Gods, Spirits and Monotheism
When struggling with a difficult situation, Rebecca, one of my best friends in college, would say, “I don’t know how to think about it.” I’m sure the look on my face was not what one would wish to see from a good friend. “You don’t know how to think about it?” This seemed ridiculous to me, and probably my hidden thought was that it was a dumb thing to say. Wasn’t it obvious that we just think? It’s as natural as breathing. We do it all the time. Un huh.
That was fifty years ago. Now I know that Rebecca was intelligently verbalizing something that I had no concept for at all. It never occurred to me that there is a “how” to thinking. Nor did it occur to me that my thinking was never “pure” in the sense of rational thought. I did not understand that philosophical thought includes “how” to think; it is a strict discipline of learning how to think logically. Rational thought, which Plato equated with virtue, has been our gold standard since his and Aristotle’s time. My thinking was automatic and spontaneous, which I “thought” best exemplified my free spirit! (Bless my heart.)
I thought whatever came into my head: bright interesting thoughts, relentlessly trivial thoughts (“shall I have a peach?”), random associations (peach reminds me of Peachtree Street where I played the piano in an Atlanta hotel), daydreams, negative and dark thoughts, scary and sometimes lustful thoughts were all thoughts that I assumed were coming from my intention to think. In retrospect, it’s clear that I was not the Lone Ranger in assuming that I was choosing to think just because my lips were flapping.
I now can see that my thoughts were always “shaded” by my feelings. The correct psychological term for “shaded” is “contaminated” (which my feeling function does not like, but never mind). In other words, my thinking was contaminated by feeling. Here goes another psychological term: my feeling came from a basically undifferentiated function. “Undifferentiated” means that my feeling function was mostly unknown to my conscious mind. James Hillman explains that a “function” is something we can make use of. But if it is undifferentiated it is not yet a conscious function. So, when I thought about anything, my thoughts were not clear reason. They were mixed with unconscious feelings and sensations, like water shaded with red, blue, green, colors. I suppose my fantasy was that my thoughts were all clear.
Please do not read these words as a condemnation of feeling. The feeling function, once differentiated, allows us to know a thing’s value. Thinking cannot tell me if something “feels” bad, good or neutral, and a thinking person who is not in touch with the feeling function can easily move toward something that our feeling would have told us from the get-go, “do not touch!” I have a brilliant friend who is relentlessly rational. It is amazing to see how he can move toward a toxic woman without the slightest message of danger coming from his feeling function. How many thousands of stories begin with a person who was not connected to her feeling, which would have told her to come closer, move away or remain neutral? I cannot count the number of times a client has said, “I had a feeling that he was not right for me.” That after being unhappily married for thirty years.
I have sat with more than one client who lived with a subtle feelings of being “broken” all of her adult life. She can trace that feeling back to her earliest years long before the word “broken” came into her mind. Shame was the inevitable companion of that little girl’s feeling of being broken. Imagine the automatic thoughts that have looped relentlessly in her thinking mind, stemming from unrecognized and underground feelings of being broken. Imagine how amazing it would be for her to recognize how her unconscious feelings contaminated her thinking function.
So dear reader, once again VB has strayed from the linear path. What happened to a post on Jung’s “gods, spirits and monotheism?” A revelation! I discover that I really do not know how to think about this topic! Basically because the subject is too huge to contain in a rational, linear, sequential manner, at least for me. Without a doubt I should have listened more carefully to Rebecca’s complaint! Although I do seem to have a sense of understanding the topic, I’m somewhat confounded as to how to express that understanding in the net of written words.
I strongly suspect that many of you have experienced a similar dilemma. Sometimes we deeply understand something, but can never find the words to communicate it to another. Years ago, I realized that this is the meaning of “transmission” in Buddhism. Mutual recognition of truth, from Zen master to his or her student, with nothing but a look, was transmitted through silence. Where’s the thought in that?
So I clearly do not know how to write from that linear, rational thinking function. This helps me understand why I have always had such awe in the presence of brilliant thinkers such as my Jungian analyst Edward Whitmont, who wrote The Symbolic Quest, or James Hillman, who had an astonishing capacity to comprehend and then clearly explain these puzzling elements of Jungian psychology. They know how to think! Hillman understood philosophy, from Socrates to Kant to Neitzche, as did Carl Jung, par excellent.
I begin to see that I write from the feeling function; I need to express Jung’s amazingly brilliant psychology in stories, analogies and most importantly, metaphor. Another way of saying it is that I lean toward a poetic way of “telling it slant.” Mostly I now understand that this has always been in fact, compensatory to my limited thinking function. Psyche had to find a detour route for my particular way of communication. So there you have it. Not only did I use my heart condition to get out of gym for four years, including every other thing that I was afraid of, I also managed to get out of learning how to think. The best I seem to be able to do is think and write in metaphor. That is how I propose to describe what Jung meant by “gods, spirits and monotheism.”
Imagine that there are a number of great rivers flowing into the ocean, which we will call Psyche. After a life-long exploration of what psyche is, Jung finally and simply said that psyche is existence itself. How would you describe psyche? What does the word “psyche” mean to you? If you try to imagine psyche as Mind, I think Jung would accept that. He accepted the truth that we can only see through the glass darkly since psyche cannot see herself. Mind is both conscious and unconscious, and certainly Mind is a Jungian synonym for Psyche.
