John, talk about ships passing in the night! Thank you for your clarifying assistance. I think I have been able to make a mid-course correction here and get more in tune with your comments (although you may disagree). Your examination of language as a mirror to the movement of the soul must be like gauging how the movement of deep subterranean tectonic plates cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions on the surface. And you are right that the practitioners of all cultural practices “simply focus on the content, or information, or references outside their language in their rhetoric”. So you are monitoring what their language is trying to say about their souls (both individual and collectively) that they are unawares of. There you find “soul movement on a collective level, and another picture looming up”, especially in the description of the quantum physics experiment at the heart of this discussion. So, are you saying that unbeknownst to the experimenters, their ‘factual’ observation that objective reality cannot be hammered into the ground and made fast is actually the rumblings of the soul breaking out of the subject-object split defined by scientific objectivity? And that as the collective souls of us all are overtaken by the ‘acceptance’ (willing or unwilling) that our notion of quantifiable objectivity must sink, torching the very fabric of our world that relies so relentlessly on the notion of subject-object objectivity, on the notion that one stands apart from the other and that both are real? And this appears to you as being apocalyptic because we are not prepared for “this relativisation of our conviction of being individual, isolated centres.” So, as the center melts, the individual will not find a suitable container to migrate to because he cannot shake his sense of himself or all that he knows as ‘real.’ And this will blow his foundation and everything else to Kingdom-come. Your foreboding is powerful, just as Jung’s was for me, and I am curious if you can envision an alternate scenario where there is a profound ‘evolution’ where people can accept being not the center, not the subject, but the object for some other subject? And is it possible that the more we experience and plumb the deepest psychic layers that we will find ourselves meeting up something that will not destroy us but bring a reality that is true and fixed but different and non-overlapping with any other observer? Can the ego and the self coexist in two different, but nonetheless, equal realities where they ‘appear’ to be in one reality or the other but are actually in the same reality and it is only the observer that gets a false impression?
You must forgive my meanderings but this is not a subject that I have thought much about. Moreover, I have a firm image of myself as occupying the role of a step-down transformer: one lead into the rarefied world that individuals like you and Russ and Paco inhabit, and the other lead into the world of the common man (struggling and confused). I am trying to link the two worlds. I am also unduly influenced by having been a scientist my whole life (cancer research) and marveled at the ability of the DNA in a cancer cell to tap into its billion-plus years of learned tricks and escape routes solely to live another day. So I would naturally ask, if there no escape routes for the coming conflict you mention between the subjective and objective realities? I was very impacted by Paco’s book and his lifelong struggle to overcome this very type of dissension. While I admit he is a rare bird (or more precisely, a heron) but he embraced the transcendent that was his burden and he did not fail us. But all this discussion has made me a think of a poem I wrote long ago but is still relevant to me now.
A SCREAM AROSE
A scream arose
from me, or at least,
in a dream of mine
which I claim ownership of,
but not supremacy of.
It arose, it seemed to me
at a time of least interest,
that is, at the time of
horizontal dispassion,
and I thought it arose
from someone else,
someone other than me.
But I claim the child.
I accept its genealogy,
too like mine to be
anyone else's.
I must confess
I did not recognize the dreamer,
that distorted face,
those stricken hands.
I raised my feet higher
so my soles
(or souls) would be above
and so look down on me.
And I waited
for grace to trickle
down my globular legs.
I learned this trick
lying upside down on
Freud's couch.
It works
but only partly.
The screamer saw
into and past this trick
and surprised me with
one of his own
(men do scream, you know).
I surrendered.
Pulled my legs up to
my chest and looked
terrified.
What I felt
I can't describe.
Tony my heart lifted as I read your letter and poem here. For starters, it is rare today for an interlocutor to strive for understanding first, before judgements/agreement/disagreements which are so often without soul, i.e. not a response from psyche. Your “midcourse correction” and bid to get in tune is a breath of fresh air for me, so thank you for that. To everything you said up to the sentence, “Your forboding is powerful…”, I can only says YES you got, in your own words, what I am saying, beautifully, and for me that is a rare experience. I felt a resonance with your understanding so perhaps you know about these things too! I wonder if your cancer research serves a bit here for your understanding but that’s for another day.
Now to your question, “Your foreboding is powerful, just as Jung’s was for me, and I am curious if you can envision an alternate scenario where there is a profound ‘evolution’ where people can accept being not the center, not the subject, but the object for some other subject?” I have imagined alternative scenarios and written about them too. I wrote a short story, The Inception, which languishes “on the shelf” but I still think it is a nice imaginative variation of an alternative scenario for the future. It emerges between two lovers and I am sending you the link to it (see at the end). Two people, governed by their love, find their way to a new kind of discourse that allows a superordinate centre to emerge from within the discourse that they began to subordinate themselves to. Like most of my books and essays, this one springs from a dream. This story may address your question: “Can the ego and the self coexist in two different, but nonetheless, equal realities where they ‘appear’ to be in one reality or the other but are actually in the same reality”. I think my experience of the “First Morning” may do as well, in my original post here.
You mentioned linking the two worlds and the possibility of escape routes. Linking the two worlds IS the “escape” route but it is also an impossibility! However some individuals still are asked to engage this impossibility with their whole being—initiation!. Technically Jung called this “escape” route the transcendent function. It is at the same time no escape but an unendurable torment of what he called sustained “suspension”. As far as the collective is concerned (and that includes us), no there is no escape whatsoever. We must each find out own way as we proceed into the ineluctable future. I choose the way of love.
I have written extensively about this “escape” with regards to individuals who are called to approach the threshold, and even had one essay published about it as related to the Red Book (see link below). To date not one response to what I believe is the guts of the Red Book— Jung’s suspension at the threshold—the locus of a collision between the eternal and the temporal. This is where he was taught the reality of the objective psyche. As he once told Aniela Jaffe, “you are tormented with the opposites; I am tormented BY them!”
That’s the difference between wrestling with paradoxes, and initiation!
Lastly Tony thank you for the gripping poem. It says it all, really, as poems can do so often. Did you know that Edvard Munch’s art work of “The Scream” is generally understood as his human existential anguish but his diary tells a different story: The sky turned red; he heard a scream, nature’s scream, i.e. not his own personal scream and he expressed it, serving as ITS mouthpiece. Your poem seems quite similar to me.
Best to you, John
The Inception at https://www.dropbox.com/s/5mmg7i6hnl50g0b/Vortex.pdf?dl=0
Hidden Legacy of then Red Book at: https://www.academia.edu/12876153/The_Hidden_Legacy_Of_The_Red_Book_2015_
Tony,
I loved your comments and reflections on the quantum business. And I confess that by the time I finished reading your poem, I was chuckling. Not that I thought your poem was intentionally funny, but there was an element of sly wit beneath the screaming, the lying down on Freud’s couch, your feet in the air, etc. A vein of silver, sparkling in the dark. I thought the punch line was delicious: “What I felt/I couldn’t describe.”
Thanks, Paco
Thank you John and Paco for your comments. I now have some more ‘pondering’ to do. And thank you John for the links – I know I shall be impacted by them. As for what being in cancer research teaches – it teaches you that you never get out of second grade. And only when you accept that can you really start to listen and learn from nature.
Hi Tony, the link to my book “Inception & The Vortex” is here. Press Download button at the top of the page. Actually both short stories address alternative futures!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry8w5sdzcvpi3ce/inception%20vortex.pdf?dl=0
Cheers, John