Jung could not agree with this, because he knew there was something beyond the purely physical bodily sexual drive. He knew, by his own experiences, which he could not deny that there was something paranormal above all of this. When I talk about these subjects, the paranormal, super normal types of thing, I'm not giving any applause to the New Age group who pay their money and hope to have experiences. Phenomena which is paranormal occurs to many individuals, mainly when they're growing up. Pre-puberty or around the time of puberty, that's when poltergeist phenomena, which is really the person themselves doing it, occurs: The occasional shifting of something. A door slamming by itself. Something moving on the mantle piece.
During one of the arguments with Freud and Carl Jung, when the debate got really heated, in fact, a sharp crash resounded in the room, and they searched high and low through all the cupboards. A big heavy type of bone cutting knife, one of these little butcher's knives (the big wide ones) had split right down its blade, by itself. This freaked out Freud, and since Jung had been trying to make a point, in the first place, that there was more to life than that which we simply see in the purely material. Jung said, "yes and there'll be another resounding crash in a minute," and sure enough there was. That was pretty well the last time that he and Freud were together.
Freud's part in the whole thing was to come forward with these really antiquated theories. They were, in fact, Boy Scout theories, compared to what the ancients had written about, regarding human nature. Freud's part in it was to try and demystify everything completely into a science, which would then be regulated, because down the road they knew they would have to use medicine and this new science of psychiatry to help dominate the people. Luckily, we've had other people like Carl Jung, who opposed him and put out alternate writings, far more interesting. Although I wouldn't advise people to go along the same route as Carl Gustav Jung had taken, because he used himself as an experimental subject and he would deprive himself of food and light and so on, for weeks on end to try and get in touch with what initially was called "the alter ego."
One of the experiments eventually brought forth a female shape, which he called "the Anima," as opposed to the “Animus,” the male type projection or psychic spirit. Then he found out that the main one behind the apparition, which appeared to him and which he believed was guiding him throughout his life, was called "Philemon" and for those who know their ancient history, "Philemon" was a personification of the Fisher King. It was a sort of male figure with the wings and colors of the King Fisher, the ancient symbol of the Fisher King in the mystery religions, going all the way back to Egypt and before. I wouldn't advise people to go through that. Plus, he pretty well drove himself insane for many years, in fact, with his experiments, and didn't regain his completeness until he was much older.
However, not to discount all of his work, far from it. He, by studying himself, came to some very rational conclusions about everyone. In this particular book, "The Undiscovered Self" in Chapter 4, the title is called "The Individual's Understanding of Himself". This chapter begins:
"It is outstanding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgments and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantité négligeable. This contradiction, the paradoxical evaluation of humanity by man himself, is in truth a matter for wonder, and one can only explain it as springing from an extraordinary uncertainty of judgment—in other words, man is an enigma to himself. This is understandable, seeing that he lacks the means of comparison necessary for self-knowledge. He knows how to distinguish himself from the other animals in point of anatomy and physiology, but as a conscious, reflecting being, gifted with speech, he lacks all criteria for self-judgment. He is, on this planet, a unique phenomenon, which he cannot compare with anything else. The possibility of comparison, and hence of self-knowledge, would arise only if he could establish relations with quasi-human mammals inhabiting other stars.
Until then, man must continue to resemble a hermit who knows that in respect of comparative anatomy he has affinities with the anthropoids, but, to judge by appearances, is extraordinarily different from his cousins in respect of his psyche. It is just in this most important characteristic of his species that he cannot know himself, and therefore remains a mystery to himself. The differences of degree within his own species are of little significance compared with the possibilities of self-knowledge, which would be occasioned by an encounter with a creature of similar structure, but different origin.
Our psyche, which is primarily responsible for all the historical changes wrought by the hand of man on the face of this planet, remains an insoluble puzzle and an incomprehensible wonder, an object of abiding perplexity–a feature it shares with all Nature's secrets. In regard to the latter, we still have hope of making more discoveries and finding answers to the most difficult questions. But in regard to the psyche and psychology, there seems to be a curious hesitancy. Not only is it the youngest of the empirical sciences, but it has great difficulty in getting anywhere near its proper object.
