist, early collaborator with Sigmund Freud, who struck out on his own and left us a huge body of work, some 20 plus volumes (more yet to be published) based on his lifetime of psychoanalytic work with individuals, his own deep Inner experiences (explained and artistically illustrated in his RED BOOK), his theoretical researches, and psychological theories.  AION, published in 1945, is our subject this evening.  

Experience meant a great deal to Jung, his own and that of his patients.  He famously said, “Learn all the theories but throw them out when you meet with a living person.  Every person is unique and requires a unique understanding.”  Of course, self-understanding looms large in the Jungian approach.  There are many hints in AION that can help us with self-understanding

WHO WAS AION - IMPORTANCE TO JUNG. [Slide 4]

Aion was a Mithraic God dating from the 2nd and 3rd Century.  He represents an ancient archetypal pattern in the psyche, the time principle active in human life. The figure has a human body, the head of lion, and is encoiled by a snake.  

JUNG’S 1913 DREAM. [SLIDE 5]

Jung became interested in Aion after he had this fantasy in December of 1913 (at age 38) early on in his creative illness:  I saw the snake approach me.  She came close and began to encircle me and press me in her coils.  The coils reached up to my heart.  I realized as I struggled, that I had assumed the attitude of the Crucifixion.  In the agony and the struggle, I sweated so profusely that the water flowed down on all sides of me.  I felt that my face had taken on the face of an animal of prey, a lion or a tiger.  [1925 Lectures, p. 96]

Jung took his dreams and fantasies very seriously.  All his major life decisions were guided by them.  In his old age, he wrote that for much of his life he had been gripped, even controlled by an inner daimon that pressed him on in his work.  He may have been recalling his early encounter with the god Aion.  I’ve come to believe Aion is a shape-shifter.

RELIGION - DEFINITIONS  [SLIDES 6, 7, 8, 9]

IGNATIUS LOYOLA’S OPENING SENTENCE TO HIS FOUNDATION  (SLIDE 10]

JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGICAL TRANSLATION  [SLIDE 11]

MONOIMOS QUOTE  [SLIDE 12]

Jungian analysts emphasize inner experience, not so much a patient’s adaptations to reality, though we certainly do not ignore necessary adaptation.  Analysis, is appropriate for people already adequately adapted, perhaps even over-adapted.  In psychoanalysis with individuals, we focus on clients’ experiences, their feelings, their world view, their issues, their stories for themselves.  We explore their and our own dreams and fantasies for understanding and guidance.  Jung, in his practice, avoided all theory, taking a completely phenomenological approach, phenomena meaning “what shows itself, what shines through.”  He was guided by Monoimos dictum.  What began to shine through for Jung was the vastness of the human psyche, much of it unexplored, and the potentiality within psyche for expanding individual consciousness.  What shines through if we don’t interfere too much can be astonishing.  

ORDINARY CONSCIOUSNESS  [SLIDE 13]

Jung begins AION by describing various elements of the individual psyche and the ways they function.  In this sketch I’ve tried to illustrate the parts of psyche most of us are conscious of in our first decades.  We get information from the outer world from our psychological functions:  intuition, feeling, thinking, and sensation.  Our consciousness is extremely elastic, capable of expanding over our entire lifetime.  This area, the personal unconscious, consists of all the repressed, difficult, unacceptable parts of ourselves that have found no welcoming outlet in the outer world.  Our defense mechanisms for keeping these factors out of our awareness include regression, excess emotionality, projection, and perseveration.  These shadow characteristics are problematic for us and may begin to interfere with our conscious functioning.  This area, the persona, includes the adapted ways we have of meeting the world.  In dreams clothing or lack thereof is often symbolic of the ways we are adapted or maladapted.  When painful eruptions (complex reactions) occur in our personal unconscious, our personas often breakdown.  We are embarrassed, ashamed, exposed.  “I don’t know what came over me.”  “I was beside myself.”  The expression “saving face” relates to the persona.

Ego consciousness can be sort of an amalgam of one’s idea of oneself with rules of behavior, an invisible trellis of idea, parental dictums, cliches, institutional norms shaped and determined by personal factors.  

