"Since it is highly probable that we are still a long way from the summit of absolute consciousness, presumably everyone is capable of wider consciousness, and we may assume accordingly that the unconscious processes are constantly supplying us with contents which, if consciously recognized, would extend the range of consciousness"    (Vol 7, para 292)

Psychology is one of the most difficult of all sciences since it requires a slight modification in the scientific method because the experimenter is always a part of the experiment. Jung was unique because Jung was one of the few and rare psychologists who believed and acted upon the logical conviction that anything that interested humans was worth studying because it revealed, not the nature of reality, but the nature of human psychology. UFOs, ESP, ghosts, God, religion, myths, quantum mechanical speculations, the -ologies, and so on, were pathological indications and not something to shy away from in psychological research. Jung believed all of these things had a psychological explanation, not a physical one, and that means Jung was a true scientist because he regarded nothing as so sacred that it wasn't worth studying and psychologizing.

For example, quantum mechanics tells us more about the psychology of scientists than it does anything about objective physical reality. Jung was never interested in cutting-edge physics, he was interested in the interpretations that scientists were reporting at the cutting-edge of physics. Physics, especially cutting edge physics like quantum mechanics is, is a mysterious thing and "...whenever man encounters something mysterious he projects his own assumptions into it without the slightest self-criticism" (Vol 11, para 95). In other words, the unconscious projections of scientists onto unexplainable mysteries like quantum mechanical states tells us more about how the mind works than how the world works, therefore being able to understand the ideas behind the interpretations is very psychologically enlightening. Cosmology and quantum mechanics are a gold mine of psychological insight into the working of the mind.

The whole discipline of quantum mechanics is based on the still unresolved mystery of being able to explain the two-slit experiment with a mechanically repeatable experiment, and until that is done, quantum mechanics will remain the glorious stuff of New Age gurus. The mysteries of quantum mechanics has been left wide open as a springboard for any silly theory that comes along because the kooks have no fear of being contradicted by any tangible facts (at least in the near future). In my opinion, I consider Dr Michio Kaku and Dr Jack Sarfetti, perfect examples of what I am talking about. These doctors can imply whatever they want about quantum mechanics without fear of being held intellectually or scientifically accountable for anything they say because there is no established body of facts to contradict their fairytales, and no science police exist requiring them to provide mechanically repeatable experiments to force them to put their money where their mouth is. They are getting away with quantum mechanical murder.

When alchemy was a 'modern cutting edge science', it too found increasing points of conjecture with reality. That is until science progressed itself and established itself more firmly in actual reality, whereupon alchemy was discovered to be just someone's imagination gone wild. Likewise, quantum mechanics is a fringe science and not yet well established. Quantum mechanics is at the point that alchemy was in it's beginnings: Too many unknowns and too many metaphysical explanations. That is the exact reason so many New Age and old age religions love to use quantum mechanics to substantiate their religions because without facts, anything you make up can be substantiated with metaphysical explanations.

It sounds to me like you've been reading Richard Noll instead of reading Carl Jung. Noll has accused Jung of being everything under the sun from a racist, pro-Nazi, anti-jewish, a womanizer, and a cult leader. Hehehe! Is there anything absolutely evil that Jung didn't do according to Noll? It is interesting to note Noll prefers the logical fallacy of attacking the character of Jung instead of attacking the science of Jung, as if discrediting Jung's personal life would also somehow magically discredit Jung's science. Real scientists don't care about a scientist's personal life because scientists dedicated to the cause of science only care about science and not grocery-store tabloidism about someone's personal life. Think about just what kind of stories would cause you to discredit any scientific theory on a basis other than logic and validatable evidence. For example, Einstein committed incest and he was a womanizer. Should we all reject Einstein's ideas now on that basis alone? What next? If we found out that Newton was a closet gay, should we reject his theories too? Is no validatable evidence acceptable to us unless we first scrutinize that researchers bibliography for any behaviours that we personally deem unacceptable? I should hope not!

So even if we were to try and pretend that all of what Noll accuses Jung of in his books were true, we must remember that rationally and scientifically it is the observer's report and not the observer's personality or personal life that is of any importance in the advancement of knowledge, so no matter how much anyone tries to successfully or unsuccessfully slander or demean Jung, they can never undo his excellent mechanically repeatable observations and insights into the way the mind works.

...The facts speak louder than the hearsay!

Dr Noll indicates that Jungian Psychology is "built on an unstable foundation" and he cites Jung's outdated 1916 lecture titled THE EGO AND THE UNCONSCIOUS. No science can start off with a stable foundation because that would imply we already knew the answers before we even started! Chemistry was an offshoot of the unstable foundation of alchemy. Astronomy was an offshoot of the unstable foundation of astrology. That interesting bit of trivia in no way invalidates the truthfulness or accuracy of those sciences today. If Dr Noll was aware of the history of science he would know this.

The important thing about Jung's 1916 lecture is: Did Jung make any further progress on his first and most primitive ideas since 1916? What Dr Noll fails to realize about science is, no scientist can start out with all the right answers, but so what? No science will ever have all the answers, and no science will pretend to have all the answers. That just isn't the purpose of science. And unlike the religions of cults, science can always go back and rebuild or modify it's foundation, like it did for Darwin and Newton.

The fact is if you read for yourself every single one of Jung's works, you will not find a hint or trace of anything racist, pro-Nazi, anti-semitic, or womanising in them anyway.

I believe the only valid question Dr Noll raises in his books is, 'Is Jungism a science'? Unfortunately, when it comes to the science of psychology, almost all that psychologists have to work with are highly unscientific interpretations, experiences, and testimonies, ie -- we can only take a person at their word when they say they have dreamed about something in particular. We have no way of validating what a person has dreamed or not. With psychology, we also cannot separate the observer from the observation and that makes it extremely difficult to be objective with a subject matter that is by nature, very subjective, ie -- the shadow that we uncover in our subjects may be the same shadow we harbor in ourselves.

Just remember, if you happen to be reading this FAQ and are not interested in learning anything more than Jungism, if you are not interested in other viewpoints, then and only then you have become part of the only Jungian Cult that actually exists -- but the same thing could be said about any narrow viewpoint then, couldn't it? It would be highly prejudiced for anyone who is interested in the science of psychology to direct their attention only to Jung. Please don't take me wrong, but Jung is not the only person in the world worth listening to in the field of psychology. That would amount to deifying Jung instead of learning from him.

Normally, the things discussed in this section would have appeared in the DEFINITIONS section of this FAQ because consciousness (and all it's related derivations) is often misused in confusing or misleading ways, but this subject is such a special case since there is more to say on this subject than a simple definition could do it justice.

CONSCIOUSNESS. In general, consciousness is the ability to focus attention; it refers to what we're aware of at any particular moment. The more we are aware of, the more conscious we are. Self awareness is one of the higher forms of consciousness

Consciousness is an easily observable trait, simply based on observing focusing behavior. The ability to restrict our focus of awareness has advantages and disadvantages: the disadvantage being that it implies a narrowing of our field of view, and the advantage being the ability to take the mystery out of a phenomenon by magnifying lower level details and improving response time to certain stimuli. But no conscious being can be aware of all that is happening around itself all the time -- this would result in information overload (not to mention, impossible). Hence, by definition, consciousness is also limited -- limitation implying finiteness and finiteness implying manageability and accessibility. This is in direct contrast to the unconscious, which is unlimited, unmanageable, and unaccessable. Yet, like the undersized rudder of a large ship, we can take control of our conscious mind and attempt to steer our unconscious mind in the direction we would like to go.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS. Basically, when Jung spoke of the collective conscious he was referring to a society, a civilization, or a tribunal as a whole.

SUBCONSCIOUSNESS. This was a term that Jung unfortunately avoided using, resulting in some confusion at times which aspect of the mind Jung was speaking of. In modern psychology the subconscious is meant to refer to something that lurks just beneath consciousness, just like a SUBmarine lurks just below the water and not above it, and with a little coaxing can be brought to the surface. It is like something we see out of the corner of our eye; if it catches our attention, we can turn to it and deal with it consciously or we can continue to ignore it. Throughout his writings, Jung clearly speaks of 'levels of unconscious' with the very 'deepest layers', the layers containing the archetypes for example, incapable of becoming conscious, while the 'shallow layers', where complexes reside, are easily capable of becoming conscious. Those 'shallow layers' are what we refer to today as the 'subconscious' and those 'deeper layers' are what we refer to today as the 'unconscious'.

COLLECTIVE SUBCONSCIOUS. There is no such thing as a collective subconscious because the contents of the subconscious are completely personal in nature.

UNCONSCIOUSNESS. Unconscious does not simply mean that we aren't conscious of something, it means it is beyond our ability to be conscious of it to begin with. This eliminates instances of where someone is unaware of something because they choose to restrict their field of awareness, in which case they are subconsciously aware of it and not unconsciously aware of it.

The unconscious is vastly greater in size (read: scope) than the conscious or the subconscious, leaving much more to study within this realm of the mind, yet relatively little is known about the unconscious as compared to the conscious. Since the unconscious is a part of a person which he or she has no awareness of, a scientist or psychologist can't just go up to someone and ask them what his or her unconscious is like and expect to get a reliable answer. You also cannot make the unconscious conscious, ie -- you cannot be aware of that which you are unaware of, since that would be a contradiction of terms. This is why the study of the unconscious is so difficult and prone to subjectivity. What Jung observed was that as history progressed with time, the unconscious mind evolved, not by any conscious decision, but on it's own, and it evolved by taking what used to be unconscious and making it conscious. In this way, by observing the history of consciousness, Jung was able to learn about the history of the unconscious.

Jung referred to symbols as the language of the unconscious. A symbol can be anything that is used to represent anything else; a sound, lines on a piece of paper, a piece of artwork, or anything at all actually. Obvious examples of symbols are crosses, mandalas, signs, and mathematics formulas. Not so obvious examples of symbols are words, letters, and gestures. Symbols express what is nonrational and indescribable in ordinary speech, since ordinary speech can only deal with three-dimensional realities, therefore implying that symbols were obvious representations of things expressed by the unconscious mind but whose meaning was unobvious to the conscious mind. The symbols that appear in dreams can have very personal meanings known only between the dreamer and their subconscious, but it still remains as a language peculiar to the subconscious and unconscious.

But like the collective subconscious, there really is no such thing as an unconscious for everything unconscious is collective, although understanding the meaning of unconscious is excellent background material for studying the collective unconscious...

COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUSNESS. The collective unconsciousness is the sum of our instincts and archetypes. Instincts determine our actions such as hunger and sex. Archetypes determine our perceptions such as intuition and apprehension...both are inherited.

Jung's verifiable study of the universal motifs that appeared across many cultures that never had any social contact with each other, and over great times and distances, nullifies the belief that the collective unconscious is the result of societal embedding because societal embedding requires persistent communication between all members of those societies and that did not happen with the Mayans living in the Americas while the pre-Columbus culture lived on in Europe, for example. The universal quality of both the Mayan motifs and the pre-Columbus motifs is a strong indicator that both cultures had acquired the same imagination and the same way of mentally experiencing the world and since they didn't inherit these qualities through socializing, and that leaves only one other way for both cultures to acquire the same universal motifs: genetic inheritance. The Mayans, Incas, and the Aztecs were overwhelmed by diseases imported by the first settlers from Europe. This confirmed the fact that the Mayans, Incas, and the Aztecs indeed were completely isolated from the old world...and being isolated from the rest of the world, they still had the same inherited predisposition to express their psychologies in the same manner.