In the same way that our misconception of the solar system had to be freed from prejudice by Copernicus, the most strenuous efforts of a well-nigh revolutionary nature were needed to free psychology, first from the spell of mythological ideas, and then from the prejudice that the psyche is, on the one hand, a mere epiphenomenon of a biochemical process in the brain, or, on the other hand, a wholly unapproachable and recondite matter. The connection with the brain does not in itself prove that the psyche is an epiphenomenon, a secondary function casually dependent on biochemical processes.
Nevertheless, we know only too well how much the psychic function can be disturbed by verifiable processes in the brain, and this in fact is so impressive that the subsidiary nature of the psyche seems an almost unavoidable inference. The phenomena of parapsychology, however, warns us to be careful, for they point to a relativization of space and time through psychic factors, which cast doubt on our naïve and overhasty explanation of the parallels between the psychic and the physical. For the sake of this explanation, people deny the findings of parapsychology outright, either for philosophical reasons or from intellectual laziness.
This can hardly be considered a scientifically responsible attitude, even though it is a popular way out of a quite extraordinary intellectual difficulty. To assess the psychic phenomenon, we have to take account of all the other phenomena that come with it, and accordingly we can no longer practice any psychology that ignores the existence of the unconscious or of parapsychology.
The structure and physiology of the brain furnish no explanation of the psychic process. The psyche has a peculiar nature, which cannot be reduced to anything else. Like physiology, it represents a relatively self-contained field of experience, to which we must attribute a quite special importance, because it holds within itself one of the two indispensable conditions for existence as such, namely, the phenomenon of consciousness. Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by the psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being."
Alan: That's the important part, really, is the precondition of being.
"Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position coequal with the principle of physical being. The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche on his own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If the psyche must be granted an overriding empirical importance, so also must the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche.
This fact must be expressly emphasized for two reasons. Firstly, the individual psyche, just because of its individuality, is an exception to the statistical rule and is therefore robbed of one of its main characteristics when subjected to the leveling influence of statistical evaluation. Secondly, the Churches grant it validity only in so far as it acknowledges their dogmas—in other words, when it surrenders to a collective category. In both cases the will to individuality is regarded as egotistic obstinacy. Science devalues it as subjectivism, and the Churches condemn it morally as heresy and spiritual pride.
As to the latter charge, it should not be forgotten that, unlike other religions, Christianity holds at its core a symbol which has for its content the individual way of life of a man, the Son of Man, and that it even regards this individuation process as the incarnation of the revelation of God himself. Hence the development of the self acquires a significance whose full implications have hardly begun to be appreciated, because too much attention to externals blocks the way to immediate inner experience. Were not the autonomy of the individual the secret longing of many people, this hard-pressed phenomenon would scarcely be able to survive the collective suppression, either morally or spiritually.
All these obstacles make it more difficult to arrive at a correct appreciation of the human psyche, but they count for very little beside one other remarkable fact that deserves mentioning. This is the common psychiatric experience that the devaluation of the psyche and other resistances to psychological enlightenment are based in large measure on fear–on panic fear of the discoveries that might be made in the realm of the unconscious. These fears are found not only among persons who are frightened by the picture Freud painted of the unconscious; they also troubled the originator of psychoanalysis himself, who confessed to me that it was necessary to make a dogma of his sexual theory, because this was the sole bulwark of reason against a possible "outburst of the black flood of occultism."
Alan: He's talking about Freud's fear.