It’s not all bad news because there are wonderful parts of ourselves awaiting development in the personal unconscious.  We see these potentialities in dreams when some admired figure appears announcing possibilities for the individual. We often shrink back from the implications of such a figure because of the work, effort, and change required for making it real in our lived experience.

AN INDIVIDUATING CONSCIOUSNESS   [SLIDE 14]

This sketch illustrates Jung’s more expansive view of the personality and the psyche.  Contained in the inner world are archetypal patterns and instinctual energies.  Aion’s energies  reside here.  Who among us hasn’t been gripped by a project or creative work that did not let us go until it was realized?  In a very real sense, that is the energy of Aion though our ego is apt to take credit.

AQUARIAN SIGN - THE WATER BEARER  [SLIDE 15]

When an individual breaks through his/her personal unconscious, conscious contact with this larger world becomes possible.  No one knows quite how or why it happens but such a breakthrough is often felt as healing, or, to use an old-fashioned concept, as redeeming.  A relationship with an inner world as interesting, fascinating, and troubling as relationship with the outer world becomes possible. It is as if the fish discovers water.

 

Before the age of reason when intellect began to dominate consciousness, contact between these worlds was effected by religious rites, sacraments, and rituals.  The individual could acquire a deep faith in something ineffable and larger than itself.  Of course, many people still do.  People unable to muster an abiding faith are not so lucky.  

Consciousness (our fish out of the water)—aware of itself and aware of its source, the unconscious—is able to dip into the waters selectively and pour from it.  (The symbol for the looming Aquarian Age is the water bearer. )

INDIVIDUATING PSYCE  [SLIDE 16]

Most of this part of the psyche remains largely unconscious; we only know it by its effects on our lives.  Aphrodite Is alive and well here as are the patterns and energies of Dionysus, Athena, Hecate, Mars, Zeus, Jesus, and others, among them the ancestors.  Jung began to realize this part of the psyche is common to all humankind, that its archetypal patterns inform and shape our consciousness in ways we are generally oblivious to.  Patterns for family, mother, father, journey, love, hate, jealousy, vocation, monsters, angels, devils are all contained within this collective unconscious.  Individually in our personal consciousness, we wrestle with the energies that emerge from here, usually believing they are our energies, our demons, our personal possessions.  A better and more accurate assessment of the situation is that we can be readily possessed by them but do not realize it.

With the understanding of its relationship with water, the individuating ego (our fish) can no longer deal with the contents of the deep in its old, more limited ways.

THE SELF  [SLIDE 17]

In his own experiences and in the experiences of his patients, Jung discovered an archetype of the Self, a central organizing principle in the psyche.   He soon realized that there is a mysterious, growing and developing relationship between this self archetype and the ego.  Both serve as the executives of their domain, the ego in consciousness, the self in the unconscious.  It is a difficult relationship for the ego to develop because it is reluctant to yield any part of its fiefdom. Usually it has to lose many skirmishes and battles before it will admit defeat.  Once communication is established (usually due to a fantasy, a dream, a numinous experience, and some painful defeats), a budding relationship between ego and self begins and can prove a great boon for the individual.  This line of communication—ego to self; self to ego—is called the transcendent function.  Though concept it is, we can know it only through experience.  It is as different as a menu is from the meal.

In AION Jung traces the emergence of a new energy from the unconscious, a developing archetype with the primary symbol of Christ and how it has been assimilated by both consciousness and the collective unconscious over two millennium.  There are various symbols for this developing archetype—Buddha, Mohammed, Tao—all interpreted differently, in conflicting ways.  Dubbing this reality the self moved it from the religious to the psychological, more ordinary realm and out of the realm of metaphysics.  For many of us, experiences of the self take the place of an often unrealizable faith.

Jung was long taken with the problem of evil.  Christian dogma has defined its god-image as all-good, omniscient, and omnipotent.  What then is the problem with Allah?  With Mohammed?  Whence then comes evil?   The theological answer is that it emerges from the human realm.  In his work with patients and in his self-understanding, Jung saw there were mighty forces existent in the unconscious that could overpower an individual, a group, a people, a religion, and often did.  Remember, he published AION in 1945.  Personal conscience, cultural norms, government, laws, institutions, religions, parental dictums, the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes are guidelines people have used to handle the problem of evil—with varying degrees of success.  

