I contemplate the Tao everyday. Jung’s psychology was informed by Taoism. He understood that psychic health consisted of a unity of opposites. Western tradition shares this understanding at an esoteric level as one discovers when one studies the perennial philosophy.
See William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” for the yin/yang of God’s creations.
Blake’s poem has the virtue that it expresses astonishment at the phenomenal embodiment of dualism and leaves the matter there rather than to try to rationalize it in some metaphysical schema.
I’ve been reading Dunne, Claire. Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul: An Illustrated Biography and found the book to be very well laid out. For an ignoramus like me who struggles with Jung at times, it cleared up some things.
With reference to wholeness, the necessity of integrating the shadow and of course the anima/animus aspect of our characters in order to find completeness has become clearer to me. It has brought me back to the body/mind/soul idea that was so present in my thoughts when I was actively nursing, and the idea of holistic care, which tries to address all aspects of illness or disease. What I thought then seems right once again, that religion belongs to the soul, rather than the mind and people mix this up. A world-view is located in the mind, but religious experience is like experiencing art and music, which you can’t completely contain. It’s there and then it’s gone. If you are lucky, and you are an artist or musician, you can repeat it. With religious experience we can only re-enact it, but whether it comes to the experience one once had is a matter of grace.
Does that sound right?
Yes, that’s right. And the experience of feeling at one in a natural setting defies mental explanation.
Woody Allen parodied it thus—“I often feel that I am at two with Nature.” His parody only underscores the truth of an existential awareness. We are One.
Yes. Another Jung biography. I’ve read quite a few including his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. I perused the synopses on the one you read on Amazon and it comes highly recommended.
I think of wholeness as a guiding vision, a mandala symbolically balancing the antimony of opposites that unfold across our lifespan. It isn’t achievable in this life for to do that one would have to achieve an end state, whereas life is dynamic.
But it is the opposite pole to wherever I am at the moment that pulls me out of myself toward greater individuation and self-realization. There’s no ecstasy without agony, no grace without its opposite.
For Jung it is the Self that is directing this process within in synchronicity with the Transcendent that is directing it from without. That’s a heroic vision of life compared to my everyday average understanding of things. What Jung called the Self may also be called the soul, the human spirit, the daimon, or the guardian angel.
In my Christian background the human spirit was radically differentiated from the soul. Now I’m entertaining the idea that the soul is the archetype of life while the search for meaning or the quest for higher consciousness has a different route. The soul finds its home in the ordinary details of everyday life and does not in itself have an urgent need for understanding or achievement. Soul resides in the valleys of life and not the peaks of intellectual spiritual or technological efforts. The soul is the psyche’s actual life including the present mess it is in its discontent dishonesty and thrilling illusions. The human spirit is that dimension of human experience that is vertical tending toward abstraction development evolution and transcendence. That is not inconsistent with my earlier Christian understanding. But the attitude toward the soul is newer and more accepting.
As I wrote above, when I was actively nursing, I had this theory based on experience, that the soul was experiential knowledge and was moved emotionally more than intellectually. It helped me feel into an event, a scene, or an encounter before I understood it. Especially in emergency situations, it meant that I was moving before rationally thinking. In fact, I often had to go away to understand what had happened. When I did that, and after I meditated, I had the combination of emotional and intellectual understanding. When I stopped nursing, this intuition was still there, but I was expected to react rationally rather than emotionally, which I could do, but it wasn’t second nature.
I found that my spiritual life was the same, and my spontaneous reaction to a text, a sermon or in a group was closer to the truth that I intuited than some rational statements of other people. I asked myself why they couldn’t feel it. Furthermore, I was told that I had to put this intuition to the back, and first take in the words, which I found to be a contradiction of the spirit versus the letter. At the same time, I preached and held bible meetings in this exciting state that moved people as well. I could feel something happening when we “felt” the message and people were surprised at themselves, for reacting to it.
At the same time, I rejected the hyperventilation that I experienced as Pentecostalism or Evangelical spirit, because it seemed not to be spontaneous, but pumped up. It wasn’t natural to me, and I found myself sat between the chairs, not identifying completely with either side. I tried then to contain myself within Buddhist rationality, which helped me professionally in management, but I found it to be lacking spiritually, which finally caused burnout and depression.
It didn’t help that my idea, that the New Testament is designed for emotional/spiritual reading and is problematic when rationality rules, was rejected by people. They wanted to be assured that there was indeed a God in their idea of heaven and that Jesus went there after his death. It was too flimsy to suggest that the spiritual truth is beyond the pointing finger of the Bible. Even the rational argument that reality is far more, far greater than the reality portrayed in the Bible, didn’t work for other people. I was told that I was too intense and reading up on how other religions expressed a similar spiritual experience was leading me astray.
Consequently, I find myself alone with my experience, unable to deny what I have come to know, but also unable to restrict myself. Jung speaks to me in this immediate way, although I can’t say that his experiences are mine. But this new book has many examples which help me see that he was at least on a similar journey, despite the differences.
This is an interesting post, and i read the whole thing,
but is there a single point you are trying to get to here?
I’d say there were several points made 
Ok ill try to use my human brain to realize this.
Maybe i never told you:
I was born Jehovah’s Witness.
I was not baptized though.
A lot of crazy stuff happened.
Now I am mostly LDS.
I have a non religious side as well.
Which is mine and in this i do as i please.
I don’t live for my religion.
It is just part of how i commune.
