This blogspot is a repository for the many sayings and quotes that I have collected in my readings and studies on the path toward spiritual awakening and self-transcendence. May it happen to each of us in this precious human life which we are experiencing. . . .
"The decisive question for a man is this: Is he related to something Infinite or not?"
-- Carl G. Jung --
"I tried to find the best truth and the clearest light I could attain to. And, since I have reached my highest point and cannot transcend anymore, I am guarding my light and my treasure. It is most precious not only to me but, above all, to the darkness of the Creator who needs man to illuminate his creation. If God had foreseen his world it would be a mere senseless machine and man's existence a useless freak. My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says "no" to it."
(Carl G. Jung, correspondence dated September 14, 1960)
"Consider the difference
in our actions and God's actions.
We often ask, "Why did you do that?"
or "Why did I act like that?"
We do act, and yet everything we do
is God's creative action.
We look back and analyze the events
of our lives, but there is another way
of seeing, a backward-and-forward-at-once
vision, that is not rationally understandable.
"If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up recreating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction."
In an interview shortly before his death in 1961, the great psychologist, Carl Jung, made the prescient observation that "we are the origin of all coming evil." Fifty years later, with the Earth's atmosphere warming and amidst widespread hunger, poverty, continuous wars and a massive species extinction event caused by our impact on the planet's ecosystem, we are coming face-to-face with that evil. Can we survive the multiple crises we have brought down upon ourselves? Perhaps. But, perhaps not.
"Crises are often the catalyst for change," observes spiritual teacher, Adyashanti. In the attached video, the enlightened neo-Buddhist points out that the evolutionary clock is running down for mankind as a species, and that there is a spiritual imperative for us to evolve in consciousness before time runs out.
"There is tremendous pressure on humanity - on humanity's consciousness - right now, he observes. "We all feel it. . . . There is tremendous pressure to evolve, to awaken, because somehow intuitively everybody knows that if there is not some rather dramatic shift in consciousness this opportunity will be missed."
"Nothing estranges man more from the ground plan of his instincts than his learning capacity, which turns out to be a genuine drive towards progressive transformations of human modes of behavior. It, more than anything else, is responsible for the altered conditions of our existence and the need for new adaptations which civilization brings. It is also the source of numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties occasioned by man's progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious."
"The result is that modern man can know himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself - a capacity largely dependent on environmental conditions, the drive for knowledge and control of which necessitated or suggested certain modifications of his original instinctive tendencies. His consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating him, and it is to its peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resource."
"This task is so exacting, and its fulfillment so advantageous, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conceptions of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively replace reality."
In his magnus opus, first published in 1939, "Pain, Sex and Time," philosopher Gerald Heard traces the evolution of man's consciousness, and the attempts he has made to evolve or dilate consciousness beyond the ordinary and limited self-consciousness of the human ego, to a higher acceptive consciousness that is, Heard asserts, mankind's evolutionary imperative.
Yet, as this next evolutionary step will necessarily be psychological rather than physical, Heard points out that a conscious effort is needed to evolve consciousness beyond the current self-conscious state typical of the species in this epoch. Historically, he notes, pointing to past efforts to raise consciousness, this has been the exclusive domain of esoteric teachings and mystery schools. In reading his account of the historical attempts that were made to evolve consciously, one wonders, how Heard (who passed away in 1971) would interpret the widespread interest in conscious evolution that has been exhibited at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
In reading Heard, one is struck by the similarities of views he shared with Jung. But while Jung asserts that "modern man can know himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself," Heard notes that a much greater effort is required to achieve a far greater result.
"If we are to advance through the evolution of consciousness beyond self-consciousness," he observes, "to reunite consciousness now divided into the self-conscious and the sub-conscious, and so bring about a new and single quality of awareness and being, there is required of us a peculiar and rare quality of attention. It must be intense but without effort and strain. It must be that over-plus of evolutionary energy which we call curiosity, and the German tongue calls Neugier, the new appetite, raised to what Plato called illuminating wonder."
"Indeed," he notes, "because we are now so deeply prejudiced in favour of the assumption that it is only possible for one real experience to be presented to us, and that can only be the world of common sense, the necessary state of mind required for enlargement of consciousness must be one which is even without expectation."
"We are waiting," he points out, "for an experience of which we have no conception from the past, and that being so, any clear expectation must distort or even completely inhibit a radically new awareness."