Jung was fascinated with the biblical character Job, a just and devout man who never gave up trying to be “good enough.”  He never stopped insisting that Yahweh remember the covenant he had made with his people.  Job remembered when Yahweh, in his unconsciousness, did not.

Jung’s “Answer to Job” was Jesus, who confronted the cruel, impersonal, unconscious Yahweh so directly that the very nature of Yahweh changed.  There was a pronounced shift in the god-image.  One very human, civilized, suffering consciousness changed the arrangement between humankind and its god-image.  Job and Jesus were fine; it was the unfeeling, unconscious Yahweh who had the problem.  You could say Job diagnosed the problem, and Jesus began the treatment.  It took a very long time.

A DREAM  [SLIDE 18]

As luck would have it, just yesterday a client brought a dream that illustrates what this shift in the background god-image looks like, long imaged in the Christian world as father and son  The dreamer is a woman in in her 60’s and has wrestled with important issues for a long time.  The dream:

A mafia-type man has tied me up and is holding me captive in a basement.  His son releases me.  I want to date the son but am embarrassed because my home is so modest, beneath him.  As we are leaving I am worried the father will take me captive again.  Instead he offers me a drink.

The dream speaks to this woman in her language.  She was raised Catholic, schooled in Catholic dogma that never really meant much to her.  She is religious in the sense of our definition but definitely no longer Catholic.  The dream seizes on an archetypal story—father, son and holy spirit—to deliver a very personal message.  And, true to real human feeling, she does not feel worthy.

Michelangleo’s “The Captive [Slide 19] 

It is the problem of  all of us: dealing with the energies that flow through us that can and do hold us back, tie us in knots, keep us captive.  Our mostly unconscious god-image is a way we filter the energies that break through.  Religions have for millennia been the way humankind has tried to mitigate them.

In a conversation with my friend Rick Vaughn, I got a clearer understanding of the mechanism by which the illusion of “If only I could be good enough” thinking (Job’s struggle) is perpetuated.  Rick pointed out that our modern Christmas Story, “I will get what I hope for if only I can be good enough, and I know Santa Claus is tracking my behavior.  Naturally, I will never have all my wishes fulfilled, therefore I have failed in some way.”  You can see how that myth has morphed into today’s “Prosperity Gospel.”  God showers his riches on people he favors and approves of.  Of course, if our personal god-image is “all good,” so any failing is mine to own, the responsibility can be crushing.  Seems our god-image goes to some lengths to escape guilt.  We, of course, being made in its image and likeness, do, too.

It was in the Job-Yahweh and the more personal Father-Son relationship between Yahweh and Jesus that Jung found the meaning and value of human consciousness.  Each of us can attempt, perhaps is tasked, to develop a consciousness capable of confronting, transforming, and humanizing a bit of those amoral unconscious energies that emanate from the psyche or the unconscious.    

The God-image of Christianity is a of kind, loving, gentle god, but the thundering, angry older god-images can and do still break through to possess the consciousness of individuals and groups.  You could understand the war in Ukraine as an unleashing of primal, archaic  energies (evil, in a word) from deep in the psyche.  Atheism is a special case.  If ego consciousness has no conception, no frame for any kind of reality outside its purview, it has a great need for repression.  Fervent atheism, from a Jungian point of view, is overcompensated doubt.  Invisibility is a clever way our unconscious god-image escapes guilt and responsibility.

For the Christian community, the individual man Jesus struggled and overcame the frightening and dangerous unconscious energies that drove people in the Roman Empire.  Assimilating a Christ consciousness means that an individual has learned to mitigate devastating psychic energies so that they are not unleashed in his/her life.  Jung saw that assimilation as the task of the Piscean Age.  However, in making the Christ figure all-good, Christianity swept evil under the rug. All that repressed energy found release in horrific ways, but the Christian world faulted the human realm so that the real source of evil remained undetected.  Dubbing these energies “the devil” was a apotropaic move and a clever way our god-image protected its reputation.  In the new emerging Aquarian Age, presumably many are equipped with an adequate consciousness to effect a civilizing influence on dangerous energies still alive and well in the unconscious.  