I wish that the buddhists were more unified and organized.
Bob–
The archetypal psychological approach awakens awareness of one to the uniqueness of one’s interior life. With uniqueness there is a loneliness–the recognition that, since you’re inner experience is unique, no one will ever understand you completely. With his incredible fantasy life Carl Jung is the prototype and hero of this experience. It’s the counterpoint to the they-self that dictates what it is to be from the social nexus without. One aspect of my experience at this point is that I don’t think in terms of belief. I contemplate the symbols, images and propositions then pass through my mind while suspending judgment about their ultimate truth–the ultimate truth being, I suppose, beyond comprehension.
What do your latter-day-saint friends think about your attacks on the “Jew God”?
The LDS friends are reformed christians as far as i know.
They think the Jew-God is all loving, for example.
I don’t tell them about this because I don’t think they want to hear it.
Those folks are funny to me. There is a latter day?!?!?!
We live forever!!!
There are no saints, in a negative zero sum existence everyone in all existence is violating someone’s consent (sin) whether they want to or not.
The only game worth playing is to acknowledge that existence itself is evil and fight it by being as good as you can.
I hate the Mormons. That’s because I hate religion, it’s not personal.
I just hate when people teach falsehoods to get by.
Yes, I can identify with that. Jung said once that he didn’t believe, he knew! In a way, I feel that I know something too, that I can’t explain, but which forms a backdrop for life, against which the humdrum existence finds depth and meaning. It is something like the bass in music, the shadows in a picture, or the heartbeat of a mother. It is wholeness that is becoming. Having said that, I have a feeling that the experience of wholeness expands to include your peers and family, even neighbours – especially if you have a common experience.
It is probably because I am not existentially threatened (or I don’t perceive myself to be) that I don’t always identify with the biblical stories, because I’m sure that the situation in which stories are told always colours them. Sometimes they strike quite considerably at my heart, other times I struggle to feel what motivated them. I tend to do that in my other reading and writing too. I feel the words that my penfriends write for the experience behind them, which depends, of course, on how much feeling they put into them. Not only that, but I write from the heart and from intuition, which means that processed experience comes through.
This goes a long way to building a collective of soul friends, who are swaying with their thoughts as they are exchanged, like a flock of birds swooping in the sky. That is also an aspect of wholeness that our modern society tends to forget. I encouraged teams to develop this feeling for each other, and they reported how, when it worked, time wasn’t a factor and yet everything was done “in time”. It took a lot of stress out of the work, but required everyone to go along with it.
In your words I see the image of being made whole by complimentary relationships with others or perhaps one special other. The flip side of this is the conflict and codependency that relationships can involve. If on the spectrum there is engulfment on one end and fragmentation on the other, wholeness can be seen as the center, the mean which balances the two extremes. If we accept that something like that is the case, then I suppose it’s the wisdom to do that that we seek in our spiritual practices.
I agree that relationships can complicate our lives, and they can be problematic, but I can’t see a healthy life being possible without them. In my experience, we have the solitary experience of our own mind, body and soul, and we have the communal experience of partner, family, friends and neighbours, who also act as a mirror to us, perhaps sometimes with an unclear or distorted image, but they are essentially the people who can make us aware of the shadow. I think that they make up an aspect of wholeness that we can’t overlook.
In fact, the feeling of flow, the high we get when we harmonise perfectly, even if it is seldom, is something that people have aspired to with their chanting, singing and music making. Of course, the danger here is that the harmony may be the wrong thing to aspire to with certain people. Those who desire harmony above all are in danger of giving their individual integrity for the sake of it. So there remains a tension, between order and chaos, which depends on individual circumstances. I think you are right that this is where we need the wisdom to do that in a healthy way.
Right. The experience of flow is what we’re after. Is it to be found at the center between order and chaos, between the individual and the social? That’s what the Tao Te Ching teaches. Staying with consciousness with awareness seems to involve staying open to the Yin as well as the Yang of experience though we might be inclined to favor one over the other. That’s what I’m attempting to do today in preparation for a concert I’m giving tonight. It’s a process of expression that involves overcoming much anxiety and self-doubt in the presence of the people who comprise the audience.
I hope the concert went well! That is of course one of the most obvious experiences that shows the need for harmonious interaction. But we find ourselves constantly in the middle of people playing their part and we, insofar as we take part, wait for our que and make our contribution. Because this is a permanent fixture, and in a way, we can’t not take part and express ourselves in some way, just as we can’t not communicate, we are reliant upon a friendly environment, that won’t jump on us for a false note. It is also a question of how receptive we are of people taking the music to new melodies and strains.
Upholding our own personal need in the group is something that we learn (or don’t) in the socialisation process, and too many people fail to find the confidence to interact. That is why they lack balance and awareness and fail to keep the tension of yin and yang alive. People are allergic to chaos in some cases and can’t see the chance therein, which is one reason why women are sometimes annoyed that the ancients regarded the feminine as the side of chaos and creativity. We also have the overconfident people who fail to acknowledge their inter-reliance on the collective and strike a chord that grates the sensibility for interaction.
But this is, for me, the wholeness of experience, whether we are musicians or not. It is also the reason why communal singing or chanting is healthy and it is always a pleasure to hear people play music together, if they can accept their role in the group. There is always a time when we talk or even argue about how we play, what we’ll play and diverse specialities that only musicians can relate, but when the music is playing, it is time for harmonious interaction.