"A traveler in ancient Greece had lost his way and, seeking to find it, asked directions of a man by the roadside who turned out to be Socrates. "How can I reach Mt. Olympus?" asked the traveler. To this Socrates is said to have replied, "Just make every step you take go in that direction."
[Eric Butterworth, "Discover the Power Within You," page 15.]
"Egypt and the Pharoah are very real," observed Chassidic rabbi, Tzi Freeman. "Either you are doing Exodus, or you are dong slavery." Exodus, or the journey to Mt. Olympus, are, of course, metaphors for the moment-by-moment quest for enlightenment and freedom from ego-consciousness. Enlightenment, moksha, personal liberation, salvation - however you wish to describe that rarefied spiritual state of higher consciousness - is an all-or-nothing deal.
As spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen has pointed out, enlightenment and ego-consciousness are two parallel tracks, they never intersect. One either experiences the quietude of the enlightened state of Being (what Cohen calls "the Authentic Self"), or one experiences the raucous inner narrative of the small, conditioned "self," or "ego."
"It is probably true," Butterworth observed, "that every man intuitively knows that there is a highway of right living and that he is never completely satisfied with himself or his world until he finds the road to his own "Mt. Olympus." And it may be that this distinction leads to the indefinable yearning and hunger and thirst that causes the excesses that plague mankind. He feels the inner urge but he usually moves in the wrong direction to fill it."
Indeed, as the Apostle Paul acknowledged in his letter to the Romans:
"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing."
[Romans 7:15-19]
The great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, recognized this spiritual need and acknowledged how, if misdirected, it can lead the unsuspecting man or woman deeper into the bondage of the ego. In a letter to Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, he observed:
"I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society, cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. But the use of such words arouses so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible."
However, in his pithy, but all-important work, "The Undiscovered Self," in which he strongly critiques the development of the modern State, Jung convincingly makes the case that even society, as we have come to know it, is not in itself sufficient to meet mankind's hidden spiritual needs. In fact, it is just the opposite.
"Just as man, as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community," Jung observes, "so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors."
"The individual who is not anchored in God," Jung points out, "can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world."
"For this," Jung notes, "he needs the inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass. Merely intellectual or even moral insight into the stultification and moral irresponsibility of the mass man is a negative recognition only and amounts to not much more than a wavering on the road to the atomization of the individual. It lacks the driving force of religious conviction, since it is merely rational."
[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self," page 34.]
How then is the individual to achieve such an inner, transcendent experience? Clearly, as Jung suggests, it cannot be achieved through rational thought. What is needed first, perhaps, is the knowledge that such a transcendent experience is available to all, and then after that a conscious decision to make each of his or her steps go towards the Mt. Olympus of higher, non-egoic consciousness.
Over fifty years ago, one of the twentieth-century's greatest thinkers, the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung made the observation that both science and our modern religious views in the West lack the experiential force that would make them effective vehicles for shaping a sustainable and viable worldview. His comments now, as then, continue to cut to the heart of what is humanity's greatest existential question - how to find deep meaning in a seemingly superficial and surface life that is increasingly defined by a purely scientific worldview in conflict with fanatical and fundamentalist 'religiosity'.
Writing in his classic work, "The Undiscovered Self," Jung observes:
"The West has unfortunately not yet awakened to the fact that our appeal to idealism and reason and other desirable virtues, delivered with so much enthusiasm, is mere sound and fury. It is a puff of wind swept away in the storm of religious faith, however twisted this faith may appear to us."
"We are faced," he observes, "not with a situation that can be overcome by rational or moral arguments, but with an unleashing of emotional forces and ideas engendered by the spirit of the times, and these, as we know from experience, are not much influenced by rational reflection and still less by moral exhortation. It has been correctly realized in many quarters that the alexipharmic, the antidote, should in this case be an equally potent faith of a different and nonmaterialistic kind, and that the religious attitude grounded upon it would be the only effective defense against the danger of psychic infection."
"Unhappily," Jung notes, "the little word 'should,' which never fails to appear in this connection, points to a certain weakness, if not the absence, of this desideratum. Not only does the West lack a uniform faith that could block the progress of a fanatical ideology, but, as the father of Marxist philosophy, it makes use of exactly the same spiritual assumptions, the same arguments and aims."