In a personal analysis, investigation and illumination of the shadow side of the personality, those aspects of us that have necessarily been repressed, ignored, or remain undeveloped, play a big part.  The shadow side of Christianity includes any concept of a supreme being less than all perfect. In a parallel fashion, most of us early in life take on an ego identity, that is, a view of ourselves, usually as a “good” person while our less-stellar qualities reside in our unconscious shadow.  Church authorities are guilty of the same sin.

The church has used dogma, declarations of heresy, and its authority to repress and suppress certain shadow aspects of Christianity.  As is true for the individual, repression, (and when that fails, suppression) are difficult to maintain when an individual and a group become more conscious.  Gnosticism and alchemy were two areas of opposing thought that emphasized experience and mystery over dogma.  They were excluded from organized church teaching.  Christianity, especially the Catholic Church, through institutionalization, councils, declarations of heresy, the sacraments, and its commanding authority, relegated many contrary issues to its shadow.  Jung, in his analysis of the 2000 years of the history of Christianity carefully examines these shadow aspects.  All this is the subject of AION.

 

AION AND ASSIMILATION - Aion is an ancient archetypal pattern in the psyche.

So, if we entertain the idea that divine energies are autonomous forces that grip us, as Jung argues, his encounter with the god Aion set the stage for the rest of his life.  Aion, the time principle active in the human psyche, set the general course for the rest of his life.  You could say it squeezed out of him the best he had to offer.

What does it mean to be gripped by an archetypal pattern?  (Archetype meaning simply “a pattern of behavior.”)  We see this happening all the time but have different language to explain it.  My grand nephew Brett is an example.  He played sports in high school and suffered injuries that took him to physical therapy.  That experience awakened in him a pattern he felt compelled to fulfill.  After years of volunteer work, academic study, and clinical work, he became a physical therapist.  He awakened to, then fulfilled an ancient archetypal pattern, the healer, that became his life’s work. 

There are many such patterns, some benevolent, some malevolent.  To be gripped by one can be a blessing and a curse.  Not to be gripped, to be insulated from unconscious energies may actually be preferable.  Common wisdom is that if the unconscious doesn’t trouble you, best you not trouble it.  Trouble drives people into therapy.  Hidden in life’s vexations may be this need to fulfill some as-yet unknown pattern.  The approach most Jungians take in working with individuals is to help them discover then muster up the will to flesh out their own unique life patterns.  Put another way, you might as well be you because everyone else is taken.

AION represents Jung’s final thoughts on a vital issue that engages everyone, though not many people give much thought to it.  The issue:  One’s personal relationship with the cosmos, or one’s cosmology, how it changes over time for an individual and for a culture.

We all have a sort of cosmology.  It can range from “I am captain of my fate and determine everything that happens in my life” to “I am a chip in the ocean, swept about by forces over which I have no control.”  Most of us fall somewhere between these two extremes, but generally don’t think about it.  Second half of life issues are often precipitated by a pressing need to understand and rethink one’s cosmology, to answer pressing questions:  Who am I really?  How might I live differently so as to tackle the vexing problems in my life—relationships, job, inner discontents, my neurotic tendencies?  Understood and approached adequately, it can be a time of tremendous growth in consciousness.

Jung’s view of the meaning and purpose of consciousness, i.e., the incarnation of unconscious energies into the world for its betterment, lends enormous dignity to the individual.  What we do and how we do it matters.  

MEISTER ECKHART QUOTE  [SLIDE 20]

In casting about for how one might do that, I found this quote:

“Wisdom consists in doing the next think you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.”

FEELING STATE OF THE PERSON IN PROCESS   [SLIDE 21]

“The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden happiness. It is the state of someone who, in his/her wanderings among the mazes of his/her psychic transformation comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him/her to his/her apparent loneliness. In communing with him/herself, he/she finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner, more than that, a relationship that seems like a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests." 

                                     [From Vol. 14, MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS, Para. 623

INDIVIDUATING PERSON. [SLIDE 22]

Though it risks setting up an impossible standard, I want to share the best description for an individuating person I have found.  It comes from a fictional work, Morris West’s Shoes of the Fisherman.