No discussion of consciousness could be complete without a discussion of that thing which consciousness is supposed to be aware of: Reality! A common error that people make about Jung is that Jung psychologized REALITY when he actually only psychologized PERCEPTION. It is our fantasies that are often what seem most real to us: Our expectations of others are driven by fantasies, our notions of acceptable behavior in relationships are heavily influenced by fantasies, and our notions of good and evil are the activity of fantasies. What we call 'reality' is often the impression we get of the world though our selective attention to things which we deem 'significant'. We ignore most of our sensory impressions in order to filter out that which contradicts our beliefs about reality.

Why would people search for truth without using their minds and their senses? If you don't use at least one of your five senses to get to know reality, then by definition you are resorting to imagination. While the five senses are limited and cannot be fully trusted, the mind, when properly used, can allow us to surpass those limitations and lack of trust. A deaf person lacks a sense of hearing, but sound doesn't require a human ear to be physically confirmed, all it requires is physical verification of the mechanical wave motions of air (for example) by other mechanical devices such as microphones or speakers. So the deaf person doesn't have to have ears to know that sound exists or not. A blind man may not have eyes to see with, but a blind man doesn't have to have eyes to know that color exists or not. Scientists can determine the exact color of an object by measuring the electromagnetic wavelengths of light it reflects or absorbs in the range of 500 to 700 nanometers. It is possible for the blind man to measure the entire visible spectrum of sunlight and know that you are inaccurately describing sunlight as 'white' when it has more yellow and red than a real white has.

The stage magician can so easily fool us because we are all so easy to fool. Although we find it extremely difficult to argue with our dull and indeterminate senses, they aren't fully trustworthy, for what feels 'warm' to one person might feel 'cold' to another. We cannot even fully trust our reasoning processes and that is why science exists -- so we can rely on logical and proven methodology instead of our gullible and easily fooled minds and senses. It is like we are all deaf and blind when it comes to being able to perceive all that reality has to perceive, but that is a limitation that can be overcome by proper use of our minds and senses.

From our point of view 'in here', the 'world out there' is 'unreal' because it isn't like reality as we imagine it to be 'in here'. We rarely experience reality as it is, we experience reality as we believe it to be, ie -- we cannot perceive those things for which we have no label for, our expectations of others are driven by projections of our inner fantasies, and instead of seeing the universe as it really is we project an imaginary God onto it. The 'universe' as most people experience it, is a self-made virtual reality that we can, like incredible superhumans, bypass at anytime simply by raising our consciousness and seeing through the projections. Anything outside of our five senses can only be a make believe fantasy unless that thing outside of our five senses can inadvertently interact with reality in such a way that it can be perceived by one or more of our five senses as a side-effect.

From this inner point of view, time and space are both structures of consciousness, just as our bodies are. In psychological reality, there simply is really no past or future - there is only the present. Rather than being an 'illusion', the reality I or you experience is at least as real as we perceive, and in many ways a 'whole lot more real'. What we label as reality is usually not reality at all but our impression of what we perceive reality as being. The problem being that the majority of us voluntarily ignore most of our sensory impressions in an effort to keep our consciousness limited enough so that we can reduce reality to the stylized distortions and transformed simplifications of what we hope and wish reality is, each of us trying to custom define a version of reality that we can personally swallow. This doesn't imply that reality is merely a 'personal illusion', what it implies is that I am my own reality -- my consciousness is the only reality that I have ever directly known, ie -- We see things not as they are we see things as we are. If reality were just our perceptions, it would be impossible to imagine all the people of the world defining gravity in EXACTLY the same way then, with each and every person falling off of cliffs in exactly the same way just as science predicts they will. No one ever defines or perceives the reality of gravity differently from any other person. Reality isn't an illusion, our voluntarily limited perceptions of reality are. The less we limit ourselves, the more conscious we become and the more 'real' reality becomes.

The real small-minded person then, is the one who believes, without any factual confirmation, that something outside of everyone else's senses (ie -- outside of physical reality) exists just because someone said it might exist. The mistake most people make is to assume that if someone can imagine it, it therefore must exist. How can anyone possibly know if something exists if you are not or cannot be aware of it, ie -- I have blue curtains in my house. Were you aware of this fact before you read it?

We must remember that there is nothing that anyone can directly experience in actual reality (except ourselves) for everything that we experience must first pass through the filter of our minds. For example, what we 'see' before us is never what is really in front of us. Our eyes mechanically detects the colors and contrasts of a scene and the image impressed upon the retina is passed on to vision area of our brains. From there it is interpreted by our minds. But what if our minds interpret this image incorrectly? Then an optical illusion is said to 'exist'. So because of this detachment from actual physical reality, we must resort to outside means to determine what reality actually is by using agreed upon standards such as the scientific method, measuring instruments, telescopes, microscopes, and so on.

Have you read the book OTHER LIVES, OTHER SELVES by the Jungian psychotherapist, Roger J Woolger, PhD? The teaser on the back cover of the book states, "It doesn't matter whether you believe in reincarnation or not. The unconscious mind will almost always produce a past life story when invited in the right way...even if the conscious mind is highly skeptical, the unconscious is a true believer!". This is an interesting comment because this is very similar to what Jung said in regards to a patient of his who came in and claimed to have an (imaginary) cancer. Jung states, "What, then, shall we say to our patient with the imaginary cancer? I would tell him, 'Yes, my friend, you are really suffering from a cancer-like thing, you really do harbour in yourself a deadly evil. However, it will not kill your body, because it is imaginary. But it will eventually kill your soul. It has already spoilt and even poisoned your human relations and your personal happiness and it will go on growing until it has swallowed your whole psychic existence. So that in the end you will not be a human being any more, but an evil destructive tumour'".

If all the animals in the animal kingdom have a drive to become adult individuals and to complete their life cycles according to a predetermined pattern -- and this drive is inherited -- why is it that the human animal would, for no apparent reason at all, be the only exception? Jung was not so arrogant to assume otherwise and theorized that there must be an inherited instinctual driving force behind generic human behaviours just as there was for all other animals. Jung called these inherited instinctual driving forces, the 'archetypes'. Being genetically incorporated into the structure of the brain, naturally the archetypes would be considered universal.

If there weren't some kind of genetic component to the human psyche, then it would be very hard to explain how everyone has the same exact components to the psyche as everyone else or why certain psychological functions of the brain 'lateralize' to specific areas of the brain and never at random? What makes you human is your make up and you wouldn't be human if you didn't look and ACT like one, so naturally you must have inherited that ACT from somewhere because you certainly didn't learn it by example (ie -- you didn't have to look inside someone's brain to know where to place your language functions in exact place in the brain as everyone else).

Most people assume that humans aren't animals, that we are somehow superior in every way to mere animals, and that 'everything human started when the first human was born'. Human archetypes go back way before the first humans appeared. We see this in the collective behaviours of every other animal in the animal kingdom, for example, do we see any lions, acting like chipmunks or gorillas or fish? No, every lion has an inherited behavior specific just to lions, a behavior that is well-suited to sharp teeth and sharp claws. Evolutionists have observed this and call it, "form fits function".

Examples of archetypal figures that Jung uncovered within his own dreams, in the dreams of patients, and in the folk stories and myths of every age and nation, are those of the wise old man or woman, the eternal mother, the magical child, the trickster, the warrior, the hero, the shaman, the mystic, the mandala, and so on and so on. But although these are legitimate examples of archetypal figures, they are no longer archetypal figures since they have risen to consciousness and been identified. At one time, they were all archetypes but today, who knows what new and undiscovered archetypes are in control of us? We will never know the answer to that question in foresight, only in hindsight.

It would be a mistake to believe that there is a fixed 'psychology of archetypes' in the warrior, the hero, the shaman, the mystic, and so on. Archetypes manifest in various ways and if the psychology of archetypes isn't as versatile as the archetypes are, it won't be able keep up with each unique individual manifestation of the archetypes. Archetypes are vague and impossible to pinpoint because they are unconscious manifestations and can only be indirectly inferred from behavioral trends. To try and pin down an archetype as though someone could force the unconscious to be conscious would only be fooling themself and proving that they don't understand Jung or the concept of the archetypes.

Like actual genes themselves, archetypes are invisible, not because archetypes are microscopic, but because archetypes are non-consciously developed, ie -- unconscious functions. To be unconscious means that the conscious cannot perceive, in fact, does not even know it exists. The only connection that Jung and other's have observed between the conscious and the unconscious, is the language of symbols. Symbols are the internal mind's only real mode of communication; the spoken language being a conscious invention.

Jung realized that everything we experience, we first and foremost experience within the confines of our minds and not in actual reality. This is not to say that what we imagine as real seems any less real than actual reality, but rather our experiences are influenced by our archetypes in such a way that it causes us to react to them in ways that are specifically human-like. Modern day research has confirmed Jung's claim that our tendency to react to the world in specifically human ways is genetically inherited -- most notably Bower's work with newborn infants.

But the archetypes are only an 'instinct' in an analogous sort of way. Whereas an instinct determines an animal's behavior, an archetype only determines an animals disposition for a certain behavior. Archetypes are not to be regarded as fully developed pictures in the mind at birth as instincts are regarded, but rather archetypes are more like a negative that needs to be developed over time with experience. It might be more helpful here to visualize the archetype more like the foundation of a house: everyone begins with the same foundation, but each person builds a different house upon it.

Projections are "the unconscious fantasy mechanism by which certain arbitrary and usually disliked traits and emotions of ourselves are imagined to be the traits and emotions of someone else". A projection is like saying to oneself, 'Whatever I feel and think must be what everyone else feels and thinks' -- not being able to distinguish between the parts of us that are universal and the parts that are personal. Archetypes can never be observed directly but have only been indirectly inferred from our tendency to personify, mythologize, and spiritualize things we do not understand. When we encounter new or unfamiliar behaviours in other people, especially other races or cultures, we assume the reasons for their behavior by extrapolating the reasons that we would have for doing them. That is why projections can be so harmful at times.

Projections often seem more real to us than actual reality itself. For example, the vast majority of people never relate to each other as they really are, rather they respond to others according to the projections unconsciously placed upon them, so in reality most people relate to someone who doesn't even actually exist. This psychology of people who believe and relate to things that don't exist is important to understand, especially when you realize that most beliefs harm people rather then help them. People's behavior is always the result of their beliefs, that is their philosophies in life, because what people believe to be real about the world around them affects how they are going to react to it. This problem is compounded by the fact that human behavior is seldom rational or logical because the unconscious mind isn't troubled about what is reasonable or logical, for it, anything that works is 'real'. For example, during the time of the Crusades and the Inquisitions, Christians everywhere believed that it would be morally insane to calmly stand by while thousands of unbelieving people in the world were being sent to Hell at their death, so any act -- torture, maiming, burning alive, mass murder -- anything was a justifiable act if it meant having the person confess a belief in God before they died so they could go to Heaven. They imagined God being very pleased that they were sending so many thousands of people His way to be in Heaven with Him, so they imagined themselves as saving the world and never allowing themselves to become consciously aware of the immoral individuals that they were actually acting like in reality.

The vast majority of people I meet live in their own world, ie -- they don't relate with me but with their projections of me. So what do you do then? Some claim to challenge their 'games' -- which I and Jung don't call games but projections and personas. I can challenge my own projections but I can't challenge someone else's projections. As Jung noted, with every challenge their will be conflict -- not a very good strategy for starting relationships out with, since the vast majority of people cannot handle conflict very well (if they are brave enough to even do so to begin with) without resorting to violence, name calling, hostility, or resentment. So what do you do? You live with the projections. Humans would not have developed projections if they didn't serve some useful survival function. It isn't as if projections were some gruesome evil that must be purged from our minds, in fact projections can be downright useful consciously. There is nothing wrong with projections, projections are natural and a part of what it means to be a human. To try and eliminate projections is to try and suppress and ignore them, hence forcing them back into unconscious where they can hide and sneak up on you when you least expect it.

