Post by david on Oct 28, 2020 18:59:33 GMT
Dear friends,
It is reassuring to know that what you believe was once put into practice and made the basis of civilisation but there is a danger in a religion based on antiquarian research in that it can lead to the assumption that what was once believed is true. There are some people capable of believing just about anything so in time they will get round to believing everything. There is also a danger that historical argument will take the place of philosophy. It is most important that what we believe is true.
How much do we know about the ancient world? Our understanding of ancient religion started from an assumption of cultural superiority over it. One problem with propaganda is that the propaganda itself can become a religion if it appeals to people. The belief that non-Western people are savage led to the belief that there was a pre-rational phase of social development. This led to the conviction that religion originated from a non-rational state of mind. The belief that non Westerners are inferior because they are not rational was turned into the belief that they are superior because they are not rational. By not thinking they attained a mystical oneness with their actions, and mythology was supposed to give the same non-thinking oneness with supernatural beings, and accounted for the vitality and imaginativeness of myths.
J.J. Bachofen developed a theory which interpreted mythological symbolism in terms of sexuality and Freud turned it into a theory of psychology, dividing the mind into the ego, superego and id. He was a materialist which meant he could not conceive of any causative principle higher than the material level, which gave him a very restrictive concept of the superego. Jung was supposed to have a mystical version. His main innovation was to remove the distinction between the superego and the id and put them both together as the unconscious mind. That meant he could not make any distinction between the superconscious and the subconscious. At times he even used the word psyche for the unconscious. His “collective unconscious" was an attempt to avoid a superconscious, while the theory of synchronicity was an attempt to find a mystical explanation without a higher than material intelligence.
The whole point of mysticism is that it refers to a state of absolute existence beyond this world which is based on pure and immutable concepts not found in irrational behaviour. The best illustration the difference between mysticism and psychotherapy is the knife symbol. Jung’s explanation, given in Analytical Psychology, that it is the male intellect because it cuts,
separates and dissects. This explanation is important because it gives the impression that intellect is inhuman, though Jung probably never intended this.
On the level of absolute existence nothing can be destroyed. What appears to be destroyed is illusion which is not actually destroyed because it never really existed. If you were to see a knife as it really is you would see something removing the false to reveal the true nature of existence. This is what discrimination is about. All metals are consolidated light and each metal is a different colour. This is what the mystical explanation is about. If you could see the different metals as they really are you would see different colours. A knife is made from a piece of red and red is fire. Fire draws air into it and this is a feminine symbol. What is drawn in is re-radiated in the more subtle form of light. It is purified and finds its correct form. If you were to see a knife as it really is you would see the entire universe flowing into its point to find its true nature. This sort of thing cannot be comprehended in the explanation Jung gave in The Practice of Psychotherapy: ‘Indeed the whole world of myth and fable is an outgrowth of unconscious fantasy just like the dream”.
When you look at it this way you realise that the reason why mysticism seems irrational is not because it is outside reason - you cannot be outside reason because reason is not a thing - but because we are not thinking in the terms necessary to comprehend it. When we begin to grasp its true nature we find it is quite rational. You cannot approach mysticism from dream analysis but only by thinking from first principles and that does not mean first prejudices - and prejudice does not mean modern belief. The rantings of the bigots of three thousand years ago are still the rantings of bigots. A problem with Jung is that because he did not conceive of the objective reality behind symbolism he saw no need to distinguish between true and false. He muddled a lot of symbols together, and this is most important when he tried to discern the symbolic nature of masculinity and femininity. He declared that the mother symbol often takes the form of a monster which he justified from mythology. Much of this is propaganda; the name Medusa, the Gorgon who turned people into stone by looking at them, means “guardian”. This is not the name of a monster.
Freud’s superego, ego and id correspond to Heaven, Earth and Hell. Concepts in absolute existence take a degenerate form and these manifest in the id. Jung put Heaven and Hell in the same category. The so called “dark side” is not the path of power; the most powerful things exist in the daylight, it is furtive things which work at night. People confuse power with danger; this is the heart of the fascination with evil. The scorpion is more dangerous than the tiger. Black as a symbolic colour is the colour of humility and the unadorned.
What we are arriving at is that people will believe anything that gives them excuses: this is at the core of “noble savage” fantasies. People who could not prove that their way was correct tried to argue that there are people who lived that “noble” way and they lived better, but it is not true. People who use smoke and drums for telecommunication know what the space between the ears is for. What people do not realise is that the suprarational includes the rational. What excludes the rational is the subrational. To try to become one with your actions by not thinking is to try to become one with them on the physical level. The mystical way is to become one with the principle governing them. There is no reason to suppose that rationalists are any more intolerant than any other people and it is better to consider the truth of a principle logically than to take into account personalities, which is at best irrelevant and can lead to abusive argument.
Intellectual meditation, when the basic method is understood, does not require a teacher.
If we look back at the knife symbol we see feminine symbolism associated with a weapon which is understood by seeing the knife as a concept. It is on the level of concept that a woman has to act in order to use a knife. Because Jung made no distinction between sub and super consciousness he saw the knife as a sexual object which makes it difficult to think in terms of acting from the idea of the knife. Jung believed that the unconsciousness of men is female, “the anima”, and the unconsciousness of women is male: “the animus”. There is only one absolute existence, of which both male and female minds are equally reflections.
Jung justified Earth Mother symbolism by medieval alchemical writings, but it never occurred to him that these writings could be wrong. Jung’s perspective does not allow right and wrong to apply. Medieval writers could not write freely on religion and when there are truths which are unacceptable those most ready to compromise are likely to be the most influential. There is a hint given in a text which Jung quotes: ‘Then Beya (the maternal sea) rose up over Gabricus and enclosed him in her womb, so that nothing more of him was to be seen. And she embraced Gabricus with so much love that she absorbed him completely into her nature, and dissolved him into atoms.” Jung’s comment on this is: “The sea has closed over the King and Queen, and they have gone back to the chaotic beginnings, the massa confusa." There is nothing in the passage to suggest that the Queen was enclosed, and by reading this implication into it Jung changed its interpretation.
The problem with patriarchal religion is that is that it is women who give birth to children. The patriarchal explanation is that this only takes place on the physical level, which is why they equate women with matter and the body. This explanation prevents pregnancy from being seen as a reflection of a higher reality which makes it hard to understand how material things can be reflections of pure ideas on purer levels of existence.
When we try reasoning from first principles we come up against a lot of ideas which do not fit easily into the idea of women as either the weaker sex or the passive earth. Life is created within the female. To bring this about the male beholds the female, moves towards her, attains full consciousness of her and enters her. The female gains a heightened awareness of herself from the male as she creates. The male becomes the child who is born from her. Christianity has
reversed the principle of this mystery by making the female the bride of God. The original stories of Herakles and Hera must have been something like this and the story of Herakles exchanging clothes with Queen Omphale was the result of a muddle created by patriarchalisation of the myths. At the heart of this muddle is the fact that there are ideas in mysticism which people do not want to accept, so they try various ways of evading them.
We now come back to the idea that knives and swords are female symbols, and we discover something which will shock those who like to shock us - that matriarchy is not about monster mothers or wild maenads but an important contemplative principle, that of being consumed in the fire of God’s love.
May She be with you,
David.