"In these words Freud was expressing his conviction that the unconscious still harbored many things that might lend themselves to "occult" interpretations, as is in fact the case. These "archaic vestiges," or archetypal forms grounded on the instincts and giving expression to them, have a numinous quality that sometimes arouses fear. They are ineradicable, for they represent the ultimate foundations of the psyche itself. They cannot be grasped intellectually, and when one has destroyed one manifestation of them, they reappear in altered form. It is this fear of the unconscious psyche, which not only impedes self-knowledge, but is the gravest obstacle to a wider understanding and knowledge of psychology. Often the fear is so great that one dares not admit it, even to oneself. Here is a question that every religious person should consider very seriously; he might get an illuminating answer.
A scientifically oriented psychology is bound to proceed abstractly; that is, it removes itself just sufficiently far from its object not to lose sight of it altogether. That is why the findings of laboratory psychology are, for all practical purposes, often so remarkably unenlightening and devoid of interest. The more the individual object dominates the field of vision, the more practical, detailed and alive will be the knowledge derived from it. This means that the objects of investigation, too, become more and more complicated, and the uncertainty of individual factors increases proportionally to their number, thus increasing the possibility of error. Understandably enough, academic psychology is scared of this risk and prefers to avoid complex impunity. It has full freedom in the choice of questions it will put to Nature.
Medical psychology is very far from being in this more or less enviable position. Here the object puts the question and not the experimenter. The doctor is confronted with facts, which are not of his choosing and which he probably never would choose if he were a free agent. It is the sickness or the patient that puts the crucial questions—in other words, Nature experiments with the doctor in expecting an answer from him. The uniqueness of the individual and of his situation stares the doctor in the face and demands an answer. His duty as a physician forces him to cope with a situation swarming with uncertainty factors.
At first he will apply principles based on general experience, but he will soon realize that principles of this kind do not adequately express the facts and fail to meet the nature of the case. The deeper his understanding penetrates, the more the general principles lose their meaning. But these principles are the foundation of objective knowledge and the yardstick by which it is measured. With the growth of what both patient and doctor feel to be "understanding," the situation becomes increasingly subjectivized. What was an advantage to begin with threatens to turn into a dangerous disadvantage. Subjectivation (in technical terms, transference and counter-transference) creates isolation from the environment, a social limitation which neither party wishes for, but which invariably sets in when understanding predominates and is no longer balanced by knowledge.
As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge. An ideal understanding would ultimately result in each party's unthinkingly going along with the other's experience—a state of uncritical passivity coupled with the most complete subjectivity and lack of social responsibility. Understanding carried to such lengths is in any case impossible, for it would require the virtual identification of two different individuals. Sooner or later, the relationship reaches a point where one partner feels he is being forced to sacrifice his own individuality, so that it may be assimilated by that of the other. This inevitable consequence breaks the understanding, for understanding presupposes the integral preservation of the individuality of both partners. It is therefore advisable to carry understanding only to the point where the balance between understanding and knowledge is reached, for understanding at all costs is injurious to both partners.
This problem arises whenever complex, individual situations have to be known and understood. It is the specific task of psychology to provide just this knowledge and understanding. It would also be the task of the confessor zealous in the cure of souls, were it not that his office inevitably obliges him to apply the yardstick of his denominational bias at the critical moment. As a result, the individual's right to exist as such is cut short by a collective prejudice and often curtailed in the most sensitive area.
The only time this does not happen is when the religious symbol, for instance the model life of Christ, is understood concretely and felt by the individual to be adequate. How far this is the case today, I would prefer to leave to the judgment of others. At all events, the doctor very often has to treat patients to whom denominational limitations mean little or nothing. His profession therefore compels him to have as few preconceptions as possible. Similarly, while respecting metaphysical (i.e., non-verifiable) convictions and assertions, he will take are not to credit them with universal validity. This caution is called for because individual traits of personality ought not to be twisted out of shape by arbitrary interventions from outside. The doctor must leave this to environmental influences, to the person's own inner development, and—in the widest sense—to fate with its wise or unwise decrees.