“Yesterday I met a whole person. It is a rare experience, but always an illuminating and ennobling one. It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price… One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return on love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, yet open always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.”  

                                                        Morris West,  THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN

Lecture: "Reflections on Jung's AION," February 1, 2020

Saturday, February 1, 2020, 7:00 - 9:00 PM at First Congregational Church UCC, St. Louis, MO.  For additional information or to register, visit www.jungstl.org

AION is perhaps Jung’s most challenging and difficult work but also one of his richest.  In this lecture, Rose will present information and insights from this text that are directly relevant to our understanding and experience of the Christian era and to our own developing sense of self-identity.  Jungian Psychology, at root, attempts to provide some answers to the essential and deeply personal questions of life—"Who am I?” and “How then shall I live?”  AION provides a large and coherent frame from which we might better explore these questions.

AION is Jung’s report on his researches into the formation and development of the Christian Era, where it fits in human history, the people and themes that have shaped it, the general direction it has taken over the Piscean Age, and his conclusions about its future unfolding.  Jung applies his process of individual analysis to the collective consciousness of the Christian Era.  Just as analysis of an individual opens up a much greater understanding of both the totality of one’s consciousness and its limitations, Jung’s analysis of the Christian Era provides an extremely comprehensive view of the Christian Era, its totality and its limitations.

Our identity and personality are largely determined within the structures of family, social milieu, religious affiliation, educational and governmental institutions, and the general tenor of our time.  We are born into these structures, and they form and inform us in many unconscious ways.  As Americans, we are uncommonly proud of our independent selves, how our egos are the determining factor of our lives.  Even a cursory self-examination can correct that innocent fiction and cause us to become ever more curious about who we really are, the totality of our personhood, which, happily and unhappily, is much larger than just our ego understanding.

It is a mysterious fact that as individuals, we are in a parallel process with history.


Learning Objectives

1.  Participants will better understand the significance of religious traditions in the development of personality and consciousness.
2.  Practitioners will be better able to navigate the areas of difficulty for many people whose experiences of religion have been problematic.
3.  Participants will better understand the frame of the Christian era and, thus, the impact and influence of that frame on their continuing development of consciousness.
4.  Participants, whether affiliated with a particular religious tradition or not, will gain tools from Jungian thought that can facilitate their continuing maturation of personality.

On line Study Group - Pat Berry's Book on Dreams, facilitated by Rose F. Holt

In this Fall 2019 study group to be conducted online, participants will read and discuss three chapters of Pat Berry's book, Echo's Subtle Body, chapters that provide an excellent overview of a Jungian approach to dreams.  To join the study group, participants will need a computer with a camera and high-speed internet connection.  We will use the Zoom service, which is extremely user-friendly and requires only responding to an invitation to the group meetings.

For further information or to enroll, please go to www.jungstl.org.  If you have questions or concerns, please e-mail me at www.rosefholt@gmail.com.

Readings on Jung Study Group - September, 2019

I will be facilitating a seminar-style study group for the C. G. Jung Society of St. Louis in September, 2019.  The study group will read and discuss two chapters on the topic of dreams in Patricia Berry's acclaimed work, Echo's Subtle Body.  The study group will meet from 7:00 to 9:00 pm on Wednesday, September 04, 11, 18, 25.  

This Study Group is one of three the Society has organized in advance of its upcoming Jung in the Heartland Conference for which Patricia Berry and Thomas Moore are the featured presenters.

For more information or to register, please go to www.jungstl.org.

Learning Objectives:

1.     Practitioners will gain a broad perspective on approaches to dreams.

2.     Participants will develop an appreciation for the value of dreams and their place in one’s personal psychology.

3.     Participants who are practitioners will understand the value and importance of separating their own biases and attitudes from those of their clients so that the dream can be allowed to “speak for itself.”

OPPORTUNITY TO STUDY JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY

The Heartland Association of Jungian Analysts (HAJA) is preparing for its third year of seminars in Jungian Studies.  The seminars meet one weekend a month for nine months, beginning in September, rotating locations in St. Louis, MO, and Rogers, AR.  Teaching is done by Jungian analysts, and the seminars can be an avenue for eventual training to become a psychoanalyst.  The program is open to anyone with a four-year college history and an interest in Jungian Psychology.

