“My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that had no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt from which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered.”
“Man cannot compare himself with any other creature; he is not a monkey, not a cow, not a tree…Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity…The life of a man is dubious experiment…Individually, it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all.”
“Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared. But my encounters with the ‘other’ reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved upon my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance and everything else has lost importance by comparison…Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience.”
–Carl Gustav Jung, from his autobiography, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections.”
Had these quotations not been excerpted from Jung’s autobiography, they might easily have been included in my own accounting of my life. If you are unfamiliar with the many fascinating and illuminating writings of the famous Swiss psychiatrist, I highly recommend that you review them as well as the many scholarly analyses of his work. There are many volumes of his writings and they are often scientifically intense and technical generally, but I have found much within them that helps to clarify the importance of examining and exploring our inner life.
Jung’s emphasis on his own inner experience in his autobiography was unsurprising to me once I began to absorb the context in which he described his outer experiences. Reading back in his collected works after I finished “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” I found a passage about “the eruption of unconscious content,” that struck a familiar chord with me:
“Way back in 1973, as a young man embarking on the journey of a lifetime, I experienced what Carl Jung described as ‘the eruption of unconscious content,’ which compelled me to seek the path I continue to pursue to this day.”
It also “…led to the creation of a document entitled, ‘The Beginning, The Foundation, The Entrance.’ Although I did not recognize it as such at the time, I gradually came to view the experience as a pivotal event in my life, and I have spent much of the time since it occurred attempting to decipher its message…I recognized at this point that all I had endured, suffered, and learned prior to that day, had created the foundation for all that was to come.”
We are experiencing a particularly stressful time now across the globe, and many of us are starting to question the circumstances of our lives and to re-evaluate our emphasis on what is truly important. It’s unfortunate that we are experiencing such a serious situation right now, and the losses that families and individuals are enduring as a result are tragically taking a toll on our well-being everywhere you look. There are also stories of recovery and of the heroic efforts of many individuals and groups to help others during this time, and unless you place your focus on the broad range of events taking place around the world, you might suppose that there is little cause for much optimism going forward. It’s important to seek balance in our view of all this and to take whatever steps are possible to mitigate the harm, and to promote the safety and well-being of our fellow travelers whenever possible.
Reflecting as I often do on the responses I receive from those who visit and read here, it seems that, in some small way at least, the sharing of ideas and the expression of both the tangible events of my outer life and the movement of the spirit within me, can encourage others to be introspective as well, and in that sense, the entire path of my own recognition of an “inner evolution,” which began so long ago, has led to this moment in time, and to much of what has been posted here on John’s Consciousness. Especially during this time, I would encourage everyone to use the time in distancing from each other physically and maintaining vigilance in isolation when that occurs, to give serious consideration to giving additional attention to contemplation and what we used to call “soul searching.”
“Without the darkness of the storm, the sun can call nothing to life…Since day and night contain the seeds of one another, there is no darkness unrelieved by the coming dawn, and no stark, sun-ridden day without her stash of mystery.” –M. Holden
Jung quite often addressed the contrasts of light and darkness in his writings, and as M. Holden pointed out, he agreed that “…we subdue the chaotic, uncontrollable elements of the natural world at the price of its fertility, just as we cast out the darkness in ourselves at the price of our own wholeness.” Jung found his interests in psychiatry and noted in his autobiography that among his friends, he encountered only resistance to the subject–a curious, hard resistance that amazed him, and wrote, “I had the feeling that I had pushed to the brink of the world; what was of burning interest to me was null and void for others, and even a cause of dread.” My own inclinations align more closely with philosophy, while being passionately interested in the cognitive science of consciousness. At the heart of the challenges in bringing these ideas together, is not so much the resistance that Jung spoke of, as it is the element of uncertainty, which is only truly possible to dispel and experience subjectively. There are certain aspects of human consciousness that can only be verified “experientially,” but not tested “empirically,” and there are also empirical studies being undertaken which can cast “light” on the subject of consciousness, that are not experienced directly. It is my belief, that when combined, these sometimes disparate elements could very well produce a more encompassing view.
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