the anthropic principle(s)

Cosmologically we are at the instant, the moment of recognition of the utter relativity of existence. Modern history consists of a series of “decenterings,” “Copernican” moments when we recognize that our former seemingly-solid frame of reference is in fact just a minor part of something larger.  E.g., realizing that the earth goes around the sun, the sun is one small star in a galaxy, which is one of billions, and that our universe is just one part of a larger reality. Even physical laws are not definite.

Recognizing our finitude, our composite character, our emptiness, our sense of self fragments, dissolves, explodes. But this World Two, the transcendent, nirvana!  The anthropic principle tells us not merely that if we weren’t in a suitable world we would not see what we do, but that we recognize the infinite depth of reality by being who we are. That is, to be fully human is to see through our limitations. The crucial point is not that we are just who we are and where we are, and that these two facts are correlated (the weak anthropic principle) but that our existence is in its essential nature one of recognition.  The fact that only beings placed where we are in the cosmic order could see the truth is much less important than the bare reality of that seeing itself. We cannot but recognize (because it is part of the recognition of emptiness) that that recognition is itself of ultimate significance.  The strong anthropic principle is not a “fact,” it is a realization, and seeing it is enlightenment. 

The above is a statement of the conclusions of the Yoga Sutras and Samkhya Karikas. My discusson of the “purusarthic” principle (at BrainDance.us) says the same thing.

Jung and Heidegger

     Clearly "God after God" (title stolen from Steven Wasserstrom) is the shared theme between Heidegger and Jung. Of course it is also the theme of the whole of the modern age since Francis Bacon (and well before, back into the Greeks and their Indo-European--and Laurentian and Gondwana ancestors, following Michael Witzel). Having said all (or nothing), I do believe that the opposition between Enlightenment and "shadow" culture (Eugene Taylor) is the fundamental basis for understanding Jung. He wanted to be both, Personality # 1 and Personality #2, and when in either of them felt an unreasonable animus (or anima) for the other.

     Jung was fundamentally a man of the Right, as Jay Sherry and others have demonstrated, and in this a man of his social class and era--Burkhart and Bachofen, etc.-- but he was at the same time a Kantian and a scientist (association experiment, astrological statistics, etc.). Heidegger invested his life in the same aporia, paradox, conundrum or Mystery: that what is "correct" may not be fundamentally "right." It's rather parallel to Plato's "pleasant" versus "good." And this is where we are today, as Jungians and postmoderns. Do we live in facticity or in meditative thinking, and can--as Jung imagined--we have both? Imagination has been shunted off onto the highest of high culture and the lowest of the low. The vast middle range is the domain of "science." Which of the borderlands should we Jungians explore? Both, of course, but at the same time we have to invade science.

     Here's my latest thought on that subject: God arose as a symbol to mediate two parts of the brain, the reptilian/mamalian (sometimes characterized as the "fast") brain (brainstem, limbic, basal ganglia), and the human ("slow") brain characterized by inhibition (frontal cortex). Jung thematized this opposition when he talked about the "sympathetic nervous system" and in his fascination with the dream image of the radiolarian (wholly "sympathetic"). Finding a way to integrate the two is hard, and happens seldom in human life. The great religions all aim at this, and do occasionally succeed (minfulness in its essential similarity to nirvana is a Buddhist example).

Does World 2 require World 1 (does mystical experience rest on ordinary life?)

Robert Segal and most other writers on religion these days claim that the experience of God (what is later said to have been "God") requires first the concept of "God" in some way. One cannot have an experience that is not prepared and framed by a concept that understands it.

I would agree but counter that mystical (what I call World 2) experience explodes the concept even though it begins with it. For instance, in my own life circa 1966 realizing the truth of "emptiness," while this was indeed a concept, led to and was fulfilled by the explosion into emptiness that it (does not) name (s). That is the whole paradox of World 3, that it is and is not part of World 1 (ordinary reality). "Emptiness" is a necessary but not sufficient condition for emptiness. Emptiness expresses its appreciation of "emptiness" by shattering it.

culture and individuation

Although the personal and the social cannot be sharply demarcated, it is often heuristically useful to separate them. Jungian individuation is a process of inner development in which persons confront their complexes (split-off and limited selfhoods) and expand the self-sense to include much of the unconscious and even the outer world. Because this process, as Samkhya shows, aims at the freedom and joy of Consciousness (cit, purusa), we can say that individuation is in the service of enlightenment but goes beyond it in that it brings enlightenment into ordinary, everyday life. This "inner" process parallels the work of culture, which as we have seen brings transcendent experience, of which Consciousness is the paradigm, into mundane life (and moves us from the mundane to the transcendent).  Thus individuation is culture within, and culture is individuation writ large.

Gnostic demiurge and the 1%

The parallel between the Gnostic demiurge (essentially a selfish, egotistic, senex god) and the late capitalist cultural complex (where a similar “god” reigns) is on my mind.  Following Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), individualism is inherent to the capitalist vision. The elect, chosen, saved, comprise a subset of individuals (a relatively small number, and growing smaller as wealth concentrates).  But unlike Weber, late capitalism seems to have given up on the possibility of transcendence even among the elect, and in revenge against an absent god has chosen to take his place, to wall in Eden and indulge in pleasure in order to distract itself from the horror outside the gates.  This image is almost identical to the Gnostic demiurge hidden in cloud by his mother Sophia after she recognized the barrenness of her parthenogenic offspring.  There sits the false god, unable to see beyond his estate though all powerful within it.