Many people will perhaps find this heightened caution exaggerated. In view of the fact, however, that there is in any case such a multitude of reciprocal influences at work in the dialectical process between two individuals, even if this process is conducted with the most tactful reserve, the responsible doctor will refrain from adding unnecessarily to the collective factors to which his patient has already succumbed. Moreover, he knows very well that the preaching of even the worthiest precepts only provokes the patient into open hostility or a secret resistance and thus needlessly endangers the aim of the treatment.
The psychic situation of the individual is so menaced nowadays by advertisement, propaganda and other more or less well-meant advice and suggestions that, for once in his life, the patient might be offered a relationship that does not repeat the nauseating "you should," "you must" and similar confessions of impotence. Against the onslaught from outside, no less than against its repercussions in the psyche of the individual, the doctor sees himself obliged to play the role of counsel for the defense. Fear that anarchic instincts will thereby be let loose is a possibility that is greatly exaggerated, seeing that obvious safeguards exist within and without.
Above all, there is the natural cowardice of most men to be reckoned with, not to mention morality, good taste and–last but not least–the penal code. This fear is nothing compared with the enormous effort it usually costs people to help the first stirrings of individuality into consciousness, let alone put them into effect. And where these individual impulses have broken through too impetuously and unthinkingly, the doctor must protect them from the patient's own clumsy recourse to shortsightedness, ruthlessness and cynicism.
As the dialectical discussion proceeds, a point is reached where an evaluation of these individual impulses becomes necessary. By that time, the patient should have acquired enough certainty of judgment to enable him to act on his own insight and decision, and not from the mere wish to copy convention–even if he happens to agree with collective opinion. Unless he stands firmly on his own feet, the so-called objective values profit him nothing, since they then only serve as a substitute for character and so help to suppress his individuality. Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far as society itself is composed of de-individualized persons"
Alan: Being the collective.
…"it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists."
Alan: That's your dictators and your power freaks.
"Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes–it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator."
Alan: What he's telling you here, you think you can change nature by changing direction in your life. This is well understood by people at the top. That's why they give you leaders, always, down through history. All sides have a leader supplied, because you cannot suppress nature. Those who are collectivist people to begin with, simply change - metamorphsize into another direction into another group, maybe from a larger group to a smaller group, but always with the group. Nature reasserts itself one way or another. This is understood by the higher sciences; that's why you're supplied with leaders.
"A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far–and our blindness in this respect is extremely dangerous. People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans."
Alan: We see that all around us today, all over the planet. It's all to keep us safe, though.
"Curiously enough, the Churches too want to avail themselves of mass action in order cast out the devil with Beelzebub–the very Churches whose care is the salvation of the individual soul. They too do not appear to have heard anything of the elementary axiom of mass psychology, that the individual becomes morally and spiritually inferior in the mass, and for this reason they do not burden themselves overmuch with their real task of helping the individual to achieve a metanoia, or rebirth of the spirit–deo concedente.
It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try–as they apparently do–to rope the individual into a social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to him that he is one important factor and that the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul.
It is true that mass meetings parade such ideas before him and seek to impress them on him by dint of mass suggestion, with the unedifying result that when the intoxication has worn off, the mass man promptly succumbs to another even more obvious and still louder slogan. His individual relation to God would be an effective shield against these pernicious influences. Did Christ ever call his disciples to him at a mass meeting? Did the feeding of the five thousand bring him any followers who did not afterwards cry "Crucify him!" with the rest, when even the rock named Peter showed signs of wavering? And are not Jesus and Paul prototypes of those who, trusting their inner experiences, have gone their own individual ways, disregarding public opinion?
This argument should certainly not cause us to overlook the reality of the situation confronting the Church. When the Church tries to give shape to the amorphous mass by uniting individuals into a community of believers, with the help of suggestion, and tries to hold such an organization together, it is not only performing a great social service, but it also secures for the individual the inestimable boon of a meaningful life form. These, however, are gifts, which as a rule confirm certain tendencies and do not change them. As experience unfortunately shows, the inner man remains unchanged however much community he has.
