A Cloud of Unknowing?

Reading FWH Myers’ own work (link)—and reading about him—brought back to my mind a subject that once much puzzled and interested me, namely Carl Gustav Jung’s Unconscious. It has always puzzled me that anyone would associate a mental something, which the Jungian Unconscious surely is, with unconsciousness—and it has exercised my mind because, for me, the mental is above all, and almost by definition, consciousness. In this I am in good company because the modern psychologist I most respect, Viktor Frankl, somewhere once called the Unconscious a mystification. All sorts of thought processes are going on in the body—because the brain produces them; of some we are conscious, of others we are not. My own very traditional view is that we have a soul; and it is the soul that is conscious of some things and not of others. In the modern view, namely that the entirety of consciousness is a brain structure pure and simple, and there is no soul at all, thus nothing separable from the body and therefore from the brain, the Unconscious is some major part of brain activity and consciousness simply another and much smaller part of the brain specialized in “attention,” or something like that.

Myers comes into this picture because he postulated something quite like the Jungian Unconscious in his notion of a Subliminal Mind. And, much like Jung, he saw in this part of our mind the same features of greater comprehensiveness and wisdom than the ordinary waking consciousness produces. From that level, in Myers view, “gushes up” (to use his phrase) the inspiration that makes the genius and artist; there reside healing powers and paranormal gifts like telepathy.

Now, to be sure, anyone involved in creative activities is surely well aware of inspiration—and will confess that the work of art, whatever its nature—or the invention, or the discovery—is not a personal achievement but a gift. It comes from somewhere and the artist/inventor/discoverer is merely an agent by means of which this (call it) energy is given some kind of tangible form. You might therefore say that the Unconscious or the Subliminal Mind is what creative people would call Inspiration—thus something separate from them but actually existing out there somewhere. And access to it is by one of the actual powers of the human mind, intuition.

Back when I was wrestling with Jung, I used to laugh and say to myself: “Here’s Carl Jung. He’s reinvented God again.” I said that because, functionally, the Collective Unconscious, anyway, had many features of the towering divine. God, for Jung was just an archetype, thus something in the Unconscious. No sooner had Nietzsche declared God dead than Jung declared the Unconscious alive and well. Their lives overlapped.

The phenomenon we all experience is something strange indeed—because inspiration is a strange thing, as are meaningful coincidences—as are precognitive dreams, experiences of telepathy, and so on. Those who give deep thought to these things give them names and thus in a way institutionalize them. And this has always been so.

Back in the fourteenth century appeared a slender book—which long ago I once had read—entitled The Cloud of Unknownig by an anonymous author. It deals with prayer. It counsels that we must let go of our ego and mind in prayer and enter the realm of “unknowingness” to experience what God is. My own thoughts about Carl Jung were thus grounded in an intuition. Whenever analytical knowledge fails us, we tend to discover some king of cloud of unknowing and project there what we think the answer might be. Dark matter serves that purpose in modern cosmology. The truth may be (to produce a projection of my own) that we are indeed surrounded by a vast reality of mind quite resistant to our effective grasp. And it is real enough—but it is not us, is not our mind. At different times through history we invent new names for it to explain what will not fit into our head.

Bottom-up v. Top-down

I discovered Carl Gustav Jung just after I had passed my nineteenth year—and Frederic W.H. Myers as I’m approaching my seventy-ninth. Clearly Jung captured the attention of elements of my generation much more effectively than Myers. Jung was the worthy adversary (to use a phrase from Castaneda) of Sigmund Freud. Myers was associated chiefly with parapsychology as a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, an activity in shadows. Yet now I realize that the younger Jung (born 1875 versus Myers’ birth-year of 1843) owed an enormous debt to Myers. One doesn’t have to look hard or very long to discover the grounding ideas in Jung’s psychology fully developed in Myers and already published when Jung was just a little boy. Myers had the subconscious, which he called the subliminal mind; he also maintained the idea that the subliminal mind’s powers were greater and much wider than that of the conscious mind; finally, like Jung later, he also imagined the conscious mind as a subset of total consciousness or, to use Jung’s phrasing, as a small island floating in a sea of superior consciousness.

Myers had formulated this idea to explain anomalous phenomena in human behavior and experience—all those experiences we now label as paranormal. His views were in part shaped by the rise in evolutionary thought. Darwin was 34 years older than Myers and Myers 32 years older than Jung. Myers reached out to evolution in attempts to explain paranormal powers in humans; it seemed sensible to view them, in his time, as emerging by means of an evolutionary process. Evolution was in the air, you might say. Thus Myers’ explanation made use of a bottom-up model. To be sure, Myers was something of a genius; as his knowledge advanced he also came to see that what was bubbling up from beneath the threshold (subliminally) also at times seemed to come down from above the waking consciousness. But, in effect, he set the stage for a not-quite materialistic psychology which had a bottom-up framing. Start of the twentieth century.