For further information, visit www.heartlandjungians.org or contact me at roseholt@aol.com or 314-740-6207.

BTS and "Jung's Map of the Soul"

BTS, the young Korean pop group, has suddenly become a worldwide phenomenon.  Group members are interested in Jungian Psychology and have taken the title of Murray Stein's book, Jung's Map of the Soul, as the title for their newest album.  [BTS translates to Beyond the Scene.]

Here are some links to recent information about the group:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/preview-behind-the-scenes-with-k-pop-sensation-bts/

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-47965524

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47965524

https://youtu.be/dj3a_Qvs98U?t=2773

https://speakingofjung.com/podcast/2019/4/14/episode-44-map-of-the-soul-persona

Tickets Selling Fast! Don't miss out.

C. G. JUNG SOCIETY PLAY PRODUCTION

“ANSWER TO JOE” by Rick Vaughn

Produced by the C. G. Jung Society of St Louis

            

March 22 and 23, 7:30 pm.  March 24, 2:00 pm
Kranzberg Arts Center

501 N. Grand Blvd.

St. Louis, MO  63103

Tickets available December 15:   $25    ($20 for Society Friends – for information about becoming a subscribing member, go to www.cgjungstl.org) 

All tickets through MetroTix.com  (314) 534-1111

https://www.metrotix.com/events/detail/answer-to-joe

Or Fox Theatre Box Office

2 CEU's available for attendance at a performance and the following discussion. ($15 Fee).  Apply before performance or at break between the performance and the discussion with the playwright and a Jungian Analyst.

The C. G. Jung Society is producing a new play, “Answer to Joe.”  The play is loosely based on Jung’s Answer to Job, and deals with the same themes—the nature of God, the reality of the divine vs. an individual’s image of it, and the psychological implications of an individual’s often unconscious god-image.  Though these are deeply serious topics, the play presents them in modern understandable dress and treats them with considerable humor. 

Rick Vaughn, author of “Answer to Joe,” has long been interested in Jungian Psychology and its potential for resolving inner conflicts in ways that release creative energies.  In presenting his work for possible production by the Jung Society, he said, “My intention was to communicate some of the profound, transformative insights that I discovered from reading Answer to Job. In the process of writing, it became clear that the work was much more personal.  This story is mystory.  It may well be a story for many others.  Job’s working out his relationship with the overwhelming and overpowering energies of Yahweh-- which Jung equates with an individual’s coming to terms with the unconscious—has been my quest for decades.  My own god-image of a punitive, demanding, and intractable old patriarch needed considerable updating.  In writing the play, I knew I was somewhat describing my own inner conflicts and working them to a more satisfying end.  I seemed to be engaging the energies bound up in an old god-image and tempering some of them so they could be directed creatively.  I’m happy with the result, and in some strange way, I feel my ‘god’ is, too.” 

“Answer to Joe,” is the second play the Jung Society has produced.  In February 2017, our first one “Casting Shadows” by Carol Haake was presented to sold-out audiences for three performances.  We hope for similar enthusiasm for “Answer.”

Ti

THE CALF PATH

• by  Sam Walter Foss  (1858-1911)