His environment cannot give him as a gift that which he can win for himself, only with effort and suffering. On the contrary, a favorable environment merely strengthens the dangerous tendency to expect everything to originate from outside–even that metamorphosis which external reality cannot provide, namely, a deep-seated change of the inner man, which is all the more urgent in view of the mass phenomena of today and the still greater problems of the increase of population looming up in the future. It is time we asked ourselves exactly what we are lumping together in mass organizations, and what constitutes the nature of the individual human being, i.e., of the real man and not the statistical man. This is hardly possible except through a new process of self-nourishment. All mass movements, as one might expect, slip with the greatest ease down an inclined plane represented by large numbers. Where the many are, there is security; what the many believe must of course be true;"
Alan: My saying is (personally), “Never underestimate the stupidity of very large groups of people.”
To continue:
"…what the many believe must of course be true; what the many want must be worth striving for, and necessary, and therefore good. In the clamor of the many, there lies the power to snatch wish-fulfillments by force; sweetest of all, however, is that gentle and painless slipping back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care, into happy-go-luckiness and irresponsibility."
Alan: He's talking about socialism here, where all your decisions are made up for you.
"All the thinking and looking after are done from the top; to all questions there is an answer; and for all needs the necessary provision is made. The infantile dream state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes. Wherever social conditions of this type develop on a large scale, the road to tyranny lies open and the freedom of the individual turns into spiritual and physical slavery.
Since every tyranny is ipso facto immoral and ruthless, it has much more freedom in the choice of its methods than an institution, which still takes account of the individual. Should such an institution come into conflict with the organized State, it is soon made aware of the very real disadvantage of its morality and therefore feels compelled to avail itself of the same methods as its opponent. In this way the evil spreads almost of necessity, even when direct infection might be avoided. The danger of infection is greater where decisive importance is attached to large numbers and statistical values, as is everywhere the case in our Western world.
The suffocating power of the masses is paraded before our eyes, in one form or another, every day in the newspapers, and the insignificance of the individual is rubbed into him so thoroughly that he loses all hope of making himself heard. The outworn ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité help him not at all, as he can direct this appeal only to his executioners, the spokesmen of the masses.
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. I fully realize that this proposition must sound well-nigh unintelligible to the man of today. The helpful medieval view that man is a microcosm, a reflection of the great cosmos in miniature, has long since dropped away from him, although the very existence of his world-embracing and world-conditioning psyche might have taught him better. Not only is the image of the macrocosm imprinted upon him as a psychic being, but he also creates this image for himself on an every-widening scale. He bears this cosmic "correspondence" within him by virtue of his reflecting consciousness, on the one hand, and, on the other, thanks to the hereditary, archetypal nature of his instincts, which bind him to his environment.
But his instincts not only attach him to the macrocosm; they also, in a sense, tear him apart, because his desires pull him in different directions. In this way he falls into continual conflict with himself and only very rarely succeeds in giving his life an undivided goal–for which, as a rule, he must pay very dearly by repressing other sides of his nature. One often has to ask oneself in such cases whether this kind of one-sidedness is worth forcing at all, seeing that the natural state of the human psyche consists in a certain jostling together of its components and in the contradictoriness of their behavior–that is, in a certain degree of dissociation. Buddhism calls it attachment to the "ten thousand things." Such a condition cries out for order and synthesis.
Just as the chaotic movements of the crowd, all ending in mutual frustration, are impelled in a definite direction by a dictatorial will, so the individual in his dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. Ego-consciousness would like to let its own will play this role, but overlooks the existence of powerful unconscious factors, which thwart its intentions. If it wants to reach the goal of synthesis, it must first get to know the nature of these factors. It must experience them, or else it must possess a numinous symbol that expresses them and conduces to synthesis. A religious symbol that comprehends and visibly represents what is seeking expression in modern man could probably do this; but our conception of the Christian symbol to date has certainly not been able to do so. On the contrary, that frightful world split runs right through the domains of the "Christian" white man, and our Christian outlook on life has proved powerless to prevent the recrudescence of an archaic social order like communism.