At the start of the twenty-first, Myers is once more rising into prominence but, curiously, as a champion of a top-down theory of psychology. That theory is that the mind is irreducible to matter and must therefore in some sense either transcend matter or belong to another radically different order. (See this post on Irreducible Mind here.) Myers’ work supports that thesis because his exhaustive review of the empirical evidence for the veridical character of paranormal phenomena had already effectively undermined materialist monism back at the tail of the nineteenth century. But nobody paid it any mind. Materialism was rising like a gusher based on technological success. By the twenty-first century, despite being ignored, evidence for the paranormal had greatly increased.

It occurs to me that cycles in civilization also tend to be either bottom-up or top-down in orientation. Modernity is bottom up—whether it is in explaining reality by studying matter or ruling collective by democratic means. The age that came before was top-down in looking up towards an invisible Creator. I’ve slowly come to feel that beginning roughly in the 1820s a transition back from bottom-up to top-down began with the decay of Western civilization. Myers occupies a kind of midway point in this transition. It is not surprising, therefore, that his labors are equally useful in the support both modes of thought. He saw the one nearing its end and foresaw the other rising. These processes, needless to say, do not take place on a human time scale. Reading the papers I see a total conviction that we’re only beginning to build the Tower of Siloam. The sky’s really the limit. Poets see only cracks (link).

The Comprehensive View

One of the more interesting ideas in Carl G. Jung’s work is the suggestion that consciousness is a very bright but also a very small sort of light. It is a tiny but very energetic island afloat on a vast ocean of Unconsciousness. And that phenomenon, the Unconscious, comes in a personal and a collective form. Moreover, it holds a deeper wisdom. Or that, at least, was how Jung saw it. He was, as I’ve remarked elsewhere here, a transitional figure between an ending and a dawning age, the Enlightenment and the New Age. Let’s call the second the New Dark Age to signal that, unlike the Enlightenment, it will takes its inspiration from within, not from the world without.

Living in that transition, Jung seemed to have trouble deciding what could and what could not be conscious. Getting down to the practical, the Personal Unconscious just has to be our memories, thus a kind of record. But while records, like books, may contain the products of consciousness, they are not in themselves conscious. And similarly with that Collective Unconscious. The only practical way to imagine that vaster complex is to say that, in some as yet undiscovered way, we participate or have access to the deposit of the memories of all who’ve ever lived. In Jung, however, these formations not only contain a kind of wisdom; they are also active, as if they were persons, the Collective older than the Personal. And in dreams the Unconscious presents information to the little consciousness in symbolical formations, as if awarely guiding us. Not surprisingly, he sometimes treats the Unconscious as if it were God.

To someone like me, born into the early days of the New Dark Age, consciousness is the property of souls, of agents. And rather than talking of it as if it were a kind of mysteriously arising Phenomenon that streams through us, to use William James’ phrasing, it is a power. So how does the Unconscious fit that scheme? It fits nicely if we think of the powerful, bright light not as consciousness but as attention. What we know in the day-to-day and general sense is what we mind. But we experience a good deal more than we mind. Nevertheless, what we ignore is also cumulated in our memory.

This suggests the great importance of cultivating a comprehensive view of reality, be it of the mundane or of the exalted. “Comprehensive” has become a key word in my mind of late because our ordinary state of being, what with media bombardment almost unavoidable, is so dangerously one-sided. We shouldn’t have to wait for dreams to remind us of aspects of reality we should be minding. I develop a here-and-now example of that in a post on LaMarotte today (link)—which, as I was writing it, reminded me of the bigger picture sketched out here.

Mirrors of Projection

It was in C.G. Jung’s writings that I first encountered the rather useful concept of projection. Jung held that the collective unconscious holds permanent energetic structures he labeled archetypes (“primal patterns”)—an old, old concept with a hoary history… Plato’s ideal, eternal forms were of this category existing somewhere in a transcendental space, the very model and source of all things visible; in scholastic times they were transferred to the mind of God; during the Enlightenment Locke, for instance, brought them back to earth and suggested that archetypes were simply things out in the world that our minds turn into patterns. What goes around, comes around. In the transitional twentieth century, the archetypes go back into our chests, and if we seek to trace them further, we find them in that quasi-divine collective unconscious which was Jung’s reinvention of divinity. They reside there in Platonic silence, energize us, and we project them out into the world. There you have the root of this conception. The archetype of “father” is projected onto leaders, of “mother” on the nanny state, of “evil” onto capitalism, socialism, the red menace, or Muslim terrorism. Jung wisely suggested that people should withdraw their projections in order to mature.