Jung wrote about the worship of projections, or hero worship, as definitely being a worship of a projection. Americans are such hero worshippers because the American personality suppresses the hero to such an extant that the only way they can experience the hero is to project it upon others and worship what they believe they do not have. But on the other hand, to paraphrase Jung, "What you see is what you are".

Some archetypes are of such great importance in shaping our personality and behavior that Jung devoted special attention to them, and hence we too shall follow his example by devoting special attention to them as well...

Jung called the persona the "outward facing" part of the psyche because it is that part which faces the world. The "inward facing" part he called the anima in males and the animus in females. Since the anima/animus, or syzygy for short, is the compliment to the persona, it takes on the characteristics that compliment the persona. This means that the anima is feminine and animus is masculine. And just like the shadow influences our relationships with the same sex, the syzygy influences our relationships with the opposite sex.

Although a man may have numerous reasons for being attracted to a woman, these reasons can only be secondary ones, for the primary reasons are set forth in his unconscious: If a man experiences a 'passionate attraction' for a particular woman, the woman undoubtedly will have the same traits as his anima-image of woman.

If the personality is to be well adjusted and harmoniously balanced, the feminine side of a man's personality and the masculine side of a woman's personality must be allowed to express themselves in consciousness behavior. If a man exhibits only masculine traits, his feminine traits remain unconscious and therefore undeveloped, primitive, and unconscious. That is why the most virile appearing men are often weak and submissive inside. A woman who exhibits excessive femininity in her external life would have the unconscious qualities of stubbornness or willfulness, qualities that are often present in a man's conscious behavior.

As we have already discussed, the ego can only be regarded as the center of conscious and if it tries to add unconscious contents to itself, it will be in danger of destruction, like an overloaded vessel which sinks under the strain of taking on too much water. The Self, however, can include both the conscious and the unconscious. The harmonious and magical orchestration and the unconditional acceptance of all aspects of our being make the Self. As the ego expands itself, and realizes more of the Self it becomes more aware of what it already is. The Self is often projected or perceived as 'God', hence God is considered a 'golden shadow'.

If I could sum up all of Jung's work into one sentence, I would say Jung revealed to us that 'I' am never myself, but 'I' am a 'we' and 'I' can see this 'we' everytime I project or personify things that exist around myself in the world. But just who exactly is this 'we' within me? That is a complex question that requires a complex answer: Jung referred to the 'we' as the "...psychic entities that have escaped from the control of consciousness and split off from it, to lead a separate existence in the dark sphere of the psyche, whence they may at any time hinder or help the conscious performance" (Vol 6, para 923)...in other words, the complex. This subconscious complex can be sparked into action by certain externally or internally produced stimuli (images) of any kind, such as a particular word, a thought, a conversation, a movie, or anything, depending on the complex. When stimulated, complexes can set off strong emotions and moods, and automatically generate patterned behaviour of all varieties.

The complexes we see in others are usually turned inside-out. For example, an inferiority complex is really a superiority complex as seen from the outside, ie -- it isn't that a person with a superiority complex sees themselves as superior but they see everyone else as inferior.

At the core of every complex is an archetype. Considering the definition for an archetype as given by Jung, since all complexes develop from our needs, wants, and desires, of course they are all going to have archetypal characteristics to them. Referring back to the section before this one on the archetypes, it was said that the archetype was analogous to the foundation of a house. If we extend that analogy a little bit further, the complex can be envisioned as the furniture that goes into the house and it is the ego-conscious that decides what kind of furniture goes into the house, therefore every complex is mothered by the ego, which means there are no complexes that were not at one time in the ego-conscious.

Let us consider the development of a God complex out of the God archetype. As a person experiences the world, those experiences that are relevant to the Self archetype and are not integrated into ego-consciousness, accumulate in the God complex like iron fillings to a magnet. Then, after gaining sufficient energy of repression from the addition of enough unintegrated God-like experiences, the maturing God complex will develop to the point where it force expression in the consciousness as numinosum and the experience of spirits and visions of God.

The three most important complexes involved in human behavior are the ego, the persona, and the shadow:

The Ego is the 'I' of your mind in exactly the same analogous way as the ego is the 'eye' of your brain. Your eye is that part of you that can focus on the world around you, it perceives reality, and it wanders wherever it chooses, but it is really the rest of the brain that runs the show, only the eye isn't aware of this fact. Likewise, the ego/eye is that part of us that feels and thinks and perceives itself as the 'I'. But it is not the soul of the person -- that function is served by the archetype of the syzygy. This 'I' can focus outwardly (extroverted) or inwardly (introverted), it judges reality, and it wanders wherever it chooses, but it is really the rest of the mind that really runs the show, only the 'I' just isn't aware of this fact.

We conform to the collective in different ways depending on the situation and conformity has always been recognized as an important factor in social life. For example, a young man or woman who cannot put on an act or wear the mask of the corporate image will inevitably find themselves passed over for advancement or out of a job. This mask is called the 'persona' and the persona enables us to get along with people, even those we dislike, in an diplomatic manner. Customs and laws that relate to personal conduct are an expression of a group or collective persona.

We all have multiple personas: the face you present to your wife is not the same face you present to your boss or the face you present to the grocer or the stranger and so on. Some of us may even switch a shadow for a persona depending on the role we are playing!

Many people make the mistake of thinking that the greater the light of our consciousness, the greater our shadow becomes when in reality, the greater our persona becomes the greater our shadow will become.

Most cultures identify or personify themselves with any idealized object that can serve as a suitable mask or projection for their collective personas. For the Nazis it was the 'pure Aryan race' that they unconsciously hid behind. When the collective German ego became inflated with it's over-identification of the mythical Aryan race, this lead them to commit mass genocide of the unconscious projection of their shadow that was hiding behind the Aryan mask -- and this happened to be the Jews. What the Germans saw in the Jews was in reality what they saw in themselves, a part of themselves that they hated so much that they wanted to destroy it at all costs.

Although Jung and many other psychologists consider the Shadow an archetype, technically it is a complex because the Shadow shares many of the characteristics of a complex and none with the archetype: a complex can be directly observed or become conscious and complexes consist of personal contents rather than universal contents.

As we have seen, in order for a us to become acceptable to society, ie -- in order to become more 'civilized', it was necessary for us to tame the parts of our personality that are unacceptable by resisting them. In the process, our ego is strengthened by resisting these undesirable alter egos or morally ugly desires. But the person who suppresses the animal side of their nature may become civilized, but they do so at the loss of spontaneity, creativity, strong emotions, deep insights, and most importantly, they cut themselves off from the wisdom of their instinctual nature. On the other hand, a shadowless life tends to become shallow and spiritless. So we need to have a shadow and hence the reason we have all evolved to have one. Therefore both the persona and the shadow are considered, in large part, as extensions to our ego.

But resisted contents, as we already have guessed due to the nature of the unconscious, don't get forgotten, they remain in the subconscious, where they eventually gain enough energy to force us confront them in the guise of complexes.

The shadow contains more of man's basic animal nature than any other complex does. Because of its extremely deep roots in evolutionary history, it is probably the most powerful and potentially the most dangerous of all the complexes. It is the source of all that is best and worst in man, especially in his relations with others of the same sex.

The keyword when talking about our shadows is 'undeveloped'. The words 'evil' and 'negative' are not applicable but promote further rejection of the shadow, where it can only continue to wreak havoc because of the shadows undeveloped competence.

Like everything subconscious, our own shadows are usually something apparent to everyone else around us except for our own selves. Hence one's own shadow is generally easy to observe: One simply look at the nearest person of the same sex who has characteristics that one really does not like or disapproves of strongly and you will see your own shadow.

If a person finds himself faced by a crisis or difficult life situation, the shadow will use this opportunity to exert its power over the ego. An example would be the compulsive alcoholic who succeeds in overcoming the habit. The reasons for him becoming an alcoholic in the first place would, when he is cured, be forced to reside in the unconscious, awaiting an opportunity to express themselves. This opportunity would become available if the person experiences a traumatic, adverse, or conflict-containing situation that he could not handle. The shadow then steps in with little resistance from the weakened ego, and the person reverts to alcoholism.

When the shadow is stringently repressed by society or when inadequate outlets are provided for it, disaster often ensues. Writing in 1918 at the end of World War I, Jung observed that the "animal in us only becomes more beastlike" when it is repressed. He goes on to say that "that is no doubt the reason why no religion is so defiled with the spilling of innocent blood as Christianity, and why the world has never seen a bloodier war than the war of the Christians nations" (Vol 10, para 22)

We all agree that our educational system is failing us or that there is a drug problem in this country. Drinking and driving often do mix, the mind is a wonderful thing to waste, yet there are other countries that manage these things much better than us, so why don't we study their example? So you have to ask yourself how is it that people who all unanimously agree to a goal can miserably fail to achieve it? As Jung says, either we deal with the shadow and bring it into the light, or it may deal with us when we're not looking! Buried rage, for example, is most often the experience leading to extreme violence in many teens I used to live with.

When we choose to believe that we do not have a complex, the complex can become pathological since we become unconscious of it and, as we learned earlier, whatever we are unconscious of becomes projected outside of ourselves onto others. Therefore we experience the complex as projections of 'evil persons' or "spirits that persecute us from all sides".

If a person becomes too involved and too preoccupied with the role they are playing, and their ego begins to believe it is the persona it plays, this is called 'overidentification'. A person who overidentifies with their persona will have an exaggerated sense of self-importance which derives from playing a role so successfully. This person is 'pulling the wool' over other peoples eyes, so to speak. At the other extreme, a failure to live up to an unrealistic persona can lead to a superiority complex and as a result cause the person to feel alienated from their own community and experience feelings of loneliness and estrangement. Therefore one key to mental health is to be able to express our personas in a modest form.

The counterpart to overidentification is possession. If the God complex becomes overly dominant, then much of what the person experiences and how he behaves will be governed by the God complex. They will perceive and judge everything in terms of absolute good and evil, they will preach brimstone and hellfire for the wicked, and eternal paradise for the saintly. They will accuse people of living in sin and demand repentance from them, believing themself to be God's chosen prophet or even God in person and that they are the savior to the world. Today, such a person would be considered a fanatic or psychotic but in the past the person would have been regarded as being either possessed or a prophet or shaman.

Compulsive or addictive behavior is always associated with ones's inferior function. When a persona expresses the inferior function and/or attitude, it sadly takes on all the compulsive inadequacies of our most primitive, undeveloped, subconscious contents.

We said earlier that many people suffer from inflated or overdeveloped personas. The opposite condition is more often true of a pathological relation with the syzygy. This archetype is often deflated or underdeveloped. One consequence of this imbalance is that it may trigger off a rebellion of between the syzygy and the persona, in which case the person overreacts. A young man may accentuate his anima to the extent that he is more feminine than masculine. Some male transvestites and some effeminate homosexuals fall into this category. A man's overidentification with his anima may be so complete that he will undergo hormonal treatment and genital surgery to turn himself into a physically appearing woman. Or a young woman may identify so completely with her animus that she has her feminine features changed in order to appear more masculine.

I have yet to meet someone who has accepted the statement that he or she was possessed by the anima or animus. However, the more heatedly a person reacts against such a statement, the more on target it is. For the demon will put all its powers of persuasion on the line to convince the critical observer of the contrary and to try to prove that he has no grasp of the subject's psychology whatsoever.