Apocalyptic affect: The cultural complex in a selfless world

 A workshop in New Orleans, August 2012

Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies (JSSS)

End-of-the-world fantasies herald—or manifest—profound changes in psyche. The year 2000 was the occasion for a millenarian fantasy that still, twelve years later, seems unresolved. Reasons for its longevity are not hard to find: Y2K proved more than a scary dream, as a series of all-too-real catastrophes have plagued society and the planet ever since. To pass some of the more devastating in review: for the United States, two unconventional wars followed the 9-11 destruction of the New York twin towers, the largest oil spill ever spoiled the Gulf of Mexico, and a massive economic collapse now in its fourth year destroyed hope, especially of the young and poor. For the world as a whole, two massive tsunamis and a nuclear catastrophe were added to the specter of global warming and melting of the polar ice caps, which is already flooding low-lying island countries and threatening millions of people. What is the relationship of these events to the collective consciousness of the present moment, the “spirit of these times” as Jung characterized the Zeitgeist of pre-World War I Europe in his Red Book?

 This workshop will approach our current predicament symbolically, viewing it as a “cultural complex,” Kimbles' and Singer’s term for the specific psychological pattern—generally unconscious—that rules a culture at a given moment.   Although scarcely new in his time, the situation we face was most succinctly diagnosed in Nietzsche’s dictum that “God is dead,” and His demise lies behind both the ongoing terror of the millennium and its converse, the narcissistic fantasy of indefinite human potential and even physical immortality. The psychic loss of God—which leaves us wandering in an abyss of unmeaning without Him—also brings the end of “sacred time” (Eliade).  Henceforth (symbolically post-2000), immersion in the chaos of profane “history” gives rise to a multi-layered structure of anguish, denial, inflation, and narcissistic rage. Jung said that “The fundamental question for Man is whether he is related to something infinite or not.”  For modern humans, this relationship is strained to the breaking point; the other pole of our ego-self axis has been stripped away and the ego flies off into space, on the one hand asserting an inflated autonomy and individualism (a manic defense), while underneath experiencing anguish and rage at the divine failure. This is the cultural complex of the present moment in the West, the spirit of this time. Both inflation and resentment deny the reality of God’s absence, and avoid the descent into the depths that might give hope of renewal.

We suggest that the synchronistic eruption of social and planetary disasters during the past fifteen years may be compensating this failure and pushing us to go deeper. This workshop will try to respond by imagining a therapeutic intervention in culture, as we seek to penetrate the ego’s defenses and to identify the green shoots of renewal already poking up from the cinders. Participants are invited to present dreams that may reference apocalypse or God in absentia or renaissance, and to join in the imagination of healing.

Interpretation in art and life

For my class at Pacifica

Years ago, Susan Sontag wrote a famous essay titled “Against Interpretation” that many of you would agree with. Sontag argues, as some of you have done, that we should attend to the unmediated power of the work of art and set aside the irritable tendency to overthink it critically. I agree with her, and would ask, in fact, how anyone could disagree?

On the other hand, we also mostly agree that in “our times” (meaning in all times experienced in their “profane” every-dayness) the sacred is mostly absent and to locate it takes strenuous and faithful work, the sort of thing the Buddha did before his enlightenment and that Joseph Campbell (following Jung) terms the “Hero’s Journey.”

It follows that we need to be open to the immediacy of art but at the same time must complete a quest to achieve it. A paradox, is it not? Yes, but we have made progress, as it is now clear that immediacy is not immediate! It requires somehow attuning the human organism (body-mind) to the transcendent. Now we are on more familiar territory, that of the symbol and transcendent function, and developmentally of the individuation process.

Let’s look at the symbol in particular. From the beginning of his psychological development Jung understood symbols as engines to transform psychic energy (libido) to a higher, more spiritual (numinous) level. I want to suggest that this transformation itself can be understood as a kind of interpretation of both the archetypal forms that underlie the symbols and of the human psychophysiology that receives them. Symbols are like a key carved from the living body of the unconscious that fits into the lock of our body-minds and opens them to the light and power of the archetypes. Art, on this view, is never unmediated, and in fact works precisely as a mediator between sacred and profane, the unconscious and the conscious mind. On the other hand, when it is successful (the definition of greatness in art is success) art does plunge us into the unmediated. It is just like a fairy tale where the hero rides his little pony into the dark forest where he comes upon an enchanted princess. The vision of the princess is unmediated, but without the pony (the symbol) he could never get to her.

In the terms of my simple theory of culture, art lives in World Three but, when it succeeds, it drops us—hair on end, and chills down our spine—into the midst of World Two. Unsuccessful interpretation of art descends from World Three to World One, and becomes part of the mundane realm that the art work sought initially to escape. This triumph of the banal, which occurs all too frequently in secondary work about art (as Sontag said), is tragic but not essential. In my opinion, our response to art, as the ecstasy of World Two dissolves into the “orgasmic” afterglow that follows the esthetic experience, should and can become itself a new part of World Three, a particle of culture performed in and by our lives. In other words, art should “change our lives,” as Kafka said, a change that constitutes what Eliade calls turning chaos into cosmos and Jung terms (in the personal sphere) individuation.