Let’s walk hand-in-hand for a moment with this archetype of the Wise Old Man. Jung thought that the mirrors of our projection take on the energy of the archetype itself, and that, by projection, we thus form god-like entities that rule us in our turn. Not bad when you think about it. The rational way, Locke’s way, is much less exiting. Without the psychic energies that reflect malignly from so many structures of reality, CNN’s coverage of news would become—as it already is for the aware—a crashing bore. If we genuinely saw the reality behind today’s bogey-man, Al Qaida, we wouldn’t get very exited—much as in McCarthy’s day careers and reputations would not have been destroyed had we really looked at communism as it really was. When we don’t see reality, it turns into a mirror. It reflects back what we are.

Okay. But what is your solution, Mr. Darnay? And what does science say about this subject? A solution? I don’t have one. One of our more interesting projections is that the world arrays itself in a series of problem-solution sets, and if we can just get enough people behind us, we can get the problem solved. If this state of affairs troubles you, look for a solution within. Turn off CNN, for instance, or decline to participate in polls. Now as for science… Or should I have capitalized that word?

Mind-Sphere

I produced a short verse the other day concerning the noosphere and, based on the reaction to it, I feel a need to say a little more. Here’s the attempt.

The last century produced a veritable rash of bottom-up theories that I studied avidly as a young man but, as time passed, I came gradually to regard them as strangely juvenile—the more so as my juvenile years passed. Since the 1950s, when I encountered these theories, the world has also changed, of course, and not visibly for the better; hence my perception of that change had something to do with my growing doubts about modernity. In this period I also studied cyclic theories of history; that choice was justified; the broad development of events has generally confirmed what I had learned from the historians. At the same time, thus still in the 1950s, I had at least minimum exposure to ancient and medieval philosophical traditions in college. The exposure proved helpful. As my dissatisfactions with modernism grew, I came to value the older thought more and more. You might say that mine’s an average pattern: the rash enthusiasm of youth leads to sober acceptance of wisdom as experience hammers away.

The theories that I’ve found wanting all have their roots in the idea of progress, thus in the notion that change for the better takes place spontaneously over time. It is tempting to classify them as descendants of the evolutionary theory, but their origins predate Darwin and point back to the Enlightenment—indeed the post-Renaissance period. The theory of evolution, certainly in modern form, is itself a product of the same impulse—an impulse that burst on the scene in a politically visible form as the French revolution, an event that capped the eighteenth century.

The best explanation I’ve ever found for vast collective changes of this kind—e.g., the appearance of the idea of progress—I found in the cyclic theories of history. And the reason why such explanations are plausible to me is because they’re grounded in observations of human behavior—thus in conscious agencies—rather than in nature or in matter.

One example of such a theory is the emergence of the noosphere, first proposed by Vladimir Vernadsky, a Russian mineralogist. The picture we’re supposed to form is that of successive spheres, one above the other; thus we have the geosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere. The biosphere developed along the way and came to be inserted, as it were, on top of the rock and into the water. The final sphere is that of mind. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin developed this idea further. He was a paleoanthropologist and simultaneously a Jesuit priest; he wrote about evolution; the Church frowned on his ideas and impeded their publication. What more do you need in the way of a perfect profile for a modern culture hero?

De Chardin’s writings are obscure enough—especially when he diverges from biology—so that you can understand them in more than one way. One is that biological evolution is producing a sphere of mind that, in due time, “at the omega point,” will create a collective consciousness that will be God in the world. Another possible reading is that evolution is producing a collective mind striving toward Omega, that last word a new name for the divinity. In any case we have here a bottom-up theory, the usually advanced modern thing, producing God from matter in a wooly sort of sense—or is it God leaning over as matter rises up? Je ne sais pas.

Close relatives of the noosphere are Jung’s Collective Unconscious, Bergson’s Élan Vital, the Gaia hypothesis, Whitehead’s Process Cosmology—and there are others, to be sure. In popular culture these same ideas enliven or underpin many episodes of Star Trek, to name just one modern series. Behind these newer forms are older versions of the same, including Hegel’s evolving God difficult to distinguish form the state and the closely related dialectical materialism of Marx that returns us to the worker’s paradise. For me the ultimate problem with all of these downside-up theories always turned out to be my inability to detect an agency responsible for such energetic teleological upward striving. I note parenthetically here that the big question isn’t whether or not God exists but whether agency exists. Once we determine agency at any level, God becomes necessary.