We perceive reality with our senses and our intuition, then we evaluate our perceptions by our feelings and by thinking. In each of us, typically one function predominates, helped by one or two others, thereby one or two functions will generally remain undeveloped. This becomes our personal typology. For example, if thinking dominates our conscious mind, then our feeling function will remain undeveloped in the unconscious. If sensation governs our conscious mind, then our intuition function will remain undeveloped in the unconscious. The other two functions will then become "helping functions" that border between consciousness and unconsciousness. No function has any value by itself. It is only when all four functions work together, do the functions start to have any real value.

How we react to archetypal figures is determined by our psychological types. Typology is the study of what we can observe about a person's personality (ie -- the two attitudes and the four functions), therefore typology is NOT the study of the collective unconscious but the personal conscious and the personal unconscious (Read: The Ego and the subconscious). The four functions are not archetypes and all four can be made fully conscious, therefore they cannot, by definition, be any part of the collective unconscious.

The first half of life isn't spent connecting to the archetypes -- a Jungian-like term denoting religion -- it is spent developing the four functions. To me that teaches us that we should spend all our time teaching children how to think rationally and logically and spend no time teaching them religion. Religion is for the second half of life when the ego has reached sufficient strength to withstand unconscious contents that religion encourages.

Neurosis (psychological and emotional suffering) occurs when the growth of one's natural main function is frustrated. Normally the inferior function is also an undeveloped function with the result that each person discovers that if they use this function in life it works badly and they learn to distrust this function in themselves and anyone else who uses this function. A successful relationship of any kind requires that there be at least one helping function in common with the main function so that there may be a complimentary blending of our personalities with others. We energize our inferior functions by resisting them. While we are awake, the inferior function works badly and in troublesome ways like a thorn in our side. We see this inferior function operating well, however, in our nightly dreams, thereby providing us with an overall optimally complementary and compensatory balance.

Actually, did you know there are really five functions and not four? There exists a transcendent function which helps realize the unconscious meaning of archetypes to the conscious mind. The purpose of the transcendent function is to compensate for the tension between the spiritual and material worlds by facilitating a transition from one (unbalanced) psychological state to another (balanced). It is a bridge between consciousness and unconsciousness "a manifestation of the energy that springs from the tension of opposites" (Vol 7, para 121). Unfortunately not much is known about this fifth function, so this subject cannot be discussed any further.

Jung helps explain our society's compulsion to frustration and addiction and death as being the result of unreasonable projections, which in turn are caused by ignorance of the unconscious. In any large gathering of people it is not the unique qualities of individuals that count -- these only serve to differentiate and not to unite them -- and what is common to a crowd of unindividuated individuals? Namely, their subconscious Shadows. When the same Shadow is active in a number of people it draws them together, as if by magnetic force, and drives them to act in irrational ways. In addition, to preserve it's life, a group must stress the adaptation of each of its members, so that differences become a disadvantage and average qualities are cultivated. Hence the larger the group the more stupid it is likely to become; even a collection of highly intelligent people will act at a much lower level of intelligence than its individual members. The opposite of being just another face in the collective crowd, is to start standing up for the unique individual that we are -- a process that Jung called individuation.

Individuation is not the process of making the unconscious conscious, but rather changing our relationship to the unconscious. Once an individuation process is successfully initiated, the individual's identification with the collective herd will slowly be terminated. They will discover traits in themselves which will make them stand out from the crowd. Recollections of subconscious shadow contents can become 'abreactive' -- meaning that even physical ailments can suddenly disappear once a trauma has been resolved. This individuation process becomes a journey of the personality, a tortuous and slippery path that can at times simply seem to lead round in circles -- although a better description would be that of a spiral. As you can plainly see, individuation is not just a process, it is also a goal.

Consciousness was a very delicate and fragile phenomenon when it first appeared in humans, always in constant peril of being overwhelmed by mysterious strong urges or emotions. Jung referred to these perils as "the loss of the soul". To defend the poor weak conscious from the more superior unconscious, 'weapons' like religion and dogma were developed to stem the tide of unconsciousness instead of allowing it the chance to integrate with consciousness.

What happens to us actually doesn't have nearly so much of an impact on us so much as what we choose to believe about what happens to us. Whether it be the death of a close relative, a nasty divorce, a car wreck...all of these things can be a wonderful experience or a horrible experience, all depending on the attitude or belief you choose to take towards it. How you are living your life right now is always on what you choose to believe it to be right now. While waiting in the slow lane of traffic or browsing the newsgroups on the internet, you are as free to work yourself into a flaming rage as you are to compose a gentle poem. Therefore we can begin to see why only a select few of us ever come to realize that no one nor no thing can force us to be upset unless we make the decision to allow it to upset us. People can calmly or even happily accept the obvious facts of their situation, do what they can to improve their present situation, or get out of their present situation. Therefore when we change our beliefs, we change our reactions, and when we change our reactions we change our experience of the world around us. So when you are upset, you have to ask yourself the question, "Why do I choose to be upset about this event, since I don't like being upset?". In honestly answering that question you will discover that much of your thinking is determined by irrational thoughts instead of rational ones. Why is this? Because the Ego has evolved by deriving conscious abilities from unconscious ones, and so accordingly the ego has with time, become more focused in it's direction and strengthened in it's will to the point that religion and dogma have become less important to the well being or protection of the present day ego then it has been the past. While these new conscious abilities are available for the taking, it is not a given that they will be used, for example, while directed thinking is a recent development in our consciousness, rarely do people know how to think in logical, rational, or scientific terms. This reacquisition of untapped abilities into consciousness is one of many goals of the individuation process.

By nature the Ego is fragmented into a duality and so it views the world through that fragmentation, thereby further deluding itself into thinking that the world also must be a fragmented duality like itself. The antagonism, the duality, the dissociation, the illusions of good and evil are all the result of the delusions of the Ego and not properties of the unconscious or the archetypes (or even of the real physical world). And so the Ego creates its own Heaven and Hell and peoples it with its own angels and its own demons and then (again) further deludes itself into thinking that this world of its own making isn't its own creation or that this was the way it found it when it got here. The Ego further deludes itself into believing that it runs the whole damn show, that it is the ruler and King of all that exists within the psyche, even though the reality is that the unconscious is far more vast and powerful and complete than the Ego can even imagine.

The Ego, fearful that the real world will see it for a frog instead of prince, resists individuation because individuation requires that we discard the ego inflating delusions and step down from our thrones and admit we aren't really the star of the show. This is why Jung observed that most people fail to achieve individuation to any significant degree within their lifetime because that kind of action would require moral fortitude, courage (to face failure), responsibility, the ability to welcome change with open arms, honesty to see things as they really are instead of what we wish they were, and fearlessness (to confront our true selves). So individuation is a very difficult thing to achieve, something which we cannot force or encourage, even if we rely on someone outside ourselves, someone who has already attained a higher consciousness than ourselves.

There are two subprocesses that occur in conjunction with a successful individuation process: enlightenment and integration.

ENLIGHTENMENT.To become enlightened simply means to bring the light of our ego-consciousness to bear upon something long ignored or repressed: in the case of individuation, that would be our unconscious. Enlightenment psychologically means to become more aware; to perceive inner reality more for what it actually is instead of what we wish it were.

One of the first steps to make on the way to enlightenment, is in illuminating that dark side of ourselves: our shadows. By exposing our shadows, not for being the monsters we feared all along, we can uncover a wealth of additional qualities that are needed for the further positive growth of the personality. For example, let's say you are a man and notice that you date the 'wrong' type of women over and over. In this case your relationship to women is being determined by your shadow. Until you dig down deep and discover where your attitude about women is coming from, within your shadow, you are destined to keep dating the same woman over and over.

INTEGRATION. We discovered through enlightenment the potential alchemical gold that every shadow contains, but then it becomes time to claim it for ourselves. As the old saying goes, "90% of the solution is to realize [or perceive] that there is a problem", so the last 10% will be spent integrating our unconscious by learning how to develop and teach our shadows. For example, assertiveness is commonly repressed into the shadows of women, as is the ability to freely express affection in men. For further information, I recommend reading YOUR GOLDEN SHADOW by William A Miller.

When a shadow complex surfaces, so do the conflicting opposites that we created it from originally. We re-discover aspects of our disassociations, one of two of the polar opposites created by our dualistic Ego, that now resurfaces tormentingly. So the new problem facing us during the second half of life then becomes to find meaning and purpose in living because the old way of relating to reality by strengthening the ego or repressing unpleasant aspects of reality will no longer effectively work for us. Instead it will only add more and more fuel for complexes to thrive on -- since strengthening the ego is how they got there to begin with. The best way to deal with surfacing complexes now is to love them and educate them so we can integrate them back into one whole piece again -- just like they were in the beginning. The problem is, confronting our complexes is excruciatingly difficult as complexes strongly conflict with the ego's original ideals and demands. This fear of conflict is what can keep complexes attached to us forever and ever. Dealing with our complexes certainly requires courage and persistence, because an encounter with a complex is always a moral dilemma. Before feeling better concerning our negative shadow sides, we should expect to feel worse. Withdrawing projections and focusing on the 'darkness' within can be a depressing experience -- that is how we psychologically interpret the myth of the crucifixion. When this happens, and the ego surrenders to it, the individual experiences a period of adjustment in order to replace obsessions, bad habits, and oppressive attitudes. This will imply a sort of psychological torture and death of another person within ourselves...and torture and death being something that all of us instinctively flee.

Note that if we can experience "loss of the soul", then we can also experience the 'loss of individuation'. It can go either way and seeing as that "the path that leads to heaven's gate is narrow and few will find it" so is the path that leads to individuation narrow and few will find it -- much less stay on the path once it has been found. With each turn of the 'spiral', the person evolves and becomes closer to realizing what is vaguely referred to in all religions as 'The Truth'. That Truth cannot be found in the light of the ego-consciousness but in the Self, which encompasses both consciousness and unconsciousness, but it is a rare and valuable treasure and few seek it, much less even know of its existence.

Why do you think that Jung observed that the first half of life is spent learning to connect with the material aspect of reality? Because before you can become a spiritual master of spiritual reality during the second half of life, you have to at least be able to come to grip with reality as it actually is; to be able to separate the illusions and delusions from actual reality. If one cannot do that, then correspondingly their spirituality cannot be guaranteed to be free of illusions or delusions as well and their spirituality will eventually be revealed as empty and phony. If one cannot see reality as it actually is, it will be impossible for one to see beyond reality as a spiritual master should be able to.

If everything goes well up to this point, a new personality-center will arise, centered around the archetype of the Self. This results in a change of personality because the person will no longer be an 'ego-personality' but will be a 'mana-personality'. This new mana-personality will be more charismatic and wiser than the ego-centric person, giving the impression of a more complete human with nothing hidden or suppressed or unbalanced. The mana-personality has the ability, that the ego-conscious does not, to tap into the collective unconscious that contains the stored up wisdom of collective existence.

Isn't it unfortunate that there are more things to hinder the individuation process than there are to promote it? In fact, the vast majority of people resist individuation because individuation requires things that the vast majority of people lack such as: moral fortitude, a lack of fear of failure, individual responsibility, the ability to welcome change with open arms, honesty to see things as they really are instead of what we wish they were, and a lack of fear of conflict.

EGOTISM. As Jung once said, "...we constantly overestimate the existing content of consciousness" (Vol 11, para 327), ie -- always trying to believe that there is nothing beyond our conscious reach, nothing that is beyond our awareness, or nothing that can escape our notice, but accepting the fact of our unconscious (read: admitting that your consciousness has limits) is actually vital to the development of your consciousness, because denying it is equivalent to saying, 'What I don't know isn't worth knowing'. So in our quest to attain enlightenment, we miss out on much of the alchemical gold that the shadow contains because we overlook things that we believe we are fully conscious of, when in reality we operate more from an unconscious point of view then from a conscious one.