In a durable commentary that is at least as applicable in the non-Christian East as it is in the West, Jung points out that churches (and one might add mosques, temples and synagogues) "stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experience but on unreflecting belief which notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it." Then, he notes, "(t)he content of belief . . . comes into collision with knowledge, and it often turns out that the irrationality of the former is no match for the ratiocinations of the latter."
"Belief," Jung notes, "is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously."
"People call faith the true religious experience," he observes, "but they do not stop to think that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled 'nous' into us - that is, trust and loyalty."
"This experience has a definite content that can be interpreted in terms of one or other of the denominational creeds," he points out. "But the more this is so, the more the possibilities of these conflicts with knowledge mount up, which in themselves are quite pointless."
"That is to say," he concludes, "the standpoints of the creeds is archaic; they are full of impressive mythological symbolism which, if taken literally, comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge."
[Carl Jung, "The Undiscovered Self." pp. 46-48.]
What is apparent from Jung's analysis, it seems, is the need that both individuals and societies have for a meaningful and experiential belief system which is compatible, and not antithetical, to the collective knowledge that the world has garnered - both through science and through real religious insight. Such an insight, to be meaningful, must take into account what science has disclosed about the outer, material world and what experiential religious practice has disclosed about the inner, spiritual world of the individual and collective consciousness and psyche.
In his essential guide to mankind's psyche, "The Undiscovered Self," the pioneering Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung expounds on the preeminence of the individual psyche and consciousness, and discusses the challenges that the psyche and consciousness present to both science and religion.
"The structure and physiology of the brain furnish no explanation of the psychic process," Jung observes. "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 hold within itself one of the two indispensable conditions for existence, 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 a psyche. Consciousness is a 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," Jung notes, "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," he notes, "so also must the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche."
The psyche, Jung observes, is devalued by science because of its own subjective characteristics, which is not amenable to statistic analysis, and by organized religion which discounts the validity of the psyche if the individual does not ascribe to its particular dogmas.
"One other remarkable fact (about the psyche) deserves mentioning," Jung notes. "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 - panic fear of the discoveries that might be made in the realm of the unconscious."
Of course, such fear (along with rampant desires that are impossible of fulfillment) is the substratum of the human ego, which, as such, separates the individual not only from religion, but ultimately severs the ties of the individual to human society, ties that Jung sees as being of paramount importance, unless one is sheltered from such isolation by real religious insight based on experience rather than mere belief.
"Often the fear is so great," Jung observes, "that one dares not admit it even to oneself." "Here," he notes, "is a question that every religious person should consider very seriously, (as) he might get an illuminating answer."
"What we find in the life and teachings of Sri Ramana," wrote the great psychologist, Carl Jung, "is the purest of India, with its breath of (a) world liberated and liberating humanity. It is a chant of millenniums. In India, he is the whitest spot in a white space."
A modern-day sage, Sri Ramana Maharshi lived and taught a path of radical self-inquiry in order to realize one's true nature and self. "Whatever the means adopted, " he observed, "you must at last return to the Self."
"So," he asked, "why not abide as the Self here and now? What is not permanent is not worth striving for. You are the Self. You are already perfect."
"Meditation," he observed, "is your true nature. You call it meditation now because there are thoughts distracting you. When these thoughts are dispelled you will remain alone in the state free from thoughts, and that is your real nature."
"The path of self-inquiry frees one from the unceasing fear and turmoil resulting from taking the ego to be real," he remarked. "By becoming free of the ego illusion one experiences true freedom and supreme peace. It is this path that takes one from the apparent duality of the individual and the world to the bliss of one's real nature. Through this awakening to self-awareness, even by imperfect glimpses, one begins to sense a reality not confined to the ego's world. And this current of awareness is ultimately revealed as the Self - pure consciousness.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mount Arunachala
Referring to the Bhagavad Gita, Ramana Maharshi observed, "(O)ne must realize that he is not the doer, but that he is only a tool of some Higher Power. Let that Higher Power do what is inevitable and let me act only according to its dictates. The actions are not mine; therefore, their results cannot be mine, either. If one thinks and acts so, where is the trouble?"
"Be fixed in the Self and act according to nature without the thought of doership" he notes, "(t)hen the results of action will not affect you. That is manliness and heroism."
Thus," he concludes, "'inherence in the Self 'is the sum and substance of the Gita's teaching."
[Talks with Ramana Maharshi, Inner Dimensions, pp. 48-49.]