Now concerning what I thought was a tongue-in-cheek little verse suggesting that de Chardin had prophetically foreseen the Internet in general and the blogosphere (another sphere?!!) in particular—and that he saw this as the sphere of mind. Well. Yes. This is the hammer of experience beating down. We do have a noosphere now and, with the right instruments, we can even detect it filling the electromagnetic spectrum with invisible waves filled with meaning. But what is that meaning like? It's just the same-old, same-old. Sheer mass, however dense, does not appear magically to transmute the ho-hum into something higher. That this was possible was very clearly an idea de Chardin actually held. He thought that huge masses of matter, piled up on top of each other, would produce what physics calls a singularity (e.g., black hole). That the extremely tiny suddenly exhibits unimaginable properties, such as particle-wave duality—and finally that complexity, if raised to the nth degree, suddenly bursts into mind. Watching the noosphere on CNN I no longer wonder; the tempting melody sounds flat. Or am I just getting old?

Brigitte's Zen Mistress reaction to hearing this post was: "Did you notice that noosphere and blogosphere both have two Os?"

Sensate Reflex

A while back I read again certain portions of Carl G. Jung's book entitled Synchronicity. The word is of Jung's own coinage and refers to the phenomenon we ordinarily call "meaningful coincidences" or, with a slightly more romantic toning, serendipity—that word, in turn, derived from a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. Synchronicity, meanwhile, has taken pretty deep roots in the circles that concern themselves with borderline phenomena.

Jung's very choice of a neologism to label a relatively common, usually pleasant, but also mildly wonder-rousing experience that people have reflects what I call a kind of sensate bias, a word to which I'll return in a moment. The essence of the experience is its meaningful quality; in Jung's treatment of it, however, the emphasis shifts to the coincidence of something, presumably X and Y, in time. Meaning is introduced, but almost with a kind of timidity. Quite a few people, straining to reach once more a holistic stance toward reality, but wishing to be thought orthodox by Science capitalized, exhibit sensate bias. Jung illustrates this tendency in the present context rather neatly. Now to the substance.

The part I was rereading is the account of a very interesting and, indeed, classical near death experience (NDE) reported by one of his lady patients. She had the experience in the wake of giving birth under difficult circumstances. What struck me in reading the account this time—and reading beyond the case itself—was the curious bias that seems to have held back even a figure like Carl Jung from reaching the logical conclusions that the case that he reported clearly demanded.

The very essence of Jung's book is to show that synchronicity is evidence for meaning in the universe. In making room for meaning, Jung created a quaternity of principles supposedly underlying the cosmic design. He arranged these, initially, in the form of a cross as follows:

		Space
Causality				Synchronicity
		Time

Later, in collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, he modify this scheme further to yield the following:

		Indestructible Energy
Constant Connection Through Effect (Causality)				Inconstant Connection Through Contingence, Equivalence, or "Meaning" (Synchronicity)
		Space/Time Continuum

Note that the word meaning here receives a set of quote marks around it, almost as if to signal that we must not take the word too literally. Jung is striving for a scientific flavor here even though what he is saying transcends the category of science as usually understood.

I can’t help but see this as what might be called a reflex by all those reared in the atmosphere of a sensate culture. That term comes from Pitirim Sorokin, the sociologist, who classified ages such as ours as totally focused on sensory experience whereas religious ages focus on internal, spiritual processes and look "upward" as it were, rather than "outward" at the world. Members of the sensate culture live in flatland. They cannot quite internalize the fact that the moment meaning is seriously contemplated to be part of the cosmos—wherever it may be found—the picture is immediately transformed. It becomes hierarchical.

Jung’s whole career had a transitional flavor. I myself strongly suspect that part of the nineteenth and all of the twentieth century were times of another renaissance, thus periods of transition between ideational/spiritual and sensate/materialistic ages—or the other way around. The period we call the Renaissance was the transition between Christian spiritualism and the great era of materialism that is now crumbling all around us. Such periods are outwardly oriented. The reverse motion is inwardly directed. In the chaotic times that always follow when materialism collapses by its own weight are dramatic in another way and do not leave the same kind of grandiose impression. Throughout his life Jung kept reintroducing his audiences to the ineffable dimensions of spirit and mind, but he tried so hard to remain part of the scientific caste that his creations were highly ambiguous at best, an example of which is the Collective Unconscious. It has a strong flavoring of divinity. His archetypes, which live in the Collective Unconscious, are reminiscent of Plato's eternal ideas. And, finally, his synchronicity reintroduces “meaning,” albeit in quotes.

I’m glad that Jung labored as he did. For many members of my generation, he was among the most important guides leading us out of the wilderness of materialism toward the new world that approaches, as it were, both from the future and the past. For many of us the old order was decadent beyond retrieval. At the same time, in my generation (although I may only be speaking for myself) the sensate bias that caused Jung to hesitate did not prove to be much of a barrier. I myself wave it off as mere hesitation to make the break clean.