IGNORANCE. It took me quite some time to really understand what the Jungian psychotherapist, Roger Woolger, meant when he said that, "It doesn't matter whether you believe in reincarnation or not. The unconscious mind will almost always produce a past life story when invited in the right way...even if the conscious mind is highly skeptical, the unconscious is a true believer!" (OTHER LIVES, OTHER SELVES, Roger J Woolger PhD, Back Cover). Being an extreme skeptic, I could not logically accept that my conscious mind would believe one thing while my unconscious mind would believe another -- how could that possibly be since it was a contradiction of beliefs? How could my unconscious not know what my conscious knew in regards to New Age fraud and deception? But as Jung said, "...the breath of the spirit rushing over the dark water is uncanny, like everything whose cause we do not know -- since it is not ourselves" (Vol 9i, para 35) and "'Magical' is simply another word for 'psychic.'" (Vol 7, para 293). What this means is that what we don't know, what we don't understand, what we are ignorant of, what we are unconscious of, can appear uncanny, mystical, magical, or even miraculous. So the mana-personality paradoxically will reject mystical/magical nonsense, but on the other hand will actually attempt to seek it out and embrace it because the mana-personality knows that is the place where it will have the greatest potential to grow and learn about itself and others. This acceptance and philosophical incorporation of mystical/magical ideas and experiences does not necessarily mean we are to be gullible, because just like when we were children, when we outgrew our childish fantasies, we replaced them with newer more adult ones. Likewise, our prior beliefs and rituals, having served their purpose as a growing tool, so they can now be jettisoned without guilt or remorse. The same thing can be said about gurus or mentors or religious icons or Jesus or astrology or the I Ching or whatever tool it is you use for enlightenment presently.

When there is imbalance between the quality and quantity of life, there is no need for any of us to reconnect with the Spirit, for the Spirit will come to us and not us to the Spirit. To become spiritual we must give up all hope of becoming spiritual for spiritual things are not things you can own or buy but it is a process. Like wisdom, it is obtained by participating in a process (actually, a better analogy would be a dance) that requires one to give up becoming the end result of what the process creates. We are not Spirit but we are a part of Spirit. Like God itself, we are not God but neither are we different from God.

The individuated spirit is frequently personified in prophets, visionaries, shaman, and other mana personalities. Today's mana personalities are the UFO and X-Files freaks. Their visions of UFOs and supernatural conspiracies are this cultures way of expressing spirits since as Jung said, "spirits are either pathological fantasies or new but as yet unknown and challenging ideas" (A CRITICAL DICTIONARY OF JUNGIAN ANALYSIS, page 141). You can't make a personal decision to become a shaman, you must be invited by Spirit or it can't happen. In a psychologically healthy world there can be no shamans, since if no one ever got hurt or sick or died, would everyone then become a doctor? If there are no sick there is no need for a doctor. Likewise, if there are no psychologically sick people, there would be no shamans.

MEGLOMANIA. This was discussed under the subheading OVERIDENTIFICATION AND POSSESSION OF COMPLEXES in the WHAT IS A COMPLEX? section of this FAQ.

Notice that neither Jesus nor Buddha were ever shown integrating or even admitting that they had a shadow, and integrating the shadow is the very first step all humans must make on the path to individuating. Buddha projected his shadow onto the concept of 'all is illusion,' while Jesus projected his shadow onto Satan.

In ANSWER TO JOB, Jung implies that Jesus was a man totally 'taken over' by the archetype of the 'Son of Man.' Jesus was a person who so totally and unconsciously identified with the Self/God archetype, that the archetype manifested within Jesus in a collective-historical framework -- or in other words, Jesus had megalomania. Carl Jung interpreted the coming of the AntiChrist as a shadow cast by the unbalanced Christ image. Today, the Christ has become the 'persona' of Western civilization. Now when the Christ Archetype was created those many thousands of years ago, the Christians also simultaneously 'predicted' the coming of the AntiChrist, but the coming AntiChrist is not just the remarkable fulfillment of prophecies but "an inexorable psychological law"!

The development of individual consciousness and the integration by the individual of unconscious contents are the only real safeguards against possession by the archetypes...which can be either evil or good, destructive or constructive -- all depending on the conscious attitude one takes and it's effects on the individual's capacity for understanding and moral evaluation.

FEAR. Most of us fear freedom to express our true selves due to what is called 'shadow-anxiety' or fear that the shadow, the 'dark' side of the ego, will accidentally be revealed as the core of our personality. This actually cannot happen because the contents of the shadow are simply aspects of oneself that could have taken up lodging in the ego or persona, but were relegated to the shadow because they were unacceptable to the ego (in it's own judgement) at the time the shadow-impulse arose. Integration of the shadow, which means reclaiming aspects of oneself that were 'lost,' inevitably enriches the ego.

People fear failure but failure is feedback. If we don't strike out in new and uncharted territory, if we don't experiment with a new backhand, if we don't put forth the effort to experiment, all the while not knowing if the road we take will lead us to where we want or hope it leads us, we will have no opportunities to change and grow. All failure leads to success, it is only a person's attitude towards failure that defeats them. Sometimes success itself is failure because without the experience of failure they will have missed the opportunity to learn to be flexible and resilient. To the person born with the silver spoon in their mouth, if they lose everything they become miserable failures that have come to a dead end and their life is over. To the person born with nothing and rises to the top and falls again, it is just another chance to start the glorious process all over again. Failure gives us something to work at.

The efforts that some scientists make to find room for the operation of a supernatural divinity or magic or metaphysics are as futile to me as the crudest attempt of a witch doctor to make it rain by sprinkling water on the ground. All paranormal phenomenon is pure delusion based on misdirected emotion, and inaccurate and illogical thinking. The universe is obviously strictly mechanistic. Science anchors itself in reality not by going off on wild goose chases but by inquiring only phenomena that are reproducible at will, by mechanical means, under strict controls. This allows actually observable phenomena to be linked by hypothesis, illuminated by theory, and integrated by law. It allows effects to be subject to analysis by rational logic, to prediction from verifiable experience, and to control through cause...and all these things are something that has never been possible to do with paranormal phenomenon.

Jung was not a parapsychologist or a guru or a mystic, he was a scientist! Jung didn't promote ESP, psychic abilities, or astrology, he supplemented them by giving rational explanations for apparently irrational experiences. He didn't say they actually are what people claim they are, he just acknowledges that there is a hidden connection between the people and the events, but this hidden connection isn't magic, it is purely psychological. Therefore Jung's writings do not lend credence to any of the paranormal things I mentioned except in the sense that all of these things are being experienced as reality to those who believe in them.

As someone on the internet once so elegantly stated, "It seems to me that many people have taken Jung's belief in the psychic reality of 'paranormal' events as evidence of belief in the empirical reality of same said events. This is not necessarily the case. While Jung believed that things such as Astrology and Alchemy held archetypical truths in relation to unconscious content, I don't think he meant to imply that a daily horoscope is any more accurate, than say, what the reader chooses to observe from such a reading, as to the nature of synchronous phenomena, which at times may produce a concrete 'coincidence' by definition synchronous phenomena would be acausal and therefore not subject to any system. While Jung never denied metaphysics he did not, as empirical fact anyway, support them either, anymore than he took a literal interpretation of Bardo Thodol or The book of Job for that matter" ("Max Privorotsky" <Fprivor@rochester.rr.com>, Date written: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 18:40:04 GMT, MsgID:<8_ed7.268219$T97.30737681@typhoon.nyroc.rr.com>)

It was Jung's mistake to not take the same approach with his occult beliefs later in life that he did earlier in life. To Jung, everything he studied he did so from a psychological perspective but he made an exception for occult phenomenon late in life. He was out of his league at that point.

In 1902, Carl Jung wrote ON THE PSYCHOLOGY AND PATHOLOGY OF SO-CALLED OCCULT PHENOMENA. Right here the title of his paper tells you everything you need to know about Jung's attitude about seances and other occult matters in the beginning of his career. Jung did the perfect debunking of all such trickery and his investigations into seances was spectacular. He discovered that all mediums have one thing in common and that is that they are all prone to fits of hysteria. Another thing he discovered was that table tipping was a primitive form of subliminal messaging. On the other hand, ON SYNCHRONICITY was one of the worst papers Jung ever wrote. Jung's later statements on the subject of astrology clearly contradict his earlier statements of the matter. But credit must be given to Jung for his professional honesty in admitting that his astrological experiments really didn't give the results he had hoped for.

Jung states in his paper ON SYNCHRONICTY on the subject of ESP that, "Great credit is due to JB Rhine for having established a reliable basis for work in the vast field of these phenomena by his experiments in extrasensory perception, or ESP. He used a pack of 25 cards divided into 5 groups of 5, each with its special sign (star, square, circle, cross, two wavy lines). The experiment was carried out as follows. In each series of experiments the pack is laid out 800 times, in such a way that the subject cannot see the cards. He is then asked to guess the cards as they are turned up. The probability of a correct answer is 1 in 5. The result, computed from very high figures, showed an average of 6.5 hits. The probability of a chance deviation of 1.5 amounts to only 1 in 250,000. Some individuals scored more than twice the probable number of hits. On one occasion all 25 cards were guessed correctly, which gives a probability of 1 in 298,023,223,876,953,125. The spatial distance between experimenter and subject was increased from a few yards to about 4,000 miles, with no effect on the result" (PORTABLE JUNG, On Synchronicity, pg 509).

It is unfortunate that Jung was taken in by these ESP 'researchers', but at least he isn't the first or the only highly-intelligent person to ever be taken in by the ignorance of probability and statistics. Little did Jung realize that it is only individual odds that are the most important thing to note in ESP research, yet no researcher ever provides those results. Think about what they are doing here! Go to a casino sometime and visit the bingo parlour. Note how many people come forward each hour to claim their winnings -- the number of winning individuals is quite high (ie -- "proof of ESP"), but pick out a lone individual and note how many times that individual comes forward to claim their winnings -- it is very low (Oops! ESP theory doesn't look too good now!). So what these ESP researchers are really doing is reporting the high number of 'winners' each hour but not listing the individual results which is much lower.

I see many many viewpoints on what sychronicity is or is not, and I don't want to spew out yet another 'authorities' answer to the question. Rather, we all know the answer to these questions deep down inside of ourselves. Psychology is the study of ourselves so what do we all find when we look deep down inside ourselves when we experience synchronicity? I consistently find, in myself and others, that events will appear synchronistic when the inner reality of a person coincides with the outer reality of that person. The two realities can be said to be in sync with each other at this point but to the person experiencing synchronicity it appears as though the world is somehow magically revolving around what they are thinking when what is really happening is a case of selective attention to things they didn't consciously notice before. Synchronicity is therefore a state of mind and not an actual demonstrable physical phenomenon.

For example, how is it possible that certain numbers will keep on appearing in a person's life at fortuitous moments, as if by magic? Easy: this will occur whenever one chooses to ignore all the other numbers in one's life. This is a case selective memorization; when one is sad, all of the memories of past sad events become much easier to recall than happy ones and events that take place in one life seems to have a sad quality cast upon them. And when one is happy, the reverse happens. Numbers and geometry 'existed' long before we 'discovered' them and that is precisely why without some analyses, without some thought, numbers have no special meanings, especially synchronistic ones. As soon as 'I' could distinguish itself from 'others' it could then come to realize that it had existence and could attach meaning to things apart from itself. So numbers were there all along but were not given any special notice until those numbers were suddenly given new meaning by the person experiencing the synchronicity.