Carl Jung was perhaps the most influential and greatest of all early psychologists, outshining even Freud, his one-time mentor. While his public writings have fueled many Jungian schools, until recently, his most intimate metaphysical musing were collected only in what is generally known as "The Red Book," the contents of which were until recently a closely guarded secret by Jung's surviving family.
"The Red Book, also known as Liber Novus (Latin for New Book), is a 205-page manuscript written and illustrated by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung between approximately 1914 and 1930, prepared for publication by The Philemon Foundation and published by W.W. Norton & Co. on October 7, 2009. Until 2001, his heirs denied scholars access to the book, which he began after a falling-out with Sigmund Freud in 1913. Jung originally titled the manuscript Liber Novus (literally meaning A New Book in Latin), but it was informally known and published as The Red Book. The book is written in calligraphic text and contains many illuminations." [Source: Wikipedia.]
The following poem and video (from the newly published "Red Book") give the reader a taste of the depth and conviction of Jung's religious experience and conviction. When asked if he believed in God, Jung demurred, saying there was no need for "belief" as he "knew."
"My soul... Where are you?..
Do you hear me?..
I Speak.. I call you.. Are you there?
I have Returned.
I am here again.
I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet,
and I have come to you.
I am with you..
After long years, of long wondering,
I have come to you, again.
Should I tell you, everything I have seen?
Experienced? or drank in?
or do you not want to hear,
about the noise of life and the world.
But one thing you must know,
the one thing I have learned,
is that one must live his life..
This life is the way,
the long sought after way,
to the unfathomable which we call divine.
There is no other way.
All other ways, are false paths.
So I found the right way,
to let it let me to you, to my soul.
I've returned, tempted and purified.
Do you still know me?
How long, the separation lasted.
Everything has come so different.
And how did I find you?
How strange my journey was.
What words should I use to tell you,
on what twisted path a good star has guided me to you.
Give me your hand,
My almost forgotten soul.
How long, the joy, at seeing you again.
You long disappointed soul.
Life has let me back to you.
Let us thank the life I have lived,
for all the happy, and all the sad hours,
For every joy, for every sadness.
My soul, my journey,
should continue with you..
I will wonder with you,
and ascend to my solitude.."
What are the two greatest misunderstandings about consciousness and the psyche? I would argue, as so may others have, that the two greatest blunders - blunders which contribute to the continuing shortfall of Western science to put on an academic "full-court press" to get to the root of what 'consciousness' actually 'is' - are the blind assumptions that (a) consciousness is a 'by-product' of the brain, and (b) that when we are "conscious" (as opposed to dreaming, or hallucinating) we are actually in control of what it is we think.
As the great modern enlightenment teacher, Eckhart Tolle, has often remarked, Descartes got it absolutely wrong in making his famous declaration, "I think, therefore I am." I would, only add that he got it wrong on both counts. It seems far more likely that the thought processes and structures of the brain are the by-product of a higher order of consciousness, or at a very minimum they are shaped by consciousness. Moreover, I think that upon close observation almost everyone must concede that most of the time, when we believe we are consciously 'thinking,' we are actually being 'thunk!'
The embedded video, "Zen Biology Lesson on Enlightenment," produced by TheTruthsofLife.com, tackles both of these "false" presumptions 'head-on' (so-to-speak), while accompanied by a rather nice rendition of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
In his short masterpiece (see attached link), "The Undiscovered Self," the great Swiss psychologist. Carl Jung puts it this way:
"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 causally 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 fact is so impressive that the subsidiary nature of the psyche seems an almost unavoidable inference. . . ." "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 one of the two indispensable conditions for existence as such, namely 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 a psyche. Consciousness is a condition 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. . . ."
Western neuroscience has made great strides in mapping the neural correlates of different emotions and phenomena of consciousness, but little or no success in mapping the neural correlates of consciousness itself. There is likely no specific neural correlate and if, as Jung and others suppose, 'consciousness' is indeed aphenomenal instead of epiphenomenal in nature such a neural correlate will never be found.
Because of the strong two-way correlations between the brain and consciousness, however, mind scientists are all-too tempted to conflate correlation and causality, as Jung notes. It is high time that neuro-scientists and neuro-anatomists who expend a great deal of effort probing the brain for an objective phenomenal 'seat of consciousness' so to speak, turn with an equal effort (and open-mindedness) to the question of just what the subjective aphenomenal nature of consciousness and its many-flavoured shades are.