This is not to say that Christianity is finished. I am, on the contrary, convinced that it is not Christianity, but our conception and interpretation of it that has become antiquated in face of the present world situation. The Christian symbol is a living thing that carries in itself the seeds of further development. It can go on developing; it depends only on us, whether we can make up our minds to meditate again, and more thoroughly, on the Christian premises."
Alan: Now, Jung remember, as I say, was born of a very high freemasonic family, the mystic side of it, in Switzerland. He's well aware that the Christian story has esoteric meanings and it's reborn down through every age, under a different story, but containing the same ideas and principles of rebirth, rejuvenation. The whole purpose was for a few to follow, and he knew the light, you see. The sun is the light. It was never meant to be static, and it became dominated by those in power, and power does corrupt. It corrupts everything. Doesn't matter what creed you belong to, or religion you belong to, it's all corrupted. They've been there too long every single one of them. Ideas written down by priests or rabbis become fixed as laws, instead of staying as ideas, which are developed further and further, until you're bogged down. It becomes solid. It doesn't move anymore, and then it becomes antiquated. That's why they all die at the end of an age and need something to be reborn, something that is new, for that age. Jung was well aware of this. He didn't want to ruffle feathers by going into it in this kind of depth.
"This requires a very different attitude towards the individual, towards the microcosm of the self, from the one we have had hitherto. That is why nobody knows what ways of approach are open to man, what inner experiences he can still pass through and what psychic facts underlie the religious myth. Over this hangs so universal a darkness that no one can see why he should be interested or to what end he could commit himself. Before this problem we stand helpless. This is not surprising, since practically all the trump cards are in the hands of our opponents. They can appeal to the big battalions and their crushing power."
Alan: At that time he was writing when the Cold War was supposedly on and the antithesis of Christianity was set-up – communism – but on a deeper level, communism sprang from the same source, in a sense. Since the sun of God is always represented as the sun crossing the sky, giving his light and life for the world, and turning red at sundown. That's the blood being poured out, the life of the world. Their communist idea was the same, because the hammer and sickle were also old, old occultic symbols. The sickle is also the symbol of Saturn. Saturn is also called "Kronos" in the Greek. Between the horns you'll see a little star, not quite dead center, a little bit north in the communist flag. Kronos or Saturn was the one who was the scythe-wielder; he used the scythe to cut the ties between ages. That's why he always rose at the end of the age, to cut the ties of the old age into the new. It's highly occultic. It was not, as they pretended at the top, an atheistic organization - far, far from it. They're symbols were all highly Caballistic. Very occultic and there was a religion at the top, and they were the Reds. They have the Red Square, which was really in opposition to the Blue Lodge, because every lodge must, in a sense, compete with each other to bring the Great Work about. They must create conflict, in other words.
So getting back to this book here:
This is not surprising, since practically all the trump cards are in the hands of our opponents. They can appeal to the big battalions and their crushing power. Politics, science and technology stand ranged on their side. The imposing arguments of science represent the highest degree of intellectual certainty yet achieved by the mind of man. So at least it seems to the man of today, who has received hundred-fold enlightenment concerning the backwardness and darkness of past ages and their superstitions. That his teachers have themselves gone seriously astray by making false comparisons between incommensurable factors never enters his head. All the more so as the intellectual elite to whom he puts his questions are almost unanimously"
Alan: I've got trouble with my mouth because it doesn't keep up with my reading.
"…agreed that what science regards as impossible today was impossible at all other times as well. Above all, the facts of faith, which might give him the chance of an extra-mundane standpoint, are treated in the same context as the facts of science. Thus, when the individual questions the Churches and their spokesmen, to whom is entrusted the cure of souls, he is informed that membership in a creed–decidedly worldly institution is more or less de rigueur for religious belief; that the facts of faith which have become questionable for him were concrete historical events; that certain ritual actions produce miraculous effects; and that the sufferings of Christ have vicariously saved him from sin and its consequences (i.e., eternal damnation). If, with the limited means at his disposal, he begins to reflect on these things, he will have to confess that he does not understand them at all and that only two possibilities are open to him; either to believe implicitly, or to reject such statements because they are flatly incomprehensible.