Now Jung defined synchronicity one of three ways:

1. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content (eg, the scarab), where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable.
2. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content (eg, the scarab), where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable.
3. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding (more or less simultaneous) external event taking place outside the observer's field of perception, ie, at a distance, and only verifiable afterward (eg, the Stockholm fire).
4. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not yet existent future event that is distant in time and can likewise only be verified afterward.

In groups 2 and 3 the coinciding events are not yet present in the observer's field of perception, but have been anticipated in time so far as they can only be verified afterward. For this reason I call such events synchronistic, which is not to be confused with synchronous" (THE PORTABLE JUNG, On Synchronicity, pg 512).

Certain creative acts and many turning points are accompanied by synchronicity, for example, during the transition to adulthood, marriage, middle age, death, etc. But the psychophysical experiences, such as synchronicities accompanying these life events, don't actually take place in objective reality, they only appear to happen. Psychologists are all very aware of the fact that the mind deceives us and we are especially prone to distorting the details of cause or sequence, especially under times of stress. The unconscious ignores time and it remembers things in terms of narratives and emotional content and not sequence or logic, hence the source of synchronistic phenomena.

If there is no emotional energy surrounding a synchronistic event, then that same event could be viewed as mere coincidence or maybe not even noticed to begin with. I am just curious, but can anybody name an example of synchronicity that Jung gave where the person experiencing the sychronicity WAS NOT ALSO simultaneously experiencing emotional distress of some kind? A common mistake people make is when they attach meaning to an uncanny event after-the-fact -- which is the anti-thesis of synchronicity since it would become causal instead of acausal. Keeping synchronicity in mind instead of falling back on purely causal explanations which "serve only to debunk the patient's experience instead of letting it work towards change" may then have therapeutic value in analysis because it directs attention to problem areas which, because unconscious, may as yet be untouched. This makes it clear that synchronicity is more of an diagnostic tool then something that actually takes place in physical reality.

A good example of a non-synchronistic event mistaken for a synchronistic one would be like the one also related to by Jung: "...for instance, someone chances to notice the number on his street-car ticket. On arriving home he receives a telephone call during which the same number is mentioned. In the evening he buys a theatre ticket that again has the same number. The three events form a chance grouping, although not likely to occur often, nevertheless lies well within the framework of probability owing to the frequency of each of its terms" (THE PORTABLE JUNG, On Synchronictiy, pg 506). Notice that in discrediting this event as non-synchronistic, Jung makes no mention of whether or not the person has attached meaning to the events, because it is irrelevant whether or not the coincidences have any meaning to that person. This is entirely within Jungs earlier statements in that paper cited above, namely that synchronicity is not just, "...a statistical -- that is, a probable -- concurrence of events..." but as "...the more foreseen details of an event pile up, the more definite is the impression of an existing foreknowledge, and the more improbable does chance become..." and the more probable it is the event was due to synchronicity (THE PORTABLE JUNG, On Synchronicity, pgs 506-507).

Jung related his story of the synchronicity surrounding his paper on UFOs once, saying, "While I was engaged on this paper an acquaintance from abroad unexpectedly sent me a dream he had had on May 27, 1957. Our relationship was limited to one letter each every one or two years. He was an amateur astrologer and was interested in the question of synchronicity. He knew nothing of my preoccupation with UFOs, nor did he connect his dream in any way with the theme that interested me. His sudden and unusual decision to send me the dream comes, rather, into the category of meaningful coincidences, which statistical prejudice dismisses as irrelevant" (Vol 10, para 682-83). This is an example of selective attention. Jung probably received many more letters about UFOs then he mentioned, it was just that all the letters he received BEFORE he first became interested in the phenomenon were ignored or dismissed without second thought so naturally he would forget all about those letters. Many alleged cases of synchronicity fall under this category of selective attention, especially when it comes to certain numbers 'synchronistically' appearing in someone's life.

Paranormal experiences don't actually happen, they only appear to have happen after we recall emotionally significant events. Psychologists are all very aware of the fact that the mind deceives us by distorting the details of cause or sequence, especially when under stress. The unconscious ignores time and it remembers things in terms of narratives and emotional content and not sequence or logic. There are no documented cases of people dreaming about an incident before it actually happened, it is always after-the-fact. There is no such thing as astral projection or out-of-body experiences -- not in PHYSICAL reality that is. It is more example of wishful thinking again. The real danger of course, is the belief itself. When one takes a fantasy and tries to makes it a reality, they are teaching themselves how to be unreasonable, illogical, and unjustifiably sanctified. How soon we forget the lessons of the past, like the Crusades and the Inquisitions.

"He [Jung] suggested that synchronistic phenomena may be more apparent when the level of consciousness is low (see abaissement du niveau mental). What occurs may then have therapeutic value in analysis, directing attention to problem areas which, because unconscious, may as yet be untouched. Keeping synchronicity in mind protects the analyst from the twin perils of feeling that everything is due to fate or of falling back on purely causal explanations which 'serve only to debunk the patient's experience instead of letting it work towards change' (Williams, 1936b). The synchronistic experience occurs where two kinds of reality (ie -- inner and outer) intersect." (A CRITICAL DICTIONARY OF JUNGIAN ANALYSIS, Andrew Samuels, pg 146-147).

As INTRODUCING JUNG by Maggie Hyde and Michael McGuinness so simply and elegantly sums it up, "To test for a possible acausal link between psychic states and real events, for this, Jung chose a specific, measurable event -- marriage. Jung devised a carefully planned statistical investigation of the astrological contacts between the birthcharts of a sample number of married couples. He then asked: What are the specific horoscope configurations that are traditionally said by astrologers to symbolize marriage? There are 3 which all involve the Moon in one person's birthchart being placed in the same zodiacal position (conjunct) as one of the following 3 factors in the partner's birthchart < snip charts > When the first batch of horoscopes arrived, Jung was so impatient for a result that he analyzed it before the rest of the data had been collected. The result showed a strong statistical evidence for a contact of Moon conjunct Ascendant. Jung sat in his garden, delighted with the result. But then he saw the face of Mecurius laughing at him in the garden wall. The trick was evident when the next two batches of horoscopes were analyzed. The second showed a high proportion of Moon conjunct Sun contacts; and the third produced significant results of Moon conjunct Moon. The results neutralized each other! Jung had failed to demonstrate statistically any relation between planetary contacts and marriage...What had Jung succeeded to prove? No more than astrologers had always known. 'A secret, mutual connivance exists between the material and the psychic state of the astrologer'"

Jung succeeded in explaining the existence of magical and spiritual forces, so consequently we are no longer in need of a God or demons or spirits to explain these phenomenon, yet despite the fact that we can even prove the non-existence of God, these kind of phenomenon continue to exist because it is in our nature to be religious. What Jung referred to when he talked about religion was "an attitude of mind, a careful consideration and observation in relation to certain 'powers'...indeed, an attitude toward whatever impressed a person sufficiently so that he is moved to...reverence and love" (A CRITICAL DICTIONARY OF JUNGIAN ANALYSIS, Andrew Samuels, pg 130). Jung defined spiritual as the non-material aspect of a living person, ie -- thought, intention, ideals, morality, ethics, and so on. A person that ignores the Spirit is a person who is only concerned with the quantity of things they have, want, or can exploit to their advantage. Ghosts and other apparitions are a borderline pathological phenomena, "autonomous complexes which appear as projections because they have no association with the [spirit ignoring] ego" (CW 9i, para 285). These psychic apparitions are the language of the Self communicating with the ego in the only way it knows how.

Everything we humans make or invent has a design and a purpose. The less we think so, the more unconscious our motivation for that invention. A good example of this is stories, myths, and of course, religion! Many modern psychological disciplines still disregard religion as merely a 'private personal' thing, something that couldn't ever be possibly indicative of pathology or inner thought processes. By assuming this, they dismiss an entire mother lode of psychological gems hidden within the myths of yesterday and the religions of today. Jung stood up to that narrow-minded thinking of his time because he realized that no belief just simply appears out of thin air, that we express in our beliefs and our religions and our fads reveal much about what goes on in our minds 'behind the scenes'.

Some believe organized religion is whatever anyone wants to make of it, but you cannot take one thing and make it into another thing that it isn't and since religion is made up of superstition, sanctification (read: discrimination), blind-faith gullibility, and intellectual suicide, it will never be more than those things. Some people have bad experiences of religion...others have good, but whether the experience is good or bad is not a rational criteria for evaluating the validity of a belief. What was a bad experience for the Jews was a good experience for the ruling elite under Hitler's reign in WWII. Religion has often been used as a means to perpetuate violence, hate, or war, hence the reason God shows up more often on a battlefield than a church, ie -- "there are no atheists in foxholes" and the highest per capita of Christians isn't at a Church gathering but in a typical American prison.

Faith gives people hope...false hope that is! Personally, I would rather be hurt by the truth than comforted by a lie, but most people would not only rather be comforted by a lie, they are willing to pay big money for you to tell one to them! But lies aren't going to bring anyone closer to reality or expand their consciousness. When you look at the world around you as it actually exists today, it is plainly obvious that it is lies that make the world go round and it is lies that fuel our wars, our politics, our divorces, and our religions.

During an interview on the BBC in 1959 with John Freeman on FACE TO FACE, Jung was recorded as saying:

JF : "And did you believe in God?"
CGJ: "Oh, yes."
JF :"Do you now believe in God?"
CGJ: "Now?...Difficult to answer. I know. I don't need to believe. I know."

At first glance it appears as though Jung actually believes in a literal God, but if one takes the time to go beyond such a superficial answer and probe deeper into Jung, the next obvious question would be, "Which God did Jung believe in? The Catholic God? The Jewish God? The Jehovah Witnesses' God?"

But during that interview, Jung also made a comment about the meaning of life. He said that men cannot live without meaning in their life and for him this was a meaningful spiritual existence in the world. He viewed our search for spirituality as a search for meaning in life. A way to connect to something larger than we are, an ordering aspect to the universe. That's the 'God' Jung believed in.

Shortly before his death in 1961, Jung was asked by an interviewer about what his definition of God was to which he replied, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse." So in fact if one reads all that Jung had to say on the subject one gets an entirely different picture of what Jung really believed in respect to God. Jung never intended for his comments to be taken as a proof of the existence of a non-imaginary God, he felt that a literal belief in a God was absurd, and religious faith could include a intellectual sacrifice that rendered it's followers childish. That's the 'God' Jung believed in.

It is a wholesome endeavor to reduce the God-being to a God-idea because people who believe in a literal God are just fooling themselves and fooling yourself is not a very mentally healthy thing to do, ie -- the Crusades and the Inquisitions would have not happened had people realized that God is just an imaginary idea and not something physically real. So yes, Jung did believe in a God that seemed everybit as real as an actual existing object, but no, he never entertained a belief in a non-abstract physically existent God-being.

In regards to the newly discovered 'God Module', it wouldn't surprise me that religious beliefs are localized (or if you prefer, "lateralized" as neurophysiologists would put it) in one area of the brain, as is every other mental function of the brain has been discovered to be. What does surprise me is that some religious bigot labels it the 'God' Module instead of the 'Spritiality' Module yet no one cries, 'Foul!'. I see this as due to prejudiced and biased interpretation of the data by the scientific community as a whole instead of reporting what the data actually demonstrated (which was a religious experience and not a God experience). I'm sure if I believed in God, the memories and attitudes for that belief would be located in the same spot in my brain as everyone elses, but since I don't believe in God, I must have replaced it with something else...probably a logic module.

Pretending that God exists and knowing you are pretending is a vastly different thing then pretending that God exists and not knowing you are pretending. The former is a healthy case of conscious awareness of all that is going on around me while the latter is a less-than-healthy case of allowing my unconscious to determine my thoughts and actions. Personally, I choose the former. Yes, you heard me right, I believe in God, but like Jung, I believe in the 'God within' because the only place that God can exist is within your imagination.