• One day, through the primeval wood,
  A calf walked home, as good calves should;
  But made a trail all bent askew,
  A crooked trail, as all calves do.
  Since then three hundred years have fled,
  And, I infer, the calf is dead.
  But still he left behind his trail,
  And thereby hangs my moral tale.
  The trail was taken up next day
  By a lone dog that passed that way;
  And then a wise bellwether sheep
  Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,
  And drew the flock behind him, too,
  As good bellwethers always do.
  And from that day, o’er hill and glade,
  Through those old woods a path was made,
  And many men wound in and out,
  And dodged and turned and bent about,
  And uttered words of righteous wrath
  Because ’twas such a crooked path;
  But still they followed — do not laugh —
  The first migrations of that calf,
  And through this winding wood-way stalked
  Because he wobbled when he walked.
  This forest path became a lane,
  That bent, and turned, and turned again.
  This crooked lane became a road,
  Where many a poor horse with his load
  Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
  And traveled some three miles in one.
  And thus a century and a half
  They trod the footsteps of that calf.
  The years passed on in swiftness fleet.
  The road became a village street,
  And this, before men were aware,
  A city’s crowded thoroughfare,
  And soon the central street was this
  Of a renowned metropolis;
  And men two centuries and a half
  Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
  Each day a hundred thousand rout
  Followed that zigzag calf about,
  And o’er his crooked journey went
  The traffic of a continent.
  A hundred thousand men were led
  By one calf near three centuries dead.
  They follow still his crooked way,
  And lose one hundred years a day,
  For thus such reverence is lent
  To well-established precedent.
  A moral lesson this might teach
  Were I ordained and called to preach;
  For men are prone to go it blind
  Along the calf-paths of the mind,
  And work away from sun to sun
  To do what other men have done.
  They follow in the beaten track,
  And out and in, and forth and back,
  And still their devious course pursue,
  To keep the path that others do.
  They keep the path a sacred groove,
  Along which all their lives they move;
  But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
  Who saw the first primeval calf!
  Ah, many things this tale might teach —
  But I am not ordained to preach.
  

GRASPING THE NEW GOD-IMAGE

Edward Edinger, in the slender tome, The New God Image, tells us that there are three steps involved in understanding Jung’s material concerning the new God-image. One must be able to perceive the new God-image and that requires mastering certain epistemological premises. One must actually perceive for one’s self this living reality and the impact it has on one’s own psychology as well on the psychology of the collective. Jung (and analytical psychology) can teach the how, but it is not something taken as an article of faith. It is something one must do for one’s self, a kind of God-has-no-grandchildren concept. And the third step requires a developing awareness of one’s own role in the transformation of the God-image, one’s part in the process of continuing incarnation.

Edinger manages to capture the essence of Jungian analysis in these three steps.

"Answer to Joe," a New Play - C. G. Jung Society of St. Louis Production

March 22 and 23, 7:30pm. March 24, 2:00pm.

The C. G. Jung Society of St. Louis is producing a new play,
“Answer to Joe,” by Rick Vaughn.

Tickets now on sale.

Kranzberg Arts Center
501 North Grand
St. Louis, Mo 63103

All tickets sold through MetroTix.com (314-534-1111)
or Fox Theatre Box Office

Ticket prices: $25 ($20 for Friends of the C.G. Jung Society of St. Louis.
Friends received an e-mail with a code for discount purchase.)
The Kranzberg is a small theater, and, as was the case with the Society’s production of “Casting Shadows,” we anticipate all three performances of “Answer” will sell out.

Call the Jung Society (314-533-6809) or e-mail cgjungstl@yahoo.com for further information.

The C. G. Jung Society is producing a new play, “Answer to Joe.” The play is loosely based on Jung’s Answer to Job, and deals with the same themes—the nature of God, the reality of the divine vs. an individual’s image of it, and the psychological implications of an individual’s often unconscious god-image. Though these are deeply serious topics, the play presents them in modern understandable dress and treats them with considerable humor.

Rick Vaughn, author of “Answer to Joe,” has long been interested in Jungian Psychology and its potential for resolving inner conflicts in ways that release creative energies. In presenting his work for possible production by the Jung Society, he said, “My intention was to communicate some of the profound, transformative insights that I discovered in reading Answer to Job. In the process of writing, it became clear that the work was much more personal. This story is my story. It may well be a story for many others. Job’s working out his relationship with the overwhelming and overpowering energies of Yahweh-- which Jung equates with an individual’s coming to terms with the unconscious—has been my quest for decades. My own god-image of a punitive, demanding, and intractable old patriarch needed considerable updating. In writing the play, I knew I was somewhat describing my own inner conflicts and working them to a more satisfying end. I seemed to be engaging the energies bound up in an old god-image and tempering some of them so they could be directed creatively. I’m happy with the result, and in some strange way, I feel my ‘god’ is, too.”

“Answer to Joe,” is the second play the Jung Society has produced. In February 2017, our first one “Casting Shadows” by Carol Haake was presented to sold-out audiences for three performances. We hope for similar enthusiasm for “Answer.”