Whereas the man of today can easily think about and understand all the "truths" dished out to him by the State, his understanding of religion is made considerably more difficult owing to the lack of explanations. ("Do you understand what you are reading?" And he said, "How can I, unless some one guides me?" (Acts Chapter 8 Verse 30.) If despite this, he has still not discarded all his religious convictions, this is because the religious impulse rests on an instinctive basis and is therefore a specifically human function. You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return."
Alan: That's true. This is what they understand at the top and they give you them.
"The leaders of the mass State cannot avoid being deified, and wherever crudities of this kind have not yet been put over by force, obsessive factors arise in their stead, charged with demonic energy–for instance, money, work, political influence, and so forth. When any natural human function gets lost, i.e., is denied conscious and intentional expression, a general disturbance results. Hence, it is quite natural that with the triumph of the Goddess of Reason…"
Alan: The Goddess of Reason was held up and pulled into the Notre-Dame Cathedral, during the French Revolution.
"… a general neuroticizing of modern man should set in, a dissociation of personality analogous to the splitting of the world today by the Iron Curtain. This boundary line bristling with barbed wire runs through the psyche of modern man, no matter on which side he lives. And just as the typical neurotic is unconscious of his shadow side, so the normal individual, like the neurotic, sees his shadow in his neighbor or in the man beyond the great divide."
Alan: We project it on to other people.
"It has even become a political and social duty to apostrophize the capitalism of the one and the communism of the other as the very devil, so as to fascinate the outward eye and prevent it from looking at the individual life within. But just as the neurotic, despite unconsciousness of his other side, has a dim premonition that all is not well with his psychic economy, so Western man has developed an instinctive interest in his psyche and in "psychology."
Thus it is that the doctor is summoned willy-nilly to appear on the world stage, and questions are addressed to him which primarily concern the most intimate and hidden life of the individual, but which in the last analysis are the direct effects of the Zeitgeist. Because of its personal symptomatology this material is usually considered to be "neurotic"–and rightly so, since it is made up of infantile fantasies which ill accord with the contents of an adult psyche and are therefore repressed by our moral judgment, in so far as they reach consciousness at all. Most fantasies of this kind do not, in the nature of things, come to consciousness in infantile form, and it is very improbable to say the least of it, that they were ever conscious and were consciously repressed.
Rather, they seem to have been present always, or, at any rate, to have arisen unconsciously and to have persisted in this state until the psychologist's intervention enabled them to cross the threshold of consciousness. The activation of unconscious fantasies is a process that occurs when consciousness finds itself in a critical situation."
Alan: This part here, if you understand and listen carefully, you'll see it's used by governments on the people, not just by certain parents on their children.
"Were that not so, the fantasies would be produced normally and would then be followed by the usual neurotic disturbances. In reality, fantasies of this kind belong to the world of childhood and give rise to disturbances only when prematurely strengthened by abnormal conditions in the conscious life. This is particularly likely to happen when unfavorable influences emanate from the parents, poisoning the atmosphere and producing the conflicts which upset the psychic balance of the child.
When a neurosis breaks out in an adult, the fantasy world of childhood reappears, and one is tempted to explain the onset of the neurosis casually, as due to the presence of infantile fantasies. But that does not explain why the fantasies did not develop any pathological effects during the interim period. These effects develop only when the individual comes up against a situation which he cannot overcome by conscious means. The resultant standstill in the development of personality opens a sluice for infantile fantasies, which, of course, are latent in everybody but do not display any activity so long as the conscious personality can continue on its way unimpeded.