"The view that we can simply turn our back on evil and in this way eschew it belongs to the long list of antiquated naiveties. This is sheer ostrich policy and does not affect the reality of evil in the slightest. Evil is the necessary opposite of good, without which there would be no good either. It is impossible even to think evil out of existence" (Vol 9i, para 567)

Translation: We cannot turn our backs on evil because that is how all projections, like evil, obtain their strength. It is impossible to think evil out of existence without also simultaneously thinking good out of existence because both depend on the other for their existence. Of course, if you don't want good AND evil, then you could think them out of existence.

"Who says that the evil in the world we live in, that is right in front of us, is not real! Evil is terribly real, for each and every individual. If you regard the principle of evil as a reality you can just as well call it the devil" (Vol 10, para 879)

Translation: In case you didn't notice, devils are imaginary creatures, not real ones, so the "reality" that Jung speaks of here is obviously not an actual physical one but an imaginary one.

As Jung said, "'My fate' means a daemonic will to precisely that fate -- a will not necessarily coincident with my own (the ego will). When it is opposed to the ego, it is difficult not to feel a certain 'power' in it, whether divine or infernal. The man who submits to his fate calls it the will of God; the man who puts up a hopeless and exhausting fight is more apt to see the devil in it" (Vol 12, footnote 17), therefore if you don't regard the principle of evil as a reality, you won't have to call it anything since it won't exist. Like God, once you stop believing in it, it stops existing.

"There is no getting round the fact that if you allow substantiality to good, you must also allow it to evil. If evil has no substance, good must remain shadowy, for there is no substantial opponent for it to defend itself against, but only a shadow, a mere privation of good. Such a view can hardly be squared with observed reality. It is difficult to avoid the impression that apotropaic tendencies have had a hand in creating this notion, with the understandable intention of settling the painful problem of evil as optimistically as possible" (Vol 11, para 247)

Translation: Again, Jung makes it very clear elsewhere that, "...just as the conscious mind can put the question, 'Why is there this frightful conflict between good and evil?,' so the unconscious can reply, 'Look closer! Each needs the other. The best, just because it is the best, hold the seeds of evil, and there is nothing so bad but good can come of it'" (Vol 7, para 289) and "...in the long run the right deed in the hands of the wrong man will also have a disastrous effect (Vol 12, para 36). Obviously Jung interprets good and evil as just merely interchangeable labels of the same psychological projection as seen from different subjective viewpoints.

"...it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil" (Vol 9i, para 19)

Translation: People gaze into the face of "absolute evil" all the time (Hitler or Osama Ben Ladin for example). What is rare and shattering as an experience is for a person to suddenly realize that the absolute evil they see out in the world actually only exists completely inside themselves; it is only then that they truly look into the face of absolute evil and realize it is a reflection of THEIR OWN FACE they are looking at (instead of Hitler or Osama Ben Ladin, for example).

"In themselves, spirit and matter are neutral, or rather, 'utrisque capax' -- that is [in]capable of what man calls good or evil" (Vol 9i, para 197)

Translation: Jung is once again clearly saying that good and evil don't actually exist in any reality except the psychological one. Naturally then, good and evil will cease to exist when humans learn to stop being a collective unconscious thing and become more fully conscious.

NOTE: The basic meaning of "neutral" is 'not aligned with either side'. So for spirit and matter to never be 'aligned with either side' of good or evil essentially means that they sometimes align themselves with good or evil? Sorry, but neutral means never taking sides in any way, shape, or form. Furthermore, everywhere else in Jung's writings, he talks about there not being any sides to take because good and evil are subjective opinions and not objective facts. Go ahead, try and define absolute good or evil for us. One man's evil is another man's good just like one man's God is another man's demon. It's elusive because it only exists in the imagination and not physical reality.

"Every psychological extreme secretly contains its own opposite or stands in some sort of intimate and essential relationship to it. Indeed it is from this tension that it derives its particular dynamism. There is no hallowed custom that cannot on occasion turn into its opposite and the more extreme a position is the more easily may we expect an enantiodromia, a conversion of something into its opposite. The best is most threatened with some devilish perversion just because it has done the most to suppress evil" (Jung)

To summarize this and tie it up so very neatly into the theme of this thread, "If, through assimilation of the unconscious, we make the mistake of including the collective psyche in the inventory of personal psychic functions, a dissolution of the personality into its paired opposites inevitably follows. Besides the pair of opposites already discussed, megalomania and the sense of inferiority, which are so painfully evident in neurosis, there are many others, from which I will single out only the specifically moral pair of opposites, namely good and evil...Both are as illusory as the megalomania and the inferiority, because the imaginary virtues and the imaginary wickednesses are simply the moral pair of opposites contained in the collective psyche" (Vol 7, para 237) and "...unconsciousness makes no difference between good and evil. Inside the psychological realm one honestly does not know which of them predominates in the world. We hope, merely, that good does - i.e., what seems suitable to us" (Vol 12?, para 97)

Evil is not something that exists in the world, it is something we created all by our lonely selves. Evil doesn't exist in nature, it only exists in humans. That's why many people are so dogmatically religious to the point that they are prudes. They are running scared from every little reflection that they see of their own creation in the world around them. It is because of what they see in that reflection, their own hideous evil nature, that scares them so. But little do they know that they can run but they can't hide, for wherever they go, there they are -- hideous evil and all.

The following discussion regards only left-brain controlled right-handed people (more references available upon request):

The brain is completely responsible for the total care and protection of the human body it resides in and it choreographs all the chemical and physical operations of the entire body while keeping everything in it in near perfect sync, but the brain is more than the sum of its parts. Beyond the mechanical capabilities of maintenance and information processing is an emergent property called "the mind". While the mind isn't something that is physically real, neither is it different from physical reality. The physically real parts of the brain gives us many clues as how the mind works on the non-physical planes of human existence.

The first thing one notices about the brain is that it has a large split running down the center that divides it into left and right hemispheres. This is a case where form fits function because just like the brain is divided, so is the intellect. I know you've probably seen this a thousand times, but here is a table showing the differences between the left and right brain intellectual functions performed exclusively by each hemisphere, as determined by various researchers over the years:

Split-brain research has demonstrated that the right brain handles concrete forms, spatial patterns, and the copying of simple geometric figures.

"Right-handed people who have suffered certain posterior temporal, left-brain injuries have anomia for familiar objects; that is, they misname familiar objects, forget the meanings of familiar words, and lose their ability to evoke visual images in response to specific words. When these people look at simple drawings of objects, they can copy the drawings well. But they cannot draw a copy of the same drawing when using their memory alone (Luria 1973, pg 145). Their memory-based drawings are so bizarre, it is almost impossible to recognize them. Simple line drawings of animals or objects might well turn out like this:

      ___   <-+---+     _
     / | \    |   |    / \
       |      |   |    | |
       |      +---+    \_/
      CAT      COW   BOOK

Those facts justify these three conclusions:

1. Words in the left brain function as mnemonic cues that trigger corresponding right-brain mental images of remembered or imagined objects and events.
2. Those images then serve as mental cues and pictures that trigger and control the person's behavioral responses...
3. The inability of anomic people to draw objects from memory alone indicates that, without verbal cues from their left brains, their right brains no longer can hold or recall old holistic images of absent objects. That fact makes it impossible to draw from memory alone." (RATIONAL BEHAVIOR THERAPY, Maultsby, pg 39)

I know I've covered alot of territory in that last quote, but let me first start off with two statements:

Split-Brain research lends much credibility to Jung's ideas. For example, it proves that the brain is not a homogeneous whole with a single personality, but it is composed of at minimum of two distinctly different personalities with many functions segregated to different areas of the brain. Of course this doesn't lend any evidence yet for Jung's claim of the existence of complexes (ie -- multiple personalities), but we will get to that later. For now it is only a thought I want you to consider.

It is very easy to see how the left and right hemispheres work together in response to various stimuli. For example, the words people conjure up with their left brains during their self-talk will trigger corresponding images or symbols of what those words represent in their right brain. The right brain will automatically translate the left brain's word symbols into the right brain's "not-word" symbols. For example, when we hear or think of the word "mother", that word will evoke images of whatever experiences we have had of "mother", as well as any habitual or instinctual reactions we may have of acquired about "mother". Other examples of words that can elicit a strong emotional response are words like "father" or "God" or "death".

The right brain functions can be triggered by either external or internal stimuli. The right brain's stored habits, attitudes, and instinctual reactions can be triggered directly by either the outside world or indirectly by the left brains self-talk (Gazzangia and LeDoux 1978; Humphrey and Zangwill 1952; Sperry 1970; Zangwill 1954; Maultsby 1984). This is why it is very important that we always pay attention to the choice of our words. It is never "just a matter of semantics" in during self-talk or normal conversation because our wording can affect our perception of the our world in subtle negative or positive ways.

The brain's limbic system is what is responsible for our ability to "feel" our emotions; it triggers either positive, negative, or neutral states of arousal in response to all stimuli. There are five basic emotional states created by the limbic system and they are:

1. Glad
2. Mad
3. Sad
4. Scared, and
5. Neutral

The limbic system can be triggered in one of two ways: by external or internal stimuli. An internal stimulus means any stimulus elicited from the right brain. From the chart above, we can see that the right brain is where people store and maintain habitual reactions and those habitual reactions are what enable people to react instantly to many external stimuli automatically. Notice that not all habits that are allocated to the right brain are good habits. The power of the mind to be self-habitforming leaves it highly susceptible to bad programming. Habits can appear in the form of spoken and unspoken attitudes and beliefs. Attitudes and beliefs are our built-in automatic co-pilot that we can depend on.

Attitude reinforcement in the right brain can only be maintained through either repeated external stimulus from the limbic system or repeated internal thoughts from the left brain. Without some kind of strong emotional reaction to the internal or external stimulus, no new habits or attitudes will be created or maintained in the right brain. People's remembrance of past experiences also affect the maintainence of habitual reactions. How people choose to remember their past determines how it affects them now. Ignorance of this fact is one of the main reasons people with miserable pasts suffer in the present.

People habitually perceive what they already believe exists, therefore people will often be unable to perceive that which they don't have a label for.

What people see is never right before their eyes; it's always a mental picture or image formed in the back of their brain. This fact indicates that human brains work like cameras except that the brain can form images based solely on their imaginations, memories, and emotional feelings. Human brains don't automatically separate mental pictures that are created from the mental pictures that are based on obvious facts. The brain will use any mental picture to control people's cognitive, emotional, and physical reactions. Obvious facts don't adjust themselves to people's arbitrary mental pictures, therefore when obvious facts are in significant conflict with arbitrary facts, people will often end up in undesirable conflicts with those obvious facts.

It is a known fact that feelings do not appear magically, there is no magically he, she, or it that causes our feelings. Feelings are created by one thing and one thing only, thoughts. We think therefore we feel. Never do we feel first then react to the feeling, although it doesn't always seem that way. Sometimes we have feelings that we cannot account for. This experience does not negate the fact that feelings are always a direct result of what we think, it means that there are two kinds of thoughts: Conscious thought and unconscious thought. This is the reason that spiritual and psychics tell you to pay attention to your "gut feelings". Do not confuse this kind of gut feeling with the gut feeling that we discussed earlier, the gooney bird kind of gut feeling. No, this is the kind of feeling you get but cannot account for where it derived from. Attempting to trace these feelings to their root cause will lead you to your unconscious thoughts.