Jung personified psyche as feminine, which is good enough for me, at least at this juncture. Imagine that psyche is not in you or in me, but that we are in psyche. Another way of saying it is that our conscious mind is surrounded by psyche. An island (the conscious ego) is in the ocean, but an island is also connected to the ocean’s floor, just as our conscious ego is part of the unconscious. Unfortunately, it has forgotten that deep connection and imagines itself to be a separate entity.
Imagine that there are two great rivers flowing into Psyche. Actually, there are more than two great rivers, in particular those flowing from India and China, but we are narrowing our focus to these two, which we’ll call the Western Rivers of Influence. Let us call one of the rivers Monotheism. If we trace that huge river, as big as the Mississippi, back to the smaller rivers, streams and tributaries that flow into it, we come to a land far from Europe where it originated: the land of Judea. From it comes the archetypical story of God coming down to meet Moses on Mount Sinai. This is not simply a childhood Biblical story. It is a Foundational Myth in our Western consciousness, a myth that is hardwired into our European-American brain. In other words, this Myth flowed into the ocean of our unconscious psyche thousands of years ago. It is amazing to acknowledge that this great river, which eventually flooded over the entire Roman Empire, originated from a tiny Middle Eastern culture and mentality.
God said to Moses: “I am that I am.” While this is a tautology, it is also foundational. “I am one” is the ego’s mantra of Monotheism. But God’s second Commandment fleshed out what eventually became a cult of conscious monotheism.
1) “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.”
2) “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
3) “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”
I would say this about covers it, yes? God’s commandment was given not only to the children of Israel but, through their diaspora, it spread throughout the civilized world to Egypt, Greece and then to Rome. But this great river flowing from Judea had already been exponentially expanded in power and size through the merger of a revolutionary message of salvation. The one thing Judaism did not have was a messiah. Moses was never destined to lead the Children into the promised land. Jesus Christ was the catalyst that flooded the river of Monotheism into the Western promised land.
Jung reminds us that even today, after we have had one hundred years to absorb Neitzche’s mind-bending announcement that God is dead, we still need to consciously acknowledge that Christianity raised what was essentially a barbarous and unconscious people by holding us together with a unifying theme of Monotheism on the one hand and love, devotion and forgiveness “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, on the other.
So we have an unconscious bias in favor of Monotheism: Unity is good, diversity is bad; one God, good. many gods, bad. Perhaps we have an unconscious fear of multiplicity. It’s one thing to have a little statue of Buddha in your living room, but having a graven image that will bring down punishment on your children, grandchildren and great-grand children? Well, maybe I’ll keep it in the closet.
But what about the other side of the mighty thin plank, Polytheism? When Jung suggested that Psyche contains “gods or spirits,” he was making a statement that remains quite radical to our Judaic-Christian monotheistic ears. If gods and spirits sound rather pagan, this very fact represents Christianity’s great triumph over the Greek gods and goddesses who once resided on Olympus.
Jungian Psychology suggests that our unconscious has been deeply affected by a second Western river of influence. This river he called Polytheism, and it can be traced back to ancient Greece and its Pantheon of Gods. Where did Zeus, Hermes or Athena go after they were labeled “pagan” and their representatives called graven images” by Christian dogma? Jung’s answer: they became our diseases. Let me interpret that. They became our neuroses: Anxiety, obsession, compulsion, depression, hysteria, sexual addiction and every other addiction imaginable under the sun. The ancient, “pagan” gods of polytheism went underground, and our mantra since that time has been, “out of sight out of mind.” Their repression has not necessarily led to psychic health.
Where did anima (Soul) go? Where did the eternal child (Puer) go? What happened to Satan (Lucifer) once God supposedly kicked Him out of Heaven? “Obviously Evil did not tuck its tail and vanish into thin air. So, where oh where did the dark side go? God is Love, Jesus is Love, angels and saints are love. Clearly Heaven had a “No Vacancy” sign designed to keep out any “love-challenged” god, goddess or spirit (and they were always a feisty bunch, to put it mildly). But as the famous alchemical dictum goes, “as in heaven, so on earth.” We also put up a “No Vacancy” sign on earth.
Where then could Hermes go if there was no place for him in heaven or on earth? Mount Olympus vanished under the great flood of monotheism, and its gods became psychic systems living in the unconscious mind. This is why Jung stressed psyche’s inherent tendency to fragment into autonomous systems. Now, Hermes lives below the surface of our conscious ego, as does Athena and Eros. Buddha never saw that one coming.
So Shadow, the morally compromised part of every human, our dark sister, and brother, became a living, psychic system beneath the surface of the conscious ego. And since the conscious ego only acknowledges its own existence, “I am that I am.” it does not have to deal with such a messy thing as a shadow brother or a shadow sister, where the Buddha’s three poisons, greed, hatred and delusion, still reside.
I end with the soothing words of Mary Oliver, who tells psyche slant”
“Ocean
I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is
always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all the blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.””