When the fantasies reach a certain level of intensity, they begin to break through into consciousness and create a conflict situation that becomes perceptible to the patient himself, splitting him into two personalities with different characters. The dissociation, however, has been prepared long before in the unconscious, when the energy flowing off from consciousness (because unused) strengthened the negative qualities of the unconscious personality, and particularly its infantile traits."
Alan: This was always understood in psychological warfare, this particular science, you see. Jung doesn't go into that part of it, at any great depth, in this book. However, he's showing you the same techniques are used on the masses, where neurosis, infantile types of neurosis, are encouraged all throughout life. It's no coincidence that in the 1800’s and going into the 1900’s, when the elite gave permission for the leaders to start pushing the coming New Age, they gave us all kinds of magic. They pulled out stuff from the past - stuff that would appeal to the infantile, stuff that would seem fantastic to truly logical minds. Not, as I say, that there's no such thing as paranormal - far from it, but it doesn’t happen every day on queue or as a phenomena projected by the masses.
The science of the control of the mind of the masses is well understood, and they have given a New Age religion, a Neo-Paganism, which is well controlled by the elite, because they've ensured they’ve created it in such a way that you could never come into conflict with the ruling modern State. In fact, it is a great outlet for the people to fantasize their lives away forever, and that's the whole point of it. Fantasy comes up to the fore and is promoted as the "new normal," because these fantasies are harmless to dictatorial type societies. That's why they gave us this one.
That's why they gave us the champions of the farcical, who can only sell their wares - the bizarre, the fantastic mixed up with the sciences of our times, such as “the aliens are controlling us,” and so on. They've given us those people to be the front people to encourage the fantastic, and many fall for it because they're already neurotic. Very few in this society are actually healthy today. Very few are even truly individuals. Those who cannot express their individuality and allow it to grow, become bitter or angry or withdrawn, or else, they jump full body into the fantastic, because they want to believe in it so much. They swallow it all, until they become babbling idiots parroting the propaganda put out by authorized leaders.
It's been a long-winded little talk here. I’ve only touched on this little bit by one author. As I say, Carl Jung had much to say on different subjects. He experimented with himself in an unhealthy way, and even towards the end of his life, he did publicly admit he was wondering if this little guide of his, this Philemon, wasn't perhaps a demon. That was an interesting little thing. He also was very honest and perceptive about himself, and that gave him the ability to look at the world, more critically of what was happening.
We are just about finished with this year, as I said before, a time of reflection, a time where we must make decisions. Many people listening to this already have made decisions, which will affect those around them. It will affect their own lives, because I think today those who are conscious are realizing they can't sit on their hands any longer, and they can't stop growing. A lot of them can't even stay with those they're around, because those around want you to conform to the general rule, which is a state authorized zombie, and zombies tend to keep us back. These are the hard decisions people go through. Not just at this time of year, but definitely so much does come in the winter, the time between ages and seasons. It's a time of choosing and deciding. The worst thing, of course, is to allow the decisions to ultimately be made for us, because we always find then its not the one we would have chosen if we had done so ourselves, or made the choices ourselves. We can't allow people to make them for us.
I thank the people who have given me a few presents. I've either eaten them or worn them, or have one on my wall with a photograph of the dog in it. Thank you very much. I hope you had a good time. I hope that you're finding more meaning in your lives, and that meaning isn’t a learning process where it's all over and done with. It's an ongoing process.
People say to me or ask me, “is consciousness the only end?” and of course it's not. However, for me to tell you what happens thereon would be to suggest something to you; and suggestions are a powerful tool that's used on everyone by the advertising and the government propaganda agencies. It’s a process of consciousness that comes naturally and those who arrive at it will actually tell me what they're going through, and I know if they're on the right path, because there is only one. We all go through the same stages, the same things happen, and some of the things that happen are not in the science books. There are things that happen to people, which are tremendous things, but there are also things you can't really share with other people. Experiences are personal things. It can only truly have meaning for yourself, not for others. Religions are put out there for the others.
Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt – December 29, 2006 (Exempting Music and Literary Quotes)
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