Emotionally ignorant people want to feel better emotionally without thinking better. People don't realize that they control their own emotions by what they are thinking. Without the thoughts of the left brain to reinforce the habitual reactions of the right brain, the negative feelings will never have a chance to occur. The left brain initiates new learning so simply by changing one's mind, one can change their emotions.

When people do attempt to change old habits, they will get a strange, uncomfortable feeling called "cognitive-emotive dissonance". Cognitive-dissonance is the reason why people never accept an idea they feel is incorrect, even when the idea is a verifiable fact. People's oldest and strongest attitudes and beliefs trigger feelings of rightness or wrongness of new ideas or actions and that is why if people think more about what they are feeling more than what they are thinking, they won't learn any new behaviours. This is called "gut thinking". Just because an idea "feels right" or "feels wrong" does not prove the idea is right or wrong, it only proves that the person BELIEVES (or doesn't believe) in that idea. People's attitudes create the very common illusion that some external he, she, or it magically causes their feelings.

To eliminate old emotional habits or negative feelings people must do four things (and in this order):

1. They must completely reject the beliefs and attitudes that support the undesirable habits.
2. They must replace their old beliefs and attitudes with new beliefs and attitudes.
3. Be prepared to feel strange and uncomfortable...like you are out-of-place or acting strange to others.
4. Practice mentally imagining themselves thinking, feeling, and behaving exactly the way they want to think, feel, and behave.

Remember that while the right brain can deal with images or symbols, it cannot deal with words. Specifically, the word "not" is a word the right brain has difficulty dealing with. When the left brain informs the right brain (through the corpus callosum) that it has made a New Year's resolution to "not eat ice cream this year", the habit forming right brain has no way to visualize what NOT eating ice cream looks like. This is a New Year's resolution that will certainly fail. If the resolution was instead to "chew gum instead of eating ice cream", then the resolution has a greater chance to work because the right brain can easily form a picture of what chewing gum would look like.

There really is no such thing as a "subconscious" but only a "repressed-conscious". For proof of that I would like to point your attention to the March 1990 issue of Scientific American titled "Unconscious Mental Functioning" by Joseph Weiss. That article addresses the question of "Why does therapy work?". Look at the various types of therapies that exist in the world and notice just how many of them give results of one kind or another. Can they all be objectively factual statements of how the mind works when they are based on wildly different psychological assumptions (or even just plain ol' fantasy)? The fact that the "therapists" must be very specific in the types of patients they can or cannot accept and handle is evidence that they aren't objectively factual statements of how the mind works nor that they are based on sound reasoning and science. But then why do so many therapies (religion for example) seem to work fairly well at rehabilitating their "patients"?

Those of the Fruedian school of thought view the mind as two opposing forces: Impulses and the thoughts necessary to repress those impulses. I don't agree with that point of view, but that is immaterial to this discussion so let's forget that for now. The real point to be made is that there are (or were) three competing points of view of how the mind deals with impulses:

Dynamic hypothesis I: Intolerable impulses can overwhelm the repressive thoughts of the patient and force themselves into consciousness when given a chance to do so.
Dynamic hypothesis II: Intolerable impulses can escape notice of the patient's repressive thoughts by disguising themselves and coming to consciousness.
Control hypothesis: The patient can allow the impulses to become conscious after they have decided that it is safe to do so.

Each of these hypothesis give different predictions of what would happen if they were each objective statements of how the mind works:

Dynamic hypothesis I: A direct conflict between impulses and repressive forces would cause much anxiety.
Dynamic hypothesis II: Since the impulse is "disguised", there will be no conflict or resultant anxiety about the impulse, but neither will the impulse be experienced more than weakly.
Control hypothesis: Since the patient chooses to diplomatically allow the impulse to become conscious, there will be little anxiety and the impulse will be experienced very vividly.

So guess which hypothesis was verified as being a more objective and factual statement of reality? That's correct: The control hypothesis! We have control over whatever is in our "subconscious" mind. We can repress our improper private thoughts or those parts of our personalities that we don't like or we can choose to let them out at an appropriate time and experience them. This thought was well put in a book I read recently titled, THE BOOK OF CHINESE BELIEFS by Frena Bloomfield:

"The subject of possession is an interesting one because it is an area where different vocabulary may disguise what is really going on...there are a great many 'musts' and duties in Chinese society. There is no admission of negative feelings and these tend to be suppressed. Wives never show anger towards husbands who leave them alone every night to go out...children never express rebellion, even at the most outrageous demand of their parents, and so on. Any psychologist would see this as a recipe for disaster and so it would be were it not for the belief in spirit possession. Whenever situations occur that cannot be fitted into the rigid ideas of established society, they tend to be attributed to possession, which is a convenient way of explaining them and also exonerating the person concerned, as well as continuing to deny that such negative feelings can reasonably exist among ordinary people" (THE BOOK OF CHINESE BELIEFS, Frena Bloomfield, pg 99)

I suppose that spirit possession is one "safe" way to allow repressed thoughts and feelings to be consciously expressed, right?

The language of the BRAIN is not words, but symbols. The primary language of HUMANS is the spoken word, not symbols. An applicable analogy is that of a computer. The computer internally communicates using binary digits composed of electrical impulses. Certain strings of binary digits represent (ie -- symbolize) certain commands or data but the commands and the data are not what the computer "recognizes" it is the symbolic representation of those binary digits that the computer "recognizes". It is only the outside world that communicates with the computer utilizing the final representation of those certain strings (ie -- characters on a screen, sound from a speaker, or accessing of some hardware like a keyboard or a harddrive).

Remember when I was talking about physical experience versus psychic experience? Another good example of a psychic experience would be dreams. An article from Scientific American ("The Meaning of Dreams", Nov 1990) stated that, "dreams are a nightly record of a memory process. This is when mammals form strategies for survival and evaluate current experience in light of those strategies. The unusual character of dreams is the result of the complex associations that are culled from memory during this integration process". Dreams are something that cannot be described accurately, they can only be experienced. We can paint a picture of what we saw or felt but we can never convey the terror or the bliss we experienced in the dream. And how do we tell the difference between a dream and a trance? Is there a difference? How about visions? Or do we just cop out and say these other things don't exist?

Dreams are a nightly record of a memory process. This is when mammals form strategies for survival and evaluate current experience in light of those strategies. The unusual character of dreams is the result of the complex associations that are culled from memory during this integration process.

So now back to the subject. How do we know dreams are real? I cannot show you my dreams. I cannot prove I had any dreams. But I can PREDICT that you will have dreams. I can PREDICT that you will have dreams that will baffle you, charm you, and scare you. Here is a PROVABLE experience. Science has only recently been able to catch-up with this psychic experience in terms of proving that something does take place physically while one dreams but it still has done nothing to prove they exist. It is only confirming they exist. Until science can take a dream and videotape it, all a scientist can do is take you on your word for what you claimed to dream.

Dreams are not just an experience they are a physical processing -- specifically a restructuring and reorganization of memory infrastructure. As Johnathan points out, "The echidna, which does not possess REM sleep, has a larger prefrontal cortex compared with the rest of its brain than does any mammal, even humans...For higher [intellectual] capabilities to develop, the prefrontal cortex would have to become increasingly large -- beyond the capacity of the skull -- unless another brain mechanism evolved. REM sleep could have provided this new mechanism, allowing memory processing to occur 'off-line'. Coincident with the apparent development of REM sleep in marsupial and placental mammals was a remarkable neuroanatomical change: the prefrontal cortex was dramatically reduced in size. Far less prefrontal cortex was required to process information. That area of the brain could then develop to provide advanced perceptual and cognitive abilities in higher species." (The Meaning of Dreams, Jonathan Winson, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Nov 1990, pg 93-94)

Scientific American ran an article in November of 1990, titled "The Meaning of Dreams" by Jonathan Winson. In that article it points out how the first true mammals did not posses REM sleep. A still living version of one of the first true mammals is the Echidna (spiny anteater). With the subsequent evolution of the marsupials and the placentals, came the development of REM sleep. Now the interesting thing about the echidna is that its prefrontal cortex is very large compared with the rest of its brain, even when compared to homo sapiens. Now the prefrontal cortex is known (from various studies done on patients who have had frontal lobotomies) to be the center of the brains decision making processes. So something changed in going from the echidna to the other types of mammals that enabled a smaller brain to work with the same level of intelligence. Somehow, having REM sleep improves the functioning of the brain. This is where studies on brainwaves is helpful. While certain mammals are awake, they will display theta rhythm while doing various activities that are vital to its survival: while mice are searching for food or while a cat is hunting for example. This same rhythm is also displayed during REM sleep indicating that "crucial information acquired during the waking state may be reprocessed during sleep". "[Dreams] appear to be the nightly record of a basic mammalian memory process: the means by which animals form strategies for survival and evaluate current experience in light of those strategies". The unusual character of dreams is due to the complex symbolic associations that are culled from memory and not due to "random brain stem activity" or "reverse learning" (two alternate theories which explain and predict nothing useful about dreaming).

So here we can see where symbols are the visible result of the brain thinking or communicating to itself on a subconscious level. We can actually see the symbols at work. Just for your information though, it has been said before that the conscious mind is "The Great Storyteller" so only when the opportunity arises for the conscious mind to become aware of the symbolic language being "spoken" by the subconscious mind during REM sleep, then the conscious mind will take that opportunity to narrate the parade of symbols into a story (at least it tries the best it can to do so). For example, that is why as one is waking up and hears noises, those noises can be incorporated into the dream as part of the narration of the dream.

Jungs emphasis on the meaning of dreams as a way to understand the unconscious was right on the money. Dreams are not suppressed and repressed sexual passions and wishes as Freud suggested, but they have great significance to the dreamer. Dreams are also not something magical or random but they certainly still are very mysterious due to their symbolic nature.

But the real thing I want to concentrate about in this part is Jung's teachings about symbols. Jung emphasized the importance of symbols; the mandala, cultural heroes, myths, and so on. He especially stressed the importance of being familiar with mythical symbols and themes when dealing with clients because he considered myths not as mere stories, but as records of people's previous experiences with their own archetypes.

Before infants learn to talk, they are unable to visualise mental images of things that do not exist, but they have no problem visualizing things that exist in reality. Language therefore enables an infant to overcome that limitation in forming mental images of things that don't exist. Before that age, if they are presented with hallucinations, the infants will either cry or start banging their head against a wall (Bower 1971).

Archetypes are personifications of various aspects of our psyche (A Dictionary of Jungian Analysis by Andrew Samuels) and as such they are not rational but nonrational (because they are not 3-D realities that can be described verbally). We are going to cover this in more detail later, but for now just assume that nonrational things belong to the category of what is referred to as "The World of Not Words", ie -- symbols! As Jungism teaches us, the language of the nonrational is symbols (Jung to Live By by Eugene Pascal).

Did you notice the symbolic representation of the words "cat", "cow", and "book" from the quote above? We are viewing the language of the mind by manipulating the brain in split-brain patients.

The brain has not been shown to be neither deterministic nor indeterminate, but rather is a combination of both. You see, even if there were evidence that the actions of our brains were absolutely 100% deterministic, that would not prove that free will does not exist. I offer as evidence, the 'Butterfly Effect' (ie -- the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Harvard Square can radically affect the following week's weather at Princeton. This is not a fact but just an analogy of what chaos is like) or "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" syndrome, where even minor differences in the output of certain neurons can result in wildly different displays of behaviour. It also means that even simple neuron circuits are capable of displaying very complex and even unpredictable (read: chaotic) behaviour. My viewpoint is taken from the vantage point of neurophysiological psychology. The brain is a chaotic system, therefore it's state is not 100% predictable, although much of it's general behavior is predictable due to biochemistry and genetics.