Decemeber ‘24 1-to-1 Wiseletter (C. G. Jung)
In December's 1-to-1 Wiseletter, we're looking at a quote by C.G. Jung, the massively influential early 20th-century Swiss depth psychologist.
Carl Gustav Jung
Quote
"The crux of the spiritual problem of today is to be found in the fascination which psychic life exerts upon modern man." Modern Man in Search of a Soul
A Pueblo Indian friend of Jung's once told him in confidence:"We don't understand the whites; they are always wanting something--always restless--always looking for something. What is it? We don't know. We can't understand them. They have such sharp noses, such thin, cruel lips, such lines in their faces. We think they are all crazy.'
Jung goes on to say that his friend had "recognized, without being able to name it, the Aryan bird of prey with his insatiable lust to lord it in every land..." His friend picked up on Western man's spiritual problem, the same one Friedrich Neitzche famously expressed as the death of god in 1882.
Both Jung and Nieztche (and probably the Pueblo too) understood that at the end of the 19th century the West found itself in the throes of a spiritual crisis. Western man looked inward and found a God-shaped hole that was, he realized with horror, in large part self-inflicted by a culmination of the catalytic energies of Enlightenment rationalism, scientific reductionism, and gross materialism.
Western man peered into that hole and found the Unconscious. A new science immediately emerged to study its depths: psychoanalysis. Spiritual-science movements like Theosophy and Anthroposophy arose in parallel with the same goals as the psychoanalysts.
And even though we stand over a century past Rudolf Steiner, Madame Blavatsky, and Sigmund Freud, interest in man's psychic nature is still exploding. Yesterday, it was Freud's id and Oedipal complexes. Today, it's behavioral mechanics, astrology, meditation apps, and "doing the inner work."
Helena Blavatsky, Founder of Theosophy
Common across all is the insistence on self-understanding, something entirely foreign to the man of the medieval and ancient worlds. For that pre-modern man, his inner world was adequately expressed by his religion. But for Jung's modern man, when he enters church or temple, its images and words largely fail to reflect back at him that which he feels on the inside.
Western man thus pursues self-understanding elsewhere with a frightening fixity of purpose. And he does so, he says, in the name of self-improvement. He tells us that at the moment he becomes fully aware of his complexes and traumas, he will become that perfect person and his relationships and the world will follow in tow. Society will function as it should: at peace, equal, harmonious. Our dreams will come true.
But it isn't clear that Western man has moved much closer to illuminating the depths of the hole he discovered some two centuries ago. In fact, his pursuit of self-understanding has become so feverish and dogged that he's begun trying to make the tail wag the dog. He improves the outer world to correct his inner world. Maybe if he perfects culture and society and the economy, that God-shaped hole inside him will fill again.
What is clear is that many of the problems Western man busies himself solving are ones he created in the first place. And so around and around he goes, chasing his tail. Isn't his righteous pursuit of world improvement the Aryan bird of prey at it again, searching, scanning, looking for...what? He probably could not say.
But I sense that he, if even unconsciously, detects that the prey of his pursuit lays hidden inside. It's there, he knows secretly, that all of the frustrations and contradictions and paradoxes of existence flow together. He suspects, as Jung did, that from these recesses, "new spiritual forms will arise; they will be expressions of psychic forces which may help to subdue the boundless lust for prey of Aryan man."
QUESTION
Where in the outer world do you find inner peace?
Cheers,
John
